What happens when technology creates real differences?
Imagine the Capulets can afford technology that allows them to live past 120 years old and the Montagues cannot. Or that the Montagues have, thanks to a new technology, perfect recall and the Capulets do not.
In 2024 Romeo and Juliet can only be so far apart in their anatomical humanity: coloring, looks, height, weight, strength, speed, mathematical ability, language skills, etc. Our base humanity still binds all of us in ways that are important to every society.
In today’s world an ultra rich strongman can still run for political office by finding common cause against degree holder elites. He or she can even pretend to have lesser language and logic skills so as to encourage the vote of those who divide up humanity that way.
But it would be difficult for that same ultra rich person to pretend to age at rate faster than he is aging. It would be difficult for that ultra rich person to pretend not to have perfect recall when probably users of that technology aren’t even allowed to attend the same schools as those without it.
Really the only way to stay a capitalist society in our current form is to not invent those technologies in the first place. Even providing free Covid vaccines for the entire population was a shock to American capitalism that could only be endured on an emergency basis.
If you make very expensive medical technology available indefinitely, the cat will be out of the bag that high inequality scarce resource economies are a sham. If you don’t make that very expensive medical technology available to everyone then you risk your society fracturing into violence.
Whether by planning or design not inventing such technologies seems to be exactly where we are now.
There is a fairly successful war on cancer (not complaining of course - it’s already saved the lives of some of my relatives) but no war on aging. Ever more expensive super colliders are in the works (again that’s great - I don’t think this is zero sum) but no equivalent for biomedical engineering.
This very conservative approach to funding science continues in America’s 2025 budget where AI, computer chips, cancer, and next generation defense are the winners. None of those can fundamentally change what it means to be human (again not complaining as that’s very likely a prudent approach).
In order to really break out you need AI capable of training itself to the next level. What’s happening currently is the opposite of that where you have to keep providing AI with an every increasing amount of human gathered or generated data just so it can mimic a human.
However this damper on research that could create real differences between humans won’t last. As Alice in Chains put it:
Oh, you couldn’t dam that river
And maybe I don’t give a damn anyway
So you couldn’t dam that river
And it washed me so far away
The dam has been holding so far for two reasons. First because big business steers government funding towards where they perceive potential profit. For instance for the National Institute on Aging (or National Institute on Alzheimer’s):
Jokes aside, the fact that Alzheimer’s research (classified as Neuroscience) hauls in the majority (approximately $2.4 billion, or ~60%) of the NIA’s total annual budget is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.
So any hint of a possible breakthrough in aging or augmenting human intelligence will result in the government backing them as money makers. Or put another way the right policy for the wrong reasons won’t last long.
The second reason the dam against human enhancement has held so far is that these problems are very difficult. If they were simple evolution would have fixed them or at least had genetic variations that do so — some people live longer than others or have better recall but max lifespan is still 120 and naive total recall is a disaster for humans that had it.
How long will the difficulty of the research buy us Homo sapiens, Latin for wise men, and how bad would it be if the technology became available? IMHO even the possibility of such technology is already a tremendous drain on our society.
Human beings having the heroic flaw of always seeking change as an essential property means that if we continue seeking change then we will no longer be human and if we stop seeking change then we will no longer be human.
If the outcome of the next thousand years or so is, either way, that we are no longer human then why bother?
That changed generation will see us the same way we view apes or, best case, children. Faced with the challenge of creating that generation and maintaining the world they will live in, it’s not very surprising we are failing. However failure means giving up our humanity as Homo sapien wise men and that’s extremely depressing.
The only way out is to ignore these technologically created real differences and just embrace these new humans as human. Unfortunately we are already stumbling on such minor differences as race, gender, and gifted in academics. So ignoring real differences is probably beyond us unless there was some technology to help us with that.