This post marks the end of the first year of The Technological Citizen, and the end of my Hackworth Fellowship at The Markkula Center for Ethics.  And what a year it has been!

Over the course of the past 9 months, I’ve written and featured over 20 posts, on topics ranging from biotechnology to social networking to artificial intelligence.  These posts have amassed upwards of 500 thoughtful and interesting comments; and since September, approximately 20,000 people have visited the blog.

Throughout the year, posts from The Technological Citizen have been incorporated into the curriculum of eight courses at Santa Clara University in five different departments, including Social and Ethical Issues in Biotechnology (Biology Department); Science, Technology and Society (Philosophy Department); Technology and Communication (Communications Department); Science, Ethics, and Society (English Department), and Difficult Dialogues in Genetics and Medicine, to name a few. Hundreds of students have responded to posts as part of their coursework, and students from the philosophy course Science, Technology and Society wrote “guest posts” as their final papers, from which the previous post on electronic recycling and two upcoming posts were selected.

Over the year, I’ve been able to connect with some amazing people in the fields of technology, ethics and beyond.  Due to the powers of e-mail, contributing writers to the blog have included Paul Bloom, psychologist from Yale University;  Wendell Wallach, ethicist from Yale University; and Colin Allen, from Indiana University.  I’ve also been honored to feature articles by Dr. Lawrence Nelson, bioethicist from Santa Clara University, and Dr. Sean Hatt, psychologist from Santa Clara University’s Graduate School of Psychology.  I am so grateful, too, to Roger Holzberg from Methuselah Foundation for letting me interview him about the foundation’s work in life extension, and to Dr. Wallach and Dr. Allen for featuring my article on The Singularity on their blog, Moral Machines.

Living in the Silicon Valley has afforded me some excellent opportunities throughout the year as well: I’ve attended lectures by Jonathan Zittrain from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Santa Clara University; Dr. William Hurlbut from Stanford’s Neuroscience Institute on ethical issues raised by biotechnology; Dr. Hank Greely, Dr. David Magnus, and Dr. Christine Wijman at The Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford on fMRI technology and Vegitative States; and blogger and writer Jonah Lehrer on neuroscience and decision making.

I also had the opportunity to learn about The Power of Social Technology from Professor Jennifer Aaker at Stanford Business School, when I was invited to serve on a panel evaluating the final presentations of her course on using social media for social good.  Excitingly, excerpts from The Technological Citizen are going to be featured in her forthcoming book, The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media To Drive Social Change, an amazing book coming out next fall on the power of social media.

To top it all off, just recently I attended Wisdom 2.0, a conference bringing together leading thinkers in the fields of mindfullness and neuroscience with tech leaders from Silicon Valley and beyond to discuss how we can integrate our use of technology to lead better, more meaningful lives (very Technological Citizen-y, indeed).  Overall, it’s been rewarding and exciting to write about these topics in an area that is such a hub for technological innovation!

Looking Back

When I started The Technological Citizen, I knew nothing about blogging or web design; I didn’t know how to “embed” videos or post podcasts or even how to post a link. But I felt passionately about ethics and technology, and eager to share ideas, so I figured it out (with some help, of course) and set out to create my first blog.

My primary goal was to begin to spread the notion of “technological citizenship” and empower others to become informed and make thoughtful decisions about shaping our technological future — because it is our individual decisions about how we use technology that aggregate into our technological norms.  To that end, I tried to build a site that reflected a deep engagement and commitment to exploring technological issues, one which I hope modeled the type of intellectual engagement I hoped to inspire in others.

I wanted The Technological Citizen to be a bit different than the blogs I had become accustomed to reading, though.  My feeling is that on the web, so much gets posted, so frequently, that we can read blog posts only to forget about them 5 minutes later when we’re on to the next one.  I also think in our technologically paced world, we mistake sharing information with engaging with that information: it’s one thing to tweet out articles or blog a couple times a week (or a day) about a few thoughts about this or that, and to receive quickly formulated, knee-jerk comments or even just a Facebook “like” button in response; but what is missing from this type of internet discourse is a more in-depth, sustained reflection on the topics we are exchanging.  So much of the content online gets transmitted in bits and pieces, isolated from context, removed from any cohesive whole; is there a way, I wondered, to challenge this model, to create a website that was more about ideas than updates, which valued dialogue more than instant reactions?

So instead of posting constant updates, just linking to other articles and writing a paragraph or two on a topic, I wanted to take time to research, reflect on, and carefully construct my posts,  in hopes of creating an atmosphere of more in-depth reflection.  I wanted to create a forum for ideas that would have some staying power, where posts didn’t have a 24-hour expiration date but could be valuable sources of information, hopefully long after they were posted, and where people took the time to reflect on what they were contributing to the conversation, instead of just pressing “reply” and moving onto the next thing. And my hope was that the extra time it takes to read a long post, watch a video, or listen to a podcast is time readers might engage more fully with the topic, consider its impact, and reflect on it more meaningfully.  In essence, I wanted to try to reframe what a blog could be, and by bringing my own sustained reflection to the blog, elicit that from my readers as well.

The result? I can’t feel anything but deep gratitude towards the 475+ people who have shared their reflections in the comments section of the posts this year, for you all have really helped me to achieve this goal.  Thank you all so much!  On my posts on Cognitive Stimulants, there are over 40 comments; on my post on Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis, there are over 65 comments; and on my post on Personal Genetic Testing, there are over 120 comments.  I am so grateful for all the support and interest I have received for the blog, and for all the enthusiastic readers that have really made this year a success.  I know there is a lot to read online, and I thank everyone who has taken the time to stop by and contribute to The Technological Citizen!

Posts: A Summary

When people ask me where I get ideas on what to write on, I usually say, “Everywhere!” One thing I certainly never suffered from was a lack of things to write about, and my one regret is that I couldn’t have covered more topics.  But looking back, it is fun to see the diversity of the topics that have been featured on the blog so far…

Over the year, I’ve written about everything from Ritalin to Robots; I’ve examined “ubiquitous human computing” and a Singularity-fueled post-human future.  I’ve looked at internet privacy and advertisements for egg-donors and presented views on designer babies, too.

I’ve tried to present issues in a balanced and nuanced way, and in so doing, asked readers to take some time out of their media-multitasking to sit and read posts which are long and sometimes complicated, hoping earnestly to create a blog that flies against the conventions of online reading behaviors, which condition us to expect quick, short bits of information that we can easily skim (but often quickly forget as a result).

I’ve tried to inspire those same readers to think twice about whipping out their cell phones in public places at the expense of talking to those around them (and I also suggested what to do with those cell phones when you’re ready to move on to a newer one).  I hoped to encourage readers to consider spending some time in nature, and to try and appreciate the natural world for its intrinsic value, not just as a resource we can use for our technological gains.

I also took my interest in neuroscience and philosophy and tried to draw some attention to “brain overclaim syndrome”; I’ve even offered up some tips on how to live a longer, healthier life (and cued you in to the benefits and pitfalls of getting your genome tested, also).

And I wrote about how you can use technology to change the world — and highlighted that you can live in a pretty swanky house while you’re at it.

When I look back at all of these articles, I’m so happy to have been able to write about such a broad range of topics.  But my real hope is that the culmination of all these articles achieves something beyond what any individual post could get across — my hope is to have challenged you, in general, to think about technology with a critical, analytic eye; to see technology as not only something that we shape, but something that shapes us; to become aware of it as a powerful and  influential force in all of our lives and to constantly question if the path we are heading down is the path we should be taking.

I also hope to have inspired you to think about both the powers and dangers of each of the technologies that impact our lives, and furthermore, to plant a seed of skepticism that causes you to think twice about the technologies that are advancing around us each day, and say, “Yes, we are able to do this with technology.  But does that mean we should?”  And  lastly, I hope to have provided you with some information or insight you may not have thought about otherwise, so that the next time you’re skimming an internet article, checking your cell phone while having a conversation with someone, or reaching for that Ritalin, you might approach it with a bit more careful reflection.  ”Concern for man himself and his fate,” Einstein said, “must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors.”

I’d Like To Thank…

In the process of looking back on this year, I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has read the blog, sent the blog to friends, and left comments on the posts: I appreciate it so very much!

This blog could not have been possible without the thoughtful encouragement and feedback of my advisor Dr. David DeCosse, who has been so supportive and helpful throughout the year, as well as the support of The Markkula Center, including Kirk Hanson and Miriam Schulman, and the generous Hackworth Fellowship.

I’d also like to thank all of the people who have guest posted throughout this year: Dr. Sean Hatt, for his thoughtful piece on cognitive stimulants; Dr. Lawrence Nelson, for his article on PGD, and whose bioethics course got me interested in studying ethics in the first place; Dr. Wendell Wallach and Dr. Paul Bloom from Yale University and Dr. Colin Allen from Indiana University for generously allowing me to feature their thought-provoking material. To the students who have contributed guest posts: Preet Anand, Kaelin Holland, Danny Meyers, Rachel Hammel and Kendra Postell.  Thank you for your interest in the blog, for your willingness to contribute, and for all the discussions you have inspired as a result.  Keep it up!

I’d also like to thank Professor Leilani Miller, who has been so supportive of the blog from the beginning — your support has meant so much to me; Professor Margaret McLean, Professor Aparajita Nanda, and Professor Jeremy Townley, for graciously using this blog in their courses; to all of the amazing students and people who have contributed their comments over the course of the year, thank you for your thoughtful feedback.  Also, to Professor Jennifer Aaker, for all of the wonderful opportunities she has afforded me – thank you so much!

To my family and friends for being so supportive over the course of the year, and for listening to me talking about these topics non-stop(!), thank you.  To Angela Zhu, for all of her help, particularly launching the blog, with helping me design and troubleshoot for the website.

And last but certainly not least, I’d like to thank Professor Shannon Vallor, without whom this blog would not exist.  The Technological Citizen is an outgrowth of her profound teaching, guidance, and intellectual influence, and I am deeply indebted to her for all that she has taught me.

What Next?

When I look around, I see that things are changing.  Fast. Genes are being spliced. Brains are being scanned. Tweets are being Tweeted.  The decisions we make as a generation now about how we approach these things — the internet, genetic engineering, neuroscientific pursuits, environmental technology, robotics, and reproductive technologies — these decisions will be crucial in the shape our technological future will take.  And if we get interested, get informed, and get involved, we can better create a future we can be proud of, instead of just mindlessly being along for the ride.

So what happens with The Technological Citizen now?  I will continue writing, albeit less frequently, into the forseeable future.  (Of course, in our technologically saturated world, I will never, ever run out of topics to cover!)  I hope you will continue to read, comment, and share the blog.

In addition to new posts, I will be working on other pages for the blog, like a books page, and a page on philosophy of technology, highlighting some of my favorite philosophers and ethicists.  I will also be updating my articles page with my favorite sources for interesting ideas.  The blog will also continue to be incorporated into the curriculum of courses at Santa Clara University, next year and in years to come.

As year one of the blog comes to an end, I wanted to close my posts with a passage from Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly’s article, “We Are The Web,” because it expresses a powerful concept I believe to be true:  We are living through a major technological transition, one which will go down as a pivotal, transformational period in history.  And as we live through this time, I think it is important that we not only open our eyes to the technological changes taking place, but that we examine these changes from a place of ethical and philosophical inquiry. The type of wisdom necessary to guide us through these changes is not inherent in the creation and proliferation of technology, but must be called upon through reflection and dialogue.

Technology is a tool: whether we choose to use it for good is up to us.

From “We Are The Web,” by Kevin Kelly:

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don’t. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

-Courtney, The Technological Citizen

Which ones do you forward onto your friends, and which ones do you relegate to internet oblivion?

Out of the requests you get on Facebook to support a cause or become a “fan,” to the e-mails you get from Barack Obama to watch a short video about healthcare reform, to a link someone sends you to donate to their charity, how many of them do you take the time to engage with deeply, and how many go, in one eye, so to speak, and out the other?

Most of us are inundated with requests online to take notice of social causes: to “Save Darfur” or to “Campaign for Cancer Awareness”.  And yet many of us glaze over and ignore them; or perhaps we join a group but end up taking no real action towards the cause. Indeed, for anyone who has ever created a YouTube video, written a blog, or tried to get someone to join their cause on Facebook, you likely know that simply sending out a request doesn’t always lead to action.

Yet, the power of social technology, when fully engaged, can be nothing short of revolutionary. Micro-loans websites like Kiva.org, which allow people to lend money over the internet to small-business owners in developing countries, have enabled people to change the lives of entrepreneurs in 3^rd world countries at the click of a button.  With over 2 million online registered users, members of my.barackobama.com mobilized and planned over 200,000 events, wrote 400,000 blog posts, and created over 35,000 volunteer groups during campaign season; and through these online avenues, the campaign raised over 500 million dollars from 6.5 million online donations (the majority of which were under $100 each).  And in recent months, The Red Cross has raised over $30 million dollars for Haiti relief through text message donations, allowing people to literally lend a helping hand by using it to send a text.

The same technologies that enable us to “poke” our friends or “retweet” an interesting article are the ones that can connect and mobilize us to bring about change in profound ways.  This week I had the exciting opportunity to be on a panel evaluating the final presentations of students taking “The Power of Social Technology,” a course at Stanford Business School taught by Professor Jennifer Aaker devoted to looking at how to promote social good by harnessing the power of social networking technologies.

Professor Aaker’s course was inspired by the phenomenal story of Sameer Bhatia, a Stanford grad who was diagnosed with Leukemia at the age of 32.  Sameer needed a bone marrow transplant, and he needed to find a genetically matched bone marrow donor, fast; but out of 6.8 million people registered at the National Marrow Donor Program, only 1% were South Asians, and the chance for a genetic match was exceedingly low; indeed, Sameer had less than a 1 in 20,000 chance of finding a match from the national donor registry.

Sameer’s friend Vinay had also been diagnosed with Leukemia the year before.  Both men needed donors and had only weeks to find them.  So what did Sameer and Vinay and their family and friends do? They joined forces, took action, and used social media – Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter – to spread their story.  Through videos, Facebook ads and groups, and viral messages, Sameer and Vinay’s team reached out across the US and within a matter of weeks, succeeded in registering over 24,000 people of South Asian descent as donors. As a result, Sameer found a direct match, and Vinay a close match, in the time frame they needed, and both underwent transplants shortly thereafter. (Read more about Sameer and Vinay’s incredible story here).

