My colleagues and I have been looking into the human computer confluence (HC-squared) research as a potential area of collaboration for EU grant proposals. We participated in a visions workshop and got invited to submit a visionary statement for their online white book. This was not as simple as it sounds - we had to come up with a vision of the future. In order to get inspiration we spent the afternoon reading the statements that have already been published online. As a sort of exercise we tried to imagine what the future might look like had all of these visions come to pass. Perhaps this is a view coming from a somewhat more cynical and cautious about technology point of view, perhaps we are simply failing to see the positives, but the future we ended up imagining looks less than attractive:
In the future technological extensions to our minds will be able to determine our emotional states and deliver information judged appropriate given our estimated processing capacity. In the future we will be able not only to share our lives and our ongoing experiences with people dear to us who are spread out all over the world, but also to experience their lives remotely almost as if we were physically present there. Of course we will be able to consume that information when our mind-expanding technologies will judge us capable of doing so. In the future we will be able to better encode our experiences in our memory by using taste and smell as triggers, potentially making a simple dinner a moment of remembrance or perhaps a memory-lane minefield. After all, what might seem like a wonderful moment to encode as a memory at the time, may turn into a reminder of an awful time in your life later. In the future, our technologies will ensure that we are constantly working on becoming better human beings so that we can be part of an urban socio-technical superorganism busy minimizing energy use, reducing traffic and pollution and maintaining wealth.
Perhaps my vision of the future is how to prevent some of the futures described above from coming to fruition? Or perhaps just ensuring that despite these futures, we can retain our ability to unplug, turn off, spend time alone, make stupid mistakes, feel pain and happiness just because life goes on and for no other reason.
I agree with the basic sentiment, which is that we need to pay close attention to what makes us human and what makes live enjoyable and worth living. That is, we need to focus on our psychological and biological makeup, our motives and emotions, and make sure that any technology we develop is compatible with those.
ReplyDeleteNot all "improvements" are good.