A non-immediate but decidedly disturbing and revolutionary prospect is that of bionic education, advocated by various trans-humanistic currents and pursued by tech companies such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink. It involves building digital prostheses to connect directly to the human brain, initially to treat neurological damage in people with brain diseases, but in the future also to enhance the human mind through symbiosis with Artificial Intelligence.
In some academic circles the concept of Extended Intelligence-which in this text is applied to natural Human Intelligence evolving by interacting with artificial intelligence-is understood instead in a bionic sense, and referred to experiments related to neural prosthesis implants. The first microchip implants occurred in 2023 in the brains of paraplegic people.
Attali in his essay “Knowledge or Barbarism” raises an alarm: the bionic education scenario may lead to a polarized society in which only a rich and powerful elite will be able to afford to equip their children with the best technological artifacts, a middle class will have to make do with surrogates, and the masses will sink into ignorance.
Moreover, bionic prostheses present a high potential risk of mental atrophy for humans: with their use would come a disruption of the very idea of the natural mind, which instead remains firmly positioned at the center of the Homo Extensus vision.
Bionic education at present remains a promise within a futuristic perspective and it is still too early to assess whether it will ever be realized and how. While its adoption in the medical field, to repair brain damage, is plausible, the application of bionic implants on a mass scale and thus also for educational purposes is much more doubtful, even on an ethical level. However, on a theoretical level, it is important to take this potential evolutionary strand into account in our analysis as well.
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