HelpSameer.org

Sadly, despite finding successful donors, both Sameer and Vinay passed away from complications from their diseases; however, their legacies live on strong, through family and friends, as well as the over 250 lives that have been saved as a result of the donors that Team Sameer and Vinay managed to get registered. Their story is one with a powerful, enduring impact: it shows how the technologies we have at fingertips can enable us to share stories, mobilize support, and take action and change lives in ways that have never before been possible.  With a collective will fueled by deep friendship and love, Sameer, Vinay, and their friends and families achieved a monumental task that has continued to have positive ripple effects reaching far beyond their original goal.

Professor Aaker, taking inspiration from Sameer’s story, charges her students with a similar mission: in just 5 short weeks of the course, identify a cause, brainstorm how to represent it, and then, make it go viral.

The student groups chose a wide range of topics, from helping students from East Palo Alto get on the track to go to college, to creating a food traceability network to help people know where there food comes, to creating a website where students can ask each other questions and share notes (see all the group projects here).  There were three group videos that stood out to me the most:

1. Group “Project Baby Warmth: Embrace” promoted a simple product with a simple story: spend $25 and you can support the life of low-weight babies in poor conditions by providing them with a sleeping bag that keeps them warm – and alive:
2. “Women 4 Women” seeks to bring the crafts from artisans in the third world to a market in the US, where one can buy a one-of-a-kind item (instead of say, a carbon copy from Pottery Barn) and in turn, support the livelihood of a woman abroad:>
3. “The Bubbles Project” aims to bring people together, on and offline, to “inspire, create, and connect” through community based art projects: The Bubbles Project from Raja Haddad on Vimeo.

So what makes an online cause successful? The most successful groups, in my opinion, were those that brought together all the elements to engage a viewer – the audio, visual, and stylistic components, as well as the storytelling and individual connection that makes you feel invested in the cause.  The videos with the most impact each seemed to touch upon these elements:

Get Attention, Then, Tell A Story

• What makes a video go viral?  It’s pretty simple: people watch your video, and like it enough to send it to friends.  But achieving this, as anyone who has created a video knows, is far more difficult.  In the sea of content on the web, how do you stand out?  How do you keep someone interested and watching? Those initial moments that open the video are critical in engaging the viewer; and keeping the pace up is important so that they don’t lose interest.  The most effective videos were those where style informed substance; where visuals and songs elevated the message; where you forgot you were watching a video but were simply inspired by a story.  This “attention-grabbing” component is critical: because no matter how important your cause, or how moving your story, no cause can be promoted if people don’t take the time to learn about it.

Identify Concrete, “Actionable” Goals

• Creating a viral movement is more than just getting people to watch your video; it’s about inspiring people to contribute to a cause.  How do you get someone to not only view your video, but to have it stay with them in a meaningful way?  How do you create a goal that is measureable and achievable? Focused and actionable goals were an important element of these projects; and certainly, of any movement for social good.  It can be hard to look at a large issue like poverty or lack of education and feel like you can have any impact; but when you remember that you have the power to affect one life in one, measurable way, the illusion of helplessness dissipates and you feel inspired to make a difference.

Turn Awareness Into Action

• Making someone aware of a cause is half the battle; getting them to take real action to do something about it is really the ultimate goal.  And though the internet has the capacity to engage a worldwide audience in social good, it also can breed internet apathy.  Membership in an online group does not equate with true commitment; we all know it’s one thing to join a Facbeook group for a cause, but it’s quite another to turn that group membership into real-world action. How do you get people to translate their online membership to actually donate their money or time? The groups that succeeded were those that were able to pair their online movements with real life actions, so that the cause didn’t simply evaporate and dissolve into the internet ether.

So from a viewer’s perspective, what came across about using technology for change?  It was clear from the group presentations that promoting causes and goals is inherently social, and to be successful, there needs to be that feeling of participation, of networking, of growth, of ripple effects, all of which are a combination of tangible and intangible forces coming together to create a movement that people feel they are a part of.  Indeed, the teams that really excelled were the ones that were able to represent their enthusiasm and spirit for their message in an engaging and thoughtful way; in a way that tells a powerful story; and in a way that generates that ‘kinetic energy’ that drives social causes — leaving you with that feeling you get after seeing a video that causes you to continue to reflect on it long after you are away from your computer.

I left Professor Aaker’s class with that feeling: and with the feeling that the power to use social technology for good,  to create, motivate, and perpetuate social movements, is a profound power indeed.

It’s truly remarkable to see how quickly and effectively technology can be used to bring people together, whether it’s to register bone marrow donors, or to send a quick text to help Haiti.  With over 175 million people logging onto Facebook each day alone, and over 600 “tweets” going out on the web each second, it’s incredible to consider the impact we could have if, both local and global, if we continue to identify and harness these networks for social change.

So the next time you get forwarded information about a cause, remember: every movement starts with one person — one person, and maybe one click of “play” on that YouTube Video.

To learn more about The Power of Social Technology and watch all the group’s videos, click here.

• To learn more about social innovation, and how to harness social media for impact, follow Professor Jennifer Aaker on Twitter.
• To learn more about Sameer and Vinay’s story, go to http://www.helpsameer.org/strategy/, and to read about how to harness social media to help save the life of an individual, see the cases found here.
• To watch one of my favorite “viral videos” for social change, “The Girl Effect”, click here.

**Portions of this blog post, along with my own original contributions, will appear in Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith’s upcoming book, The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change. Read more at TheDragonflyEffect.com.

With the high availability of so-called “cognitive enhancing drugs” like Ritalin, Adderall, and Provigil on college campuses, students everywhere are facing the choice of whether or not to take non-prescribed medications to help them “perform better” in school. Studies show that anywhere between 20-35% of college students have used one of these medications without a prescription in their college career, but an informal survey would likely reveal an even higher percentage, as the use of these medications is on the rise.  Many claim these drugs help them concentrate, study longer, and juggle more tasks by creating more productive hours in the day.  Others rely on them in a crunch, during midterms, finals, or the night before a big test, when the clock is ticking and assignments are due, and there doesn’t seem to be enough time –or brain power–to get everything that needs to get done, done.

The question of whether to use these “cognitive enhancing drugs” poses many ethical concerns– some rooted in the very immediate and direct impact of these drugs on the developing brains of young people, and some rooted more in what these drugs say philosophically about the direction our society is headed in.  And with the rate of use tripling within the past ten years, along with the fact that dozens of new cognitive stimulants are currently in the pharmaceutical pipeline, it seems an important issue to examine.  Should we embrace the use of these drugs, in hopes of them making us smarter, more efficient, and more productive?  Or should we be wary of using them, concerned with the risks that they pose not only to our brains, but to our own personal and societal values?

I think before launching into the ethical arguments surrounding the use of these medications, it’s important to consider the context within which they are used, particularly on college campuses. Why do students feel compelled to take these stimulants, and why has there been such a boom in their use? What kind of environment fuels the perceived need for these medications, originally developed for disorders of attention, but now so widely used by the general public?

One idea to consider is the general trend our society is taking towards having attentional problems across the board.   Cognitive stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin were originally developed to treat Attention Hyperactivity Disorder, a disorder characterized in part by inattentivity, distractibility, and trouble staying focused; but in our era of technological multi-tasking, where everyone’s attention seems strained, are we all suffering from an attention deficit?

In his article “In Defense of Distraction,” Sam Anderson suggests we are experiencing a “crisis of attention”: and that “A quintessentially Western solution to the attention problem—one that neatly circumvents the issue of willpower—is to simply dope our brains into focus.”

Yet, no one needs an article or even an official decree from a psychologist to identify our deteriorating attention spans.  Just look around: most of us can hardly sit for any sustained period of time without checking our cell phones and our e-mail; we like things to be fast, and when they aren’t, we get frustrated. We expect instant communication and instant feedback; we even start getting antsy a few minutes into that YouTube video.  Our technologies have conditioned us to expect small bits of information, in quick surges, whether it be through Twitter, Facebook status updates, or one or two-sentence e-mail responses quickly transcribed on a Blackberry or iPhone. Even our news is increasingly transmitted in these small, quick packages. Across the board, technology is making things quicker and faster, causing us to spend less attention on each individual thing as we try to spend our attention on more things.

Indeed, we are currently experiencing an explosion of information in today’s “information age” where our cognitive loads are being challenged more than they ever have before.  Could this be said to drive the need for these medications? Just consider what an average student might be doing while trying to study: surfing the internet, checking e-mail, text-messaging, breezing through Facebook updates, listening to music, checking out a YouTube video and (let’s not forget) trying to study. With all of these inputs vying for our attention, with so much information to master, is it any wonder that we have a hard time staying focused?

Other factors surely contribute to this trend: the need for stimulants likely also stems from the immense amount of pressure students feel to get their work completed, in a time when school is more and more competitive, people are more high achieving, and there seems so much to do, and not enough time to do it in. Overwhelmed with school projects, balancing a social life, and the pressure to memorize all those Biology terms by your midterm can be daunting– sometimes, it might even seem impossible to get by without a little bit of help.  A student from a medical school chat forum went as far as to say it’s impossible to juggle school these days without the help of these drugs and live a normal life:

“The only people who get through the (med school) program I’m in either use stimulants or have no social life whatsoever. There is no other way. This is just the natural outcome of students being expected to memorize everything. The choice we’re being given is use drugs or fail.”

The pressure to juggle all of this academic pressure is certainly one driving force in the use of these drugs; but other students may use the medications less as a way to be a top, high-achieving student and more as a way to manage the day to day life of being in college, doing, well, everything college students do. In her article “Brain Gain” for The New Yorker Margaret Talbot interviewed a Harvard student with the pseudonym Alex, who said:

“I don’t think people who take Adderall are aiming to be the top person in the class…At the most basic level, they aim to do better than they would have otherwise.” He went on, “Everyone is aware of the fact that if you were up at 3 A.M. writing this paper it isn’t going to be as good as it could have been. The fact that you were partying all weekend, or spent the last week being high, watching ‘Lost’—that’s going to take a toll.”

Another student from the medical school chat forum chimed in,

“People use these medications because they’re lazy, and because they have no study habits. They’re a crutch for people who need a last minute way to get work done, fast.”

These examples seem to represent poles of a spectrum of students who take these medications – those who are seeking a high level of achievement and competitive edge, and those who are scrambling to get their papers done after slacking off all quarter – and of course, there is everyone in between, looking for a brain boost and a quick-fix way to get some help getting their work done.  In each case, the medication seems to offer a way of helping the student’s manage their workloads – including school, extra-curriculars, and even our attention-straining technologies – by giving them the opportunity to cram more work into their day.  But regardless of the reason, it is clear from the demand for these medications that there are people increasingly looking for ways to keep up – to pay attention, to stay on top, or even just to keep afloat.  And so the question one might ask, from an ethical perspective, is: “If there is a medication out there that might make it a little bit more manageable, why not take it?”

There are a number of arguments to consider when trying to address this question:

Are stimulants a tool for achievement?

In the scientific journal Nature in 2008, Director of The Center for Law and Biosciences at Stanford University Henry Greely and his colleagues published an article entitled, “Towards The Responsible Use of Cognitive Enhancing Drugs by the Healthy,” promoting the view that using medications like Ritalin and Adderall would allow us to become more focused, productive, and attentive, and that we should therefore embrace their use, not for people suffering from ADHD but for anyone who is looking for a cognitive kick.

“We should welcome new methods of improving brain function,” Greely wrote.  “In a world in which human work spans and life spans are increasing, cognitive enhancement tools – including the pharmacological—will be increasingly useful for improved quality of life and extended work-productivity, as well as to stave off normal and pathological age-related cognitive declines.  Safe and effective cognitive enhancers will benefit both the individual and society.”

“Why would you want an upper limit on the intellectual capabilities of a human being?” Nicholas Selzter, interviewed in Margaret Talbot’s article, adds.  “Think about the complexity of the intellectual tasks that people need to accomplish today.  If we had a tool to enable more people to understand the world at a greater level of sophistication, how can we prejudice ourselves against the notion?”

Indeed, some studies have demonstrated the benefits these drugs can provide.  Yesavage et al showed that pilots performed better during a month long trial of 5 mg of donepezil (Aricept, a stimulant) in flight simulation tasks, particularly in responding to emergencies. Other studies have shown that these drugs can, in some cases, help people learn better: “Amphetamines in small doses can promote neural plasticity and accelerate motor learning,” notes  Anjan Chatterjee, in his article “Cosmetic Neurology” and other stimulants have been shown to increase performance on memory and learning tasks.  Chatterjee poses the question, “Could they be used in normal subjects at the time of skilled motor learning, such as swimming, playing piano, or skiing, to increase learning potential?”

When Hank Greely presented his argument at Santa Clara last year, he put forth the idea that these drugs should be viewed as “tools” that can help people perform better, much like other tools we use to think better, for example, like a computer can serve as an instrument to help execute tasks more readily and efficiently and eyeglasses can help people see better. Some external tool that provides a leg up in studying, he says, is not much different from a medication that does the same thing; and if both can help us think, memorize, and perform better, than why close off the option of Ritalin just because it’s a “drug”?

“No one gets very worried if I enhance my eyesight by using binoculars, or if I enhance my memory using writing,” he said. “We don’t worry about “Google” as somehow an inappropriate enhancement.  We get more worried when we are changing our bodies and our changing our brains, but I’m not really sure we should be.  No one gets bent out of shape about the idea that people are using reading glasses as an evil enhancement because they are a tool.”

Greely suggests that we condone other types of “neural enhancement” with no moral problem. He writes, “research has identified beneficial neural changes engendered by exercise, nutrition, and sleep as well as instruction and reading…. cognitive enhancement drugs seem morally equivalent to other, more familiar enhancements.”

And later, puts forth the question directly: “Given the many cognitive-enhancing tools we accept already, from writing to laptop computers, why draw the line here (at giving medication), and say, thus far but no further?”

Greely’s argument essentially asks us to consider, why should influencing the brain directly using medication be considered different from using other external aids to help you study?

