Let's assume that someday, we find some compound which does for cognitive development what steroids do for muscles. For our purposes, it doesn't need to be side effect-free, steroids aren't. Just assume that it exists, call it X.

Now, what does a world with X in it look like?

Do we outlaw it in academia? Do we outlaw it in the workforce?

Suppose we did. There'd still be an underground market in College (if you can't find drugs at your college, you are taking courses online), so students in high-stress fields (or ones that are just real lazy) would use X to get better grades. Once they knew it worked, a very large number of them would, because they'd be competing with other students who were users.

The same way that steroids spread, because if you don't and everyone else does, you're out of the game.

And once this generation of X using students heads to the workplace, where doing better than your peers amounts to $$, they are not going to stop, so you get X showing up more and more in the workplace. And just like sports teams, companies say they want to fight it, but what they mean is they don't want to get caught allowing it, because the benefits to them are enormous.

None of this is as scary as when people who run Gold Farms in the 3rd world discover X, and start dosing their $1/day workers, and then lining up outsourced work. Call them Brain Farms. They won't stop with a little X, they will push deep into cognitive enhancement drugs, and they won't care about the side effects, and neither will their workers, who will be rich compared to their neighbors.

By the way, this has already started. The drug's name is Adderall, and it is already on the upswing in college. The business world isn't far behind, because those kids are graduating.

Labels: cognition, drugs, productivity