Where do we draw the line between boosting human potential and eroding our humanity? Any system I build follows my most important technology design rule: You should not only be better when you’re using it, you should be better when you turn it off. Neuroprosthetics shouldn’t replace what we can do for ourselves—they should augment who we aspire to be.

I don’t want to “cure” someone of themselves. Especially not my son. I want them to be able to share that self with the world.

Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron imagined a planet in which prosthetic handicaps make us all equal by removing advantage. While a standardized world may seem utopic, it is equally possible that we’d lose our rich differences through over-augmentation as well. If we assume there is only one kind of strength, one kind of beauty, or one kind of intelligence, then we might super-normalize away the rich difference of human existence.

It’s seductively easy to imagine a world in which we’re a little smarter or a bit more creative, in which our kids have the latest advantage. But augmentation could also become a tool to entrench inequality even more firmly.