I think the argument is an interesting one, for it asks us to determine which technologies we consider appropriate to use to help us be more efficient and productive, and which ones we don’t.  Are we to view cognitive enhancing drugs merely as a tool that aids with a task like focus or memorization in the same way a tutor or making flashcards can help us memorize information?  And if these medications are merely a tool, should they be allowed in the same way students are permitted to use other types of study aids?  Should students come to rely on these medications with the same familiarity and comfort level that they rely on using a calculator on a math test?  Should they then be readily available to all students who want to use them?

His argument also raises the question, Why do we accept some forms of enhancement and not others?  Why do we condone a laptop or calculator as an appropriate tool, but not a medication? Does it have to do with the differences in their direct impact on the brain?  If so, then is there a moral difference between using a prescription medication and using large amounts of caffeine, which could elicit similar mental and physiological effects?

Another argument related to this idea of using stimulants as tools for achievement is whether it is “fair” for people to enhance their thinking using these drugs.  Is taking medications to achieve better simply another way to get one’s work done, or is it a form of cheating?

Would it be fair? Is taking a stimulant a form of cheating?

Do cognitive stimulants give an unfair advantage to some students over others?  Does it create an unjust environment where those who can afford or are willing to take the drugs are given an unfair leg up over those who don’t?  Is it “fair” that some students can afford to purchase such enhancements when others can’t?

In her article Brain Gain, Margaret Talbot writes,

“At many colleges, students have begun calling the off-label use of neuroenhancers a form of cheating. Writing last year in the Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper of the University of Virginia, a columnist named Greg Crapanzano argued that neuroenhancers “create an unfair advantage for the users who are willing to break the law in order to gain an edge. These students create work that is dependent on the use of a pill rather than their own work ethic.”

The question about cheating inevitably draws an analogy between using cognitive steroids to boost the mind and using steroids in athletic to boost physical strength. We generally acknowledge that using steroids in sports is unfair — it’s even illegal: so is doping our minds and different from doping our bodies?

Scientist Anders Sandberg says there should be no distinction, and that “cognitive doping” should be treated much like steroids are treated in sports: “If the goal of education is a competition for high grades, then the drugs would be a kin to doping and only add an unfair positional advantage to users…”

Yet others disagree, claiming that taking these medications is no different from other techniques students use to try to do better in school – invoking an argument similar to Greely.  One student writing about this topic said,

“Taking a study drug, while unhealthy and risky, should neither be considered illegal nor unethical…it’d be akin to saying studying for extra hours is somewhat unfair. How a person stays up has always been private business and varies person to person…Taking a study drug (should be) no more illegal than taking caffeine. Those who can afford to do more, get more. This is far from cheating, which is getting what you didn’t work for.  Debating whether drugs are fair is to debate whether we should compete at all.”

I think this argument is important to consider. Would the advantage given to those who are willing to take the drug be unfair over those who are unwilling to take the drugs? And would people start feeling coerced into taking the drugs if that was the only way to achieve at that level, much like athletes feel the pressure to take steroids in order to compete at the same level?  Extending it out, one might ask, what would happen from a distributive justice perspective if wealthy people have access to these cognitive drugs but people who can’t afford them don’t?  Would the gap between the rich and the poor widen?

Is there value in hard work that is undermined by using these drugs?

Another interesting perspective to consider is what role these drugs play in our conceptions of personhood. Have you ever had the experience of working so genuinely hard on something, and reaping the great rewards as a result of your genuine hard work?  Would this experience be undermined if you had relied on an artificial method of enhancement – a drug – in order to complete it?

Anjan Chatterjee’s article “Cosmetic Neurology” raises this concern, questioning what impact cognitive stimulants have on our concepts of character.  He takes the view that taking cognitive stimulants is indeed cheating, and therefore that taking these medications would erode our character. “Getting a boost without doing the work is cheating,” Chaterjee puts forth.  “And cheating cheapens us.”

Chatterjee also raises another interesting point, which is that these medications challenge the principle of accomplishing something on one’s own good will. Just like we don’t like it when athletes break records doped up on steroids, Chatterjee says, shouldn’t we hold the same judgment when someone “performs well” on a stimulant? We have long adopted the view that struggling builds character, and that eliminating pain altogether erodes that character.  In other words, the genuine hard work we put into things is important, and avenues that circumvent that hard work or augment them unfairly, undermines the entire achievement.  This issue seems particularly relevant in academia, where the analogy with steroid use in sports seems apt: would you respect a person less knowing they use a drug to enhance their thinking, much like we are disappointed by an athlete who engages in artificial enhancement?  If someone earns an A on a paper written on medication, are they as “worthy” of that A as they would be if they hadn’t taken it?

And one wonders, too, about the value of hard work, and whether it is lost in the midst of a stimulant-driven haze: is it really as valuable an experience to crank out a 10 page paper in one night on Ritalin as it is to work on it over time, sit with it, and truly learn from it?

Another question to consider in regards to personhood and values involves looking more generally at what types of thinking these medications encourage, and whether they are the types of thinking we want to be promoting. If we are to embrace the use of these drugs, then what value judgments are we placing on the idea that this type of alert productivity is necessarily the best type of thinking?

We automatically call medication that stimulates alertness “cognitive enhancement” – but should we?  It is well known that stimulants help people to focus, be more attentive, and more alert; yet, calling this type of thinking “cognitive enhancement” is not a technical term but rather a value judgment. Are there “cognitive trade-offs”  to these drugs — other valuable ways of thinking that these medications shut out? In creating a focused, attentive state of mind, what cognitive capacities might these drugs be undermining?

Indeed, many neuroscientists suggest that in promoting this type alert, “efficient” thinking, other types of thinking are de-emphasized in the brain.  Talbot notes:

“Cognitive psychologists have found that there is a trade-off between attentional focus and creativity. And there is some evidence that suggests that individuals who are better able to focus on one thing and filter out distractions tend to be less creative,” adding, stimulants “facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.”

Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and author of “How We Decide,” adds that these cognitive stimulants can negatively impact creativity and prevent the type of thinking that leads to insightful breakthroughs.  To achieve better focus, he says on his blog The Frontal Cortex, there can be a trade off of more creative ways of thinking:

“While it’s commonly assumed that the best way to solve a difficult problem is to focus, minimize distractions, and pay attention only to the relevant details, this clenched state of mind may inhibit the sort of creative connections that lead to sudden breakthroughs.”

Many students may relate to this point: those who take these medications talk about how the papers they write on Ritalin or Adderall are long-winded, and obsessive about certain points, perhaps indicating this certain type of thinking that these drugs emphasize over others.  The student Alex interviewed in Talbot’s article said, “Often, I’ve looked back at papers I’ve written on Adderall, and they’re verbose.  They’re belaboring a point, trying to create this airtight argument, when if you just got to your point in a more direct manner it would be stronger.  With Adderall I’d produce two pages on something that could be said in a couple of sentences.”

So, while these drugs may help with memorization and focus, are they limiting the type of thinking that can enhance analysis, creativity, and open-mindedness? Might a student, in thinking they are creating better work on stimulants, actually be cutting themselves off from different, more creative ways of approaching their assignments?  And what does it say about a society that is placing value on shutting out these more creative types of thinking, in favor of what Talbot calls “a grindingly efficient form of productivity?”

One wonders if in trying to gain one type of thinking, we would be losing out on another.  Hasn’t everyone had the experience of a stroke of insight while falling asleep or taking a shower – times when the mind is not “pinched and attentive”, but precisely the opposite?  What effect would medicating the “wandering mind” have on insights that come precisely because the mind is wandering?

Do the risks justify the gains?

A final point to consider is the risks these drugs pose, which are an important feature to examine when looking at any technological tool. Indeed, the argument that stimulants could benefit society should not be presented without a fair look at how they could also limit or pose a risk to society as well.  So do the risks of these medications justify the gains?

It is generally accepted that there is a difference between therapy and enhancement — in other words, that there is a moral difference between giving someone a treatment to alleviate suffering caused by a disease and giving someone treatment when they are healthy in order to make them even better. For those who take these medications for attentional disorders, the risks of these medications are considered in balance with the disorder the person is suffering from; one assesses the risks of the medications with the severity of symptoms of ADHD and decides that it is worthwhile to manage the side-effects if the medication alleviates the symptoms of the disorder. But if we proliferate these medications to the general “healthy” public, are the potential benefits of alertness and attentiveness –which don’t necessary to alleviate suffering in any strict sense but are rather just a preferred or “enhanced” way of functioning– worth the potential harm?  Is it ethical to take these drugs, intended to treat disorders, purely for the sake of enhancement?

Another idea to consider is at what cost we are willing to enhance ourselves — and whether we accurately assess that cost when pursuing new modes of enhancement.  It seems that often when looking at new technologies the potential benefits are lauded and the risks are downplayed, and this issue is no different. Hank Greely’s argument, for example, suggests that we shouldn’t necessarily view Adderall and Ritalin any differently from the way we view glasses that correct our vision: what makes them different, if they are both tools to make us better?

The somewhat obvious response to Greely’s argument is that there are potentially far greater risks to taking these medications than there are to using eyeglasses, or a laptop, or calculators.  Indeed, stimulants known side effects include nervousness, headaches, sleeplessness, decreased appetite, and cardiac problems, and are classified as having a high potential for abuse.   Increased risk of ideations of suicide, as well as increased cases of cardiac arrest that have led to death have been reported, and have led to the FDA instituting a “black box” warning on most stimulant medications.  Many students who take these medications experience abnormal sleep and eating patterns, some not sleeping or eating anything substantial for long periods at a time, and can experience increased anxiety and even stimulant-induced psychosis.  And while some who use stimulants casually do so with few side effects, these more serious effects should not be overlooked: for those students who have experienced them, or for parents whose children suffered cardiac deaths or suicide, these effects are not exaggerated or embellished but very real, and important to bring to light.

There  seems to exist a view, both because the medications are so popular and because they are not “street drugs” but prescription drugs, that these medications are generally safe to take without one’s own prescription; but this is a powerful misperception. Indeed, prescription medications are not safe merely because they are available through prescription; drugs, prescribed or not, carry with them risks and side effects that can vary from person to person, and in some cases may have drastic effects.  Furthermore, taking a prescription medication for which you yourself don’t have a prescription –sharing a prescription with a roommate, or selling pills at the library– can be a dangerous undertaking, particularly when mixed in with a college lifestyle of alcohol and perhaps even other drugs. The toxicity of stimulants increases significantly when mixed with alcohol; and without a proper discussion with a doctor, a student is at risk to experience these dangers without a proper avenue set up to assess his or her own safety.

Moreover, if we are to advocate the proliferation of these drugs in the widespread population, we must acknowledge that the effects of cognitive stimulating medications in the healthy has never been formally studied.  We simply don’t know how these drugs are metabolized by these “healthy,” non-ADHD individuals, for whom these stimulants were unintended and remain untested.  And given that we are essentially the first generation of people who are using these medications so widely and for such long periods of time, the long-term risks are still unknown.   As Margaret Talbot writes, the effects of these drugs are being discovered “furtively, amongst the increasing number of Americans who are performing daily experiments on their own brains.”

So where do the risks of these drugs factor into the ethical debate? And in light of these issues, it seems important to ask, it is ethical to present the idea that these medications can be a tool for an achievement without acknowledging these very real drawbacks?  Advocating the use of these drugs based on the premise that there is no substantive difference between them and a laptop or a pair of eyeglasses, particularly in a school setting, seems not only misinformed, but irresponsible.  And one wonders, what impact does promoting these drugs as simply “tools for achievement” without a full acknowledgement of these risks have on a student’s perceptions of taking these medications?

Ultimately, is the argument really simply between choosing to take these medication to become “smarter”, and choosing not to take them and staying the same?  Or should it really be presented as a cost-benefit, where the idea of taking these medications to achieve attentiveness and focus is posed alongside the potential for these very real side effects?

Each of these issues – what effect these medications would have for academic competition, what effects they might have on concepts of personhood and thinking, and what the risks are, converges on one question: What might a neuro-enhanced society look like?

If Greely and others are to be believed, we have the opportunity to become smarter, more productive, and more focused by embracing the use of cognitive stimulants.  Why try to do less, when we could medicate ourselves to be able to do more?  Who, as Nicholas Selzter said, would want an upper limit on productivity?

Yet from a critical perspective, consider some of the potential fall out: might we imagine a time when employers expect—or even require – employees to take these drugs to achieve better? Could hospitals require doctors to take drugs in order to be more alert on their late night shifts?  Pilots to take the drugs for long trips?  Would the people undergoing surgery, or flying on the planes, come to expect these professionals to take them as well? Could it lead to an environment where students feel coerced or compelled to take drugs to perform better, in the same way some athletes may feel compelled to take steroids to keep up with competition?  Would we live in a society where, as Margaret Talbot writes, “we give children academic steroids along with their daily vitamins”?

The idea that we need to ‘enhance’ ourselves is certainly a persuasive one: it is clear we have increasing demands not only on our cognition but on the amount we are physically expected to accomplish in a given day — and it makes sense that we would feel the drive to need to keep up.   But as Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins says in Talbot’s article, “Maybe it’s wrong-footed to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people.”

A perspective to consider is this: to what future are we committing ourselves?  If we continue the effort to achieve, accomplish more, produce more, compete more, the cycle of needing to modify our brains to keep up will continue. It’s almost certain that in ten years from now, the debate will have moved on from the ethical issues of cognitive stimulating medications to the ethical implications of brain implants, or other types of even more invasive brain modifications. Will we want to continue the road to increasing our brain function indefinitely, to keep up with our own technological demands?  Is there a point at which we should decide we are busy enough, productive enough, and smart enough now?   In reality, the expectations placed upon students and those in the workplace – the demands for a non-stop, blackberry fueled workday, or the barrels of homework on top of extra curricular activities and day-to-day life – will only continue to grow if we as a society allow it too.  And our pursuit towards keeping up – whether it be with medications now, or brain implants down the line–will have to continue as well.

I would argue that the use of cognitive stimulants – a technological tool in and of themselves– is intricately tied to our relationship with the increasing use of technology in all areas of our lives, and that to look at the issue of “cognitive enhancement” one would need to examine what effect all of this technology could be said to be having on our lives in general: on our attention spans (those attention spans which we feel compelled to take pills in order to get a handle on); on the belief that a better society is one that is more productive, efficient, and fast; and on the idea that if we can do something, we can always do it faster, and better.

I think Talbot makes an interesting point in her article, about what road we may be paving for ourselves:

“All this may be leading to a kind of society I’m not sure I want to live in,” she writes. “A society where we are even more overworked and driven by technology than we already are and where we have to take drugs to keep up.”

Conclusion

As technology continues to develop, more medications that can influence our brain chemistry –and eventually, more technologies, whether they be brain implants or currently inconceived of brain modifications — will be marketed as the next big thing in cognitive enhancement.  One could either say these scenarios present an opportunity to create more advancements using technology, or take the view that we have created a problem through technology that we are trying to solve using more technology.  Either way, it seems important to establish firm ethical guidelines about how we are to handle these issues.  If not, the use of these technologies will continue to be dictated by social pressure, rather than by principle.

It’s hard to separate out the “ethical” uses of these drugs form their neurological risks; the philosophical principles raised by this issue– as with many issues in technology and health — are somewhat separate from the real life risks these technologies pose. I think it’s important to acknowledge though, particularly in light of articles such as Greely’s which praise “smart drugs” but somewhat dismiss their risks, that the use of cognitive stimulants amongst people – amongst children, students, and those in the workplace– is an ongoing, uncontrolled experiment.   And moving forward, it seems important that we frame the argument appropriately.  Cognitive stimulants are not “smart pills”– indeed, no one takes Ritalin and becomes Einstein, or learns their entire Biology textbook instantaneously.  Rather, cognitive stimulants are drugs that manipulate brain chemistry in a way that, in many people – but certainly not all – increases their ability to focus and pay attention, and often to sleep less and work more.  Choosing to encourage the use of these medications is not promoting becoming “smarter,” necessarily, but promoting a type of brain state associated with these effects, among other, less desirable ones as well.

But the question at hand is not merely about whether students, or people in general, should take drugs to become “smarter.”   Perhaps the question we should be asking ourselves is whether the pursuit of these “cognitive enhancing drugs” would really be enhancing our lives at all.  Might we look deeper into this debate, and challenge some of the assumptions upon which it rests?  Maybe we should challenge the idea that these drugs are enhancing the way we think, by making us more alert and more “grindingly efficient.”  Maybe we should challenge whether this type of uber-efficient, speed-driven, hyper-productive society is really the type of society we want to be promoting.  Maybe we should focus not so much on the question of whether students should take these medications, but on where the perceived need for these medications arises — on what it says about an academic environment where there is so much pressure to focus, to be more productive, and to get more work done that students feel they need medications just in order to keep up.  Maybe we should reframe the debate, and ask ourselves whether it is our conception of what it means to be “enhanced” that is really what needs to be modified.

Questions

Consider some of the ethical arguments surrounding the issue of cognitive stimulants: is taking a cognitive stimulant without a prescription unethical?  Does it constitute cheating? Should it be viewed as “cognitive doping,” akin to using steroids in athletics?  Does it undermine one’s ‘personhood’ by helping one to avoid the challenges of discipline and failure? Do the risks of the medications justify the gains?

What role do societal pressures — academic, social, and technological — play in this debate? How does our relationship with technology factor into our approach to the use of cognitive stimulating medications?

Watch a CBS News segment called “Adderall U” featuring an interview with two students who take cognitive stimulants:

Part 2:

It’s interesting to consider how we decide what the rules are about which drugs are deemed socially acceptable and which ones are not.  We condone (not only condone, but actively rely on) certain substances like caffeine, guzzling down cups of coffee and cans of Red Bull without a second thought about their “ethical implications.”  We condemn marijuana as illegal but allow a much more dangerous drug – alcohol – to be consumed at will after the age of 21.  We think it’s permissible to use coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes to pull an all nighter to complete work but would gape at someone snorting a line of cocaine for the same reason.  How are these lines we draw–the ones that call a certain brain-altering substance taboo and another one completely embraceable– determined?  Do they involve a careful assessment of their effects on the brain?   A standardized measure of risks?  Do they come from some subjective evaluation grandfathered in by socially determined forces?

I raise this point because this post is a response to an article from the scientific journal Nature published in 2008 called “Towards The Responsible Use Of Cognitive Stimulants In The Healthy,” an article which gathered together reputable academics from elite institutions across the country and declared that cognitive stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin should not only be permissible to use in the normal, healthy population, but that their use should be encouraged.  A society of individuals taking these cognitive stimulants would be more smarter, more efficient, and more productive, they said, and therefore we shouldn’t shy away from these drugs, but should embrace them.  The article states:

“Cognitive enhancement has much to offer individuals and society…We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function.  In a world in which human work-spans and life spans are increasing, cognitive enhancement tools – including the pharmacological—will be increasingly useful for improved quality of life and extended work productivity, as well as to stave off normal and pathological age-related cognitive declines.”

Hank Greely, a law professor who directs the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences and spearheaded this article, makes the point firmly: If we can manage the risks of these medications, he writes, why wouldn’t we pursue a future of widespread “cognitive enhancement”? A future where we could be smarter, more focused, and more alert?  And admittedly, when put this way, Greely’s argument sounds pretty convincing: no one can deny that being smarter and thinking faster would be a net-net gain for our society.

But maybe that’s a faulty assumption.  As with any ethical issue, there is a powerful counter-side to consider to this “faster = smarter = better” paradigm.  In his guest post below, Santa Clara Graduate Psychology adjunct lecturer Dr. Sean Hatt challenges Greely and his colleagues conclusions, outlining a number of reasons why the encouragement of these drugs is a worrisome path to head down.  Indeed, these so-called “smart drugs” are not a panacea for our wandering minds; they come at a real cost, a cost that Greely’s article, one could say, blithely glazes over and ignores.  The risks and effects of these medications can be substantial, particularly for the young populations who take them (one study even found increased death rates in children); and in ‘focusing’ our minds, the use of these drugs can stifle more creative types of thinking.

Dr. Hatt also raises an important question about what promoting these medications says about the types of values we are fostering as a culture.  Is advocating for drugs that enable people to do everything faster and more efficiently really cultivating the type of human beings we want to be? Read his post and consider the idea: what is the symbolic meaning of the pursuit of cognitive stimulants?  What does it say about who we are as human beings, about what we want, and what we value?  Why do we consider these types of drugs – which Margaret Talbot described as facilitating “a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity,” cognitive enhancement?

Dr. Sean Patrick Hatt is an adjunct lecturer in the Graduate School of Education, Counseling Pyschology, and Pastoral Ministries at Santa Clara University.  He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the social construction of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Poor African American And Affluent White American Families, which can be read on his website, www.seanpatrickhatt.com.

Cognition Enhancing Drug Use: Sacrificing Depth for Speed

Guest Blog Post by Sean Patrick Hatt, Ph.D.,

Department of Counseling Psychology
Santa Clara University

As a scholar and clinician interested in the social construction of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder as well as other mental illnesses more generally, I was asked to render a brief opinion regarding the use of prescription stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall by otherwise healthy people simply for the purpose of getting better grades, or working faster or more efficiently.

At the surface, it seems fairly benign. After all, we have been giving these drugs to our young school-aged children for decades to help stem disruptive behaviors or address difficulties in focusing attention in the classroom. In fact, the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) recently published research touting the possible efficacy of stimulant medication in children as young as three years of age (Greenhill, et al., 2006).

That all makes it understandably easy for people to wonder how dangerous these drugs could possibly be. And, if they do promise to help healthy, responsible, intelligent people get far more work done, more quickly and with fewer distractions, what’s the harm? How different is this from drinking coffee or an energy drink?

If you find yourself nodding in agreement as you read, you have company in some very reputable places. In a recent issue ofNature, which is widely recognized the world over as one of our more prestigious scholarly publications, clinicians and scholars from Harvard Medical School, Stanford University Law School, the University of Cambridge, the University of Manchester, UC Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania collaborated on an article advocating the “responsible use of cognitive enhancing drugs by the healthy” (Greely, et al., 2008).

Greely's Article, From Nature

While exploring the question is almost certainly a worthwhile endeavor, this article, and the idea it seeks to advance, concerns me for a number of reasons, particularly given its rather authoritative status. Acknowledging the brevity of this forum, allow me to elaborate upon three of them, and then offer another way of thinking about this issue.

First, the article frames the subject in terms that scarcely anyone would take issue with. Who wouldn’t support “cognitive enhancement?” After all, isn’t that why people attend a University in the first place? I believe special care should be taken to employ more neutral language to frame a debate like this so as not to unduly bias the conversation, or even marginalize dissenting voices before they can be heard. As a community of teachers and researchers, let us respect the power inherent in our positions as constructors of new knowledge, and take particular care not to unintentionally cloak what may be a wolf in a sheep’s clothing.

This brings me to my second point: The article barely acknowledges the potential health risks of taking the drugs in question, and only touches upon the topic in rather general terms. In my opinion, this only serves to further support the apparently innocuous nature of this proposal.

These are powerful pharmaceuticals that carry a long list of potentially serious risks, particularly in young people with still-developing brains

Allow me to fill in the blanks on this latter point with a few specifics. In spite of their seemingly ubiquitous presence, drugs used to treat ADHD are not at all similar to the caffeine in coffee or energy drinks. These are powerful pharmaceuticals that carry a long list of potentially serious risks, particularly in young people with still-developing brains. Adverse drug reactions in stimulant formulas include impaired growth (Swanson, et al., 2007), insomnia, agitation, hypomania, mania, seizures, physical withdrawal, rebound effects, dependence (Breggin, 1999a, 1999b), and even psychosis (Breggin, 2000). Non-stimulant formulas also present safety problems, and their manufacturers were recently ordered by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to include a “black box” warning regarding the potential for increased suicidal ideation in adolescents (Carey, 2005). The black box was also subsequently ordered by the FDA for some popular stimulant formulas given an increased risk of sudden death (Pettypiece & Blum, 2006).

Third, the article focuses upon only one family of “enhancements” as if they are all that might be possible or desirable—speed, memory and attention. It makes this idea sound every bit as simple as upgrading to a new computer with a faster microprocessor, more RAM and a bigger hard drive. A growing minority in the scholarly community who have been studying the legitimate therapeutic uses of a variety of other psychoactive substances—like MDMA (Parrott, 2007) for example—would have much to say about this limited definition of enhancement. If the scholarly community at large wishes to open the question of the legitimacy of “cognitive enhancement through drug use” for a comprehensive hearing, why not include these substances and what they may offer as well?

I raise that potentially controversial point as a way of leading into what for me is the heart of the matter. It’s not about advocating for all drugs equally. It’s about questioning what this says about our culture. Should we allow the pharmaceutical industry, corporate-owned media, allopathic medicine, the academy, and the Law decide for us what is worthy of enhancing and the means by which we should seek to do so?

Allow me to explain further. Greely and colleagues (2009) talk briefly about the issue of fairness, which I think is salient here, but mainly as a means of focusing in upon this deeper thread of the conversation. Specifically, they compare the use of cognitive enhancing drugs by some students and not others with the notion of some being allowed to use calculators on a math exam while others are limited to pencils and scratch paper. Further, they wonder how this divide might show up as a function of access given socio-economic status. Whatever the case, the authors imply that allowing the use of cognitive enhancing drugs by some may amount to a form of indirect coercion whereby students feel they have no choice but to take the drugs in order to compete. While those are all worthy points from both sociological and psychological perspectives, this begs an even more fundamental question the authors fail to address: Compete for what, and to what ends?

Paul Tillich (1999) framed a convincing case that our culture increasingly tends to overemphasize what he called  “the horizontal dimension” of life. I see this showing up in how we relate to our world as a place filled with objects that are separate from us—including, ironically enough in this case, our own brains. These detached objects exist only to be exploited, acquired, shaped, produced, controlled or manipulated, with ever more efficiency, and for ever increasing personal gain.

The result of unconsciously proliferating such cultural practices is a loss of the dimension of “depth” in our discourse and in our lives

The result of unconsciously proliferating such cultural practices is, sadly, a loss of the dimension of “depth” in our discourse and in our lives. Tillich (1999) maintains that losing depth amounts to a disconnection from Spirit at the most universal level: namely, “the ability of man to ask passionately the question of the meaning of our existence.” To my mind, that’s where an education at a place like Santa Clara University strives to set itself apart, and often does. So the question for me becomes, “Do we want to risk losing that?”

I’m not suggesting that we ought to ignore the acquisition of skills and excellence in academic performance in the “horizontal” sense of their meaning in the world. What I am suggesting is that we needn’t emphasize or “enhance” them at the expense of students’ concerns for their own Being, or the state of Human Being more broadly.

In my opinion, that is the hidden price tag attached to “cognitive enhancement” as long as it’s all about speed—both literally and more symbolically.

In closing, the awe inspiring opportunity which lies before each of us is to creatively and authentically engage the tension between the horizontal and the deep, to the best of our God-given abilities, as professors and students and staff alike. When we do, we will co-create an education that develops heart and mind, body and soul, cognitive power and depth of feeling, efficiency and creativity. Best of all, such an education will en-courage us all to embody as a whole community what I have come to understand as foundational values of the Jesuit tradition: the sacred union of intellect, wisdom, skillful means, and love, as expressed in service to all of Humankind.

Now that is the sort of enhancement I can fully support.

References

Breggin, P. R. (1999a). Psychostimulants in the treatment of children diagnosed with ADHD: Part 1–Acute risks and psychological effects. Ethical Human Sciences and Services, 1(1), 13-33.

Breggin, P. R. (1999b). Psychostimulants in the treatment of children diagnosed with ADHD: Part II–Adverse effects on brain and behavior. Ethical Human Sciences and Services, 1(3), 213-242.

Breggin, P. R. (2000). Confirming the hazards of stimulant drug treatment. Ethical Human Sciences and Services, 2(3), 203-204.

Carey, B. (2005). F.D.A. orders new warning on Attention-Deficit drug. The New York Times.com. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/30/health/30drug.html?ex=1157169600&en=a11a780cbe726cd4&ei=5070

Greely, H., Campbell, P., Sahakian, B., Harris, J., Kessler, R. C., Gazzaniga, M., et al. (2008). Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy. Nature (December 2008), 702-705.

