Stimulants prescribed for the treatment of narcolepsy and ADHD are often used ‘off label’ to enhance cognitive function, primarily in the context of a demanding university or workplace. This unprescribed use of neuro-enhancing drugs to maintain competitiveness has even begun to feed back into their marketing. In 2004 pharmaceutical company Cephalon received permission to extend the scope of their product Provigil from ‘excessive daytime sleepiness’ to include ‘shift-work sleep disorder’, which saw sales increase from 196 million dollars in 2002 to 988 million in 2008 (Talbot 2009). Cephalon has also been reprimanded and later pleaded guilty to the off-label promotion of their products as remedies for ‘tiredness’ and ‘decreased activity’.

Martin Lancaster is a former healthcare marketing specialist who worked for international pharmaceutical company Wyeth. He received a Bachelor of Chemistry with first class honours from the Imperial College London, and an MBA in Business, Administration and Marketing from the Macquarie Graduate School of Management. Prior to its consolidation with Pfizer in 2009, he was Wyeth’s regional marketing director within the Asia Pacific region for seven years.

Notable products manufactured by Wyeth include over-the-counter drugs Robitussin―a brand of cough medicine, Advil―an anti-inflammatory analgesic, as well as prescription drugs Premarin―an estrogen medication, and Effexor―trade name for the antidepressant Venlafaxine. Venlafaxine is licenced for use in the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social phobia, and panic disorder (Australian Medicines Handbook 2013), however it is also used in the treatment of narcolepsy and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Interview Questions

1. During your time as marketing director for the Asia Pacific region of Wyeth, were you ever tasked with the marketing of psychiatric drugs like Adderall, Ritalin, or Provigil?
2. Were you and your peers aware of the alternate ‘off label’ use of Wyeth’s products? Was this seen as a positive increase of the consumer pool?
3. What are your thoughts on the use of prescription drugs for nonmedical purposes?
4. In competitive fields there is the risk that abstaining from biological enhancement will put you at a disadvantage. What do you envision the future of high-demand institutions will be like under these circumstances?
5. Is there still value in a natural work ethic, or are neuroenhancers simply the next step in an efficient and dedicated work ethic?
6. Bio enhancements could also be expanded to include the fitness industry, where performance-enhancing drugs range from commercial supplements to the non-medical use of anabolic steroids, hormones, and stimulants. Are these two contexts comparable?
7. Did you notice any change in the popularity and kinds of performance enhancing drugs available during the length of your career? Do you think this has affected your company’s manufacture and marketing of these products?
8. Where do you see the development, manufacture, and marketing of performance enhancing drugs 20 years from now?

Citation

Talbot, M. 2009, “Brain gain- the underground world of ‘neuroenhancing’ drugs”, The New Yorker, 27 April, viewed 26 September 2018, < https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/04/27/brain-gain&gt;.

In our future-oriented scenario for 2040, the prime-minister has imposed his extreme right-wing policies on the country and repealed the 1977 Anti-Discrimination Act. Formerly protected personal attributes like sex, disability, and race have become subject to institutionalised prejudice. Employment, among other areas of public life like housing and education, no longer uphold principles of anti-discrimination, equal opportunity, or diversity. Dormant societal prejudices and preferences have resurfaced, unhindered by legal intervention, which begin to narrow society’s perception of human virtue and worth.

Society begins to structure itself around a narrow ideal, concerned with physical appearance and lifestyle. Celebrity culture drives this new social model, which propagates a ‘back to nature’ style existence, turning away from the technological advancements that artificially accelerate physical wellbeing. Only the upper classes have the resources to cast off contemporary biotech, which has otherwise made quality of life more accessible to the poorer classes. The super-rich seek an organic, agrarian lifestyle away from the mass-produced and densely populated metropolis that the remainder of society inhabits.

The most superficial aspect of this coveted lifestyle is a specific physical appearance, which immediately indicates your superior socio-economic status― full eyebrows, sun-kissed skin, and a naturally toned physique. To obtain these attributes is seen as the height of accomplishment, as it implies that you have ample time and money to eat an organic and nutritious diet, and live and exercise in a spacious unpolluted environment.

