Using Technology to Enhance Humans 293
Roland Piquepaille writes "It's a well-known fact that technology can improve our lives. For example, we can reach anyone and anywhere with our cellphones. And people who can't walk after an accident now can have smart prosthesis to help them. But what about designing our children on a computer or having a chip inside our brain to answer our email messages? Are we ready for such a future? In 'Robo-quandary,' the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that many researchers are working on the subject. And as a professor of neuroscience said, "We can grow neurons on silicone plates; we can make the blind see; the deaf hear; we can read minds." So will all we become cyborgs one day?"
Are they really improvements? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I haven't.
I use technology for fun and profit. If you choose to make yourself a slave, that's your decision.
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The GP said he uses tech for fun and profit and this is your response? If life after needing a pacemaker doesn't include some fun then help the guy live it up a little, please. Just not with an iPod.
Oh good (Score:2)
Re:Oh good (Score:5, Funny)
Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
When you don't want to be contacted, turn it off. When someone you don't want contacting you calls, hit the ignore button, or ban them on your phone. It isn't that hard.
Re:Correction (Score:4, Interesting)
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Me? I usually just leave my phone on silent, and people know that if I do not answer during the day I am at work and there is a good reason. And if it is my day off - well they have no reason to be calling me, do they?
Expectations are what *you* set. If you answer the phone every damn time and call back ten minutes after, people will begin to expect that of you. If you don't, people won't.
-shrug-
That's only the case if you allow it to be so (Score:2)
Technology, like everything else, can only control you if you choose to allow it to.
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Re:Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
With the converse case, when I can't reach someone immediately I know they are either busy, or genuinely don't like me in which case I know how to take the hint. How complicated is that?
We should not be worried... (Score:2)
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think it's something that is unnecessary and isn't something we should be too worried about. Besides, with the rising risk of oil running out, global warming, and nuclear warfare, I think we'd be better off spending this money enjoying life while it still exists, or helping people in other countries stabilize their economies and educational systems.
Why is it whenever something cool comes along someone has to say "the money could be better spent blah blah blah"? Just because you don't see a need for it doesn't mean that people shouldn't spend money on it, it's not like we don't have enough to spend on this and fuel alternatives. Besides, if you are so sure the world is going to end, why spend money on educational systems etc at all?
I for one would love to have the ability to download documents to a chip connected to my brain. Just think of how
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Improving lifes?
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This question has been asked for ages (Score:2)
Yes, of course! [wikipedia.org] Its not complete without the robots [wikipedia.org] though.
Re:And the answer was/will be: Resistence is Futil (Score:5, Insightful)
Spoken like a true Luddite. However, what I think you don't take into account is that "what makes us human" is always changing -- it's always just beyond our ability to change at any given moment.
E.g.: in the mid-19th century, the idea of swapping blood with someone else was pretty macabre. After all, "the blood is the life," right? Hence, it got used as a plot device in Dracula (among other novels), as a way of showing the 'human essence.'
But, once it became possible to routinely pump blood from one person to another, so that they didn't always die, and their personality didn't change, the criteria of 'what makes us human' got pushed back a little further. Okay, so we can now swap blood -- nope, that doesn't make us human; it's not what makes us unique. Suddenly, a blood transfusion doesn't seem so bizarre anymore.
Not too many years later, you have people getting their organs swapped. Although not too many rational folks really thought this would change one's personality, there was still some squeamishness on the part of the public, initially. But over time, it became accepted. Just because you have someone else's liver inside you, and maybe somebody else's heart and lungs, you're not them. Whatever makes you human? Not sure, but haven't hit it yet.
What about brains? We know that can cause personality changes. Seems pretty ghoulish. But there are thousands of people in the world today running around with implanted electrodes in their brains, allowing them to hear better, or not have seizures, or see -- are they still human? Yep.
The fear that we'll change "what makes us human" is the same sort of vague uneasiness that caused cartographers to draw giant sea creatures at the edges of their maps. It's a fear of the unknown, of change. But when you get close to it, suddenly it doesn't seem quite so scary anymore. That's how change happens. We'll make a change, realize we're still human, still here, afterwards, and push the "what makes us human" mark out a little beyond our current grasp. Repeat, over and over, and even if the end product isn't recognizable as a "person" to us today (just like Steven Hawking would probably be written off as some sort of carnival freak by anyone born in the 18th or early 19th century), people will never really question their humanity.
