If I drink a cup of coffee, I perk up, stay awake a bit longer, and (seemingly) think a bit faster. We call this tradition.
If I take a modafinil (Provigil), I perk up, stay awake longer, and (measurably) think a bit faster. We call this cheating.
That seems to be the implication, at least, of a spate of articles popping up over the last year, from Tech Crunch to the New Yorker. People in a variety of attention-dependent industries, such as entrepreneurial business and laboratory science, are starting to use various “cognitive enhancing” drugs–and a dark future inevitably awaits. But is that the only option?
For those of you who haven’t been watching this trend, the dilemma is that certain pharmaceuticals intended to treat cognitive and neurological disorders–primarily, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy–and, when used by people without these disorders, provide a kind of cognitive boost. This usually means increased focus and concentration, but it can also mean better spatial reasoning, greater alertness, and improved “clarity” of thinking. As a result, it’s apparently becoming increasingly common for people in “knowledge work” professions to take these drugs as a way of improving their performance.
The mainstream debate on this subject seems to boil down to one side arguing that this is the knowledge work equivalent of athletes taking steroids, and the other side arguing that this is little different from using a more powerful computer, getting a better education, or any of the other steps we might take to improve our performance–it just happens to be pharmaceutical in nature.
There’s clearly a competitive aspect to this enhancement, and that disturbs many of us. The use of cognitive drugs is driven, at least in part, by a perceived need to keep up with colleagues and rivals. The fear is, how much longer will it be possible for someone to reject the use of these drugs and still maintain competitive parity? If everyone else vying for the promotion uses modafinil to stay awake for 20 hours/day, can you afford not to? Given that the long-term effect of these drugs is still poorly-understood, however, is it at all ethical to allow this kind of “slippery-slope” scenario to come about?
