Despite the fact progress is being made all around us towards this future, very few people find a cyborg future palatable. I hate to use the word cyborg because it's laden with Hollywood inflections and a host of other irrelevancies. Our attitudes of defensive competitiveness currently force robots to conform to a harmless shape and substance (except for military robots but remember we are talking about consumer robots). That attitude disappears if we begin to identify with the android. People are still too complacent with the idea that we are "years away" from merging with our machine counterparts because they mistakenly believe that we have to understand a lot more about how the brain works to interface with it. They hold the false idea that we need to duplicate, or at least completely model brain function before we can work with it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Take any real wetware type of story available on the Internet, where real scientists attempt to merge neurons with silicon, and the ability of neurons to interface with any signal becomes self-evident. Neurons by their very nature process signals and identify patterns, and they don't care where the signals come from. [Note: the current brain/machine interfaces do not use direct connect techniques because the neurons from the human brain that grow onto the contact leads are usually inoperative. Someone will solve this problem soon enough. However, small independent neuron clumps can be coaxed into binding with contact leads and can perform simple tasks.]
The only potential obstacle to the man-machine merger are political and social ones. But who is going to tell a poor quadraplegic that they can't link up with the Home Assistant 9000 to have a chance at a better life? What politician wants that on their soundbite resume? The social ones are even more nefarious. There are people right now giving their kids growth hormone who don't need it. The kids aren't dwarfs, the parents just want them to be taller so they can have an edge in life. I'm appalled by this and would never do this to my children, if I had any. However the impulse to have your child win at any cost is real and has far reaching consequences when it comes to technology. Will little Johnny be sentenced to a life of menial jobs and huge social disadvantages if he can't link his brain up to the Universal Hypernet?
Article comments
1 - Xenia
Wow. Scary.
2 - Caroline Hagood
This fascinating article is just one more reason that I'm glad I joined BlogCritics. So good.
3 - Jraz
I can relate to the cell phone scenario. I see it all the time. What on earth is going on that needs to be said 24-7? I just don't get it.
4 - Tom
You guys are all complete luddites. oh, the robots will take our jobs! the robots will take our lives!
you really have no idea how limited robots are, or how your fellow humans work. do you know that being fat used to be widely considered sexy? all of a sudden it became too easy to become fat, with the advent of modern civilization, so we switched our desires to something more difficult. humanity can adapt. you old fogies are too myopic to see it, but our generation is already adapting to the influx of images of perfection available. perfection has become, mentally, too easy to find, so "Real" people with imperfections are benefitting from a backlash against the "fake-looking". I can't think of anything more unappealing and ridiculous as the "perfect woman" of the previous generation.
this will simply increase as the availability of easy sex robots becomes easier. humans prefer what comes with a difficulty rating, it's built into our genes.
as for this labor concern, we have been LONG overdue for a major revolution on this front anyway. the long and short of it is that we have way more manpower than we know what to do with, hence: unemployment, underemployment. a robot workforce might very well be the extra push we need to transition fully to a society of abundance. only a few people need to work all the time anymore to keep this society running, and the average job is getting paid for meaningless busywork to pay for other people to get paid for meaningless busywork. it can't last forever.
in short, reconsider your assumptions about society for a while, your knee-jerk reactionary side is showing.
bonus.