While i doubt it’ll get me banned anywhere, it does get me very weird looks if i bring it up in meat space, so I’ll bring it up here instead!
As a product of totally random processes selecting for absolutely nothing in particular humans are pretty cool, but from any kind of intelligent perspective we are a failure. Our teeth don’t fit, our backs don’t work right, we have organs with no other purpose than to kill us. God or evolution, which ever, has put in an absolutely minimum wage effort into our bodies and i think we should strive to do better, to be better. I understand being against current possibilities (I’m not getting magnets in my hands or the musk brain chip), but to be against transhumanism in general is completely insane.
I myself, am in a way, living this kind of life as is. My digestive system doesn’t work, I was born without a working one. I need a central line I.V (which was surgically “installed” into my chest) to get the nutrients I need that others get by eating.
This being said, I kind of hate it, I’m weird in this way, I am generally against any foreign object being in my body and I actively avoid others. I wouldn’t get a BCI except maybe under very specific circumstances.
I would also be concerned about others having it. The idea of having a BCI, a device which can read, write and override thoughts is extremely concerning. Especially if this device wasn’t 100% open hardware, open source, open firmware, literally open from the ground up to the point where anyone could make their own if they wanted to. Even then, I have my doubts, what about hackers? Could you literally have your brain be hacked? That’s a huge concern.
I’m all for things that help individuals with disabilities to live, like myself, for example, even though I feel personally uncomfortable that I need to have these foreign objects in my body in order to live life.
My wife also just reminded me of something else that might be worth mentioning. I am generally opposed to smaller body modifications as well. I find tattoos, earrings, makeup, and similar minor forms of body modification to be extremely unappealing, this is just my personal preference, but it might also help with understanding my overall opinion on body modification as a whole.
I hope this could kind of give a decent idea as to where I stand on the matter, please feel free to ask any questions. I know I can be a bit disjointed sometimes.
Oh yeah. I forgot to mention in my post that it has to be open hardware too. Really I’m more in favor of augmentation of anything but the brain now that I think about it.
If neuralink is a thing, then it cannot connect to the internet at all, no Bluetooth either or any other protocol that can connect to other devices. It’s just asking to get hacked since it’d be akin to leaving your front door locked. Will it deter a lot of people? Yes. But others might just kick it open and break in.
The neuralink just needs to be there to increase efficiency of the human body in many ways, and that’s it. Use a smartphone if you want your entertainment/dopamine fix.
In its basest form, isn’t that what advertizing is? :)
That’s…not what a BCI is, though? It’s just any direct interface between brain and computer. Doing anything with thoughts is not an inherent aspect of the concept—if you look at fiction you’ll see plenty of BCIs that are limited to receiving motor signals directed at them and sending sensory signals. And AFAIK a lot of current research into BCIs is focused on just reading motor signals (for prosthetics and such).
I’m getting most of my info from things like Neuralink which Musk has said will be able to “Cure” things like autism and schizophrenia, pretty sure he’s mentioned it’s ability to write/override thoughts directly before too. But even if he hasn’t the only way to “Cure” these issues would be to override/cancel out their thoughts.
That’s almost my worry how do we define “imperfections”. At a certain we begin to erase parts of our humanity. Even something seemly benign like curing deafness, would end up slowly killing off thousands of languages. Historical these things are tested on those deemed “retarded” first. Gay conversion “therapy” is widely agreed to be abusive, yet it’s fine to be used on autistics when it’s called “ABA”. The people spearheading this are Elon Musk, their concerned about “perfecting” society to fit their own interest.
As much as I like some of the companies he’s invested in, Musk isn’t exactly a reliable source of accurate scientific information.