Our Future with Cognitive Enhancement

What might it look like?

This is the first in a series exploring the philosophical implications of specific technologies, using plain language and zero jargon.

The goal of this series is to remind ourselves that the greatest impact from any technology will be how that technology changes us: the humans that use them. 

Special thanks to Sean McFadden from Deep Noetics for assistance in thinking through these topics.

No technology has greater potential for transforming the human condition than cognitive enhancement. 

Enhancing our cognition means changing our actual minds. Given how much our identities are defined by our thoughts, it also means changing our selves. And given how far-reaching these changes could be, it could even mean changing our very species.

And yet there is very little scientific consensus about how our cognition actually works. We struggle to define the nature of consciousness, creativity, or intelligence. We don’t know exactly how memory, emotions, or the subconscious affect our thinking. It’s surprising how little we do know.

This combination of immense power and profound uncertainty is why it’s so critical to consider all the potential futures that cognitive enhancement may bring. This is where philosophy comes in. One way that philosophy benefits technology is by considering the potential implications that go beyond technical feasibility or the obvious ethical concerns.

In other words, philosophy can help us ensure that our future with cognitive enhancement is one that we will want to live in.

What do we mean by cognitive enhancement?

To help understand what we mean by cognitive enhancement, the following are some examples in order from active development to the completely speculative.

• Wearable Tech for Enhanced Learning: Devices like smart glasses or earpieces that provide real-time information and learning assistance, similar to a more advanced version of current smart devices.

• Nootropics for Improved Cognitive Function: The use of drugs or supplements to enhance memory, creativity, or other cognitive functions. 

• Advanced Language Translation Implants: Tiny implants that allow for real-time translation of foreign languages directly in the ear, enhancing communication capabilities without extensive language learning.

• Memory Enhancement Devices: Implants or wearables that aid in memory recall or storage, perhaps by syncing with digital databases, assisting those with memory disorders or for general use.

• Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs): Non-invasive BCIs that allow users to control computers or machinery with their thoughts, extending human capabilities in work and daily life.

• Emotion and Mood Regulation Implants: Devices that can regulate or alter an individual's emotional state or mental well-being, a more invasive approach to managing psychological health.

• Neural Lace for Enhanced Brain Connectivity: A thin mesh that lays on the brain and connects it more directly with digital devices, allowing for faster processing and data access, akin to upgrading the brain's hardware.

• Full Neural Integration with AI Assistants: A deeper integration where AI not only assists with tasks but also becomes an integral part of decision-making processes, blurring the line between human thought and artificial intelligence.

• Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication: Enabling direct, non-verbal and non-physical communication between individuals, creating a form of collective consciousness or hive mind.

• Total Merge with Machine: The ultimate fusion where human consciousness is fully integrated into a machine, allowing for potentially eternal life, limitless cognitive capabilities, and a complete departure from biological limitations.

The following are 10 philosophical implications of cognitive enhancement that are worth considering.

1. How to compress a thought

What is a unit of thought?

Will there ever be a cognitive equivalent of a .gif or .mp3 file? Will some digital unit of thought emerge to compress everything that a thought contains—all the complexity of emotions, memories, and intuition— into mere ones and zeroes?

This is the challenge of compression: converting the essence of human cognition into the smallest possible signal. This process will necessarily be lossy. Something inherent to human thought will always be left out.  

Language is the primary way that we compress thoughts today. Yet words often fail to cover the gap left by compression, even in spite of our emojis and non-verbal gesticulations. We become frustrated when our attempts to communicate don’t capture the the depth of an emotion or the subtlety of an idea.

The promise of BCIs is to far exceed the limitations of human language, enabling much faster and denser communication between brains and machines. Only the parts of our thoughts that are essential to supporting these goals will be included. How can we be certain that what is left out will not be something critical?

It’s impossible to predict how compression might affect thinking itself. We know the brain is incredibly plastic.¹ If our thinking begins to conform around a standardized unit of thought, what happens to the aspects of cognition that are neglected? Could they atrophy away as our neural pathways adapt to a new paradigm?

Or, like a new style of painting, might we reveal new ways to understand and experience thought itself?

2. Trying on a new self

What happens to our “self” when we can think up a new one?

How we think about our “self” very much depends on the environment we construct it in. 

The internet has made this obvious. When we are online, we can try on identities as easily as new outfits. Our digital selves can be freed from how we look, where we are from, or what we’ve done in the past.  We can find communities to engage with the most particular aspects of our identities while ignoring the rest. We can act anonymously and hide the self entirely.

While the digital landscape can be liberating, it also poses significant challenges. Our identity gets divided into fragments mapping to different online contexts.  We’re less certain about which of our identities is the “authentic” one. We have less opportunities to engage with our “whole” self. We might behave much differently when we’re anonymous than when we’re not. 