Without the Anti-Discrimination Act to promote diversity, this singular appearance becomes the preference of all employers and offers a prominent advantage to those who adhere to it, homogenising the workforce and society at large. Those who do not possess these arbitrary ‘natural’ qualities face barriers to opportunity that effect their socio-economic advancement and subsequent quality of life. Remaining competitive in the public sphere is no longer about being the most accomplished, but modelling society’s perception of accomplishment.

Poorer socio-economic classes seeking to advance themselves are unable to afford the costly organic diet, rural open-air residence, and time-consuming exercise regime that would make them the most desirable candidate for a better position. Biological augmentation is the cheaper, faster alternative for the middle and working classes. As biotech becomes more accessible to all classes, it is considered unexclusive and the easy way out, a method of cutting corners and a cheap imitation of ‘natural’ self-enhancement.

Since meeting this ideal is the only avenue in which to get ahead socially and in the workplace, middle and working-class citizens are constantly resorting to affordable biotech in secret, disguising their augmentation as genuine lifestyle practices. A culture of fabricated identity and medical secrecy becomes the new norm, as those most able to pass themselves off as the genuine ‘natural’ article are the ones who succeed in life.

To summarise―practices necessary for a natural lifestyle and appearance are living in a clean environment, consuming organic and nutritious food, and regular outdoor activity. Common methods of imitating the natural lifestyle and fast-tracking bodily enhancement include factory gyms, bio hacking, supplements, and cosmetic surgery.

Two major changes have occurred in my futuring studies since my last blog post. My group’s chosen future scenario took me from my focus on AI and care systems to aesthetic surgery, which was then expanded to encompass body hacking and body modification at the recommendation of our tutor. Considering this significant shift in my study trajectory, I felt it necessary to revise my literature review:

—

The concept of homo faber, introduced to me by Don Ihde (1993), concerns the agency of homo sapiens in controlling their fate and surroundings using tools. Since before history, humanity has been equipping themselves with technology that enables them to go beyond their bodies’ natural capabilities. The acceleration of science and technology has generated ever more intuitive and ‘physically transformative’ innovations that blur the line between the organic and artificial.

Contemporary consumer culture’s focus on the human body and how it correlates to social status, acceptability, happiness, and moral goodness has seen great investment in and the commercialisation of transformative cosmetic modifications. Mike Featherston argues in his article, Body, Image, and Affect in Consumer Culture, that this preoccupation with simplistic technological pursuits is ‘a superficial diversion from the important questions of social and planetary justice, equality and reconstruction which continue to accumulate’ (2010).

On a more functional yet still controversial trajectory is body modification technologies that seek to maximize one’s health, energy, and vitality. Unlike reconstructive/restorative biotech (prescribed medication, pacemakers, cochlear implants, prostheses, etc.) that aim to restore fragmented bodily functions caused by injury, illness, or disability, ‘mind hackers’ and ‘body hackers’ seek to enhance rather than restore natural human capability (Duarte 2014).

 

Adderall, commonly used ‘off-label’ as a cognitive enhancer. (Reed 2006)

The proliferation of ‘off-label’ neuroenhancement practices reflect technology’s deep cultural entrenchment, as mounting pressure to achieve in the workplace and university has popularised the modification of personal cognitive function through supplements and unprescribed drugs (Talbot 2009). Neurologist Anjan Chatterjee predicts that in the future this ‘cosmetic neurology’ will be as mainstream as cosmetic surgery, but with persuasively practical results. The ethical complications of ‘smart drugs’ lie in their fairness and accessibility, as their unregulated use further disadvantages those who cannot afford them or consider it a form of cheating, expanding inequality and promoting a cognitive arms-race.

A subculture of human-technology hybridism that has begun to filter into mainstream consciousness and praxis through online communities is ‘body hacking’. Unlike commercial cosmetic practices and mind hacking, which have lead to body normalisation, competitiveness, and a lack of tolerance towards diversity (Featherstone 2010), body hacking offers an alternate discourse that challenges attitudes about ‘what [bodies] should look like and how they should behave’ (Duarte 2014). Practitioners uphold the ideals of transhumanism, a movement that perceives a future where the human species surpass their evolutionary limitations by becoming a techno-scientifically augmented cyber-humanity (Duarte 2015). Above all is their belief in a future of individual agency- they are the architects of their own bodies, recreationally augmenting their bodies in pursuit of new sensory, functional, and physiological experiences that enrich their lives.

