Grrl Power #1310 – No cybernetic peg-leg for you
The security spell is still there, it just, uh, soaked into the drywall.
“Shkran lak” is “thank you” in Arabic. At least according to google translate. Arabic is the first language Dabbler learned/copied/cheated when she got to Earth. She also picked up Kurdish, Turkish, and Neo-Aramaic before learning English. Maxima speaks passable Arabic. Her vocabulary doesn’t quite cover discussing an advanced medical condition or talking someone through rebuilding a motor, but can have reasonable non-technical discussions about most topics. The closest she gets to technical topics involve tactics, like discussing the need to post lookouts with a village elder or compliment that elder’s wife’s dolma or falafel. And yes, getting in good with the elder’s wife definitely counts as tactics.
Dabbler has more or less made this point before in the comic, and while this is a flashback, it’s not even the first time she’s made this no-super-tech-for-you argument to Maxima, even though their relationship is still quite new. Dabbler doesn’t subscribe to any sort of Prime Directive. Her hesitancy is two-fold. One is just as stated on this page. There is a line in cybernetics that once crossed, can lead to amazing and horrible things. In a way, we’ve started to dip our toes into that pool… or, the line… the surface of that pool is a line when viewed in cross section from the side. Yeah. My dad had a cochlear implant. That is a piece of hardware that directly stimulates nerves. Not nerves in the brain, but in the ear, bypassing the broke stuff. But it’s a step. Or a toe-dip. That tech is nearly 40 years old? I mean, commercially. We’ve also started messing with direct brain implants – at this point, mostly for paralyzed people, but the things we learn from that won’t be confined to those in need, especially if there’s money to be made from widescale commoditization.
But here’s the thing I think will hang up broad adoption of cyberware entertainment/utility. Would you trust Facebook or Twitter or Playstation/Sony or literally any company to install hardware into your brain? Any publicly traded company is afflicted with institutionalized enshitification. I mean, think about even a minor example, like how Helldivers 2 required a Sony Online Account, making it so players in 118 countries couldn’t access/play the game. But some dickhead MBA thought it’d be more useful to force people into some sort of mandatory mailing list/pseudo social network than it would be to sell however many more millions of copies that move excluded them from. Yeah, the community rallied, Sony caved. Fine, whatever. But that’s just one super minor example – do you trust Slappy the Idiot MBA when you have shit wired to your brain? Think about how many data breaches Sony has had over the years.
I would say that no one would allow a megacorp to wire stuff to their nervous system, but humans are just so stupid. Even those of us without ADD have incredibly short memory spans it seems, and are easily distracted by anything that jangles a shiny key-ring in front of us.
The other reason that Dabbler doesn’t want to hand us unheretofore invented technologies is simply because she thinks it’s important for a race to have its own heroes. If some alien came down during the 1400’s and handed us a textbook with the laws of thermodynamics and a bunch of other goodies in it, would we know the name Newton or Einstein or Curie or Darwin or Hawking? Or would it all be Gorglo, Who Sold Unto Us His Used Science Textbooks so He Could Score Some Space Kush? Humans would think less of ourselves if someone held our hand while we walked up the big-boy steps, and Dabbler won’t take that away from us.
The counter argument to this approach is that while there are some really important scientific, engineering and invention-ing milestones, I think there’s a relatively narrow window for those things to happen. Sure, we all know Edison (stole the idea from the actual engineers who) invented the lightbulb, and Jack Kilby and a few others invented the integrated circuit and I’m sure you can name quite a few other notable people, I feel like there’s a point at which inventions are a function of corporations or universities with deep funding or research grants. Like, you can google “who invented the accelerometer” but at some point, projects are the results of dozens of people and the white-papers that came before, and it gets really muddy to point credit an individual with some creation. Like, when was the last time you heard about an inventor? I don’t mean the guy who zip-tied kitchen knives to a weed whacker in an attempt to make an improved weed wacker, but really just invented a way to more efficiently cut off his own feet. Back in my day (shakes fist at cloud) inventors were something you occasionally heard about. Now it seems if you’re an inventor, you probably spend most of your professional life inventing one tiny sliver of a smartphone along hundreds of others and no one will ever know your name. I mean, I guess your family would know your name. Hopefully. I was talking about national renown.
Well, that’s kind of a downer. Anyway, please enjoy the above comic page of enjoyableness!
The new vote incentive is up!
Dabbler went somewhere tropical, in a very small bikini. As you might guess, it doesn’t stay on for long, which of course, you can see over at Patreon. Also she has an incident with “lotion,” and there’s a bonus comic page as well.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
It’s an interesting conundrum. I would say that a potential counter-argument is that what Dabbler is doing is sacrificing the current wellness of humans in the present for their potential egos in the future.
Yeah, if Glorglo gave us a science book in the 1400s we might not know all those names… but how many people would live who might have died? If pheneticillin had the chance of being discovered earlier… should we let people die because it wasn’t a human who discovered the medicine?
