Nick Jones

It’s hype cycle time again. My colleague Jackie Fenn has a fun job, she manages the hype cycle for emerging technologies which covers things like 3D displays, augmented reality and 3D printing. Many of the emerging technologies on Jackie’s latest hype cycle will be disruptive, but some will be much more disruptive than others. Technologies like telepresence for example are well understood. We know what they can do, they are heading (slowly) towards maturity, and the discussions we have about them tend to be around features and implementation. People don’t worry about the ethical risks of telepresence; they worry about the screen resolution, the cost justification and the amount of network bandwidth they’ll need.

But when we look towards the left hand end of the hype cycles we see technologies that will pose challenges that go way beyond such implementation issues. It’s not an exaggeration to say they will totally redefine society. One of the examples is a new entrant this year – human augmentation. This refers to the use of technology not just to correct human injury or failings (e.g. implanted optic sensors), but to enhance human capabilities. It will take a few decades but at some point your children or maybe grandchildren will have the option to buy implants that make them smarter, give them faster reactions, better eyesight, a perfect memory and so on. And when that time comes, the technical questions about whether they opt for a petabyte cortical implant or a terahertz neural accelerator will be insignificant beside the ethical arguments about the morality of that augmentation

Imagine a few of the ethical challenges that we’ll face. For example: Should society allow an affluent person to augment their kids with expensive implants so they can intellectually and physically out-perform the children of someone who can only afford basic implants? Should the state provide the same implants for everyone? Should society allow drivers with artificially augmented reactions to buy faster cars? Should there be a legal requirement for everyone to disclose what implants they have before undertaking any business or social activity whose outcome might be affected by them? Who owns the data stored in the implants after someone dies? Does e-discovery legislation apply to the data in implants? Will skills change from something that we painfully acquire over decades to something we download in seconds?

I’m sure some approaches to these challenges will be influenced by traditional political and social attitudes. We’ll see communities who reject implants on moral or religious grounds, societies who try to enforce equality of implants, and some who follow an unfettered capitalist path where you can install anything you can afford. But the implications of such decisions will be far-reaching, because people who reject implants might be less effective both economically and socially than those who embrace them. I don’t know the answers to these questions, and I’m not even sure how we’re going to find the answers. But we ought to start looking now because the search will take decades.