That thing that "makes us human" will always be one or two discoveries away, just like the sea monsters were always a little beyond the edge of the known map.
Better question: Will we remain human? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I doubt we'll end up in some Ghost In The Shell - like world anytime soon, the urge to improve ourselves to the point of modification and beyond is a part of our own adaptability.
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Teeth? You can get that done right now ;)
Cities (Score:2)
My take is that we are going to go through an enormous re-urbanization soon for a variety of reasons. Cities are already the engines that drive entire regions. We may find ourselves increasingly relying on others' intellectual specializations. Think of a city as a giant brain and you as a neuron.
We are not nature.
No need for human contact for that... (Score:2)
Actually, if you're living in a cabin in Montana, you probably already know that you can cast your own bullets [midwayusa.com], preferably from the ones recovered from yesterday's dinner.
Now, modern gunpowder
"Humanity" is being continually redefined (Score:3, Insightful)
Today we don't regard a person with breast implants or metal+plastic hip replacements as anything other than human, and this trend will continue as replacement technology improves and our rather crappy protein organs get upgraded bit by bit.
A far better question though is
I'm using less technology these days (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm using less technology these days (Score:4, Interesting)
In a village, everyone knows everyone. It's a small world and people know their neighbors, help them, gather together, whatever. Since the distance between villages also tend to be rather large, and mass transport usually is either nonexistant or laughable, kids also tend to form friendships in the neighborhood.
In larger towns, you usually have the luxury to choose your "neighborhood". You can pick your friends, simply because the pool is larger. The need to know your neighbor because, well, he's the most accessable person around, is not there.
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And think about how many people you know at work-- they just don't happen to live next door.
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It actually doesn't have to deal with working close to each other. In the village I come from, everyone knows everyone (ok, not that bad, but close). There's one single elementary school nearby, so kids are kinda "forced" to find friends from the vicinity. This in turn automatically forces parents to know each other. There are only so many places to shop or hang out, so people automatically come together.
Towns are generally more impersonal, simply because you can't, even if you wanted, know a mi
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Re:I'm using less technology these days (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I think the borg issue is still more in the realm of philosophy than technology. Morbidity for cancer remains largely unchanged, half the nation is still eating itself to death, and leeches are still used in even the most advanced hospitals. Speech recognition is better but still clumsy and my brand-new Blackberry 7200c just rebooted tonight when I tried to delete an email. The world of tomorrow is today.
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Since the Soviet Union is gone, and a whole generation of people have grown up (or are in the process of growing up) without it, the term "Second World" has an alternate, perfectly logical definition: it's those countries that are somewhere between, on a vaguely but genuinely perceived economic/quality-of-life/PCGDP scale, those that are definitely First World and those that are definitely Third World (where the latter is basically a synonym for 'poor').
True, but who uses it that way aside from yourself
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These all seem like breast implants for technology nerds anyway.
You mean I can get a breast implant which is also a wireless network interface? Bring it on...
Seriously though, I foresee these kinds of things coming on (maybe not in the next 50 years though), but they'll be either completely external to the body (like a watch, mobile), or seamlessly integrated (like a pacemaker). No interface will be bought by consumers en-mass until it's aesthetically pleasing too - no one, except borg fetishists would want wires sticking out of them.
Being able to access search engines
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Yes, we all want moderated. But we always want it to be up.
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Being able to access search engines or things like maps at will is going to be too irritableness for most people. Think about the difference the Internet has made to the learning process for those who have it - no more heading to libraries for books which are loaned out. Similarly I'd imagine being able to access a news update like a normal memory would be a similar jump.
The big downside to this is it will further increase the divide between people who are plugged in and those who aren't.
It will have other consequences, too. There will always be people, perhaps even whole professions, that choose to not "plug in" because possible outages would deprive them of more than it ever offers them in the first place.
Since the advent of the 'net, "just Google(tm) it" has become a common phrase, displacing "good ole actually knowing stuff" in a manner that is surely less than intellectually wholesome. I don't need to know the postal code for the city my father lives in, or my doctor's phone number, b
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Tell that to me when your daughter is born blind or a boy is born autistic and there is no way for you to communicate to him, but with human augmentation we can make him healthy again or enable him to communicate directly with you via telepathic technology.
The next great advance will be the direct linking of human minds, imagine having access to a minds eye that you can both share when connected together, you can manipulate the data in the mi
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This will suck. Those who do will n
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Note you are reading way too much into this, obviously the technology would be designed so that you can disconnected it or turn it off.