And how many would have died from all the new Weapons?
Dynamite was invented for safer mining and excavation.
It’s use in war is what got Alfred Nobel to make the Nobel Prices, to do some good.
The basic concept is that technology is also a filter. We are still on the cusp of annihilating ourselves with nukes. We _were_ backing away from that particular cliff, but thanks to authoritarian regimes making a comeback, we are inching towards global nuclear holocaust once again.
The short version being, “Technology is not a substitute for social development.”
As far as the specific potential hazards with BCI’s, Dave hit the nail on the head, speaking through Dabbler. There is absolutely no private party that can, or should, be trusted with direct access to people’s brains. Consider the manipulation capitalists _already_ engage in, in order to extract ever last quantum of alienated wealth that they can. Do you really think any of them would respect anyone’s free will if disregarding it might mean number go up?
They would not.
And the only way said technology could be regulated and administered publicly would be with a genuinely transparent, fully _consensus_ based government, which explicitly locks out any private influence, especially in the form of bribery – sorry – I mean “donations.”
And I’ll be the first to point out that such a government currently does not exist anywhere on Earth, and likely will not, so long as private wealth hoarding is allowed, and able to be used to control public figures.
And this all drives me crazy, because technology like this has the _potential_ to be universally liberating. Advanced BCI opens the door to full body prosthesis, freeing us from the tyranny of flesh. Bigotry of race, sex, aesthetics, athletics, it all goes out the window once you can have a customized body designed to your own preferences. Naturally, this would cause a certain portion of the population to lose their narrow little minds, once they could no longer justify constructing artificial hierarchies based on skin color or genitals, but I for one would enjoy watching their meltdown.
It’s on the same lines as Musk’s brain chip, there’s NO way in HELL would I agree to anything like that! “It’s safe and hack proof” what a load of BS. There’s an old saying, “if you can make it, someone else will fake it”. Meaning nothing is ever “fool proof” sooner or later someone else will figure out how to get past it.
An early step in that direction was an implanted RFID chip. There was an experiment with a few stores and entertainment facilities where you could just get chipped, then walk in and do whatever the facility had to offer without ever getting out any payment device. It is even easier than “pay with phone” because you just don’t have to think about paying. In the moment.
I’m not sure if stuff like that is still going on or if people figured out that there are disadvantages to that. In the report I read there were at least some customers who sang high praises of that added comfort.
And to think I have added an extra step to my banking to ensure that I have to specifically think about making payments. Namely, my bank account, where my paycheck goes to has no access except via the app. I do not have a debit card for it, or checks. If I want to use that money to buy something, I have to go into the app and move the funds into another checking account which I do have a debit card for specifically intended for buying things. This keeps me from accidentally overspending.
Not only that, but to be seamless so you don’t have to think about it, that means you default to ‘approve’ when something pings a bill at your RFID. That is easily scammable. The only reason it isn’t an issue for the bunch that have already done it is not enough people have it to make it worthwhile to target them. If adoption went up significantly, there’s no way it wouldn’t start to be exploited.
The only way for that to work would be equivalent to you using your phone (or computer watch or whatever) to approve the charge before being allowed to leave (since the store wouldn’t want you to walk out and then ‘not approve’ the charge), and at that point, just use your phone/watch/etc to pay, since you’d have to have it anyway.
About 20 years ago, the US Army got really interested in RFID. All armies have problems with equipment going missing, and they reckoned that if they put an RFID chip into each and every piece of issue equipment, they’d do a lot better at finding the stuff that had been “Lost, Sir!”
Then someone pointed out that this would make it easy to make landmines that only blew up people who were wearing or carrying US equipment. There isn’t a way round that problem and the scheme had to be abandoned.
Musk’s brain chip is “hack proof” because it’s a SENSOR. Also, that is not at all what that saying means?? It’s referring to the inevitability of knockoff products?
There’s always a back end somewhere. I can hack THAT.
Through that sensor.
If it’s a strictly passive sensor then it can’t fry your brain or whatever, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be hacked.
Funnily enough, I have a similar view about eugenics. The idea of using biotechnology to make ourselves better is an incredible one.
The problem is that no-one, whether individual person or group, could ever be truly trusted with defining “better”.
The people that so far HAVE tried have usually been utter monsters using it as justification for all kinds of atrocities.
Especially any sort of group consensus that grants them power over the individual. As much as people kvetch about hierarchies, consensus based decision making can be incredibly pathological since it diffuses accountability of the decision makers in both perception and practice.
Would you consider biotechnological enhancement more, practical if there was a tradeoff if it required verified sterilization or similar existing natural condition, for a categorial range of customized genetic alteration augmentations exclusively for consenting adult humans?
A big one that will likely hit if not interrupted, is longevity treatments.
