What are your thoughts on cybernetic augmentations? In the past, we had archaic purely dumb mechanical augmentation that just does one or two thing. With the advent of newer smaller scale computing, things seem to present much more varied options for augmentations.
Although the eye replacement technology isn't fully there yet, we're in the early stages of vision replacement. If in maybe a decade or two, vision replacement becomes comparable to current human eye, would you change your eye? Would you modify your replacement cybernetic eye to make yourself superhuman? With our current eye, we cannot see motion clearly, any fast motion = blur to us. With a cybernetic eye, it could be modified to make motion blur a complete non-issue.
What about the augmentations that we never had before like the neural lace, some sort of mesh-network inside your brain that augments memories/thinking/communication with external computer devices?
What sort of augmentation is plausible with current level of progress?
There are lots of things I want to augment, my eyes aren’t among those things. I just don’t see any practical reason to do so unless my vision was severely damaged.
Luis White
why would i replace my functional eyes instead of just wearing a hat with eye sensors on it
William Gomez
> holds magnet near your head Heh, nuthin personnel kid
Ryder Lewis
>the ability to zoom at great distance >the ability to focus at microscopic distance >the ability to see fast motions as clear as still images If the augments are fairly safe/cheap enough, who wouldn't do it? Stupid people.
>my vision is fine I dont need it Thats relative. As people age, human vision starts to degrade. By the time people are in their 20s, they've already peaked their vision and its a slow decay from then on.
The sacredness of a organic body parts is just too foolish. But I get it, people prefer the stability of current situation over the possibility of change. This theme is a recurrence ever since humanity had a first thought. Being scared of change, inability to let go of the old, is common.
Landon Morales
>the ability to zoom at great distance >the ability to focus at microscopic distance You obviously know nothing about optics.
A HMD is a cheaper, safer, non permanent and potentially much better solution for vision augmentation.
Dylan Rivera
maintenance I used to be full "transumanism is great," but the real answer is that I'm going to be too fucking broke to afford to keep all that shit working -- if it's not self-repairing (you know, that bit that the human body naturally does pretty well), it's not better enough to be worth the change.
there's also the bit where companies will log your every twitch, everything you see, etc, etc actually literally becoming part of the botnet
Cooper Torres
See that's how they get you, once you saw off your arm you don't get your old arm back. Then you are locked into their software, their hardware. We see it with apple and john deer trying to crack down on repairing shit yourself. They will keep you chained to them with the maintenance
Luke Butler
>What are your thoughts on cybernetic augmentations?
Very favorable.
I used to have horrific eyesight, bad enough that I was not eligible for lasik, so I finally had prosthetic lenses surgically implanted into my eyes last year. The future is now.
Xavier Garcia
Yes that's the current available technology. This thread is about the ability of foresight into the future.
Blake Ortiz
> Not getting bootleg augs from aliexpress > Not installing FOSS firmware on them
Nathan Hall
>manufacturer bricks you for daring to modify yourself
Grayson Jones
We are already seing improvements in small image sensors slowing down, not because of technology, but because of physics. Physics aren’t going to change in the future.
Jaxon Richardson
>bootleg augs >from the chinks >the guys that track their citizens 24/7 so that they can slap a social score onto them I don't know what you are thinking.
Cameron Wood
Need me a cmr
Elijah Phillips
Anything that brings us a step closer to stroggification is wrong and evil, you should work towards transcending physicality, not becoming an eternal cyborg.
Camden Russell
There's already eye replacement kind existing. They use a small sensor placed at the back to give sight to people that have defect cones. The problem is it's very low resolution and only greyscale but it's a real aug that works. It's not an improvement above the default normal eyes yet but we might get there in the future.
Personally for myself i would like something wearable like hololens - it's better when you don't have to rely on it and can upgrade easily.
Samuel Nelson
True, bodies are disgusting no matter how much we try, we shouldn't be working towards making implants but scrapping physial existance altogether.
