The funny thing is that nobody seems to have any issue with this in the particular. I have a family member with a hip made of metal. I have a friend with an insulin pump installed in her gut. She literally has to plug herself in to charge. We all probably know somebody with a tiny computer that regulates their heart, or a deaf person who can hear because of a computer stitched into their brain. At a base level, as the recently late Dan Dennett put probably best, language itself is a kind of mind prosthetic.
But as you touch on a bit maybe, the real danger is first the unequal distribution of access. This stuff is expensive and there is a risk of creating a new class or caste divide. For those who are uninsured or underinsured you could say we already have that in a way.
The second risk is of creating a set of people who can be hacked. The series Ghost in the Shell has one of the most imaginative explorations of this. People can already hack your thermostat, doorbell or car. Or as we saw just yesterday, technology can be compromised and half the world shut down because of a crappy software update. That's bad if it's your airline but worse if it's your pilot.
No, just no. It's one thing to have a prosthetic leg (if you're missing one), and another one to create "transhumans" through artificial technological enhancements just because we can.
One could argue that a prosthetic leg is different because it's correcting a deficiency, but that's going to depend on how you define deficient. There are people in the deaf community who feel they aren't deficient and don't need "fixing". From that perspective a cochlear implant isn't a correction; it's an enhancement. On the other end, pro wrestling runs on steroids. Artists and musicians take psychedelics to enhance creativity. Every office runs on coffee.
The line between "being normal" and "being better" has a lot to do with context and it's a moving target.
The funny thing is that nobody seems to have any issue with this in the particular. I have a family member with a hip made of metal. I have a friend with an insulin pump installed in her gut. She literally has to plug herself in to charge. We all probably know somebody with a tiny computer that regulates their heart, or a deaf person who can hear because of a computer stitched into their brain. At a base level, as the recently late Dan Dennett put probably best, language itself is a kind of mind prosthetic.
But as you touch on a bit maybe, the real danger is first the unequal distribution of access. This stuff is expensive and there is a risk of creating a new class or caste divide. For those who are uninsured or underinsured you could say we already have that in a way.
The second risk is of creating a set of people who can be hacked. The series Ghost in the Shell has one of the most imaginative explorations of this. People can already hack your thermostat, doorbell or car. Or as we saw just yesterday, technology can be compromised and half the world shut down because of a crappy software update. That's bad if it's your airline but worse if it's your pilot.
No, just no. It's one thing to have a prosthetic leg (if you're missing one), and another one to create "transhumans" through artificial technological enhancements just because we can.
One could argue that a prosthetic leg is different because it's correcting a deficiency, but that's going to depend on how you define deficient. There are people in the deaf community who feel they aren't deficient and don't need "fixing". From that perspective a cochlear implant isn't a correction; it's an enhancement. On the other end, pro wrestling runs on steroids. Artists and musicians take psychedelics to enhance creativity. Every office runs on coffee.
The line between "being normal" and "being better" has a lot to do with context and it's a moving target.
This is a key point. The closer you look and the longer you think, things that at first seem differences of kind become differences merely of degree.