The acceleration of biotech promises significant shifts in the ethical, political, philosophical and sociological spheres. As society becomes more willing to modify the human form, so too must it modify its perception of what exactly being human is, and crucially when that ceases to be.

Citation

Ihde, D. 1993, Philosophy of technology: an introduction, Paragon House, New York.

Duarte, B.N. 2014, Entagled agencies: new individual practices of human-technology hybridism through body hacking, Springer Science+Business Media, Dordrecht.

Reed, JB 2006, 30mg tablets of Shire Plc’s Adderall XR, Getty Images, viewed 23 October 2018, <https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/30mg-tablets-of-shire-plcs-adderall-xr-are-arranged-in-a-news-photo/94626696 >.

Featherstone, M. 2010, ‘Body, image and affect in consumer culture’, Body & Society, vol. 16, no.1, pp. 193-221.

Talbot, M. 2009, “Brain gain- the underground world of ‘neuroenhancing’ drugs”, The New Yorker, 27 April, viewed 26 September 2018, <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/04/27/brain-gain >.

Duarte, B.N. 2015, “Some highlighting considerations on ‘body hacking’”, Humanities and Technology Review, vol. 11, pp. 167-175

 

The evolution of future studies has progressed from deterministic prediction and mystique, to the indeterministic and control-oriented, to most recently the transformative and agency-oriented (Kuosa 2011). Contemporary future studies is a synthesis of approaches, objectives and methods that imbue us with the ability to think and plan for a future developed civilisation.

At the forefront of this contemporary futuring paradigm is Sohail Inayatulluh, whose description of future studies’ principles, theories, and methods is deeply complex yet holistic. Inayatulluh’s methodology enumerates six foundational concepts of futures thinking, six questions with which to develop possible and preferred futures, and six pillars that utilise methods and tools that can be used both in theory and praxis. This novel approach to futures studies seeks to recover the agency in people- giving them the concepts, ways of thinking, and tools, to construct and realise a world they wish to live in (Inayatullah 2008).

Regarding the exponential acceleration and sophistication of technology through history and into the future, the futuring discipline has become a dialectical means of investigating technology’s ongoing influence on ‘love’. Speaking on love at UTS, J. Kanga (2018, lecture, 3 August) described relationships as a core element of society, which may be familial, romantic, or professional. The deep cultural entrenchment of technology means that technologies have always influenced how we communicate (Ihde 1993), thus in the ever changing technological sphere, the nature of human–artefact relations and human–human relations is constantly being redefined.

The nurturing implications of love in relation to futuring and design can relate to care and care systems, which include child rearing, care for the elderly, and disabled care. It is here that much analysis, projection, and discourse is undertaken by specialists, academics, and the general public alike. Australian radio program Future Tense’s episode titled ‘Robots, AI and ethics’ (2017) addresses the impacts of new technology on contemporary care systems, a potent issue regarding ethical technology development and ethical AI. According to roboticist and roboethicist Ronald Arkin, considerations primarily concern the preservation of dignity and the quality of care of a patient, and thus need to address the lack of safeguards that would ensure a duty of care when programming AI behaviour. Concerns include the entrenchment of pre-existing human biases via automation, ethical questions of transparency in contexts where lifelike robots interact with vulnerable members of society, and the slippery slope from AI companionship as a ‘social enabler’ to a negligent substitution for real social relationships, love, and care.

It appears that regarding the exponential acceleration and sophistication of AI technology and its implications for love, there are growing concerns of accountability where robots assume a caretaking role, despite its potential technological and economic benefits. This accountability extends to both those who design and market the technologies, and those who use and appropriate them. The intangible and qualitative values that often inform love, relationships and ethics necessitate an equal focus on human psychology in AI programming as much as technical knowledge.

Citation

Inayatullah, S. 2008, ‘Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming’, Foresight, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 4-21.

Kuosa, T. 2011, ‘Evolution of futures studies’, Futures, vol.43, no. 3, pp.327-336

Millett, S.M. 2011, Managing the future: a guide to forecasting and strategic planning in the 21st century, Triarchy Press, Dorset

Ihde, D. 1993, Philosophy of technology: an introduction, Paragon House, New York

Arkin, R. 2017, ‘Robots, AI, and ethics’, Future Tense, audio podcast, Radio National, Sydney, 20 August, viewed 23 July 2018, < http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/robots-and-ai/8804292&gt;.