Two-day Cognitive Enhancement Workshop and Symposium
Date: 27-28 June 2009
FHI held a workshop and symposium on the economics and social impact of widespread weak cognition enhancement. The workshop was a small and tightly focused event, with participants invited from a few relevant disciplines. The workshop was followed by a larger symposium on cognitive enhancement and related ethical and policy issues.
Speaker(s): Professor Garrett Jones; Professor Linda Gottfredson; Professor William Nordhaus; Professor Heiner Rindermann; Professor Jessica Wolpaw-Reyes; Professor Nick Bostrom; Dr Anders Sandberg; Professor Robin Hanson;
Venue: St Hilda's College, Oxford
Cognitive ability clearly plays a major part in individual life outcomes and the functioning of societies as wholes. It is strongly linked to education, human capital, health and economic gains in complex feedback loops. If methods of cognitive enhancement (through biological interventions, new training methods etc) become available, how large an impact would they have? It appears likely that weak but pervasive improvements in cognition could have significant effects on a societal level. The goal of the workshop is to estimate the size and type of such impacts.
Resources:
Robin Hanson's presentation reviewed how we currently treat mental enhancements in some areas, for example, sport, nutrition, medicine etc, and considered how new mental enhancements technologies might be used in the future.
Audio file: "Mind Enhancing Behaviors Today".
Powerpoint presentation: PDF [261 KB]