"Distribute 10 $10 million fortunes (a good size fortune) equally among the residents of a medium size city, and everyone gets $100. Whee! Now everyone is poor."
Again you read into what I was saying, there are many easy ways
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Ah, and this brings up the discussion on eugenics [wikipedia.org]. Should we improve the daughter or son so that they might live and be able to produce more offspring, that might also be genetically abnormal?
Of course, then comes the counter discussion on what is norm
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You know, telepathic communication seems like such a great evolutionary advantage that I'm surprised no major organism can do it. In particular, how come RF communication didn't evolve?
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Are you sure about that? It looks like us humans are about to implement many other world technologies into our bodies/brains. Evolution isn't just what happens within a physical body but also an entities ability to change, utilize and gain unforseen advantages out of its environment. Humans are evolving augmentation as the next step to removing the environmental defects that plague us today... ie witness the ability for even the most infertile to produce offspring.
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Evolution is usually comes up with "good enough" solutions.
It takes a long time for evolution to do stuff, and some stuff may never get done even if possible. If in the early days you had creatures that evolved an ability for easy mutual mind reading, they'd probably get killed/eaten pretty quickly. There aren't very many
Choice is great (Score:5, Insightful)
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But why does not knowing my neighbor's name make me less social? Why doesn't discussing on slashdot with people like you make me more social?
In other words, what makes my neighbor weigh more - way more - than those I interact with in the virtual world when it gets to deciding my "social karma"?
If technologies have enabl
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I still use a lot of tech, but have grown to prefer it when it enables communication -- like this exchange
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Between the Swedish sexaganarian dog trainer who encourages her dogs to bark by going AIEEIEIEEEIEEIEEIEE at 8:15 on an otherwise beautiful vancouver island summer morning, or the three new houses that mow their new lawns religiously and all too frequently.
Perhaps the new age musician up the way?
Welcome to America. Neighbour's suck.
(Settle down canadians, I use the term continentally.)
(On-topic, I would certainly sign up for some form of optical
The first application (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The first application (Score:5, Insightful)
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When I saw the title, all I could think of was the book 'Necromancer' and the AI telling him that it was "just a concern of the meat, boyo."
Sex With Robots (Score:2, Funny)
the horrors of LoverBot tech support! (Score:3, Funny)
[lonely geek]: Hello? Are you human?
[support]: Yes dearie, I am human...
[lonely geek]: Oh good, I'm speaking with a real techie girl! My LoverBot v6.2 beta just crashed in the middle of some awesome robolovin', and I can't get her rebooted. Can you help me?
[support]: {chewing gum sound} Have you tried plugging her in, givin' her some juice?
[lonely geek]: Oh yes, Lots!! but, for some
eyeglasses (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, what was that question, again?
Who owns my head? (Score:5, Insightful)
But when I look at today's systems and the surveillance surrounding them, who wants to tell me that whatever is plugged into my cranium is really "mine"? And the manufacturer doesn't think that he's still the one owning it?
We have operating systems that require you to let them phone home to see if you're no crook. We got content restricted with DRM (or DCE or whatever the buzzword of the week is). We even got corporations that don't even consider infecting your computer with a trojan to protect their precious.
And I should trust them with my thoughts? In today's society, I'd be wary with such an idea.
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But when I look at today's systems and the surveillance surrounding them, who wants to tell me that whatever is plugged into my cranium is really "mine"? And the manufacturer doesn't think that he's still the one owning it?
1: The fucking United States of America. The first corporation to try and exert copyright control over thoughts will be the first one to have their corporate charter revoked. (Not to say that you won't be bugged, but if you're ok with that, you'll be fine.)
2: Christianity. Believe or n
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Actually, if you own "stuff" just generally, it's only really at the OK of the government.
We may think we own our bodies, but I doubt that we do. We can be induced to war and probably labor as well. We can certainly be plugged into a jail, and we know for certain it can happen unjustly.
Our cybernetic attachment to all the other people out there is a well established fact, as of at least a few millenia.
So, clearly, there should be no resist
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This is sort of scary (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exaggerating what role MS might play, but the question is valid.
