But I mean widespread neural enhancements are probably as far away as… maybe not post scarcity society, but at least “I can get by on basic income” society. So I’m not too worried.
My assumption from your position on cognitive enhancement is that you'd support a separate category where your allowed to dope as much as you'd like?
Do we have any duty as a society to dis-incentivise people from pushing that too far?
We might find that there are some tasks where having people take on risky enhancements really helps “team humanity.” But certainly wouldn’t want “takes on risky enhancements” to become a trait required to get by.
I’d look at it as like minimum wage or OSHA. You could provide yourself a competitive advantage by working for less than minimum wage, or by being willing to work in an unsafe environment. But as a society, we’ve decided that engaging in that race to the bottom is not something we want to do.
You may already have heard of it but there's a movie called "Gattaca"[0] that questions a world where genetic enhancements have become effectively mandatory.
I never saw the theme the movies is purported to present. I think Gattaca is conflated with other genetic-modification memes because it came out around the time those were current.
If the director wanted the movie to be about a hero, they fumbled it.
But rhey are not putting ut in rheir own hand, they are putting their luge unto rhe habds of a capricious and cruel, and occasionally fraudulent executive. Wonder, where did we see this play out before?
"renew subscribtuon or we turn off the implant"?
This will be a story of human rights abuses, debt ytades and endentured servitude.
Especially the sorts of people who think they'll dead by 30 so side effects that show up in your 40's are no big deal.
This seems sorta like not letting 80 year olds have email because they don't understand it and might get scammed.
But not a year has gone by but I wish I had a time machine, not just for myself but for a friend who had big dreams when we were 16-26 and never found their way. Of the dozen smartest kids in our high school, one became a doctor (but married to the slacker in the group), one a lawyer, one a salty cynical programmer. I found one managing a movie theater a year after dropping out. One I imprinted on in college, because I thought she was so world-wise and knew what she wanted to be, ended up becoming a stay at home mom, never really had the writing career she hoped for. Student loans were part of that dynamic, which is another decision we put on children (see also John Mullaney).
You’re here talking to a group largely composed of people who won the career lottery. Did all of your college friends fare so well? How about high school? Hell in middle school and high school I had people trying to talk me out of software as a career because we were on one of the three AI hype cycles I’ve personally lived through.
It’s the rare, inspirational person who says Fuck It, I’m Starting Over in their thirties or even later. Many of the losers just live lives of quiet desperation. Those are the people I was thinking about above.
I think people deserve to control their own fate, disastrous consequences be damned. That's part of life, and always has been. To pretend that we need to protect against that type of insecurity is absurd.
I feel the same way, but with the opposite conclusion. The older I get, the more larval and innocent teenagers and twenty-somethings seem.
I mistake 25 year-olds for 17 year olds. When I'm explaining something, sometimes I can't think of a historical or technological analogy that a 25 year old is likely to understand.
I see the mistakes in reasoning that they're blundering into with the best intentions (and utmost seriousness) that could have been avoided by reading a little more, thinking a little longer - then realize I hadn't read that stuff by my early twenties either, and could have easily made the same mistake. Then I remember some of the mistakes I did make, and wish they had been harder for me to have made.
We don’t do this with gun safety, because the lesson comes too late and at too high a cost. There may be nobody to teach afterward. So we demand that they act a certain way and come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who fucks around.
But a medical implant isn’t just a personal decision, it’s a transactions with several other commercial enterprises, with financial interests in selling more of them. This will be the next heroin epidemic, or the one after that. It’s predatory. And as someone who has survived predators, it’s people like the three of us who have a moral obligation to watch out for predators while the children play. That’s part of the deal of being a pack/tribal mammal. It’s civilization.
So you're ok with startups hiring homeless people as test subjects, because they are poor and will consent to basically anything?
People who get neruo-tech, get it from highly vetted companies with a plausible risk-benefit tradeoff.
Personally I like the idea that people can take their lives in their own hands. As long as it's clear that they're opting out of the guiderails put into place for those of us who are more cautious.