Peter Thiel’s Doping Games and Tech’s Quest for a Superhuman
From the pro-doping Olympics to Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a fervent effort by tech elites to upgrade our bodies will come with a price.
Billionaire tech investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergPeter Thiel’s Enhanced Games promise to be an annual sporting event that lets athletes use performance-enhancing drugs, nicknamed the pro-doping Olympics (which some would scoff isn’t all that different from the real thing). The games have captured imaginations and, now, money.1But behind them is a broader, unsettling effort spearheaded by tech billionaires like Thiel to use science and technology to enhance the human race.
Their vision sounds alluring: If we can lengthen our lifespans and augment our brains and productivity, we’ll live a life of leisure, powered by robots and funded by universal basic income. But they rarely mention that utopia could come with a price, too, eroding human agency and perhaps even worsening inequality.