Cognitive enhancements will amplify these challenges. While technology has always informed our identity, there’s been a clear boundary between our inner selves and our external tools. What happens when they blur together? The traditional divide between the internal construction of the self and its external manifestation may vanish entirely.

Constructing our identities could become an active process of playing with various cognitive enhancements. Who we are will become the memories we alter, the information we download, the collective intelligences we join. It could be the self as pure artifice, an aggregate of choices we present in the moment.

As we entrust more facets of our cognition to internal tools, we risk eroding the very foundations that make us truly unique. Yet there still exists the potential for profound self-discovery. By confronting the construction of our identities, we may uncover new insights into what it means to be a self. 

3. Cognitive groupthink

How can we ensure the diversity of our thinking? 

You might think that connecting our brains to computation would naturally increase the diversity of our thinking. But recent technology might suggest otherwise. The internet started as a diverse collection of quirky blogs and websites. Now we all use the same few platforms, posting content that gets rewarded by the same algorithms, following whatever meme is deemed “the current thing”.  

LLMs are another example. The diversity of human content gets statistically normalized to provide the most probable answers. The most unique inputs get averaged away. RLHF further ensures that answers conform to conventional norms. These same outputs become tomorrow’s training data, perpetuating a homogenizing feedback loop.

In both cases, the diversity of our content is sacrificed for other goals and values. Could the same happen with our thoughts? What happens when we’re all accessing the same corpus of data, our thoughts being motivated by the same rewards, our unique individual differences getting filtered out by the same technological limitations? Will we find ourselves trapped in a stifling monoculture of ideas?

Yet if diversity is prioritized, it’s easy to imagine BCIs that can reward novelty, inject randomness², and draw unusual connections between disparate ideas, all leading to a dramatic expansion in the breadth of our thinking.

4. Unlocking the hive mind

What if it takes a lot more than intelligence?

Imagine being part of a collective intelligence. Your mind connects with a stream of thoughts to collaborate on problems too large for a single brain to fathom. You send a new idea back to the hive where it becomes instantly available, sparking a cascade of further cognition. 

Unlocking collective intelligence would represent cognitive enhancement’s greatest achievement. Every aspect of human interaction could be transformed. We could run social simulations on entire populations. We could co-create new collaborative games and art forms. We could redefine democracy around dynamic participation in real-time decision-making.

Yet the term “collective intelligence” itself is something of a paradox. Unlocking the power of the hive mind will require much more than increasing intelligence alone. That intelligence must be aligned around the pursuit of a common goal, grounded in the same beliefs and values. 

Changing our beliefs and values rarely happens because we are exposed to a better argument or more facts. It happens when reality forces us to confront a dissonance between what we believe and what we actually experience. Cognitive enhancement can’t align our values around intelligence alone.

Nor can intelligence define goals. Goals are based on values, not facts. In order to guide our collective intelligence, we’ll need to develop our collective wisdom. Much like with AI, we face an alignment problem, only in this case it’s with our own collective intelligence.

Will moral enhancements be required to ensure that we’re using our cognitive enhancements for good? Perhaps we will need to increase our ethical capacity to keep pace with our increasing cognitive capacity.

Yet the same technologies that empower a hive mind (such as brain-to-brain interfaces, neuro-surveillance, and centralized thought repositories) are the same technologies that could oppress an individual mind. Deeper concerns over security, freedom, and individual autonomy may prevent us from fully embracing the dynamics of collective intelligence.

Unlocking the power of the hive mind could enable us to tackle our biggest planetary challenges, but only if our collective wisdom can match our collective intelligence.

5. Bridging the cognitive divide

What if some become enhanced while others do not? 

It’s possible that cognitive enhancements will inherently lead to new inequalities, where the smart get smarter and the truly creative see exponential returns. But if everyone is accessing the same enhanced memory, creative algorithms, and instant data, it’s just as likely that we all end up with the same basic intelligence.

The bigger risk for a new cognitive divide will be between those that embrace enhancements and those that do not. This divide could have the potential to disrupt our economies, societies, and even humanity itself.

Imagine that cognitive enhancements directly lead to economic benefits. This will create enormous pressure for everyone to enhance, even if principled reasons exist not to do so. The “enhanced” could accuse the “normies” of preventing economic growth or increasing the drain on government welfare. If you are enhanced, why would you agree to taxes that redistribute your income to the normies that contribute nothing? The stage could be set for new class politics of the worst sort.

Social disruption could be even more profound. Rather than the us vs. them dynamics of AI fear-mongering, society could split along us vs. us dynamics between those that embrace enhancements and those that don’t.