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Erm.. I mean.. THIS COULD BE REALLY BAD AND WE SHOULDN'T DO IT. *cough*
We are The Borg. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have always been fascinated by the notion of hive mind and I truly wish that one day, humans will have their brains connected to the net by wifi or something. Each time we have a question, instead of thinking we could access the net of minds. We could have one big hive mind with all of the knowledge or have a distributed system where the knowledge is distributed among our brains. Also, only the most advanced researchers could access the core to change the official knowledge database. We could always have a core that works like the current Wikipedia too. Who knows what's the best way to manage a hive mind?
I'm already answering tons of queries in my job thanks to Wikipedia and Google. I just wish we could go one step further...
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I'm sure some corporation would be rather eager to see if they happen to know, if the likes of Sony, Microsoft, et al are any indicator. Or, even worse... someone w/ the scruples and ideology of the RIAA.
Re:We are The Borg. (Score:4, Funny)
Drill holes in your head (Score:2)
Have you done it? Go do it even if you think drilling holes in your head is a bad thing :)
Then come back and tell me what you think :)
PS, it annoys me when people just ask you to exert considerable effort without explaining why you should do so.Remember, folks... (Score:2)
Will we all be cyborgs?? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not so sure (Score:2)
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So, um, you take any drugs lately? (I don't mean the 'fun' kind, I mean of the CVS kind.) If you have, I know a couple of good ChemE's who'd like to have a word with you about chemicals not being "technology."
If you really are consistent and don't ingest any type of technology (well, you're going to have to bite the bullet and accept some level of hypocrisy somewhere -- there aren't enough unmodified edible plant species left for most people
Ghost in the Shell (Score:2, Insightful)
except we can't (Score:4, Informative)
People don't realize how primitive medicine is. 90% of medicine is, "We kept tried random things and found some things that work. Half of this stuff we don't even know why it works, but it does. So we use it."
And
There is no such things as a flashing LED that makes everything better controlled by an AI that knows you need treatment before you do.
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As for making the blind see, this is not yet FDA approved, but it has been put through FDA testing. It's pretty impressive actually check it out [wikipedia.org].
I understand the frustration with medicine, but don't be too cynical. There is a lot of pretty unbe
Quality vs Quantity of communication (Score:2, Insightful)
"In the year 2000" (Score:3, Interesting)
If you asked a scientist who worked with ENIAC some 50 years ago if he believed that you could put a billion transistors into a 1cm^2 chip, would he believe you? After all, a single transistor was the size of a light bulb back then.
This is why we have to think the unthinkable when speaking of technology. We all know that having a chip inside our head sounds weird and kind of repulsive, but once we have 10 guys doing this, we will have 100 following them, and 10,000 following the first 110.
I personally don't know or care what the outcome will be, but I am sure that we can eventually create organic computers. For example, your left finger nail could in fact be a small computer.
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Woe betide the first stupid mofo who tries to overclock his fingernails... ain't no amount of anti-fungal creme or pill that's gonna clean that out.
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Are you counting in decimal or binary?
Understanding nature (Score:4, Interesting)
Then we get to our assumptions about animals. It was thought that if we sequence a genome, all would be revealed. We now know that the story is very much more complex that simply saying this gene sequence does this. The orientation of the genes seems to be an issue. Genes seem to activate or not depending on the presence of other genes. The high school analysis of genetics seems quite inadequate, and the old yarns about improvement through cross pollination seems as antiquated as staying home to make sure one doesn't miss a phone call.
I don't think we are anywhere near the point where we can predict the side effects of messing with complex natural systems. We can't even predict the side effects of delivering psychotropic drugs to kids. We do so because we want our kids to be 'normal' and succeed in school and life, and then get angry when the negative side effects emerge. Of course they will be negative side effects. Nothing is free. Entropy is always increasing, and nature will have her way. I have no doubt we will engineer our children. I just hope that our courts are not tied up by the whiny parents with fantastic dreams of the perfect kid, and we approach the process to create a more holistic child, and not just to further the Aryan state.
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Yet despite the gloomy prose, it is a better place now than then. I certainly wouldn't want to live a hundred years ago, what with hardly any refrigeration, biomedicine, etc. And, it will be a better place in the future.
"Entropy is always increasing, and nature will have her way."
Meaningless. Entropy is physics, not social or biological.
"...and we approach the proces
Using Technology to Enhance Humans (Score:3, Funny)
I can imagine the news:
Suzy, 23, said her bionic implants made her drink boiling water until her jaw dropped. "The implant said it's room temperature, and I have absolute trust in my bionic implants".
