The announcement that a Chinese scientist, Dr He Jiankui, had used the gene-editing technique Crispr to engineer the world’s first genetically modified babies provoked a storm of protests. Though Dr He said he was motivated to help families struggling with genetic diseases, scientists around the world have warned that the experiment poses grave risks not only to the twins involved and their progeny but also to our entire species, and many ethicists have agreed.

On the same day the story broke, the entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that one of his companies, Neuralink, was planning to save the human race by building a hard drive to be implanted in the brain. The goal, Musk explained, was to wire a chip into your skull, giving you the digital intelligence that is poised to surge far ahead of mere biological intelligence. Without that chip – that is, without fully incorporating artificial intelligence into ourselves – our species, Musk argued, is doomed. In the robotic, algorithm-dominated universe that lies just ahead, we will be restricted, if we survive at all, to a few protected zones, comparable to the steadily shrinking territories, little more than big cages, where the last chimpanzees and mountain gorillas eke out their existence.

“My faith in humanity has been a little shaken this year,” Musk declared, “but I’m still pro-humanity.” If this is what it means to be “pro-humanity”, what would it mean to be anti? Musk is a remarkable visionary who dreams that his neuroscience company, with its proposed “electrode-to-neuron interface at a micro level”, will cure such afflictions as dementia and paralysis. But there is a huge gap between, say, repairing spinal cord injuries by implanting electrodes in the brain and implanting an intelligence-enhancing AI chip, as Neuralink aims to do. The one restores an injured human to full mobility; the other alters the very nature of the human, at least as it has been conceived for millennia across a substantial part of the globe.

The human condition is premised precisely on the fact that we do not each have wired into our skulls what Neuralink dreams of giving us

The three great world monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all embraced the same archaic account of human origins: the story, recounted in the first chapters of Genesis, of a naked man and woman and a talking snake in a garden with magical trees. To many (though by no means all) of us, a literal belief in this story no longer seems even remotely compatible with a scientific account of how our species emerged. But the biblical myth continues to circulate widely, even among those who have no doctrinal commitment to it, and for a good reason. It focuses on human freedom, including the freedom to make very bad choices.

Ancient commentators repeatedly asked why the God in the story, having commanded Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, did not do more to prevent them from the disastrous act of disobedience. To be sure, the Creator warned them that death would follow any violation of his prohibition, but how could the first humans have possibly understood what it meant to die? Why was the tree rooted in the very midst of the garden and not locked away, the way we lock away poison (or nuclear waste)? And how, before they had acquired knowledge of good and evil, could humans in their Edenic innocence have ever grasped the moral significance of what they were doing? Adam and Eve manifestly had insufficient knowledge of the long-term consequences of their actions, and God, who could have implanted this knowledge in them far more easily than Elon Musk’s proposed chip, evidently chose not to do so.

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Why did the God of the story allow the woman to listen to the wily serpent’s misleading words? Why did God permit the man to follow the woman’s lead? Why did God not snatch away the fatal fruit, as a loving parent snatches a knife away from a small child? Virtually all the early interpreters agreed that the Creator did not want to compromise the essential nature of humans by taking away their freedom to choose, even though that freedom was the source of so much trouble and misery. If Adam and Eve knew everything that would follow from their actions – if they could make the inconceivably vast calculations that would give them, in Shakespeare’s words, “the future in the instant” – they might have avoided their catastrophic blunder, but it would, the Genesis story suggests, have been at the cost of their humanity.

Neurotechnology, Elon Musk and the goal of human enhancement Read more

This is not a celebration of ignorance or fecklessness. There was, after all, an explicit warning, however difficult it might have been for the first humans to interpret it correctly, and the consequences of the fateful choice were manifestly terrible. But the Bible represents humans neither as automata – the slaves of God – nor as miraculous sages, endowed with all the knowledge they need to make the inevitably correct decisions. And if the religious traditions sometimes dwelled with cruel intensity on the miseries that followed from the folly of our first parents, they each in their way found that what seemed at first like sheer disaster had redeeming consequences: the Torah, the Savior, the Prophet.

The human condition, in its wonder as well as its woe, is defined by uncertainty and risk, ambiguity and intuition, stupidity and spectacular creative intelligence, all premised precisely on the fact that we do not each have wired into our skulls what Neuralink dreams of giving us: the data and the computational capacity of “governments and large corporations”. Besides, at the moment it is difficult for me at least to share Elon Musk’s confidence in the superior intelligence of either of these august collectivities. I personally rely on the wisdom and the visionary generosity of such cultural heroes as Shakespeare and Montaigne, Yo-Yo Ma and Paul Farmer, none of whom (I know for a fact) ever had a chip implant.

Stephen Greenblatt, the Cogan university professor of the humanities at Harvard University, is the author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve



