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Futurist Speculation Of The Day
I think that, starting with my generation, and during the rise of personal computing in general, there has been a sharp uptick in the number of people who were "born" interactive users of technology. There seem to generally be two kinds of technology users: actives and passives. Actives are the tinkerers, the hackers, the engineers and the problem solvers - the people who actually remix and rehash technologies and create new ones; passives simply enjoy the fruits of technology without bothering to try and understand its underlying principles (or at least the implications of the technology). Tech is just a means to an end for passives, while actives pursue tech for the sake of tech itself or some other higher ideal or pursuit. It's the difference between a person who watches television and a person who solders together a TV-B-Gone!
I often wonder where cybernetic enhancement will take people, and now I'm thinking of it in terms of actives versus passives. Put simply, the passives are going to find themselves in a very bad place; if cybernetic extensions of the body are not "owned" by the person who uses them, how can a person have any kind of self-determination at all?
This is truly the most important revelation of the open source movement that one can imagine - what would it be like if your eyes were produced by Microsoft, and were subject to automated upgrades you couldn't prevent (nevermind the fact that you get Blue Eyes of Death periodically)? Or what if your ears had an automatic killswitch implanted by Apple that turned them off if you didn't make your payments on time; or better yet, what if Sony got to determine what conversations you could and couldn't hear around you based on copyright laws? Censorship, technological monopolies, and freedom take on a whole different meaning when you're literally talking about YOUR BODY and whether or not you own it.
On the other hand, people who can hack their own minds and bodies will be the ultimate expression of enhanced humanity; and the actives will very quickly outstrip the passives in terms of their abilities and grow the gap between the two groups. And of course this isn't even considering the people who will refuse to accept anything more than the most passive cybernetic enhancements for various moral or religious reasons - I can almost envision a kind of cyber-Rapture where the people who can't or won't be active get "left behind" by the active folks, who basically have either lost the ability to, or no longer want to, interact with the passives.
I often wonder where cybernetic enhancement will take people, and now I'm thinking of it in terms of actives versus passives. Put simply, the passives are going to find themselves in a very bad place; if cybernetic extensions of the body are not "owned" by the person who uses them, how can a person have any kind of self-determination at all?
This is truly the most important revelation of the open source movement that one can imagine - what would it be like if your eyes were produced by Microsoft, and were subject to automated upgrades you couldn't prevent (nevermind the fact that you get Blue Eyes of Death periodically)? Or what if your ears had an automatic killswitch implanted by Apple that turned them off if you didn't make your payments on time; or better yet, what if Sony got to determine what conversations you could and couldn't hear around you based on copyright laws? Censorship, technological monopolies, and freedom take on a whole different meaning when you're literally talking about YOUR BODY and whether or not you own it.
On the other hand, people who can hack their own minds and bodies will be the ultimate expression of enhanced humanity; and the actives will very quickly outstrip the passives in terms of their abilities and grow the gap between the two groups. And of course this isn't even considering the people who will refuse to accept anything more than the most passive cybernetic enhancements for various moral or religious reasons - I can almost envision a kind of cyber-Rapture where the people who can't or won't be active get "left behind" by the active folks, who basically have either lost the ability to, or no longer want to, interact with the passives.
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The downsides to most cybernetic enhancements are so enormous that I can't imagine people using them unless they really need them (legs for the lame, eyes for the blind). Also, hacking all that stuff aside from being potential dangerous has the small problem of who's going to install the things? The hacker? Not so much. Who has the surgical skills needed to make the alterations? A medical robot? Those won't be handed out to just anyone.
It's one thing to kit-bash a technical component that sits on your TV, it's quite another to fiddle with advanced components that will be stuck in your meat.
later
Tom
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