http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=7522
from which...
Mental health underpins the communication, creativity and employee productivity. Individuals who utilize neuroceuticals (say to forecast emotions) will become more productive and will attain neurocompetitive advantage. While some countries may choose to ban them, performance-enabling neuroceuticals will emerge as significant productivity tools.
[...]
and later in the text, my favorite moment:
While neurotechnology's impact on society may seem far-fetched to some, so was the idea of flying 400 people from Tokyo to London in 1900. Indeed, it was Lord Kelvin, the head of the British Royal Society, who in 1898, proclaimed that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible, yet 50 years later people were doing it.
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Uh, ye...yes, that's right. Creating nano-scale neuro enhancement tech is of the same order as the engineering problems associated with heavier than air flight. Child's play really.
I'm an agnostic on this sort trip down future lane. There are indeed many possibilities (though a smaller, and yet to be discovered set of probabilities) that arise from the (yet to be born) nano-neuro-pharma-silicon intersection the article celebrates.
But, as in all things, the outcome of such a convergence, if it comes to pass, may be quite different from the boosters' projections.
Who's to say, for example, that an enhanced human, able to view his or her emotions at a distance and operate at a more precise level of cognition - a sort of tech enabled state of one pointedness of mind as the Buddhists say - would be 'more productive'? Such a specimen of post natural h. sapiens may drop out of the marketplace altogether in pursuit of other goals (perhaps world domination - why not if you're so much cleverer and clear minded than all the other blokes and birds?).
That the best the boosters can come up with as an endpoint for this tech - which would represent a break with the human past - is a better worker, racking up more bonuses for 24/7 efficiency I suppose, shows how stagnant the pool of thought, at least in conventional circles, has become.
In any event, for one Brit's and one American's view of what this kind of future might look like, check out Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson...
http://transmetropolitan.com/gimme.html
.d.