Greenhill, L. L., Kollins, S., Abikoff, H. B., McCracken, J. T., Riddle, M., Swanson, J. M., et al. (2006). Efficacy and safety of immediate-release methylphenidate treatment for preschoolers with ADHD. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 45(11), 1284-1293.

Parrott, A. C. (2007). The psychotherapeutic potential of MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine): an evidence-based review. Psychopharmacology, 191, 181-193.

Pettypiece, S., & Blum, J. (2006). Glaxo, Shire stengthen risk warnings on ADHD drugs. Bloomberg.com. Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=alBMR22v6xpI&refer=europe

Swanson, J. M., Elliott, G., Greenhill, L. L., Wigal, T., Arnold, L. E., Vitiello, B., et al. (2007). Effects of stimulant medication on growth rates across three years in the MTA follow-up. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 46(8), 1015-1027.

Tillich, P. (1999). The essential Tillich: an anthology of the writings of Paul Tillich. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Questions:

Professor Hatt raises important critiques about Greely’s article, highlighting the oft-downplayed risks of the medications, and asking a more fundamental question about what the pursuit of these drugs says about our culture, in which we are emphasizing competition and speed while not promoting other parts of being.  Do you agree with him that these medications promote one type of ‘being’ at the expense of others?  What types of thinking — of being — are de-emphasized as a result of these medications?

Considering both Greely’s and Dr. Hatt’s arguments, do you think the use of cognitive stimulants by the general public would benefit or detract from society?

In the 2004 film I, Robot, Will Smith’s character Detective Spooner harbors a deep grudge for all things technological — and turns out to be justified after a new generation of robots engage in a full out, summer blockbuster-style revolt against their human creators.

Why was Detective Spooner such a Luddite–even before the Robots’ vicious revolt?  Much of his resentment stems from a car accident he endured in which a robot saved his life instead of a little girl’s.  The robot’s decision haunts Smith’s character throughout the movie; he feels the decision lacked emotion, and what one might call ‘humanity’.

“I was the logical choice,” he says. “(The robot) calculated that I had a 45% chance of survival.  Sarah only had an 11% chance.”  He continues, dramatically, “But that was somebody’s baby.  11% is more than enough.  A human being would’ve known that.”

But what, exactly, is it that the human being would’ve known?  And how would they have known it?

Humans seem equipped to solve ethical dilemmas by relying on biological and socialized intuitions, intuitions that supplement logic with humanity, mere numbers with emotion.  While the robot made ethical decisions based on narrow algorithms of numerical inputs and outputs, the human makes ethical decisions based on a wider range of factors, drawing from wells of varying experiences, prejudices, and conceptions of justice.  One person might evaluate the situation from a rights perspective, while another might imagine himself or herself in the position and use empathy as a rationale.  Whatever the conclusion, the human agent would engage in a complex process of thinking, feeling, and imagining — a process that relies on a set of moral intuitions and intellectual rubrics we refer to broadly as a “moral compass.”

Would it be possible for a robot to have a moral compass, too?  And if so, what would it look like? In their seminal book on robot ethics entitled “Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong,” Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen discuss the very real, very pressing questions posed by the immediate future of robotics, in which moral decision making extends beyond the realm of human beings to what Wallach and Allen call “artifical moral agents” — non-human moral machines that make decisions with ethically significant repercussions.

Though fully conscious robots are still confined to science fiction, consider some of the following examples of “moral machines” in today’s world:

Wendell Wallach is a consultant and writer affiliated with Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics; Colin Allen is a Professor of Cognitive Science and History & Philosophy of Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington.  They are co-authors of the book “Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong” and maintain a blog on related topics at MoralMachines.blogspot.com.  This post is the introductory chapter of their book, reprinted here with their permission.

Introduction To Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong

By Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen

In the Affective Computing Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), scientists are designing computers that can read human emotions. Financial institutions have implemented worldwide computer networks that evaluate and approve or reject millions of transactions every minute. Roboticists in Japan, Europe, and the United States are developing service robots to care for the elderly and disabled. Japanese scientists are also working to make androids appear indistinguishable from humans. The government of South Korea has announced its goal to put a robot in every home by the year 2020. It is also developing weapons-carrying robots in conjunction with Samsung to help guard its border with North Korea. Meanwhile, human activity is being facilitated, monitored, and analyzed by computer chips in every conceivable device, from automobiles to garbage cans, and by software “bots” in every conceivable virtual environment, from web surfing to online shopping. The data collected by these (ro)bots—a term we’ll use to encompass both physical robots and software agents—is being used for commercial, governmental, and medical purposes.

All of these developments are converging on the creation of (ro)bots whose independence from direct human oversight, and whose potential impact on human well-being, are the stuff of science fiction. Isaac Asimov, over fifty years ago, foresaw the need for ethical rules to guide the behavior of robots. His Three Laws of Robotics are what people think of first when they think of machine morality.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov, however, was writing stories. He was not confronting the challenge that faces today’s engineers: to ensure that the systems they build are beneficial to humanity and don’t cause harm to people. Whether Asimov’s Three Laws are truly helpful for ensuring that (ro)bots will act morally is one of the questions we’ll consider in this book.

Within the next few years, we predict there will be a catastrophic incident brought about by a computer system making a decision independent of human oversight. Already, in October 2007, a semiautonomous robotic cannon deployed by the South African army malfunctioned, killing 9 soldiers and wounding 14 others—although early reports conflicted about whether it was a software or hardware malfunction. The potential for an even bigger disaster will increase as such machines become more fully autonomous. Even if the coming calamity does not kill as many people as the terrorist acts of 9/11, it will provoke a comparably broad range of political responses. These responses will range from calls for more to be spent on improving the technology, to calls for an outright ban on the technology (if not an outright “war against robots”).

Today’s systems are approaching a level of complexity that requires the systems themselves to make moral decisions

A concern for safety and societal benefits has always been at the forefront of engineering. But today’s systems are approaching a level of complexity that, we argue, requires the systems themselves to make moral decisions—to be programmed with “ethical subroutines,” to borrow a phrase from Star Trek. This will expand the circle of moral agents beyond humans to artificially intelligent systems, which we will call artificial moral agents (AMAs).

We don’t know exactly how a catastrophic incident will unfold, but the following tale may give some idea.
Monday, July 23, 2012, starts like any ordinary day. A little on the warm side in much of the United States perhaps, with peak electricity demand expected to be high, but not at a record level. Energy costs are rising in the United States, and speculators have been driving up the price of futures, as well as the spot price of oil, which stands close to $300 a barrel. Some slightly unusual automated trading activity in the energy derivatives markets over past weeks has caught the eye of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but the banks have assured the regulators that their programs are operating within normal parameters.

At 10:15 a.m. on the East Coast, the price of oil drops slightly in response to news of the discovery of large new reserves in the Bahamas. Software at the investment division of Orange and Nassau Bank computes that it can a turn a profit by emailing a quarter of its customers with a buy recommendation for oil futures, temporarily shoring up the spot market prices, as dealers stockpile supplies to meet the future demand, and then selling futures short to the rest of its customers. This plan essentially plays one sector of the customer base off against the rest, which is completely unethical, of course. But the bank’s software has not been programmed to consider such niceties. In fact, the money-making scenario autonomously planned by the computer is an unintended consequence of many individually sound principles. The computer’s ability to concoct this scheme could not easily have been anticipated by the programmers.

Unfortunately, the “buy” email that the computer sends directly to the customers works too well. Investors, who are used to seeing the price of oil climb and climb, jump enthusiastically on the bandwagon, and the spot price of oil suddenly climbs well beyond $300 and shows no sign of slowing down. It’s now 11:30 a.m. on the East Coast, and temperatures are climbing more rapidly than predicted. Software controlling New Jersey’s power grid computes that it can meet the unexpected demand while keeping the cost of energy down by using its coal-fired plants in preference to its oil-fired generators. However, one of the coal-burning generators suffers an explosion while running at peak capacity, and before anyone can act, cascading blackouts take out the power supply for half the East Coast. Wall Street is affected, but not before SEC regulators notice that the rise in oil future prices was a computer-driven shell game between automatically traded accounts of Orange and Nassau Bank. As the news spreads, and investors plan to shore up their positions, it is clear that the prices will fall dramatically as soon as the markets reopen and millions of dollars will be lost. In the meantime, the blackouts have spread far enough that many people are unable to get essential medical treatment, and many more are stranded far from home.

Detecting the spreading blackouts as a possible terrorist action, security screening software at Reagan National Airport automatically sets itself to the highest security level and applies biometric matching criteria that make it more likely than usual for people to be flagged as suspicious. The software, which has no mechanism for weighing the benefits of preventing a terrorist attack against the inconvenience its actions will cause for tens of thousands of people in the airport, identifies a cluster of five passengers, all waiting for Flight 231 to London, as potential terrorists. This large concentration of “suspects” on a single flight causes the program to trigger a lock down of the airport, and the dispatch of a Homeland Security response team to the terminal. Because passengers are already upset and nervous, the situation at the gate for Flight 231 spins out of control, and shots are fired.

By the time power is restored to the East Coast and the markets reopen days later, hundreds of deaths and the loss of billions of dollars can be attributed to the separately programmed decisions of these multiple interacting systems

An alert sent from the Department of Homeland Security to the airlines that a terrorist attack may be under way leads many carriers to implement measures to land their fleets. In the confusion caused by large numbers of planes trying to land at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, an executive jet collides with a Boeing 777, killing 157 passengers and crew. Seven more people die when debris lands on the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights and starts a fire in a block of homes.

Meanwhile, robotic machine guns installed on the U.S.-Mexican border receive a signal that places them on red alert. They are programmed to act autonomously in code red conditions, enabling the detection and elimination of potentially hostile targets without direct human oversight. One of these robots fires on a Hummer returning from an off-road trip near Nogales, Arizona, destroying the vehicle and killing three U.S. citizens.

By the time power is restored to the East Coast and the markets reopen days later, hundreds of deaths and the loss of billions of dollars can be attributed to the separately programmed decisions of these multiple interacting systems. The effects continue to be felt for months.

Time may prove us poor prophets of disaster. Our intent in predicting such a catastrophe is not to be sensational or to instill fear. This is not a book about the horrors of technology. Our goal is to frame discussion in a way that constructively guides the engineering task of designing AMAs. The purpose of our prediction is to draw attention to the need for work on moral machines to begin now, not twenty to a hundred years from now when technology has caught up with science fiction.

The field of machine morality extends the field of computer ethics beyond concern for what people do with their computers to questions about what the machines do by themselves. (In this book we will use the terms ethics and morality interchangeably.) We are discussing the technological issues involved in making computers themselves into explicit moral reasoners. As artificial intelligence (AI) expands the scope of autonomous agents, the challenge of how to design these agents so that they honor the broader set of values and laws humans demand of human moral agents becomes increasingly urgent.

Does humanity really want computers making morally important decisions? Many philosophers of technology have warned about humans abdicating responsibility to machines. Movies and magazines are filled with futuristic fantasies about the dangers of advanced forms of artificial intelligence. Emerging technologies are always easier to modify before they become entrenched. However, it is not often possible to predict accurately the impact of a new technology on society until well after it has been widely adopted. Some critics think, therefore, that humans should err on the side of caution and relinquish the development of potentially dangerous technologies. We believe, however, that market and political forces will prevail and will demand the benefits that these technologies can provide. Thus, it is incumbent on anyone with a stake in this technology to address head-on the task of implementing moral decision making in computers, robots, and virtual “bots” within computer networks.

As noted, this book is not about the horrors of technology. Yes, the machines are coming. Yes, their existence will have unintended effects on human lives and welfare, not all of them good. But no, we do not believe that increasing reliance on autonomous systems will undermine people’s basic humanity. Neither, in our view, will advanced robots enslave or exterminate humanity, as in the best traditions of science fiction. Humans have always adapted to their technological products, and the benefits to people of having autonomous machines around them will most likely outweigh the costs.

If humanity is to avoid the consequences of bad autonomous artificial agents, people must be prepared to think hard about what it will take to make such agents good.

However, this optimism does not come for free. It is not possible to just sit back and hope that things will turn out for the best. If humanity is to avoid the consequences of bad autonomous artificial agents, people must be prepared to think hard about what it will take to make such agents good.

In proposing to build moral decision-making machines, are we still immersed in the realm of science fiction—or, perhaps worse, in that brand of science fantasy often associated with artificial intelligence? The charge might be justified if we were making bold predictions about the dawn of AMAs or claiming that “it’s just a matter of time” before walking, talking machines will replace the human beings to whom people now turn for moral guidance. We are not futurists, however, and we do not know whether the apparent technological barriers to artificial intelligence are real or illusory. Nor are we interested in speculating about what life will be like when your counselor is a robot, or even in predicting whether this will ever come to pass. Rather, we are interested in the incremental steps arising from present technologies that suggest a need for ethical decision-making capabilities. Perhaps small steps will eventually lead to full-blown artificial intelligence—hopefully a less murderous counterpart to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey—but even if fully intelligent systems will remain beyond reach, we think there is a real issue facing engineers that cannot be addressed by engineers alone.

Is it too early to be broaching this topic? We don’t think so. Industrial robots engaged in repetitive mechanical tasks have caused injury and even death. The demand for home and service robots is projected to create a worldwide market double that of industrial robots by 2010, and four times bigger by 2025. With the advent of home and service robots, robots are no longer confined to controlled industrial environments where only trained workers come into contact with them. Small robot pets, for example Sony’s AIBO, are the harbinger of larger robot appliances. Millions of robot vacuum cleaners, for example iRobot’s “Roomba,” have been purchased. Rudimentary robot couriers in hospitals and robot guides in museums have already appeared. Considerable attention is being directed at the development of service robots that will perform basic household tasks and assist the elderly and the homebound. Computer programs initiate millions of financial transactions with an efficiency that humans can’t duplicate. Software decisions to buy and then resell stocks, commodities, and currencies are made within seconds, exploiting potentials for profit that no human is capable of detecting in real time, and representing a significant percentage of the activity on world markets.

