Truly Human Enhancement by Nicholas Agar and Humanity Enhanced by Russell Blackford – Reviews

Fantasies of human enhancement have a long history, from early myths about supernormal strength and eternal life to 20th-century comic superheroes: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and their many emulators. While early attempts to achieve superpowers in real life – from shouldering artificial wings to injecting monkey glands – generally ended in disaster, today's advances in genetics and neuroscience seem to bring them closer to practical possibility. So much so that speculations about such prospects and their ethical implications have migrated from the imaginations of SF writers to the minds of philosophers and bioethicists.

The grainier issues raised by current or near-at-hand developments, from three-parent families and designer babies to smart drugs, are in danger of becoming submerged by this welter of speculation. A scholarly cult of so-called transhumanists has arisen. Their prophet is US futurologist and Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil, who argues that so rapid have been developments in the biosciences and informatics that by the mid-century a "singularity" will result through which a genetically engineered and neurally enhanced post-human species will emerge, incomparably stronger, wiser, more moral and...