Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday April 21 2015, @09:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-living-through-chemistry dept.

The NYT reports that drugs like Adderall were once only prescribed to help children with attention deficit disorders focus on their school work but then college students found those drugs could increase their ability to study. Now a growing number of workers use them to help compete. What will happen as these drugs are more widely used in the workplace? According to Anjan Chatterjee, the use of neurotechnologies to enhance healthy people’s brain function could easily become widespread. "If anything, we worship workplace productivity by any means. Americans work longer hours and take fewer vacations than most others in the developed world. Why not add drugs to energize, focus and limit that annoying waste of time — sleep?" Julian Savulescu says that what defines human beings is their extraordinary cognitive power and their ability to enhance that power through reading, writing, computing and now smart drugs. "Eighty-five percent of Americans use caffeine. Nicotine and sugar are also cognitive enhancers," says Savulescu.

But cognitive neurologist Martha Farah, says that regular use on the job is an invitation to dependence. "I also worry about the effect of drug-fueled productivity on people other than the users," says Farah. "It is not hard to imagine a supervisor telling employees that this is the standard they should aspire to in their work, however they manage to do it (hint, hint). The eventual result will be a ratcheting up of “normal” productivity, where everyone uses (and the early adopters’ advantage is only fleeting)."

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:48AM (#173773)

    My father told a WWII story about an experiment run with the "typing pool" -- a group of people (mostly, or all, women) that typed up hand written reports for an engineering office. Initially the workers got a break mid-morning and mid-afternoon. The boss started to add more breaks until they were up to something like 10 minutes every half hour. Productivity (typed pages/day at a roughly constant error rate) kept on improving as the break time was increased. Finally the typists complained--the mandatory breaks drove them into a frenzy "to get their work done" in the time they were allowed to type.

    Depending on the kind of work, long days and weeks are not necessarily the best way to improve productivity.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +2  
       Interesting=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2