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A boy has stunned medics with his ability to see in pitch black with eyes that glow in the dark.

Our knowledge of how the human brain works is rapidly increasing and some people will use that knowledge to enhance their minds – to make themselves more intelligent, to feel permanently happy or to choose different aspirations. This will challenge the existing political order in many ways: Hyper-intelligent people will find it easy to dominate their relatively dim fellows.

We may have evolved to our current state of intelligence and no further on account of the onset of various maladaptive functional impairments. If this is the case we need to seriously look more deeply into this, especially at the dawn of bona fide cognitive enhancement.

For thousands of years, humans have strived to move beyond the limits of their own minds through education, philosophy and meditation. Cognitive neuroscientists like myself are trying to turn such aspirations into reality by applying knowledge of neuroplasticity and cognition to cognitive training programs. Millions of people use their income to buy cognitive training games. This trend will continue as new discoveries foster the development of improved training programs, and the implementation of these programs will eventually cause a significant impact in society and education.

Ramez Naam is the author of More than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, which offers a tour of emerging technologies and makes a case for embracing human enhancement, showing readers how these technologies are powerful new tools in humanity’s quest to improve ourselves, our offspring and our world.

At a recent TED Conference, a dinner was organized by the Edge Foundation, a think tank and nonprofit that celebrates big ideas. The theme of the evening was the “New Age of Wonder,” and the discussion drew comparisons to the Romantic Age, the period between 1770 and 1830 when science and art were friends. It was a time when astronomers and poets were in some ways indistinguishable, as artists were inspired by science’s intoxicating sense of awe and wonder. Somewhere down the line, however, these two worlds became disjointed.

An oxymoron? Maybe.

Burgeoning lifestyle choice for a growing number of futurists? Most definitely.

Look, it’s 2011 and it’s glaringly obvious that we’re still quite a ways off from achieving the much heralded posthuman condition. The sad truth is that all interventions or augmentations currently available are fairly low impact by any measure. There aren’t a whole lot of high tech and sophisticated options available to radically alter human performance, experience, or life expectancy.

The cyborgization process of becoming in which we presently take part has a long history and a very likely and highly plausible future. This will include an array of options for radically enhancing our bodies and minds. However, the cyborgization of our civilization is a multilayered, multidimensional progression that can be parsed in many ways, one of which is the hyper-connected, virtualized enmeshed reality already in progress.

Popular Science [1] has reported a tidbit of information: Marc Christensen’s team at SMU is supposed to start testing if they can stimulate a rat’s leg with optical fibers. This is the same DARPA-funded project I mentioned last September in my article “Softer, Better, Faster, Stronger” [2]. DARPA held a related “Reliable Neural Interface Technology [...]

One worry about the possibility of radical germ line enhancement of the human species is that it may, at some point, produce a being so genetically superior to the regular human that the race would split in two. 

Ben Goertzel converses with Hugo de Garis on his transhumanist argument for the reality of a Creator.