Michael Bess - Make Way for the Superhumans: How the science of bio enhancement is transforming our world, and how we need to deal with it

Make Way for the Superhumans

One of the most thoughtful meditations on the future that I have read. the book is carefully and conscientiously crafted, and meticulously argued. Bess is also impartial, giving a fair hearing to contradictory arguments, and wrestling fairly with the ideas as he encounters them.

Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Rejuvenation therapies that could potentially extend human lifespans to 160 years or more, chemical or bioelectronic cognitive enhancement that could double or triple IQ scores, bioelectronic devices for modulating brain processes including pleasure centres, so-called designer babies, and much more are poised to cross the threshhold from science fiction to reality in the near future. Michael Bess offers a sober prediction of how such advances will directly affect human society, and the ethical dilemmas that could result. fascinating from cover to cover and near-impossible to put down. Highly recommended!

Midwest Book Review

MAKE WAY FOR THE

SUPERHUMANS

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

MAKE WAY FOR THE

SUPERHUMANS

How the science of bio-enhancement is transforming our world, and how we need to deal with it

MICHAEL BESS

This edition published in the UK in 2016

by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,
3941 North Road, London N7 9DP

email:

www.iconbooks.com

First published in the USA in 2015

under the title Our Grandchildren Redesigned

by Beacon Press Books, under the auspices of

the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,
7477 Great Russell Street,

London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Grantham Book Services, Trent Road,

Grantham NG31 7XQ

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand
by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in South Africa

by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District,

41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

Distributed in India by Penguin Books India,
7th Floor, Infinity Tower C, DLF Cyber City,
Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

ISBN: 978-178578-101-8

Text copyright 2015 Michael Bess

The author has asserted his moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Text design and composition by Kim Arney

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

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)

ONLINE COMPANION WEBSITE TO THIS BOOK:

www.ourgrandchildrenredesigned.org

Updates on Science and Technology

Updates on Social and Cultural Implications

Appendices

Dialogue Page

Full Bibliography

Welcome to the Future

Reflections from an autumn afternoon in 2049

• 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