Peter Thiel’s ‘doping games’ and the rise of superhumans
Peter Thiel’s Enhanced Games promise to be an annual sporting event that lets athletes use performance-enhancing drugs, nicknamed the pro-doping Olympics. The games have captured imaginations and money. But behind them is an unsettling effort spearheaded by tech billionaires like Thiel to use science and technology to enhance the human race.
Their vision sounds alluring: If we can lengthen our lifespans and augment our brains and productivity, we’ll live a life of leisure, powered by robots and funded by universal basic income. But they rarely mention that utopia could come with a price, eroding human agency and perhaps worsening inequality. Thiel, best known for being an early investor in Facebook, has poured millions of dollars into longevity research and has reportedly signed up for cryonic preservation.
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman also plans to preserve his brain upon his death so that his mind can be become one with the hyperintelligent AI systems. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud," he once said. Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos is trying to reverse ageing, while Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have also poured money into immortality research.
Elon Musk is trying to enhance human cognition with brain implants through Neuralink. Christian Angermeyer, a tech investor running Thiel’s Enhanced Games, has written that we should expect several waves of human enhancement, with the first generation marked by mass adoption of weight-loss medications, followed by drugs that can tackle muscle degeneration for older people and enhance cognition. Psychedelic drugs that can address mental health issues will follow, before what he describes as the final wave: “transhumanism" through brain implants.
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