Conceptually? I'm all for it. Why wouldn't I be.
In practice, we live in a capitalist society and I don't want an arm that makes me watch an advertisement before I open a bag of chips.
All right, you get the chip opening for free, but masturbation requires a paid subscription
Not against it on principle, but there's no way I'd get it knowing about the way the corporations that have the resources to make it happen operate.
There are a lot of different human faculties that can be augmented!
We augment our senses every day with tools like microphones, microscopes, radio, radar, telescopes, X-rays, cameras, etc.
And when our senses fail us, we augment them with eyeglasses, hearing aids, and so on.
We augment our legs with bicycles, skateboards, cars, airplanes, etc.
And when our legs fail us, we augment them with braces, crutches, wheelchairs, electric scooters, walkers, etc.
We augment our memory retrieval with writing, library science, search engines, and regular expressions.
We augment our ability to measure lengths with rulers, measuring-tapes, and surveying equipment.
We augment our immune systems with masks, rubber gloves, antiseptics, antibiotics, cancer therapies, water treatment, etc.
We augment our sexual functions with erotic stories and art, contraceptives, lubricants, sex toys, dating apps, etc.
We augment our metabolic function with cooking, fermentation, agriculture, selective breeding of crop species, etc.
We augment our musical abilities with horns, percussion, strings, synthesizers, and more.
It turns out that augmenting human ability is itself a core human ability.
Many of us are already cyborgs. I have a continuous glocuse monitoring system and an insulin pump, I choose to believe this will give me dual citizenship if there is a robot apocalypse.
We call it "tool use" and "medicine" and "literacy" and "science" and "accessibility" and "culture"
Wearable > implantation
Just a security concern. Augmenting is great but we don't want the augmentations to become a liability. Obviously there are exceptions to every rule, if we invent a robotic arm replacement for someone who's lost one, the security concerns are generally lower than the quality of life improvement of having a functioning arm 99% of the time, and there's an argument for the potential ability for rapid detachment in case of emergency, but once we get into subdermal and brain implants, we're in a territory where these things can't be easily removed in case of emergency, and the risks get immense.
There are folks who are facing their hardware provider going out of business and just hoping their eyes don't quit working.
As a already augmented human, i fully support this.
Glasses, portable electronic tether, surgery...........
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=WyK7lX4sk0c&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel; I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine.
Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day, that crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you.
But I am already saved.
For the machine is immortal.
I work as a surgical tech for a living, so obvious bias on modifying the body - making that shit happen is my job! The medical applications are pretty wild - we can replace worn down bones with titanium replacements, or stick a diode in you and makes your heart beat at a specific rate, or replace the chambers in your dick with a manually filled balloon if you can't get it up anymore (legit, it's a thing [SFW - seriously]).
Guessing OP is more directed at non-medical applications; we (society in general) already mostly accept that on an aesthetic front - piercings, tattoos, etc, but we've only scratched the surface functionally.
You might be interested in the concept of "transhumanism" which is kinda the more sci-fi flavor of augmentation, but the better our tech gets, the less 'fi' it is.
Lots of cool ideas, like eye lens prosthetics capable of slapping a HUD on your field of view, or being able to chemically or electrically stimulate a specific part of the brain to pump up your alertness or w/e... how often those ideas manifest as an actual product, eh, mixed results (looking at Musk's disastrous neurolink garbage).
There's also simpler stuff - I saw a documentary on this stuff years ago, and one of the cool examples was a guy that got tiny little rare-earth magnets - little 1mm balls or thereabouts. Dude cut the ends of his fingers all the way down to muscle, and implanted a magnet ball into each one, sewed back up, and let them heal. So, now he can pick up ferrous objections with a poke; and cooler than that, unexpected result was he how has a sense of magnetism! Any time he entered a magnetic field, he could feel feedback from the implants, so he could tell the strength and polarity just by moving his hand through it. And apparently some things generate a magnetic field that you wouldn't expect - like he noticed feedback when he was cooking on the stove from those those heat coils: when it was on / hot it would move the implants slightly, so he had an extra layer of warning for things like when a coil is hot enough to burn skin but not quite 'red hot' because the magnetic feedback was more noticeable than the actual heat it was putting off.
I'm all for the concept. Definitely wouldn't recommend a DIY surgery like some of those folks do, but I could definitely see something like non-medical body mod clinics popping up the same way we have tattoo parlors now.
Pretty fascinating stuff!
I really want the magic ring so I can badge in and out of the office
On a post talking about modifying the body, you say you want a magic ring? Do I dare open the link? :o
haha its an actual ring, but the site is mostly things like magnets you can stab into your finger and things like that, nothing graphic on the site from what Ive seen
I am not looking forward to having my eyes scooped out for a second time because the company providing bionic vision went out of business.
I can't imagine a faster way to dystopia. You'd be literally incapable of disobedience.
Depends on the implant. I have to imagine the only way this kind of thing could be adopted mainstream is for it to be open source, the risks are just too high to let some random company put obfuscated proprietary tech in your brain
I'm all for it, things like cochlear implants have already been improving lives for decades.
This sparks joy: Augmentation to help people become the selves that they would truly like to be.
This does not: Some kind of transhuman singularity dystopia where we have replaced ourselves not out of a soul-driven yearning for our true self, but in service of a cold, quantitative utilitarian calculus that says we must shed our skin because it is logically inferior.
Both. Everyone is afraid of AI taking over but it's just a tool. Human augmentation is way more likely to lead there. But in the mean time, Stephen Hawking lived quite a while only being able to speak with augmentations. Just like any other technology, it will be at the very least researched in fear that someone else will first. So might as well embrace it
I'm not afraid of AI taking over. I'm afraid of the TESCREAL suicide cult that wants AI to take over. If they are the ones who ultimately push a singularity button, because they believe it's a moral imperative to push the singularity button, we're going to have a really shitty rapture.
I think it'll be cool in like, 50 years once the technology is there. Right now all it does is kill monkeys.
I'm currently wearing a continuous glucose monitor. Does that count? I'm all for anything voluntary especially if it improves quality of life without impeding on others.