Column Six

Three weeks ago, I was nearsighted. Once I would have had little choice in the matter. A few laser bursts later, I see 20-20.

I’ve heard innovation in science and technology described as the process by which the impossible becomes possible, the unimaginable imaginable, the unprofitable profitable. These things may be as true as they are grandiose; I don’t presume to judge. But here’s my take: innovation, and “progress” in general, steadily shrink the role of the arbitrary in our lives.

Flat irons straighten hair, perms curl it. You can have longer fingernails in about five minutes. Air conditioning makes it possible to live (and die) in Las Vegas. Perfume, deodorant and Listerine strips let us choose how we want to smell.

Electric lights allow us to achieve sleep deprivation. Cell phones and the Internet (Facebook, anyone?) mean our friends aren’t just limited to people who live nearby (though it doesn’t seem to reduce the incidence of dormcest.)

Not even the day someone’s born is completely arbitrary nowadays. Sure, you have no control of it—unless you’re very spunky in the womb—but expectant mothers can schedule C-sections for particular days, and now that the mystery of conception is a little less mysterious, many couples try timing pregnancies to fit larger life agendas.

Web sites where you can “virtually hunt” have been in the news lately. You select an animal you want shot, and the company does it for you. It’s ghastly—but it’s in keeping with innovation’s erosion of the arbitrary. Why let the fact that you live in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan stop you from terminating an elk in Missouri?

People change their names. There’s even a newly-minted Jesus Christ with a driver’s license in Washington, D.C.

People change their faces. Makeup has allowed this for years, but now we have Botox, facelifts, rhinoplasty, photofacials and whatever Michael Jackson did. Sooner or later there’s bound to be a pill to stop hair from going white. In the meantime, there’s dye.

People change their heights. Children can opt for growth hormone, and adults for surgery—a painful procedure, involving the intentional breaking of bones, but in a world where higher shoulders correspond to higher salaries, maybe not an absurd one.

People can even change their gender. Their moods. Their attention spans. The sizes of their various parts.

First cable TV supplied us more choices; now DVRs permit us to watch what we’ve chosen whenever we want to watch it (VCRs once promised the same but nobody could program them.)

Our location and local climate no longer limit what we can eat. Fast shipping and good refrigeration give us apricots in February and cheesecakes as far as UPS can ship them.

So when I consider what future innovations may bring us, I look toward the things that are still more arbitrary in our lives. For instance, Red Bull notwithstanding, we still have to sleep. Someday we may see treatments that reduce how much.

To some extent, we’re still limited in where we go to school by where we live, and we’re still limited in where we can live by how much we own or who we were born to. E-learning promises to give us more choices no matter what our location or economic condition. Controversial political innovations, such as vouchers, address the same issue.

We can’t control the weather—but once we couldn’t predict it, either. We can certainly change it (see global warming) and someday we may be able to do so intentionally. For instance, scientists have been working on ways to divert hurricanes and to seed rainstorms during droughts.

The fact that most of us can’t learn languages as well as native speakers past a certain age—and that we don’t get to choose the language we natively speak—is arbitrary. Tools and treatments to allow genuine language mastery later in life would be a hit, and not just with expats, church missionaries and the spy industry.

Studies have shown that on average people tend to be attracted to others who look a little like them. But why should the length of someone’s second toe (which correlates closely in married couples) make a difference in your choice of life partner? “Love at first sight” is the most arbitrary thing of all. Companies already sell perfumes laced with pheromones that claim to increase your physical desirability. Someday, someone is going to hit on the right formula. On any given night you may be able to choose not only how attractive you are, but what kind of mate you want to attract.

A hot debate in politics, one that may have helped sink John Kerry in the final presidential debate, is whether or not people choose their sexual orientation (in other words, whether it’s arbitrary or discretionary.) So far science has weighed in on both sides, and this isn’t going to stop anytime soon.

What definitely isn’t arbitrary is whether technology ought to keep pushing newfound options into every nook and cranny of our lives. We should pause more, evaluative and decipher an innovation’s significance. Drugs aren’t the only things that have side effects. Maybe some things are better off within the realm of choice—but maybe others, like our children’s hair color or the age when they enter puberty, shouldn’t be.

Of course, even all-holds-unbarred innovation ultimately runs headlong into some immutable arbitraries of life.

Men can’t bear children (with one notable exception who can’t run for president because of where he was, arbitrarily, born.)

We can hide it, but we still grow old.

We can defer it, but we still die.

Did I say these things were immutable? I take it back. I’ve imagined them (and I’m far from the first one) so they aren’t unimaginable. They may sound impossible, but so was FedEx, once. And they’re bound to be profitable.