The money quote.
I don’t want to “cure” someone of themselves. Especially not my son. I want them to be able to share that self with the world.
Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron imagined a planet in which prosthetic handicaps make us all equal by removing advantage. While a standardized world may seem utopic, it is equally possible that we’d lose our rich differences through over-augmentation as well. If we assume there is only one kind of strength, one kind of beauty, or one kind of intelligence, then we might super-normalize away the rich difference of human existence.
It’s seductively easy to imagine a world in which we’re a little smarter or a bit more creative, in which our kids have the latest advantage. But augmentation could also become a tool to entrench inequality even more firmly.
These technologies can and should be used to give people with disabilities—the non-neurotypical—the ability to exist and thrive in a neurotypical world. But what happens once everyone has a superpower in their back pocket?
What happens when we all want to become superhuman?
Everything theoretical is not possible. Everything you learned from BRAVE NEW WORLD is old world.
This is the future.
And the future is now.
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