The Game Theory of Brain Enhancement

,br /> A Hitachi engineer displays a portable optical topography device

Around two years ago I wrote about how brain enhancing technologies were inevitable from a game theoretic point of view. Here is how I put it:

Because nobody will be able to tell whether you’re using it, genius will be indistinguishable from brain mounted computer use. If nobody uses it you will have the advantages over your coworkers that perfect memory would give you today. If everybody but you uses it you will have all the disadvantages that someone with really terrible memory has today. When everyone else uses brain mounted computers, those without them will look forgetful and unknowledgeable. It will be a dominant strategy in the same way that optional genius would be today; only extreme individuals will choose to reject it.

Now in an interesting new article on how technology is increasingly allowing us to enhance our capabilities, David Duncan offers a glimpse of the game theory of brain enhancement in action:

Over the last couple of years during talks and lectures, I have asked thousands of people a hypothetical question that goes like this: “If I could offer you a pill that allowed your child to increase his or her memory by 25 percent, would you give it to them?”

The show of hands in this informal poll has been overwhelming, with 80 percent or more voting no.

Then I asked a follow-up question. “What if this pill was safe and increased your kid’s grades from a B average to an A average?” People tittered nervously, looked around to see how others were voting as nearly half said yes. (Many didn’t vote at all.)

“And what if all of the other kids are taking the pill?” I asked. The tittering stopped and nearly everyone voted yes.

There are a few interesting things to note here. Memory enhancement is not framed as providing a competitive advantage over peers, and few parents choose it. In contrast, “getting better grades” is purely competitive advantage and parents far more parents choose it.  In choosing whether to choose brain enhancements, competition with peers is a crucial determinant. Of course it’s quite easy to imagine that memory enhancement could raise grades by one letter on average, and so in reality parents will probably choose that enhancement in greater numbers than they are indicating here.

The important thing is that people are choosing their enhancements with a focus on strategic peer competition, as I predicted. This is in contrast to a focus on ability and intelligence for it’s own sake. This all suggests that enhancement technologies will be adopted much more frequently than considering our own preferences for enhancement would predict. In short: it doesn’t matter if you don’t want brain enhancement, because your competition will.