In The Age of Radical Enhancement, Arnold Kling again looks at ideas raised by Kurzweil’s singularity:
Perhaps the last unenhanced human to make a significant contribution in the field of mathematics has already been born. In twenty years, the tenure track at top university mathematics departments may consist entirely of people who depend on drugs, direct neural-computer connections, genetic modification, or a combination of all three in order to achieve high-level performance.Some people would argue that the leading edge of this phenomenon is athletes’ use of steroids. I would caution, however, that athletics is atypical in that it is a zero-sum game, and we should not automatically adopt zero-sum bioethics.
When Kling asked his college-age daughter is they knew many students taking Adderall, an amphetamine cocktail prescribed for ADD, they each responded “Of course.” Here’s what Slate writer Joshua Foer had to say about The Adderall Me:
Depressives have Prozac, worrywarts have Valium, gym rats have steroids, and overachievers have Adderall. Usually prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, the drug is a cocktail of amphetamines that increases alertness, concentration, and mental-processing speed and decreases fatigue. It’s often called a cognitive steroid because it can make people better at whatever it is they’re doing. When scientists administered amphetamines to college shot-putters, they were able to throw more than 4 percent farther. According to one recent study, as many as one in five college students have taken Adderall or its chemical cousin Ritalin as study buddies.The drug also has a distinguished literary pedigree. During his most productive two decades, W.H. Auden began every morning with a fix of Benzedrine, an over-the-counter amphetamine similar to Adderall that was used to treat nasal congestion. James Agee, Graham Greene, and Philip K. Dick all took the drug to increase their output. Before the FDA made Benzedrine prescription-only in 1959, Jack Kerouac got hopped up on it and wrote On the Road in a three-week “kick-writing” session. “Amphetamines gave me a quickness of thought and writing that was at least three times my normal rhythm,” another devotee, John-Paul Sartre, once remarked.
If stimulants worked for those writers, why not for me? [...] As an experiment, I decided to take Adderall for a week. The results were miraculous. On a recent Tuesday, after whipping my brother in two out of three games of pingpong — a triumph that has occurred exactly once before in the history of our rivalry — I proceeded to best my previous high score by almost 10 percent in the online anagrams game that has been my recent procrastination tool of choice. Then I sat down and read 175 pages of Stephen Jay Gould’s impenetrably dense book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. It was like I’d been bitten by a radioactive spider.
An anecdote involving mathematician Paul Erdös:
There’s also the risk that Adderall can work too well. The mathematician Paul Erdös, who famously opined that “a mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems,” began taking Benzedrine in his late 50s and credited the drug with extending his productivity long past the expiration date of his colleagues. But he eventually became psychologically dependent. In 1979, a friend offered Erdös $500 if he could kick his Benzedrine habit for just a month. Erdös met the challenge, but his productivity plummeted so drastically that he decided to go back on the drug. After a 1987 Atlantic Monthly profile discussed his love affair with psychostimulants, the mathematician wrote the author a rueful note. “You shouldn’t have mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine,” he said. “It’s not that you got it wrong. It’s just that I don’t want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics to think that they have to take drugs to succeed.”