Automated financial systems, robotic pets, and robotic vacuum cleaners are still a long way short of the science fiction scenarios of fully autonomous machines making decisions that radically affect human welfare. Although 2001 has passed, Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL remains a fiction, and it is a safe bet that the doomsday scenario of The Terminator will not be realized before its sell-by date of 2029. It is perhaps not quite as safe to bet against the Matrix being realized by 2199. However, humans are already at a point where engineered systems make decisions that can affect humans’ lives and that have ethical ramifications. In the worst cases, they have profound negative effect.

Is it possible to build AMAs? Fully conscious artificial systems with complete human moral capacities may perhaps remain forever in the realm of science fiction. Nevertheless, we believe that more limited systems will soon be built. Such systems will have some capacity to evaluate the ethical ramifications of their actions—for example, whether they have no option but to violate a property right to protect a privacy right.

The task of designing AMAs requires a serious look at ethical theory, which originates from a human-centered perspective. The values and concerns expressed in the world’s religious and philosophical traditions are not easily applied to machines. Rule-based ethical systems, for example the Ten Commandments or Asimov’s Three Laws for Robots, might appear somewhat easier to embed in a computer, but as Asimov’s many robot stories show, even three simple rules (later four) can give rise to many ethical dilemmas. Aristotle’s ethics emphasized character over rules: good actions flowed from good character, and the aim of a flourishing human being was to develop a virtuous character. It is, of course, hard enough for humans to develop their own virtues, let alone developing appropriate virtues for computers or robots. Facing the engineering challenge entailed in going from Aristotle to Asimov and beyond will require looking at the origins of human morality as viewed in the fields of evolution, learning and development, neuropsychology, and philosophy.

Reflection about AMAs forces one to think deeply about how humans function, which human abilities can be implemented in the machines humans design, and what characteristics truly distinguish humans from new forms of intelligence that humans create

Machine morality is just as much about human decision making as about the philosophical and practical issues of implementing AMAs. Reflection about and experimentation in building AMAs forces one to think deeply about how humans function, which human abilities can be implemented in the machines humans design, and what characteristics truly distinguish humans from animals or from new forms of intelligence that humans create. Just as AI has stimulated new lines of enquiry in the philosophy of mind, machine morality has the potential to stimulate new lines of enquiry in ethics. Robotics and AI laboratories could become experimental centers for testing theories of moral decision making in artificial systems.

Three questions emerge naturally from the discussion so far. Does the world need AMAs? Do people want computers making moral decisions? And if people believe that computers making moral decisions are necessary or inevitable, how should engineers and philosophers proceed to design AMAs?

Chapter Overviews

Chapters 1 and 2 are concerned with the first question, why humans need AMAs. In chapter 1, we discuss the inevitability of AMAs and give examples of current and innovative technologies that are converging on sophisticated systems that will require some capacity for moral decision making. We discuss how such capacities will initially be quite rudimentary but nonetheless present real challenges. Not the least of these challenges is to specify what the goals should be for the designers of such systems—that is, what do we mean by a “good” AMA?

In chapter 2, we will offer a framework for understanding the trajectories of increasingly sophisticated AMAs by emphasizing two dimensions, those of autonomy and of sensitivity to morally relevant facts. Systems at the low end of these dimensions have only what we call “operational morality”—that is, their moral significance is entirely in the hands of designers and users. As machines become more sophisticated, a kind of “functional morality” is technologically possible such that the machines themselves have the capacity for assessing and responding to moral challenges. However, the creators of functional morality in machines face many constraints due to the limits of present technology.

The nature of ethics places a different set of constraints on the acceptability of computers making ethical decisions. Thus we are led naturally to the question addressed in chapter 3: whether people want computers making moral decisions. Worries about AMAs are a specific case of more general concerns about the effects of technology on human culture. Therefore, we begin by reviewing the relevant portions of philosophy of technology to provide a context for the more specific concerns raised by AMAs. Some concerns, for example whether AMAs will lead humans to abrogate responsibility to machines, seem particularly pressing. Other concerns, for example the prospect of humans becoming literally enslaved to machines, seem to us highly speculative. The unsolved problem of technology risk assessment is how seriously to weigh catastrophic possibilities against the obvious advantages provided by new technologies.

How close could artificial agents come to being considered moral agents if they lack human qualities, for example consciousness and emotions? In chapter 4, we begin by discussing the issue of whether a “mere” machine can be a moral agent. We take the instrumental approach that while full-blown moral agency may be beyond the current or future technology, there is nevertheless much space between operational morality and “genuine” moral agency. This is the niche we identified as functional morality in chapter 2. The goal of chapter 4 is to address the suitability of current work in AI for specifying the features required to produce AMAs for various applications.

Having dealt with these general AI issues, we turn our attention to the specific implementation of moral decision making. Chapter 5 outlines what philosophers and engineers have to offer each other, and describes a basic framework for top-down and bottom-up or developmental approaches to the design of AMAs. Chapters 6 and 7, respectively, describe the top-down and bottom-up approaches in detail. In chapter 6, we discuss the computability and practicability of rule- and duty-based conceptions of ethics, as well as the possibility of computing the net effect of an action as required by consequentialist approaches to ethics. In chapter 7, we consider bottom-up approaches, which apply methods of learning, development, or evolution with the goal of having moral capacities emerge from general aspects of intelligence. There are limitations regarding the computability of both the top-down and bottom-up approaches, which we describe in these chapters. The new field of machine morality must consider these limitations, explore the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches to programming AMAs, and then lay the groundwork for engineering AMAs in a philosophically and cognitively sophisticated way.

What emerges from our discussion in chapters 6 and 7 is that the original distinction between top-down and bottom-up approaches is too simplistic to cover all the challenges that the designers of AMAs will face. This is true at the level of both engineering design and, we think, ethical theory. Engineers will need to combine top-down and bottom-up methods to build workable systems. The difficulties of applying general moral theories in a top-down fashion also motivate a discussion of a very different conception of morality that can be traced to Aristotle, namely, virtue ethics. Virtues are a hybrid between top-down and bottom-up approaches, in that the virtues themselves can be explicitly described, but their acquisition as character traits seems essentially to be a bottom-up process. We discuss virtue ethics for AMAs in chapter 8.

Our goal in writing this book is not just to raise a lot of questions but to provide a resource for further development of these themes. In chapter 9, we survey the software tools that are being exploited for the development of computer moral decision making.

The top-down and bottom-up approaches emphasize the importance in ethics of the ability to reason. However, much of the recent empirical literature on moral psychology emphasizes faculties besides rationality. Emotions, sociability, semantic understanding, and consciousness are all important to human moral decision making, but it remains an open question whether these will be essential to AMAs, and if so, whether they can be implemented in machines. In chapter 10, we discuss recent, cutting-edge, scientific investigations aimed at providing computers and robots with such suprarational capacities, and in chapter 11 we present a specific framework in which the rational and the suprarational might be combined in a single machine.

In chapter 12, we come back to our second guiding question concerning the desirability of computers making moral decisions, but this time with a view to making recommendations about how to monitor and manage the dangers through public policy or mechanisms of social and business liability management.

Finally, in the epilogue, we briefly discuss how the project of designing AMAs feeds back into humans’ understanding of themselves as moral agents, and of the nature of ethical theory itself. The limitations we see in current ethical theory concerning such theories’ usefulness for guiding AMAs highlights deep questions about their purpose and value.

Some basic moral decisions may be quite easy to implement in computers, while skill at tackling more difficult moral dilemmas is well beyond present technology. Regardless of how quickly or how far humans progress in developing AMAs, in the process of addressing this challenge,humans will make significant strides in understanding what truly remarkable creatures they are. The exercise of thinking through the way moral decisions are made with the granularity necessary to begin implementing similar faculties into (ro)bots is thus an exercise in self-understanding. We cannot hope to do full justice to these issues, or indeed to all of the issues raised throughout the book. However, it is our sincere hope that by raising them in this form we will inspire others to pick up where we have left off, and take the next steps toward moving this project from theory to practice, from philosophy to engineering, and on to a deeper understanding of the field of ethics itself.

To Order “Moral Machines”, please click here.

Questions:

Should we develop Artificial Moral Agents?  If so, what ethical decisions do you think robots should be permitted to make?What ethical principles should guide their behavior?

How much responsibility should AMAs have for their actions?  If a robot commits a crime, who should be held responsible?  (For example, if a military robot kills an innocent civilian, who is responsible for that death?  The robot, or the person who programmed it?)  If the robot has moral culpability, does the robot also deserve rights?

Can you remember life before cell phones?

A time when if you wanted to get in touch with someone, you had to leave a message, and (gasp!) wait until they returned home to call you back?

A time before digital contact lists, when you memorized your friend’s phone numbers?

A time when if you planned to meet someone at a specific time and they were late, you’d just have to hang around until they got there? A time when you might have sat in silence, read a book, or chatted with someone nearby,  instead of instantly grabbing to send a text or check e-mail?

It’s hard to imagine, but just give it a try: can you remember life before you had a device with you, at all times, everywhere you go?

Today’s post is about the gadget that has wormed its way into the life of over 80% of American’s lives, and explores what it’s like to live in a world where quiet, un-connected moments are few and far between, increasingly replaced by the twitter of texts and cell phone chatter.  Guest poster SCU student Chris Kelly explores this everpresent issue in his article Smartphones Distract From Reality, writing that cell phones are “changing the way we think about free time.” Chris’s article, ahead.

Chris Kelly is an English major and a Senior at Santa Clara University.  This post is adapted from his article, “Smartphones Distract From Reality“, which originally appeared in SCU’s newspaper The Santa Clara.  He can be reached at crkelly@scu.edu.

Smartphones Distract From Reality

It’s annoying, but I find myself doing it. No, it’s not sleeping through the alarm clock or spilling instant oatmeal on my shirt in the morning. It’s that five-minute filler, that substitute for silence.

As far as I am concerned, iPhones and other products of the like are now cooler than neon spandex was in the 1980s or Kanye West’s music is to the current white middle class. I do not personally own an iPhone or Blackberry, but that does not keep me from participating in useless phone conversations in order to kill time. With or without high-tech cell phones, kids, parents, businessmen, the people who steam your lattes and yes, the rest of the world, are changing the way we think about free time.

Modern society is slowly eliminating what we often define as peacefulness, only to replace it with unnecessary, superficial conversation and web surfing.

A college campus, office building or busy city street are perfect locations to witness firsthand how modern society is slowly eliminating what we often define as peacefulness, only to replace it with unnecessary, superficial conversation and web surfing.

How often do you overhear someone on the phone orating something along the lines of “O hey, watcha doin? Nothing? O, me either,” while you, by yourself, are walking peacefully? Tranquility, apparently, has lost its stock value, while looking like Ari Gold from Entourage and keeping extremely busy has broken the glass ceiling of coolness.

While normal texts and conversations are socially acceptable, tethered technologies, such as the Blackberry and iPhone, are the power tools that are constructing the barrier between ourselves and the traditional daily events to which we are accustomed, such as face to face conversation and, more importantly, paying attention to our superiors during college classes and office meetings, instead of the YouTube shenanigans playing on our hand-held screens.

According to Apple, over 16 million Americans owned an iPhone as of last June. I cannot imagine that the Blackberry is very far behind, and I can guarantee that Santa Clara University represents a couple thousand of those in active use and another couple hundred that are now broken from using them incidentally as coasters, bottle openers and napkins. In any case, they are being used as much as 15-cent ramen packets are used in my kitchen.

The infatuation with these phones is not difficult to understand. There are certain tools and games that are simply addictive. How about those crafty widgets? They are the solution to avoiding that moral obligation we call responsibility or using that difficult thing we call a memory. Can’t spell? No problem. Don’t want a real hamster? Put a digital one on your phone, name him Lemmingwinks and feed him when you feel like it; he will not die if your phone runs out of battery.

Maybe, if we are lucky, we will whimsically fall back into the Dark Ages and barbarians will come burn all our books and sack our cities while we drink mead and reinvent the feudal system.

There are, however, plenty of advantages to these dangerous technologies. For example, the new Apple “bump widget,” which allows you to physically bump your iPhone against another iPhone and exchange contact information.

So next time you are walking by yourself to the library or to your favorite sandwhich shop, instead of screaming out “my friend likes you!” when you see that beautiful girl carrying an iPhone, you can just bump into her and say “Oh, hey, look at that, I got your number, we might as well make this work.”

My personal favorite widget was created by Jordan Palmer (no, not Carson Palmer, his brother). It’s called Run and Pee, a comprehensive list of convenient times to visit the bathroom while watching a movie at the theatre.

Though the program has yet to be officially approved by Apple, I have approved it as totally hilarious and totally necessary for those who order a liter of cola at the concession stand.

So should we continue to embrace these technologies with eager fingers? Maybe, but the next time you find yourself walking to wherever it is that you walk, creeped out by the tranquility that surrounds you, just remember that it’s natural, even healthy, and at the end of the day remember: no one really likes Ari Gold.

I think Chris is spot on that people are increasingly “creeped out” by tranquility; everywhere you look, people are glued to their cell phones, and it has become harder and harder to just sit in silence for a few minutes without feeling the urge to check your phone, send a quick message, or search through your phone mindlessly until the period of waiting is over.  Haven’t we all had the experience of waiting for a friend to show up or for a class to start, when we pull out our cell phone and start messaging someone, simply because it feels awkward just sitting there? Tranquility, as Chris says, has lost its stock value: cell phones have bred a culture where it is simply uncomfortable to sit alone without being (or even just looking) busy.  Moments of downtime that perhaps used to be time for quiet thought or a casual conversation with someone nearby are now filled to the brim with ‘texts’ and ‘widgets’ — it seems there’s not a moment that goes by now that can’t be occupied by this tethered technological gadget.

Chris’s article also brings to mind a few interesting points about our “cell phone society”, about the way cell phones have affected communal spaces and how they have changed how we interact with one another.  His comment that cell phones “are constructing the barrier between ourselves and the traditional daily events to which we are accustomed” reminds me of an article by Christine Rosen called, “Our Cell Phones, Ourselves,” in which she writes that cell phones have led to a “radical disengagement in the public sphere” wherein people sacrifice not only etiquette, but also engagement in the world around them as a result of being so cell-phone centric.  Standing in lines at the supermarket chatting away, sitting in coffee shops hooked into our text messages, conducting conversations in person while checking our phones every other minute: cell phones have caused us to become “absently present”— physically in a place but mentally absent, off in another world preoccupied by our phones.

