The Confusatory

We go about our day-to-day, happily ignoring the cyborgs in our midst. Anyone with an IUD for birth control. Anyone with magnets in their fingertips. Anyone with glasses, and definitely anyone with glasses mounted to their nose. Anyone with pacemakers, seizure control devices, joint replacements, pins to set broken bones. We’re mostly a population of medical cyborgs.

If you’ll allow me to stretch the idea of a cyborg a bit, from those with artificial bits and bobs on or in them, to creatures whose experiences and interactions are augmented by artificial means, the topic becomes even more interesting.

My 4.9 ounce pocketable computer space-phone allows me to project my thoughts and experiences far beyond the physical reach of my corporeal body for days at a time. My eight hour battery 2.9 pound high-resolution laptop with high-speed wireless connectivity lets me consume unthinkably huge numbers of audio and video bits without touching a power grid for the better part of a day.

But there’s a glaring gap: no consumer technology has made the jump into the human from the hand or lap or desk. If I went deaf from a disease one day, I could get cochlear implants, and in five years (judging by the current rate of implant software improvements alone), my hearing would be the same as it is today. Why can’t I get augmentation for my vision in the same way? Or better hearing than what I have now? Or a permanently-implanted version of the belt that always vibrates north?

About ten years ago, Wired wrote an incredible piece about artificial vision. What will the article they write in 2015 read?

• Is the First Elective Artificial Vision Man a Pox on Baseball?
• Seeing (Through) You: X-Ray Vision Isn’t a Reality, but Infrared Is Here to Stay

What will a world with augmented eyes (and ears, and hands and feet, and joints), do? Who will be disrupted by it? Who will prosper?

These seem silly at first glance, but they are incredibly important questions to ask:

Think back to the 1960s, when the first female-controlled contraceptive devices, the IUD and the pill, hit the market. Fifty years later, we know that they were the start of a gender revolution that is still making waves in society, as a second reproductively-controlled generation graduates from high school, governs corporations, and elects not to have a third generation at all (first-world fertility rates are well below the replacement birth rate of 2.1 children per couple). In the same decade that we thought hard about the first robotic machines, and “computer” stopped referring to people computing arithmetic solutions and started meaning machines, society was silently starting suffering an incredible, transformative, totally unstoppable revolution.

What part of you do you wish you augment in a nigh-invisible way? What happens when everyone does that?

(Bits and bobs of this came from or were inspired by Quinn’s piece about much of the same topic.)

• publish it Tuesday