Published in 2008, The Adoration of Jenna Fox is a young adult novel written by Mary E. Pearson. It is impossible to discuss why people interested in enhancement should read this book without spoiling some of the basic premises of the story. I will do my best not to reveal the narrative results of these premises, but if you are already convinced to read this book, and you want to remain unspoiled then you may want to skip this blog post.
So, having yet to achieve the age of majority, Jenna Fox was in a terrible accident. So terrible that only a small portion of her original body remains intact. The rest has been replaced by a substance that is a cross between stem cells and a nano-robotic neural network. Other than gaps in her memory, and odd artifacts in her locomotion and somatic awareness Jenna is indistinguishable from an unmodified girl. Her new body is far more lifelike than even the most cutting edge prostheses available on the market. She is far more wondrous than the standard wonders in this vivid near-future thought experiment. She is also in dramatic violation of the national medical ethics standards, thus an illegal life form. Her status is the fulcrum that moves the story towards its narrative and ethical conclusions.
While all these are interesting themes, what sets Jenna Fox apart from other New Promethians is that more than just her body has been remembered. Her mind has also been uploaded to a simulated purgatory, and then downloaded into this embodied neural network. Through the course of the novel, Jenna has to decide if she is the old Jenna Fox, a new Jenna Fox, or something else entirely. There are many other plot lines and themes, and the whole book is ethically sensitive, intelligent and finely-crafted. Knowing what was done to Jenna should not keep you from wanting to find out what Jenna is, what that means for her world, and indeed for the world of the reader.
What I found particularly interesting was the question of ownership of Jenna’s mind. All parents have to go through the process of letting go of their child, allowing them to become their own person. But what if that cleaving away were not inevitable? What if it were possible to keep that child forever dependent, obedient and pliant? In short, who owns the uploaded mind of a child? In this instance, the mind is the most literal possible example of intellectual property. While it is clearly a speculative exercise, the boundaries of intellectual property are already being pushed in the real world. Technology allowing for the genetic modification of cultivated plants and livestock is becoming more mature, and is increasingly big business. In order to protect the intellectual capital of these research giants, the processes for modifying those organisms and indeed the resulting genomes are subject to copyright protection. The sequence is just information after all, just a code. And yet, it is that code that is the essence of life. It is a small leap to make from copyrighting the information that constitutes a genome to copyrighting the information that constitutes an uploaded mind. What if someone could engineer and implant the memory of the most beautiful sunrise imaginable? Or more exotically, the memory of riding bareback on a giant predatory dinosaur? Would that not be worth a great deal of money? And yet as soon as we are able to commoditize memory, then all of identity has become commoditized. Persistent identity is the cornerstone of ethics, the justice system, and participatory democracy. If identity is trivial to modify, then the idea of individual accountability becomes farcical.
This kind of uploading-based scenario seen in Jenna Fox is not even an essential precursor for the commoditization of identity. For early stage work on memory modification, read this article in Wired Science. Jenna Fox provides us with an entertaining and enjoyable context for the exploration of identity in a world where mind can be quantified. We owe Pearson a debt of gratitude for the opportunity to work this out within the confines of fiction. It is far better to decide on our ethical response to the commoditization of identity now while it is still fiction than to wait until the technology is in place. I won’t spoil Pearson’s conclusions, since you really should read them for yourself. Ultimately, it is not important that we share her conclusions, but rather that we take the time to come to conclusions of our own, and share those conclusions with one another.