This “absent presence” is all too common on college campuses, as Chris writes, where students are glued to their cell phones, chatting or texting, paying attention to their miniature screens instead of what is actually going on around them.  It can be almost comical to observe “absent presence” in the classroom, where rows of students are eagerly texting away on their cell phones before, after, and during breaks in classes, often at the expense of talking to their peers sitting right next to them. Indeed, everyone in the room is having a conversation: however, it’s not with each other, but with the network of people they are connected to on their phones.  What effect does this have on classroom dynamics?  On how a community functions as a whole?  Psychologist Kenneth Gergen thinks that this erosion of face-to-face community is a moral failing; Rosen adds, “It would be a terrible irony if “being connected” required or encouraged a disconnection from community life — an erosion of the spontaneous encounters and everyday decencies that make society both civilized and tolerable.”  Is there merit to Gergen and Rosen’s point? Are our cell phone habits harmless time fillers, or are they actually contributing to the degradation of community life?

It may seem like no big deal to whip out your cell phone during these periods of “downtime” in your day…but it is interesting to consider the opportunity cost of these moments that are now busied by “superficial conversations and websurfing”–moments when we used to be able to let our minds wander, or might have struck up a conversation with an actual person nearby.  When you think about life before cell phones, are there aspects of it that you think would be wise to regain? In being so technologically connected, what other connections are we losing as a result?

Questions:

Have cell phones changed the way you experience “downtime” throughout your day? Have you ever tried to go “cell-phone-less” and if so, what effect did it have on what you thought about or did when you would have otherwise been on your phone?

Here’s a deal for you: If you can figure out how to control the bubble size in carbonated beverages, or can find a novel approach to protecting corn from insect damage, the website Innocentive will broker a deal where your idea could be purchased for $20,000.

Or maybe chemical compounds aren’t your thing? Head over to Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk program, and make $1 for identifying in 100 pictures whether the person in the photo is male or female, or earn 5 cents for every city and country you match with the correct overseas zipcodes.

Still need more work? If you successfully pass the interview process at LiveOps.com (also known as the “contact center in the cloud”), you could soon be a call-center employee taking someone’s drive thru order from the Jack-in-the-Box from across town, simply sitting at home on your couch connected to the drive-thru module via your laptop.

Each of these is an example of Ubiquitous Human Computing, a term coined by Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain used to describe the trend to network and distribute mindpower as a fungible resource on the web.

Last Week, Zittrain came to speak about this topic at Santa Clara University in his lecture entitled “Minds For Sale”, where he dynamically discussed the myriad of issues we are faced by this new wave of the internet.

Out of the many interesting topics Zittrain covered, a few ideas stood out to me:

One question that Zittrain raised was what effect ubiquitous human computing would have on society. With contracting jobs available at our fingertips, how will the lines between “work” and “home” continue to be blurred?

The company LiveOps.com, for example, allows people to work from their home as call center employees for everything from fast-food chains to political campaigns, and represents a different model for employment than the typical worker/boss hierarchy, Zittrain says.  LiveOps enables people to work anywhere (presuming they have a computer), and anytime (whether for 5 minutes, or 5 hours) depending on the person’s availability; thus, if a person wants to take some Jack-in-the-Box orders for 10 minutes while in between errands, Liveops allows him or her to do so by simply signing in and signing out at his convenience.  Zittrain presented an advertisement with the slogan “Become a Mompreneur“, intended to target stay-at-home mothers looking to be employed in small increments throughout the day.

But he questioned what kind of impact these types of “contracting” jobs could have in the future. Will we grow into communities where people are sitting in parks on their computers, one person ordering a pizza from a Liveops contractor sitting across the way?  In his article on Ubiquitous Human Computing, Zittrain writes,

“One can visualize in the near future a subway car packed with people, each far less attuned to the local environment and to each other than even with today’s distractions of newspapers and iPods. Instead, they will stare into screens even for just a few minutes and earn as much money in that time as their respective skills and stations allow.”

And he rightfully notes that with computer-mediated convenience, also comes computer-mediated control.  Liveops, for example, documents its contractors performance based on statistical metrics of timeliness and efficiency, measured even down to the second of how fast someone answers a Liveops call.  This introduces a categorically different model from the typical workplace, Zittrain suggests, where employees don’t have any flexibility or slack like they would as a typical employee, but are instead measured solely by these quantifiable measurements.   And if a contractor is inefficient, Liveops has no obligation to keep them employed — they can be dropped and replaced by another contracted employee at anytime.  Does this model lead us down a track towards people being treated less like human beings and more like computers, Zittrain asked?  And one wonders this in general: will ubiquitous human computing make us more like task-mastering computers, and less like humans?

This issue seems even more relevant to the next topic: Amazon’s Mechanical Turks.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turks is a service that allows people to complete tasks for small amounts of money– often 1 to 15 cents –that are considered exceedingly simple but require human intelligence because computers are, for whatever reason, unable to carry them out. Examples of a “mechanical turks” include identifying keywords to describe a photo on Google image search, summarizing a website for a search function, or matching names with e-mail addresses — tasks that, at this point, are too complicated for a computer, but are fairly simplistic for a human being.

Most people think of these tasks as mindless and just something to pass the time – but Zittrain pointed out some interesting ethical questions that can arise related to these tasks. He pointed out the issue of alienation, which refers to the idea that people are being asked to do a task having no idea of what it relates to.  (In other words, with mechanical turking, you can complete a task but have no knowledge of what company or person you are completing the task for.)  Why is this issue?  Well, consider the following scenario:

You are completing the “mechanical turk” of clicking through a series of pictures, simply identifying if the person in the photo is male or female.  You’re earning some small sum of money — a few dollars, maybe–while watching TV and just breezing on the internet.  But what if, in helping categorize the gender of a person in a photo, you are in fact helping to identify and catalog the images of protesters at a rally who will then be arrested based on information you helped provide?  Because you have no knowledge of who commissions the turk, you could be contributing to a cause — political, religious, social — that you might not condone if there were full disclosure.  Zittrain raises this as an important question going forward: If we don’t have transparency on who is commissioning these tasks, how can we know if we are contributing to something that may be out of line with our moral principles?

Zittrain’s talk also raised a lot of questions about honesty on the internet in regards to marketing and consumer reviews. He cited one website called Subvertandprofit.com, which allows a person to pay money to have his or her article “Digg’d” (for non “diggers,” Digg.com is an aggregate social news site where users vote on popular stories — and the more votes, the more publicity).  You can also pay money to get people to give your product a 5/5 positive review on Amazon.com or other review sites.  Essentially, if you shell out the cash, you can control the type of reviews your product can get.  Should we condone this type of practice online, Zittrain asked? How will we know who to trust online if reviewers are being paid to give good reviews?

Captcha codes are another area that breeds dishonesty online. Captchas are codes which were created to eliminate online spam–they require a human user to read and type out the letters presented, thereby confirming that the website user is in fact a person and not a computer program trying to spread spam:

But spammers have learned to get around this hurdle by eliciting their own “mechanical turks” to solve Captchas for them. For example, some programmers have designed free pornography that can be viewed if one just simply enters in a Captcha code; basically, spammers trick pornography viewers into solving Captchas for them, and then use those solved codes to spam whatever blog or website featured that Captcha. On a massive scale, this leads to Captcha codes being solved left and right by people who don’t even know that they are contributing to this internet spamming scheme (again raising the issue of alienation on the web). Zittrain even described what he called “Captcha sweatshops”, where people are commissioned to solve these codes all day long–a new type of digital labor for the 21st century.  As ubiquitous human computing advances, one wonders, what will happen to honesty, trust and ethics on the internet?

The last point I thought was fascintating in regards to ubiquitous human computing was the idea of citizen surveillance. Zittrain pointed out a website marketed to engage citizens in border control, where people can watch surveillance footage of the borders and report to the website if they “see anything unusual.” If enough people respond with concern, patrol men will be sent out to the border to survey the problem.  Essentially, people can watch the borders 24 hours a day, looking for any behavior they might deem suspicious.

But is citizen surveillance something we should be encouraging in this way? And one wonders, what might this look like in the future if surveillance intensifies, and people are constantly being commissioned to report on the behavior of others recorded on surveillance camera footage streaming online?

All in all, Zittrain’s lecture raised many fascinating questions about the future of the internet in regards to the distribution of human mindpower. Zittrain himself admits feeling ambivalent towards this trend: excited about its possibilities, but also anxious about its downsides. I share his ambivalence; there are obvious benefits (like idea sharing on Innocentive) and significant drawbacks (like turning us into cogs in a machine) to this type of networking.

But what I admired most about Zittrain was his approach to the topic — he is really the consummate example of a Technological Citizen.  His goal is to get people talking about the path we are going down, and have us all evaluate whether it is the right path to be on. He encourages people to get out of the all too popular camps that arise around issues in technology, the first which claims it’s “too early to tell if this will be a problem” and the other that insists “it’s too late to do anything about it now anyway.”

If we examine these issues now, he says, we can have some sway in bringing about changes that help move us in a direction where privacy, autonomy, and human values are taken into consideration.  If we wait too long or never address these questions, he warns, we might continue down a road that leads to a place we don’t want to end up in, where our minds are for sale, and we’re nothing more than human machines.

What do you think about ubiquitous human computing? Do you share Zittrain’s concerns, or have additional concerns of your own? Alternatively, what benefits do you see to ubiquitous human computing?

Watch Jonathan Zittrain explain Ubiquitous Human Computing in the interview below:

To check out Jonathan Zittrain’s Book, The Future of The Internet And How To Stop It, click here.

Be honest: how many other things are you doing right now?

Are you in the midst of responding to your e-mail, while casually browsing the web, scanning your friend’s most recent Facebook updates, chatting on Gchat, and mid-article on your favorite news site or blog?

Go ahead and count them: how many windows are open on your computer right now?

And what else are you doing? Are you listening to music, watching TV, or half-talking to a friend nearby? Is your cell phone within a hands reach, ready to be answered the instant you hear a text message or phone call? Or perhaps you’re even reading this on your cell phone, on your way in between classes or meetings, biding time while waiting for the next thing to require your attention?

No, this isn’t a post about Big Brother watching you; it’s about a term we all know too well: Multitasking. We have become, as writer Christine Rosen says, “mavens of multitasking,” glued to our technological gadgets, driven by our seemingly endless to-do lists of tasks. My post today asks, how have all the technologies we use – the cell phones, computers, PDAs, e-mails, and the like– accelerated the extent to which we multitask? And more importantly, what effect has it had on the way we live our lives?

A New Type Of Multitasking

The compulsion to multitask is driven by the desire to get more things done in less time, in a world that is moving at an increasingly fast pace. But gone are the days where “multitasking” meant simply reading the news while finishing your work assignment, or the common example “walking while chewing gum.” Modern technologies have ushered in a new type of multitasking–multitasking on steroids–where one cannot only do two things, but eleven things at once. Now, we live in an era where multitasking means reading the news, checking one’s e-mail, texting a friend, watching a youtube video, downloading music, and finishing a work assignment—all, if you please, while walking and chewing gum.

And I would venture to say that the new form of multitasking is not necessarily associated with accomplishing more tasks in the strictest sense, but rather just being tuned into more things at once. For those dubbed “media-multitaskers”- the ones watching TV while surfing the web on their laptops and sending text messages on their cell phones– the sheer number of available things to keep up with conditions participation across a multitude of media. Up-to-the second news updates, a constant stream of Facebook and Twitter statuses, endless e-mails, and an overwhelming amount of content available to explore at every turn: it’s hard to keep up with all the information — and impossible, certainly, if one doesn’t try to do more than one thing at once.

Writer Linda Stone says we are addicted to checking and rechecking these media, “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing” with what she calls “continuous partial attention”. “Our pleasure cycles are increasingly tied to it,” writes Sam Anderson, in his article “In Defense of Distraction“. And it has become hard to “unplug”, to take vacations, or, in some cases, to even take a few hours and go off the grid (just think of all the updates you’ll miss). One man wrote in the Mercury News:

“At work, of course, I typically spend almost my entire day in front of my computer. I’m constantly checking my e-mail, responding to instant messages, surfing the Web or playing around with various software programs. (And) When I’m away from my desk, I’m still tied to technology. I have my iPhone with me at all times and use it to check my work e-mail, navigate to out-of-office meetings, listen to music and news — or play the occasional game. But even on vacation, I felt an urge to be engaged with something electronic.”

Thus, the modern day multitasking mentality is driven not only by our need to complete so many tasks, per se, but increasingly by our need to keep up with the constant information streams; and with information everywhere–and gadgets that allow us to access it—we’ve essentially adopted “multi-media-tasking” as a new way of life. The question posed by ethics and technology would be: is it a good life?

Multitasking and “The Good Life”

Examining the good life inevitably asks us to consider what values we cultivate, and whether the path we are going down is the path we should be going down. When we think about technology and multitasking, we often imagine it makes us better communicators, able to be more on top of relevant information, and in general, capable of getting more done (yet whether or not these are achieved is up for debate). But when it comes cultivating the virtues of patience (“Patience is a virtue”, as we all know), or the virtue of perseverance (in other words, sustained attention) where does the multi-tasking mentality lead us? When we think about the quality of the activities we pursue instead of the quantity, what is all of this media-multi-tasking contributing to our lives?

I think the two interesting things to consider on this topic are multitasking’s effect on attention and engagement.

“When we talk about multitasking,” writer Christine Rosen says, “we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worth our attention.”

“People who have achieved great things,” she continues, “often credit for their success a finely honed skill for paying attention.”

Attention, to be sure, is a critical virtue to cultivate. Isaac Newton said that, for his discovereries, he owed “more to patient attention than any other talent.” Psychologist William James remarked, “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

“Tell me what you pay attention to,” Philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset said, “and I will tell you who you are.”

So how are all of us multitaskers doing on the attention front? Since we’re paying attention to so many things, we must be getting high marks, right?

Unfortunately, wrong. Studies confirm what I would suspect many people probably already know deep down, as each of us has had the experience of trying to complete a project while doing a million other things, only to get none of them done very well. We are bad at paying attention while we’re multitasking. Really bad at it, in fact.