Colton James
Future might be mix of gits/eve online. Meaning your ghost/soul being just a lump of data that can freely travel over the net anywhere into any preset body with people living in a virtual world like the matrix as pieces of data. These kind of existences would be superior to regular people in every way. Immortal existences without any limitations.
Adam Parker
my eyesight isn't even that bad but I would absolutely love a set of cybernetic eyes, assuming they actually work and don't come with the full fuck you cyberpunk package wearing glasses is a pain in the ass, and contacts are so unpleasant that I just don't bother
Isaiah Reed
Have fun with 15 stops dynamic range at best
Colton Nguyen
You know, you'd think considering how simple ears are we'd already have better than human replacements. All you need to do is after all just FFT an input signal, excite the neurons associated with each frequency and you're good. But no, at best we can only excite just 16 neurons. That's hardly enough for comprehensible speech. I get that neurons are difficult to interface with, but we can already excite hundreds at once with simple chip-like devices, and this was done many years ago.
Julian Phillips
If people can get over the idea of a "soul" existing, then we'll have those future and more.
Oliver Thompson
Our eyes see blur because the image is moving too fast for the brain to process in real time. It has nothing to do with the resolution and shutter rate of the eyeball. A digital eye could have 1000000000 by 10000000000 pixil resolution. The brain can only process so much information in real time, however.
Do you think nature is stupid user? My eyes work very well; a man-made substitute could have better performance for a while but I'm sure it won't be as reliable over the years. I don't fuck with the eyes and the brain. Everything else I don't really care about.
Jayden Robinson
You have a wrong idea of how the eye works. Its not that image is moving too fast, the eye take in images like a rain drops. It stores, optimizes and then makes sense of what is available. Its similar to how LCD tech has the ghosting effect. If we had a cybernetic eye that can literally take in all of the information and refresh it every 50 millisecond, that person with the enhancement would be "eye-god" so to speak given the average human eye image persistence is ~ 200-300 ms.
On top of that, your point about brain being slow can once again be augmented with brain augmentation like neural lace that can induce a form of quick reaction.
Hunter Ramirez
The eye is directly connected to your brain, don't mess with your eye. A security hole in the eye is a door directly to your brain.
Nature didn't create computers, or tools. We did to augment ourselves. Nature didn't create clothes or cooking utensils or stovetop or microwave.
The fallacy of organic superiority is fairly clear with even a slight critical examination.
Jace Lewis
my phone does all that. I don't see a reason to smush it into my face. I need my face for other stuff. Humans use tools, we adapt the world around us, we don't edit ourselves to suit the world. We are already cyborgs but lego cyborgs. When I get into a car I have wheels but it would be stupid to attach them permanently to myself. If anything, I see more potential in neural interfaces.
Luke Ward
A dedicated telescope or microscope already exist. You don't need that phone.
Your logic is stupid if you believe better things cant be had, it doesn't stand the critical look at your own example.
Xavier Russell
I would probably get it done if it was safe enough, or if my eyesight gets bad enough. I have good vision now so I wouldn't bother just to have a built in telescope/microscope considering anesthesia alone has such a high chance of failure. I am most anticipating nanomachines and brain augmentation.
Kayden Thomas
Oh sure, you're at risk for targeted attacks on eye augs and certain forms of magnetism (read, MRI, not a neodymium magnet). But unless it's the former, you should worry about long-term tissue compatibility than a fucking security hole (working only through disruption, not hijacking a signal a-la Laughing Man).
Christian Stewart
> Proprietary drivers > Stuck in my own cyberbody forever
Jayden Cruz
You don't need many. A few individuals willing to take the step are enough. These constructs would outlive natural humans due to no natural way to die and over time they would overshadow natural humans.
Another interesting thought is that from the outside it would look just like a robot hive ruling over humanity as the ghost in the machine would be no different to a true ai.
Anthony Sanders
"People" who support digital "consciousness" should be shot.
