How would you like to simply think, “Where’s my dentist from here?” and have the directions show up on your handheld? Maybe you would like to slip to your appointment unnoticed thanks to your invisibility cloak. And just to make sure you don’t forget your semi-annual cleaning in the first place, you’ve already been injected with nano-computers that will do your remembering for you.
Isabel Pedersen is a Communications professor at Ryerson University who studies these kinds of reality-shifting devices. She says a future such as this is not out of the question. Her concern is that we are not taking the time to consider the human implications of such technologies before we accept them as fact.
Nora’s talk with Isabel will be part of an upcoming episode of Spark. But right now you can download the full, unedited mp3 here or listen below. [Runs 18:13]
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Per memory capture devices: I never considered the rhetoric of mental deficiency. For me it’s been the confluence of a few other concerns.
First, there is the issue of using a machine to abridge my own labour. If I come across some resource (e.g. a web page), and I actually read it, chances are I will remember some part of its contents and put it to use. It therefore makes sense to bookmark it so I at least have some handle for citing it, retransmitting it or whatever, since we’re talking about the original article, chapter and verse, that contributed to some change in my perspective. I think there is genuine value in that.
The second argument for copious accounting is that larger entities such as governments and private organizations have, as an artifact of their budgets, been able to accrue detailed information about my activities for some time. The price point of gathering this information has dropped such that I can now know about myself what any other entity knows about me and arguably more. As such I am comparably equipped should a dispute or other adversarial situation arise. This is merely a survival tactic in a world where the interest with the most incontrovertible documented evidence wins.
What will be really interesting is when this kind of thing gets to the level of sophistication where we can present a digital poker face to interests that may not be completely aligned with ours.
That would be conveniently show a digital poker face, as we arguably already can with some effort.
Really enjoyed this interview with Dr. Pederson. There seems to be very little careful consideration of this aspect of technology in our lives. The words we choose to talk about technology frames how we perceive them. My doctoral work analyzed the language used to talk about technology in education policy documents. My findings found government policy documents took up a strong deterministic and instrumentalist approach to technoloy while other organizations (parents, the professional association representing teachers) consistently adopted a more critical theory stance. The difference between the two and the dominance of the deterministic and instrumentalist positions can be traced to significant issues in technology use (or non-use) in schools. Fantastic interview on a much overlooked topic!
Thanks!
Is this semi-annual cleaning legal?