A recent study conducted by Clifford Nass at Stanford University (carried out with an eye towards today’s “media-multitaskers”) showed this finding. When students were asked to multi-task while performing attentional tasks, the college-aged participants performed horribly on staying focused on what they were asked to focus on. “They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” Nass said. “Everything Distracts Them.”

Not only did they perform poorly on the rote memorization, Nass says, but on analytical types of thinking as well.

“I was very curious because I live in a dormitory here at Stanford, and I was curious how these kids were doing so many things at once. And so I wondered, jeez, you know, what is their special gift? What is their remarkable talent that I seem to lack? And our research suggests they don’t have one…

Even when we did not ask them to do anything close to the level of multitasking they were doing, their cognitive processes were impaired. So basically, they are worse at most of the kinds of thinking not only required for multitasking but what we generally think of as involving deep thought.”

Research on brain scans from UCLA has showed that our brains are terrible at switching tasks, and that doing so even results in a phyisiological stress response. Walter Kirn, Author of “The Autumn of Multitaskers” explains,

“Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.”

UCLA psychologist Russell Poldrack adds:

“Multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn.  Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily. Our study shows that to the degree you can learn while multi-tasking, you will use different brain systems.”

An oft cited study of workplace efficiency done by UC Irvine also demonstrated the ineffectiveness of multitasking. Their study showed that employees spent nearly a third of their day recovering from “information overload”, and that it took employees anywhere from 12 to 25 minutes to fully rebound from being distracted from an e-mail or phone call and resume their actual work. This loss of productivity, Balex Research estimates, cost the corporate world an average of $650 billion dollars in revenue due to inefficiency in 2008 (the number has since increased to $900 billion according to their website).

So still think you’re good at multitasking? Nass addresses you in his interview with NPR:

“One of the things that seems to be true is people who multitask very, very frequently believe they are excellent at it, and they’re actually, as far as we can tell, the worst at it of any people.”

And yet, we all multitask, and will likely continue to, perhaps even more so as our gadgets advance. But if the research is to be trusted, then the media-multitaskers must really be missing out: in paying attention to so many things, are we really paying attention to anything at all?

Life as A Multitasker

Examples on a college campus abound in our multitasking, attention-challenged culture. It seems an unwelcome challenge for students to sit for 50 or 90 minutes of class without checking their e-mail, Facebook, or websites on their laptops under the guise of taking notes, or sneaking text messages on their cell phones under their desks. Sitting and reading books or writing a paper for any sustained period of time is like a Sisyphean battle, trying to resist the urge of Youtube, e-mail or some other online interruption only to have to start the assignment over again at the beginning because of all the distractions.  Having a full conversation without someone whipping out and checking his or her cell phone seems to take more willpower than most are willing to exercise.

So what are the implications that this type of attention-splitting has for our ability to engage with what we’re doing? In these instances, it seems, significant opportunities for engagement are lost: for intellectual engagement in class, for deep reading of text and focused, sustained writing, for genuine conversation. What value is gained from reading a book, if while reading that book you are interrupted so many times that you don’t absorb any of it? What worth is there in a conversation with someone if you’re constantly signaling that you’re more interested in a conversation taking place elsewhere? The opportunity to truly immerse yourself with any one thing seems replaced by the opportunity to sort-of engage with ten things.

Going forward, two perspectives emerge for the future of the multitaskers. Sam Anderson, author of “In Defense of Distraction”, takes an optimistic view, thinking that we will adapt to this attention-splitting, media-multitasking mode we are in, and grow as a result:

“There’s been lots of hand-wringing about all the skills (kids who have grown up multitasking) might lack, mainly the ability to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end, but surely they can already do things their elders can’t—like conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media, or pay attention to switching between attentional targets in a way that’s been considered impossible. …As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information.

Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.”

Christine Rosen, on the other hand, takes a strong view that “continued partial attention” will lead us down a bad road, in her article “The Myth of Multitasking”:

“The picture that emerges of these pubescent multitasking mavens is of a generation of great technical facility and intelligence but of extreme impatience, unsatisfied with slowness and uncomfortable with silence…

Perhaps we will simply adjust and come to accept what (psychologist William) James called “acquired inattention.” E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming – all this may become background noise, like the “din of a foundry or factory” that James observed workers could scarcely avoid at first, but which eventually became just another part of their daily routine. …(But) when people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.”

On this issue, I’m more inclined to agree with Rosen than with Anderson. Though Anderson has a point that we will likely adapt, I question his premise: is “focused distraction” something we should be aiming for? Do we really want to promote this type of information grazing across so many mediums, in place of deep engagement with singular activities? Consider Multitasking expert David Meyer’s comment: “If Einstein were alive today, he’d probably be forced to multitask so relentlessly in the Swiss patent office that he’d never get a chance to work out the theory of relativity.”

I think another interesting question to consider is one posed by “lifehacker” Merlin Mann, who Anderson interviewed in his article. “Is it clear to you,” Mann says, “that the last fifteen years represent an enormous improvement in how everything operates?”

I would imagine many people, particularly technology enthusiasts, would answer, “Of course!” (the iPhone users in particular). But it’s an interesting question to consider: how do we define improvement? Does it mean more information, at a faster rate? If so, then the answer would unequivocally be yes.  But what happens when we define improvement as deep, sustained interest in activities, better human interactions, and enjoyment of day-to-day life? Under these premises, have all of these multitasking-enabling technologies improved, or detracted from, our lives?

Questions:

How has technology changed the way you multitask?

What effect has multitasking had on the amount of attention you pay to things, and how engaged you are in the activities you do?

Leave your thoughts in the comments section below!

Listen to Stanford University’s Clifford Nass talk about his study on media-multitaskers on NPR:

The question has become of particular importance in recent years, where photos, profiles, and online commentary are being factored into who gets hired–and fired–in the workforce.

Close to 50% of companies report doing background checks on their candidates by searching through online content, and claim to have not hired candidates based on finding “provocative photographs,” “content about drinking or using drugs,” or even “poor communication skills” demonstrated on their online profiles. For recent college students joining the workplace, this is particularly a problem, because they often have this type of “unprofessional” content on their profiles from their time in school.

Finding this type of content online, says consultant Brad Karsh, makes employers question the applicants’ character:

“A lot of it makes me think, what kind of judgment does this person have? Why are you allowing this to be viewed publicly, effectively, or semipublicly?”

Many students may not even be aware that this content is being factored into their job application process.  One student interviewed by The New York Times found that, unbeknownst to him, the info he had up on the web was alienating him from potential employers.  After not hearing back from any of the jobs he applied to, he followed his friend’s suggestion to Google himself, and realized that a satirical essay he wrote years before called “Lying All The Way To The Top” appeared under his name, and was possibly keeping employers from returning his inquiries.  After taking it down, he says, he started getting offers.

Interestingly, this student didn’t think employers would factor in something like an old essay he’d posted on the web into his eligibility as a job candidate:

“I never really considered that employers would do something like (search for me online)” he said. “I thought they would just look at your résumé and grades.”.

Professional networking site Ziggs.com CEO Tom Demello says that students may never know this information affected their eligibility — they just won’t get a call back.  And for those who assume they’re safe as long as their profiles are set to private, think again, he says. “Whatever you post on the web…it’s public.  There’s a reason it’s called the “world wide web”:

Employers often find ways to access the sites, either by creating a profile from the company, or by using other employees in the same university networks to look up applicants.  Sometimes, depending on your privacy settings, images and content are available simply by Googling your name.

And what you share online remains a liability even after you’re hired for a job. The Wall Street Journal reported about a woman who vented on Facebook about her dissatisfaction with work life, posting in her status: “OMG I HATE MY JOB!”  Her boss’s status response? “You also seem to have forgotten that you have 2 weeks left on your 6 month trial period.  Don’t bother coming in tomorrow..and yes, I’m serious.”

Is it ethical for employers to evaluate potential or current employees based on the information they present online?

One student I interviewed disagreed that employers should be able to use this information in the job search:

“I don’t think it’s fair for employers to look at personal profiles to judge their applicants.  The information on those profiles has no bearing on how the person will do in their job, and it’s a violation of that person’s privacy to factor in their personal lives into whether they can do the work. People put pictures up for their friends to see, not to reflect on how they will do their job.”

A contributor to Business Week’s “Debate Room” blog echoed some of these views:

Job seekers already have to contend with background screens, drug tests, credit checks, and verification of employment history, education, and income. Is adding an ideological litmus test of an online identity really necessary? What should companies care about more, the professional skills and merit of an employee or what her favorite beer is?

But others believe that information posted online is fair game to be considered.  Another student I asked said,

“It clearly reflects on a person’s judgment and character if there are pictures of them drinking at parties, or saying inappropriate things on their profile.  It would also reflect on that company as well to have an employee with that sort of information online.  People should expect to be held responsible for their online presence because your profile reflects on who you are as a person and the types of decisions you make.  And that’s fair game for an employer to know.”

To me, this issue brings up a broader question of what’s “private” and “public” in the age of the internet.  It’s interesting that the first student said that people post their pictures “for their friends to see” but not to be viewed by someone like an employer.  I wonder, can this distinction be made?  Can one expect anything posted on the web to remain “private” in this way? Perhaps a shift in thinking in order — an acknowledgement  that  social networking sites are not only a social venue for people to connect and share interests, but also a public or semi-public forum where the information one shares is subject to be evaluated in a variety of capacities by those, including employers, who can access it online.

I think Tom Demello (interviewed in the video above) is right that the current generation of social networkers aren’t truly aware of how what we post online is going to impact us.  Are we all too comfortable sharing, and only going to learn the hard way — by not getting a job, for example — to be more careful about what we post online?  Will our approach to social networking shift as we get older, and the information we have posted trails us into our futures?

Here’s a challenge: can you read this whole post without getting distracted?  Can you resist the urge to skim each paragraph for the “gist of it”, and instead read each sentence carefully, reflecting on its meaning, even thinking about how it might apply to your life?

Chances are this might take some work: if you are accustomed to reading on the web, you’ve likely also grown accustomed to the online reading style known as the “F-shaped pattern“, where when you open a webpage, you read in an F-shape quickly from left to right across the top, and then scan the middle until you get to the bottom, absorbing a few main ideas but not truly engaging with any of them.  It’s a quick and easy way to catch the major points, enabling you to get an overview of everything presented, perhaps giving you the sense of comprehension.  But as the research shows, it’s likely that you are absorbing very little.

And when you’re websurfing, reading for entertainment, or perusing blogs, maybe it doesn’t matter if you’re just skimming. But as the internet is increasingly the source for all our content – the news we read, the research we do for work and school, the entertainment we enjoy– we must ask the question: how is the internet changing the way we read, and the depth with which we take in information? What are the implications for society if the deep, reflective thinking associated with reading is replaced by the “web-page graze”?

In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” writer Nicholas Carr raised many of these same questions.  In it, he explored the idea that websurfing is restructuring the way we process information, conditioning us to take in a lot of information at once, but not in much depth. Carr opens his article talking about how he believes the internet has reprogrammed his attention span:

“I’m not thinking the way I used to think,” he says. “I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now, my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

He elaborates,

“…What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface life a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Carr interviews a fellow writer who says this type of reading has generalized to reading books as well:

“I can’t read War and Peace anymore” he says.”I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

I’ve noticed that many students report the same problem.  After becoming accustomed to reading quick bits of information online, it has become harder to stay focused on long reading assignments that require sustained focus. Students are more and more foregoing reading long articles and books and instead look for quick summaries on sites like Wikipedia and Sparknotes– sites which allow them to get an overview of the content quickly, but don’t require the same type of reflection and commitment that reading a book requires.  If people, and in particular, students, are reading less thoroughly and getting more “summarized content”, how will this affect the type of thinking they engage in?  What will be the impact of online reading on the depth with which people immerse themselves in the subjects they are reading about?

Is How We Read Important To Who We Are?

Sven Birkerts, in his essay, “The Owl Has Flown” (printed in the anthology Making Sense), presciently addressed the internet’s potential impact on our intellectual ethic, and would likely be worried for the fate of student scholarship in the age of online reading.  Birkerts echoes Carr’s observations about reading behavior, and then reflects more philosophically on the implication that this type of reading style has for the virtues of depth and wisdom, believing that reading online leads not only to a lack of depth in what we read, but a lack of depth we cultivate as human beings:

The reading act is necessarily different than it was in its earliest days…the reader (now) tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly.  The inscription is light but it covers vast territories: quantity is elevated over quality.  The possibility of maximum focus is undercut by the awareness of the unread texts that await.  The result is that we know countless more “bits” of information…(but) we know them without a stable sense of context.

Instead of carrying on the ancient project of philosophy—attempting to discover the “truth” of things—we direct our energies to managing information. The computer, our high-speed, accessing, storing, and sorting tool, appears as a godsend. It increasingly determines what kind of information we are willing to traffic in; if something cannot be written in code and transmitted, it cannot be important.

(But in this paradigm) there is no chance that any piece of information can unfold its potential significance… Where electronic impulse rules, and where the psyche is conditioned to work with data, the experience of deep time is impossible. No deep time, no resonance; no resonance, no wisdom.”

Carr states similar views in his article:

“The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading…is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in ourselves but in our culture.”

I think it’s interesting when Carr says, “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.”   I wonder if material garnered online– given the sheer amount of content, and the skimming-type reading style that we often employ when reading it– resonates with the reader as much as content read in actual books, magazines, and newspapers, and can set off those “intellectual vibrations” in the same way reading a book does.  Is there something about reading on a computer , constantly distracted by advertisements, wanting to check e-mail, and the impulse to read other websites, that keeps information from “unfolding its significance”, the way it can in a book?

Also, I think Carr is right that “deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking.”  I wonder, how is reading online affecting student scholarship? Are students becoming conditioned to expect shorter, quicker versions of content, and losing the capacity to engage in deeper thinking as a result?  Is information being retrieved but not retained? If so, does this support the idea that Birkerts puts forth that as a result of losing depth in reading, we are also losing our capacity for deep thought as human beings?

Questions:

How has the internet changed the way you read?  Do you find it more difficult to engage in “deep reading” of long books and articles because you are accustomed to reading quick bits of information and skimming for “overviews” online?

Do you agree with Birkerts and Carr that, as a result of being “information retrievers” on the web, we will experience a loss of depth and wisdom as a society?

Leave your thoughts in the comments section below!