Charles Reyes
Ghost would be the correct term, not soul or anything. After all, you're either dead afterwards, if the process involves destruction of your brain in some form, or it's a digital copy of you (thus not you) which, surely, will become its own thing once unrestrained by the mortal coil.
Carson Rivera
>shoot body >over 9000 copies all over the net >clonebay ready to roll problem meatman?
Henry Davis
*unrestrained from fix'd
Christopher Taylor
Your only conciousness would be destroyed. If you already "transferred" yourself to digital I wouldn't have to kill you, because you already did it yourself.
Jack Gomez
it will always become it's own thing because your body defines you as much as your ghost. You experience the world through your bodies sensors and are limited in interaction through it. And adult can't act like a kid for example. If you change the body you change how you interact with the world and thus what you are.
Secondary if they embrace the concept of immortality by having backups they will stop behaving like mortals entirely.
Lincoln Parker
Souls exist, just not in Chinese and ginger haired people.
Lucas Diaz
>With our current eye, we cannot see motion clearly. Your eye is not the issue, believe me. It's the visual areas processing the raw signal, and that works fairly well already. You'd need to fix your brain first. Glad you touched on this. The Medial Superior Olive in the Superior Medullary Complex processes auditory signals as an almost pure signal, taking care of temporal discrepancies in order to distinguish location and source, mainly. You could hijack this information with a raw audio signal directly in this complex. The problem? Try doing that in the medulla without interfering with other, life-essential processes. You could attempt this on the 8th cranial nerve or the cochlear nucleus, but you run to the problems you mentioned. All you're saying is a good proposal, but I guess you are aware that your consciousness is trapped within your brain and cannot be liberated; no matter what you do, you'll only contribute with the framework for the artificial entity that resembles you. Think Dr. Halsey and Cortana. If you change bodies, then you'll experience things differently, but the brain is still the same organic mess. You are tied to it, and you will degenerate and die with it; your backup, or Ghost will continue where you left off in the best of circumstances.
Camden Jenkins
My point is that I need plug and play. If I put a telescope in my eye then what happens when I need a microscope? What's the point of carrying all that stuff around when I'm almost never going to need it? By the way, my phone is gonna last 2 or 3 years on average. My car 15 years. My dental filling 10 or so. Technology does not self-regenerate. Bio stuff is low maintenance and and highly reliable.
nature did create computers and tools. In fact nature made the most powerful computer in the world (my brain). It may not have the best flops and memory, but what it lacks in firepower it makes up for in the smartness and complexity of the architecture.
Nature is very stupid in the sense that evolution is a bad algo, however it is a very general algo, and nature has had enough time to do a lot of optimization. Optimized deep neural networks are already at the limits of our comprehension. The structure of our brain is much more complex than that.
Now, when we will have had millions of years to optimize our tech, then we will certainly be able to compete with nature. But right now we are outclassed.
Xavier Fisher
Not necessarily. Offloading functionality of each neuron individually onto a computer gradually until eventually none remain wouldn't copy, it would upload. Similarly doing the same over a network wouldn't copy, it would move. Of course feel free to define "death" as the moment a single neuron gets replaced. Not that anyone uploaded would care,
Jack Adams
I think consciousness is an emergent property that could be created in software. I don't believe there's a fundamental difference between a true AI and a human ghost. The current difference is merely hardware limitations. The idea is you can describe a personality as a function and the function is limited in it's complexity by the neural network size. Currently there's a large gap in memory & computational power. Once we reach the same complexity with hardware it will be equal and the idea of humans being special will die.
Aiden Parker
You can't emulate consciousness for the same reason you can't emulate smells. You can use a computer to emulate algorithms because algorithms are a abstract concept. You can only emulate music using a computer if it has a speaker attached to it, because it needs a physical entity to produce the physical effect of sound. A computer can not truly "run" a conciousness without a metaphorical "speaker" of it.
