This is Your Brain on Neurotechnology

An Interview with Zack Lynch, author of The Neuro Revolution.

As I pointed out in my Amazon review of Lynch’s book, Lynch reveals some unexamined pro-status quo biases. Do we really need financial speculators, like the ones who’ve created the current disaster, to do all this trading so urgently that we have to neuro enhance them? (Would we even notice the difference if these speculators took a lot more time off?) Does it serve society’s best interests to have companies engage in neuro marketing research, using fMRI’s and such, so that they can more effectively sell us crap we don’t need and can’t afford? Do we really need, short of a science fictional invasion by hostile AI’s or space aliens, to create metabolically dominant warriors who can kill people and break things for days at a stretch without remorse, fatigue or the need to sleep? (You wouldn’t necessarily want men like those patrolling the streets in your own country to enforce domestic martial law, or as occupiers from a hostile foreign country.)

I take special exception to Lynch’s view that the neuro technologies industry could turn empathy and “spirituality” into commodities. I want corporations to leave my consciousness alone, thank you.

Neuro technologies have a lot of interesting potential, but they won’t necessarily make our lives better if we use them to enhance people who currently do arguably useless or harmful things so that they can do them more efficiently.

Re Mark Plus’s query: speculators indeed perform a very valuable economic function: anticipating future changes in supply and demand, reacting now, and thereby smoothing the transition to those future conditions.

E.g., if speculators (who compete for best advance information) recognize a looming shortfall of wheat, they buy wheat now, to sell when the shortfall hits, thus raising the price a bit now and thus both keeping some supply in reserve (the supply they are holding) and encouraging less use now, by virtue of the price-rise now that they engendered. Shorter version: speculators smooth out markets, converting what would be disruptive spikes into gradual inclines (or declines).

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