A new NBER working paper by Giovanni Immordino, Mario Macis, Immacolata Marino, and Fabrizio Panebianco examines public demand for human enhancement technologies, or HET, and how that demand relates to preferences over regulation.

The authors write that when a new technology offers large private benefits but may also create social costs not priced by markets, demand alone may not show how citizens want the technology governed. Their study uses a nationally representative U.S. survey experiment with 5,556 respondents. The experiment randomized benefit domain, mechanism, heritability, purpose, and risk across vignettes. For each respondent’s assigned vignette, the researchers elicited stated adoption, preferred regulation, and ethical and societal concerns. That design lets the paper compare willingness to use a technology with views about how broadly it should be permitted or constrained, rather than treating consumer demand as a proxy for public approval.

According to the paper, about 53% of respondents said they would adopt the technology overall. Presenting the technology as enhancement rather than restoration reduced adoption by about five percentage points, an effect described as comparable to a severe side-effect profile. About 28% of respondents said they would not adopt at any benefit level. The authors say that refusal was driven overwhelmingly by the enhancing framing rather than by risk, which they describe as consistent with a non-compensatory constraint for a substantial subgroup.

The paper also finds that most respondents who would adopt human enhancement technologies still favored strict regulation. At the same time, most respondents who said they would never adopt did not want to prohibit others from doing so. The combination matters for governance debates because it separates personal use decisions from preferences about access, safety rules, or restrictions on others’ choices.

One highlighted finding is that “Productivity enhancement generates the most ethical concern of any attribute” while attracting the least regulation. The authors also report that respondents favored subsidizing rather than taxing adoption of productivity enhancement, which they interpret as consistent with concern about access rather than safety.

The authors conclude that private demand is “an unreliable guide to the governance citizens want,” and say the divergence they document could provide a basis for regulators seeking to align the direction of technical change with societal values and priorities.

The discussion appeared in a Marginal Revolution post, which repeated the phrase, “Productivity enhancement generates the most ethical concern of any attribute …” The post’s author added that the paper’s final sentence was “completely unwarranted” and called it “a classic example of underidentified political bias in academic reasoning.”