This article only scratches the surface (Score:2, Interesting)
Enhancing internal mental experience (Score:3, Interesting)
We know that all of our experiences are the result of the workings of and inputs into our nervous and sensory systems, and ultimately our brains. If the goal is to enhance our own experience, it seems that ultimately direct input to our nervous and sensory systems and even the brain by electrical signals is the most effective, most efficient, most sustainable means of enchancing our own experiences.
There is no jet fuel to pollute our water and air when you fly across the world in an airplane in your mind. There are no natural disasters in this world if you do not want there to be. There is no death to see or experience if you do not want there to be.
And there is no reason to believe that experiences grounded in physical reality are the most enjoyable experiences to have. Evolution and geological processes are not directed to enchancing the quality of human mental experience, and to the extent they have enhanced it, by no means do we have reason to believe they have maximized it. And it may be technically very difficult to simulate the fullness of experience of the real sensory world to the mind. But perhaps raw emotions and sensations coupled with abtract realities can be every bit or more enjoyable.
There is also the matter of induced dreaming. Dreaming is a very cheap way to simulate experiencing the world - or some other - in a way that often seems very enjoyable to many people. If we could find ways through technology to induce and enhance the dreaming experience, we could relatively cheaply improve the quality of experience for many people.
Dreaming seems to consist in very real and compelling experiences, or at least the sense of having had real and compelling experiences. I retain very little of what I dream about, but at the moment I awake or perhaps just before, if I have had a dramatic dream, I have the very real experience of remembering having just had real and compelling experiences (whether I have or not I do not know).
If enhancing quality and duration of experience is our aim, then I think these will be ultimately the most rewarding courses to pursue.
Unfortunately, perhaps, I stubbornly believe there is much more to life than enhancing the quality and duration of experience.
We must evolve ourselves or be replaced (Score:3, Interesting)
At some point in the near future, people will figure out how to make a machine that can learn. At that point, it will only be a matter of time before there are machines that will be more intelligent than a typical human, and will be able to build bodies for themselves which are far superior to our biological bodies.
If we haven't learned how to evolve ourselves, either through genetics and/or cybernetics at that stage, we _will_ be replaced as the dominant life form in this region of space.
I'll take one. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why being a cyborg scares people?! (Score:2, Interesting)
This IS evolution fellows, not "natural" evolution, mind you, but still evolution.
Thus... assimilate or perish!
(if being
Re:communication (Score:4, Funny)
people can wait for me to return a message on the answering machine.
Re:communication (Score:5, Funny)
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Newb.
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I normally set mine to vibrate when someone calls. So, in ten years from now...
"Excuse me, sir, your head is shaking. Are you going to answer that?"
Pretty handy for answering incoming calls. However, pretty hard to carry on a live conversation with frothy bubbles spewing forth from your mouth. But, then again, I could always shave with it. I think I'm still undecided on this technology.
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(this is just an example, of course; my mentioning of "high-paying coding job" should be an obvious giveaw
Is that a joke? (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but in all job interviews I've been, nothing even starts to move in less than a month. They'll want a CV first, then send you some forms/questionnaire/whatever to fill, wait some time as they wait for candidates and/or process the mountain of resumes, then you're one of a hundred or more guys interviewed, and only then anything actually happens.
The scenario you describe is nothing short of some company's making it a lottery. They skipped everything and just went with
Re:communication (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic _stimulation [wikipedia.org]
It's still very much in it's infancy, but this is the future of the human/silicon interface. No physical device to cause problems with biological systems. No need to "upgrade" the hardware in your head. And of course, it's not permanent.
I agree with your point that we shouldn't be accessible 24/7, but I also think that the next technological leap forward is going to be the result of increasing the data transfer rate between the brain and non-biological systems.
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The thing is, to quote down and out in the magic kingdom, "We don't need to convert our detractors, just outlive them"
There are many situations where NOT having instant communication accessible would be idiotic. Not to mention, when you break down on the side of the road or have a heart attack/accident you are relying on other people to provide you with a cell phone.
I hope no one is ever harmed by your s
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Re:"Because we can" isn't always the best answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry but eliminating serious diseases "because we can" and preventing children from being horribly and mounstrously ugly is *ALWAYS* the best answer. Designer children will be the future and those who dont will be left behind and fade away into historical obscurity. You think someone is going to resist life extension technology? I can see many wars being fought once life extension is possible, I can only imagine what its going to be like not to be able to afford life extension for the millions of poor people who will be consigned to "death" in a market society.