Michael Bess - Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future

ALSO BY MICHAEL BESS

Choices Under Fire:
Moral Dimensions of World War II

The Light-Green Society:
Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 19602000

Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud:
Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 19451989

FOR

Wendell Berry and his sycamore,
Marty Griffin and the Marin-Sonoma coastline,

AND

my 1963 Volvo, Baby Stokanza-Minza,
who taught me that a machine
is not just a machine

In the place that is my own place, whose earth I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing, a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.

Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it, hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.

There is no year it has flourished in that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it that is its death, though its living brims whitely at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.

Over all its scars has come the seamless white of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection in the warp and bending of its long growth.

It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.

It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.

In all the country there is no other like it.

I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.

I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it, and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

WENDELL BERRY ,
The Sycamore (1998)

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Theyve nicknamed me Mr. Amish. Thats what theyre calling people like me these days. I smile, I shrug. My son, my grandkidstheyre not being mean. They put their arm around my shoulders, squeezing gently, I can feel the affection. Amish grandpa. Its kind of like Im a living window into the past.

Ever since Martha died, nineteen years ago, I stopped doing all the fancy pills and implants and epigenetic boosts. I kept the bioenhancements I had, and left it at that. No more upgrades, no more tweaks. Id had enough.

Its hard for them to understand. They argue with me, my son Pete pleads with me. Youll feel so much better, Dad. You know you will.

But what if I dont want to feel better?

I glance across the living room at my grandson Kenny, playing 3-D chess with his younger sister Gwendolyn. Hes ten, shes eight. Theyre sitting across from each other on the floor near the window, eyes closed, wearing their headsets. The old maple stands just outside, its foliage of orange and yellow raining down color with the afternoon sunlight.

I used to be really good at chessthe old-fashioned 2-D kind. Kenny started beating me at that when he was six. Now its 3-D chess they all play, the moves and threats and gambits simultaneously above and below, exponentially more complicated. Gwens giving him a run for his money. Shes even better at it than he is.

Makes you wonder, though. We give them neuroceuticals with their vitamins in the morning, we make them wear cortical stimulation headsets while they do their homework, we epigenetically tweak their memory and acuity. Then my son acts surprised when he finds his daughter crying in her bedroom, reading the New York Times. How do you explain genocide to an eight-year-old kid? Problem is, she understands the article all too well. Its human nature that has her baffled.

When I bring this up with Pete, he just looks at me like Im clueless. What do you want me to do, Dad? Bring everything to a halt? Have everyone else in their grade running circles around em?

Im not the only one who feels this way, of course. All of us who were born before the onset of it all, we sometimes have a hard time adapting.

I just never thought it would happen so fast, so soon. I was born in 1979. I witnessed the birth of the Web, watched it spread through our culture. I understood the acceleration of technology. At least I thought I did. Hell, I even invested in it, made a pile of money in epigenetics stock.

So many aspects of it are amazingthe inventions unfolding all around us like one of those fast-forward movies of a garden in bloom. Theyve improved our lives in so many ways. Im turning seventy this December, and I feel like I did when I was forty-five. Better, actually.

But other aspects of itif Im really honest...

Over the coming decadesprobably a lot sooner than most people realizethe next great wave of technological change will wash over our lives. Its impact will be similar in sweep and rapidity to the advent of computers, cell phones, and the Web; but this time around, it is not our gadgets that will be transformedit is we ourselves, our bodies, our minds. This will be a shift that cuts even more deeply than the great industrial revolutions of the past. It will not only alter how we make a living, communicate, and interact with each other, but will offer direct and precise control over our own physical and mental states. People will be able to sculpt their own selfhood over time, reshaping their bodies, augmenting their cognition, reconfiguring their character and personality. We will live through this process, year by year, marveling all the while at how malleable our species turned out to be.

If you talk to the authors of this revolutionthe scientists, doctors, and engineers who labor tirelessly at the vanguard of biotechnologymost of them will deny that this is what they have in mind. They are not seeking to bring about the transmogrification of the human species, they insist: they are simply doing their best to heal the sick, to repair the injured. But once you stand back and look at the big picture, sizing up the cumulative impact of all their brilliant efforts, a different conclusion emerges. Whether they intend it or not, they are giving our species the instruments with which to radically redesign itself. Those instruments are already becoming available in crude form today, and they will fully come into their own over the next few decades. By the time our grandchildren have grown to adulthood, this wave of change will have passed through our civilization.

The results will be mixed. Some of the new bioenhanced capabilities will be splendid to behold (and to experience). People will live longer, healthier, more productive lives; they will connect with each other in seamless webs of direct interactivity; they will be able to fine-tune their own moods and thought processes; they will interact with machines in entirely new ways; their augmented minds will generate staggeringly complex and subtle forms of knowledge and insight.

At the same time, these technologies will also create formidable challenges. If only the rich have access to the most potent bioenhancements, this will exacerbate the already grievous rift between haves and have-nots. Competition will be keen for the most sophisticated enhancement productsbecause an individuals professional and social success will be at stake. As these technologies advance, they will continuously raise the bar of normal performance, forcing people to engage in constant cycles of upgrades and boosts merely to keep up. People will tend to identify strongly with their particular enhancement profiles, clustering together in novel social and cultural groupings that could lead to new forms of prejudice, rivalry, and outright conflict. Some bioenhancements will offer such fine-grained control over feelings and moods that they risk turning people into emotional puppets. Individuals who boost their traits beyond a certain threshold may acquire such extreme capabilities that they will no longer be recognized as unambiguously human.