These are more similar than you have presented. Athletes compete for contracts at the highest levels. If some athletes use performance enhancing drugs, they will have an edge and pressure will be put on those who do not want to use performance enhancing drugs, for any number of reasons.
On the intellectual side of things, you have students competing for scholarships, grants, and research placements. You have people competing for jobs in high-tech industries, and then competing with their colleagues for promotions, pay raises, and bonuses. I'm sure you can come up with more examples. The same problem then exists with devices or drugs which purport to improve learning ability. I could take dextroamphetamine every day. My productivity could go through the roof and I could soak up information like a sponge, easily putting within my grasp that which I strive to accomplish every day. Yet I do not want to do this, for many reasons.
Maybe the device in the article lacks the side effects of regular amphetamine use. It therefore would not be on the same level as nootropic drugs, but saying we should 'throw ethics out the door' is quite a leap.
But the point of those two industries is different. On the STEM side of things why wouldn't you want the kid that will give you the most bang for your buck? Whats the point of holding ourselves back just to create a fair playing field for everyone else. If we can get 100 engineers with brain boosters to do the job of 1000 engineers why not?
At the same time athletes surve a different purpose. They entertain. The perception of a fair playing field is much more important to a bottom line than the actual performance of a person. No one wants to watch a machine pitch a perfect pitch every time. Likewise no one wants to watch a juiced up player hit a home run every time. Theres no spectacle in that.
Except the "kid that will give you the most bang for your buck" might be aware he's slightly below the best in the pile when not more artificially stimulated than the competition. Artificial stimulants might deliver a payload rather more disturbing than cumulative intelligence gain when applied systematically over a period in an intelligence arms race: we know a few other ways of stimulating certain aspects of the mind that aren't entirely benign.
As for entertainment, I'd probably not object to watching steroid-pumped athletes if I was confident they wouldn't end up with anger-management and biological gender disorders afterwards. Same applies to stimulating the brain with electrodes, except we don't know where/whether that might go wrong yet. Ben Johnson wasn't competing to run the world; but at the risk of invoking Godwin's law, the track record of those using stimulants to help them run the world isn't great.
What if you're using engineers to get better at some zero-sum game, e.g. high frequency trading, SEO or developing better weapons? When your competitors start using brain-boosted engineers too, you're back to square one, except everyone's wasting resources on brain-boosting and cannot afford to stop.
Likewise no one wants to watch a juiced up player hit a home run every time. Theres no spectacle in that.
Be careful with such sweeping statements. I think it'd be cool as hell to watch athletic competitions that were really just proxies for various performance-enhancing labs to show off their latest, greatest stuff. I don't watch the Tour de France now, for instance, but if all of those riders were openly doping and tweaking to expand their limits in new and interesting ways, I probably would.
Pro athletes already make sacrifices that the rest of us would consider horrific, wrecking their health and shortening their lifespans for the sake of a few years of glory and attention. What's suggested here is absolutely nothing new.
On the intellectual side of things, you have students competing for scholarships, grants, and research placements. You have people competing for jobs in high-tech industries, and then competing with their colleagues for promotions, pay raises, and bonuses. I'm sure you can come up with more examples. The same problem then exists with devices or drugs which purport to improve learning ability. I could take dextroamphetamine every day. My productivity could go through the roof and I could soak up information like a sponge, easily putting within my grasp that which I strive to accomplish every day. Yet I do not want to do this, for many reasons.
Maybe the device in the article lacks the side effects of regular amphetamine use. It therefore would not be on the same level as nootropic drugs, but saying we should 'throw ethics out the door' is quite a leap.