Over a longer timescale, cognitive enhancements could amplify the factors that affect human values. The enhanced and non-enhanced could soon find their values drifting apart, to the point where they could no longer be reconciled. 

Even worse, the enhanced could eventually adopt forms of communication, understanding, and even ways of being that are no longer compatible with the non-enhanced. The divergence could eventually become so great as to represent a speciation event.

The enhanced would appear as a new, superior species of hominid—homo cognito. As history has shown, when two similar species vie for the same ecological niche, there can only be one winner.

To prevent this dystopia, we must proactively consider how we can preserve the fundamental values that bind us together as a species, regardless of the choice that each of us might make to embrace enhancements or not.

6. Living at the speed of thought

What happens when our very thoughts speed up?

BCIs promise to remove any friction in interfacing with computation. No more typing, clicking, or swiping—manipulating data will happen at the speed of thought. Likewise, communicating with other brains will finally be liberated from the painfully slow need to convert the photons and sound waves from our eyes and ears into language.

Yes, certain types of communication will certainly be more efficient, but are there limits to how fast our cognition can process information? Our brains evolved to be precisely attuned to the rhythms and pace of our physical world. What happens when our mental clock rate begins to conform to the hyper speed of these new technologies? 

Many of the mental heuristics that drive our decision-making have evolved to favor time over information. Any complex decision can always benefit from more data, but our bias is to satisfice—to quickly make decisions that are “good enough”, guided by emotion and instinct over rational deliberation. If these two aspects of decision-making get out of sync, which will be sacrificed?

The same evolutionary clock rate defines our attention. Our consciousness has evolved to navigate the limitations of our senses³ in order to determine what should receive our focus. Will our conscious attention resist a new input that operates at hyper speeds? Or will we find our attention becoming so attuned to this new clock rate that anything slower is too excruciating to engage with?

Engaging in meat talk with anyone that isn’t enhanced would feel unbearable. Every lecture, speech, and sermon would be transmitted over the new preferred protocols of thought. 

This new clock-rate could also affect our willingness to pursue long-term projects, or physical projects of any kind. Why operate at the speed of atoms when you can operate at the speed of thought? A hyper clock rate may make a ten-year physical project feel like an eternity.

This will place an entirely new premium on patience as a virtue.

7. The complexity of intelligence

What are the trade-offs of enhancing intelligence?

What do we mean by increasing our “intelligence"? Do we mean more creativity? Or better abstract reasoning? What about spatial awareness, problem-solving, or attention? Are all of these things intelligence?

“Intelligence” is a term we use to generalize many things our brains do. Rather than a single physical quality, intelligence is more like a dynamic process between many aspects of the brain. There isn’t a single setting that can increase all of these aspects at once. 

Take creativity, an elusive capability that appears to be deeply intertwined with intuition and the subconscious. Breakthroughs often emerge not by adding more logic or reasoning, but by giving the subconscious room to operate. Think of the countless stories of innovators who obsess over a problem only to finally unlock it when they go for a walk or take a nap. Increasing creativity isn’t as simple as increasing intelligence.

Emphasizing one aspect of intelligence may come at the expense of others. For example, abstract reasoning generalizes away the messy details of reality, while empathy must embrace them. There is no guarantee that we can simply "enhance intelligence" and achieve all desired outcomes simultaneously. There will invariably be trade-offs.

If we focus on any single aspect of intelligence, we simply have no idea how the rest of our cognition will be affected. Without a comprehensive understanding of these dynamics, the consequences of cognitive enhancement remain radically uncertain, raising questions about unintended consequences and unforeseen outcomes.

On the other hand, these efforts may help provide the experimental frameworks necessary to unlock the multifaceted dynamics of our cognition. This will only happen if we move beyond simplistic notions of "increasing intelligence" and acknowledge all the complexities of the human mind.

8. The cost of connection

Will enhancing our brains enhance how we relate with each other?

It’s not hard to imagine how cognitive enhancement could disrupt human relations. We’ve already pointed out different risks from diverging clock rates, drifting values, class politics, and even a speciation event. There’s also the obvious risk of alienating ourselves further from embodied relations, the richest form of human connection we have. 

And yet we shouldn’t focus only on the risks. Cognitive enhancement could also help us overcome challenges that perennially limit our ability to relate with each other. It could open up new ways of understanding our different perspectives and navigating our cultural differences. 

Imagine tools designed to enhance our empathy. VR might help us experience another’s perspective through their eyes, but BCIs could allow us to experience it through their thoughts. We could understand what it’s like to feel what they are feeling, to sense the same emotions that are driving their world view. This would give conflict-resolution entirely new possibilities.