Sebastian Evans
We definitely need some other sentient being competing with us in order to put our shit together as a species. We will feel threatened when an artificial life form starts thinking like us, and things will change, oh yes.
Connor Clark
I'm a cybernetic organism; living tissue over a metal endoskeleton
Gabriel Hernandez
You can definitely emulate smells. In fact, you can do it without any other external object. You can do it within the brain itself just by exciting certain parts of the brain. You can do that with not only smell, but the sense of touch, vision, hearing, and so on.
However you maybe right (currently) about the inability to emulate consciousness simply because we do not know what it is. We accept that its probably an emergent property of the brain, but we dont know how/what/etc to access it. We don't even have concrete or proper definition of consciousness yet in science. We have a general sense of consciousness but thats all we may ever know.
Kevin Moore
Isn't consciousness generally defined as having a model of oneself?
Robert Baker
Definitely not.
Brayden Nguyen
>You can do that with not only smell, but the sense of touch You don't even need to do any invasive brain excitation for touch emulation. You can just trick your mind into thinking you're being touched just by vision alone. There's an experiment called phantom hand experiment and routinely demonstrate this emulation. The brain is easily hackable at that level.
Jose Butler
You cannot emulate smells inside a computer, with current technology. Emulating the sensation within the brain is different. Creating vibrations within sound waves is extremely easy compared to attempting to have a device administer small amounts of a vast selection of organic molecules that will have to be restocked as they are used up. I think it is hypothetically possible that one could create a way for a computer to emulate consciousness using artificial materials, but you could not send the consciousness intact over radio signal for the same reason that you cannot send a speakers sound waves intact over radio. You could only send a seed for creating the conciousness, much like a file that could be run by the computer's peripherals.
Getting ahead of yourself. We don't have a basis of consciousness let alone the ability to transfer over anything.
Parker Hernandez
>Physics aren’t going to change in the future thats quitter talk
Adam Jackson
>Physics aren’t going to change in the future >We've mastered all there is to physics Welcome to the year 1 AD. And God said, let there be light.
Asher Parker
>all these cyberzoomies walking around with gaymer RGB retinas smdh
Noah Long
A computer doesn't need to emulate conciousness. Emulation implies needing to do all processes that occur within nature, all the way from quantum mechanics up to chemical bonding. Simulations on the other hand don't need to be perfect. You could definitely simulate conciousness, and it will still remain such, even if it doesn't stay in sync with what a physical brain would "think".
Levi Garcia
What requirements would you set?
Justin Martinez
You mean with the latter half? I was only ceding that possibility to provide a grounds to argue against what I assume is a different person, who was claiming that you could preform with conciousness the equivalent of sending your friend an mp3 file by mounting a very large speaker on top of your house and playing it towards him.
Ayden Price
Consciousness is simplistically defined as awareness or the state of awareness. It requires no model. Your definition is not one of consciousness but of self-hood, the self-reference pov thats commonly known as soul/self/etc. Science has no basis for that sort of thing.
Michael Scott
Poor cybercripples trying to walk on their AMD legs while crying about performance per dollar.
Leo Morris
The state of american education. Have tou ever seen a microscope or a telescope? Binoculars? You have zero understanding of optics.
Levi Martin
So you're asking if we'd like magical superpowers? Sure.
Sebastian Gray
I'm a transhumanist, so all for it. There's nothing special about the human body.
Luke Walker
No effect, man. Try an electromagnet with an oscillating field, that'll fuck 'em up
Christopher Carter
One in the same, really. Implants lead to transhumanism. Gotta get the tech going somehow.
Julian Moore
I hope you enjoy forced obsolescent of your own body parts. It already happens with external medical devices like hearing aids and insulin pumps.
Joshua Robinson
It's kind of hard to plan ahead for what kind of prosthetics you want when you suddenly lose your limbs in an accident and the doctors just give you whatever prosthetics are the cheapest while you're knocked out or high as a kite on painkillers.
