“By giving people increased memory and problem-solving skills, cognitive enhancement will help us be more creative by giving us the ability to put more things together in new ways,” she says.“It will make us better problem solvers.”

The more ability we have as individuals, the better we become.James Hughes, Trinity College

Those who support human enhancement also deny that these developments will make social inequalities dramatically worse.New technologies are often socially disruptive and can have a negative impact on certain vulnerable populations, they say.But the problem of inequality is essentially, and will remain, a political one.“The core Luddite mistake is to point to a social problem and to say that if we add new technologies the problem will get worse,” says James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a pro-enhancement think tank.“But the way to cure the problem in this case is to make the world more equal, rather than banning the technology.”

Human enhancement is just as likely, or even more likely, to mitigate social inequalities than to aggravate them, says Oxford University’s Bostrom, a leader in the transhumanist movement.