It could also help us see political polarization as something positive. By revealing the psychological roots of political differences, cognitive enhancement could help us understand how personality traits and cognitive dispositions impact our political leanings. This may help us realize that political differences evolved for a reason, and that these differences could be leveraged to help solve our biggest problems, rather than just contribute to culture wars.

Finally, it could help us navigate cultural differences. Imagine real-time assistance that helps us understand the depth and history of cultural contexts. These types of tools could encourage more radical diversity at the cultural level by enabling broader connections at the human level.

The future of human relationships is ours to shape. By prioritizing technology that fosters empathy, understanding, and shared experiences, we can ensure that cognitive enhancement serves as a force for human connection, not alienation. 

9. Man or machine

Is human cognition worth preserving?

Cognitive enhancement blurs the boundaries between machines and humans. The intimacy of this combination is the key to unlocking its promise. The closer the machine (with its boundless scale and computational power) can get to the human (with our collective choice and agency) the more powerful BCIs will become.

This close proximity will highlight the difference between human and machine cognition. Human cognition is enigmatic, messy, and limited. Machine cognition is legible, precise, and boundless. If history is any guide, we will seek to replace the messy with the legible, the limited with the boundless, at every opportunity we get. 

And yet, human cognition excels precisely because of its limitations. It’s the illegibility of paradox—between logic and emotion, reason and intuition, the conscious and subconscious—that seems to give rise to everything we value about human cognition and the human experience. 

Before we let the relentless pursuit of efficiency and power dictate the balance between humans and machines, we need to ensure that we understand precisely what is being lost. In the human brain, evolution has crafted the most elegant and complex object the universe has ever seen. We should be very careful to presume that we can do better than natural selection.

This makes it critical to prioritize systems that encourage anyone to opt out of cognitive enhancement. Opting out of enhancement should not mean opting out of society. If the social or economic costs of retaining natural cognition become too great, then it won’t really be a choice at all—we will have ceded our agency to preserve human cognition to the logic of the market and the state.

Understanding and protecting the limited, messy, and paradoxical core of human cognition is what will give us the confidence to pursue the best of machine cognition.

10. Context Matters

What is the point of cognitive enhancement?

Finally, let’s confront the ultimate question: what is the point of cognitive enhancement? Will it be to increase our general intelligence? To become "better humans"? Or will it be to achieve specific goals, such as maximizing productivity, competing with AI, or even merging with machines?⁴ 

Proponents of cognitive enhancement paint an optimistic picture. They highlight its potential to restore cognitive function, aid the paralyzed, and combat various mental diseases. Yet initial promises of health and well-being are often just opening moves in a larger strategy. Like every technology, adoption will be driven by major corporations seeking monopolies, regulatory capture, and profit maximization, for both good and bad.

These are the contexts that will determine whether we consider cognitive enhancement an “enhancement” or not. We won’t become “better” simply by becoming more intelligent, but by performing a certain task better or pursuing a specific goal better. It may be a goal that we choose, but it may also be one that is imposed on us. We will only judge an enhancement as “good” if we think that goal is worth pursuing. 

Simply performing better on some task is not in itself an inherent good. We need to ask: what context is that performance good for? Who benefits from that context?

Even enhancements that you might consider inherently beneficial (like increased intelligence) may not be equally positive. They could easily benefit the corporation while harming the employee if, for example, they don't include broader support to handle the increased stress, or unhappiness⁵, or other inadvertent side effects that could come with radically increased intelligence.

Ultimately, what will count as a cognitive “enhancement” will be entirely context dependent. The history of technology tells us that context can change rapidly, and this is more often dictated by the market and the state than anything inherent in the technology itself.

Given the risks and rewards that come with cognitive enhancement, we will need to think as carefully about context as we do about the technology itself.

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The journey towards cognitive enhancement is not just about enhancing our intelligence, but also about understanding and embracing what it means to be human in an increasingly technologically mediated world. It’s why considering the philosophical implications is so critical.

This is just one attempt of what should be many more, by a maximally diverse group of thinkers considering every aspect of cognitive enhancement. We need philosophers and engineers to come together and define the possible. We need artists and authors to create speculative futures to help us envision different scenarios. We need politicians to consider these possibilities now, when we still have time to do something about them.

And this includes you. What did we miss? What would you like to see given more consideration? Please let us know in the comments so we can keep the conversation going.

1. For example, neurons devoted to sight will rewire themselves to boost other senses in the blind.

2. Randonautica is a delightful example of how randomness can be creatively leveraged.

3. You can only speed up a podcast so much.

4. This is the preferred solution of many technologists for aligning humanity with advanced technology. See Sam Altman and Vitalik Buterin, for example.

5. There is very little positive correlation between intelligence and happiness. This report found zero correlation at the individual level, but strong correlation at the group level, which is even more support for erasing the cognitive divide mentioned earlier.