Trusting others to define “better” isn’t that big a problem. Trusting them not to turn eugenics into a death cult is.
Well, I am confident that the vast majority of humanity if given the choice would easily agree that to make ourselves and future generations biologically immortal and forever young, optimize our physical and mental abilities to the best of peak human or animal kingdom, and remove as many inborn factors for disease, disability, and evolution flaws as possible would be very desirable things. Basically the immortal genius supersoldier with perfect health package. I think we could also make the vast majority agree to a few other useful tweaks such as innate reproductive control.
Check out The Uglies, a trilogy by Scott Westerfeld. Or a movie based on the first book (same name) was release a few months ago on Netflix.
Bharda (I’m specifying because sometimes replies are ordered funny) is essentially making the old John Adams angels argument from the Federalist Papers. If men were angels, we wouldn’t need any form of government to limit people, and if angels governed men, we wouldn’t need any limits on government power. Their solution was to balance power between groups of people to limit the power they could inflict on the populace. It’s an imperfect solution, of course, because men are imperfect. It’s the old Churchill line, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”.
And that’s always been the claim of authoritarian governments like the Soviet Union, China, Nazi Germany etc. That their leaders are angels and people can trust them with unlimited power to regulate every choice over the populace because they know what’s right and will always make the right decision for every person. That taking a person and making them a Bureaucrat somehow magically transforms them into an angel. That a government can manage and control the lives of millions of people with unerring accuracy.
Now we look on totalitarian forms of government as evil, but Mussolini first coined the term as a positive description, it was his shorthand for “cradle to the grave” Socialism, the notion that the government would always be there to take care of you and do whatever you needed, you just don’t need to worry your pretty little head about it.
That you focus exclusively on governmental tyranny, without acknowledging my original assertion about _private_ actors and their propensity to exploit others for personal profit, is suggestive. Especially in combination of your breezily ignoring my point about consensus-based oversight.
Should I assume you are yet another bad faith actor, trying to sneak through the passive stance that consensus is impossible, cooperation is fiction, and that the individual must always and at all times be permitted to assert their own Will to Power, regardless of the consequences for any other people?
Not at all. I focused exclusively on governmental tyranny because governments exploit people at the barrel of a gun. Of course private actors exploit others for personal profit. A completely Anarcho-Capitalist form of government would be as much a disaster as a completely Communist government. That’s the entire point of the American founders balancing power between competing groups. They realized that private power couldn’t be trusted anymore than governmental power, hence the regulation of the private sector by the government while putting limits on what the government could inflict on people.
As far as “consensus-based oversight”, that’s just the new name for humanity triumphing over evolution. The New Soviet Man! The Aryan! The Great Leap Forward! No more will man think of himself as an individual or consider his family, every decision he makes will be made for the good of the Great Collective and society at large!
Ah, yes, when a group of people agree together that drinking water should not be filled with arsenic and chlorine, that is the Dissolution of The Individual!
Dude, give it up.
People can all agree on some things, if not everything, and the whole point of _consensus_ is that all the participants _consent_ to the final decision made.
I get what you and Dabbler are talking about, really. However, the pragmatic transhumanist in me keeps wondering why Dabbler could not do what Cora eventually ended up doing. I.e. vat-grow a biological replacement of Peggy’s leg under conditions strictly controlled by herself alone to prevent any tech leak. She says she lacks the know-how to do it by magic with a regrowth spell and I believe her. However, I find it hard to believe she cannot do it by bioengineering means, given this seems a rather vanilla healthcare task for galactic society. If Dabbler doesn’t know how to do it herself, why not to ask any of her alien contacts to do it for her, starting with Cora herself?
Broadly speaking, if I had a choice, to replace a lost limb or organ or to address other disability-removal or personal enhancement issues is a task I’d prefer to do with biotechnology means rather than cybernetic ones if possible, for various reasons. To quote one, much less need for long-term maintainance from the recipient. Potential for abuse is more or less the same for cybernetics and genegineering, just in different ways.
Because Dabbler, for all her smug superiority, doesn’t have the skill-set to do that. Or a lot of other things. Given all the times she’s suddenly become limited for plot reasons, she’s basically a hobbyist.
Sorry, kid. Hierarchy is baked into the very structure of nervous systems. Every creature from mushroom to insect to mammal does hierarchy. You wanna get rid of them, you’re going to have to re-engineer biology from the bottom up and somehow not have them declare you god.
You need to stop bouncing on Jordan Peterson’s lap.
That _some_ hierarchical structures exist in nature does not innately justify all hierarchies, least of all those specifically created as conscious acts within a social framework.
Many species have no social structures (unless you count mating behavior between otherwise solitary animals, which is not relevant to the topic). Even amongst those that do, the specifics can differ enormously. Dogs have strongly cooperative social behavior. Cats are more focused on preserving their personal freedom. Chickens have a strict hierarchy of dominance. Hive insects all have their inherent roles and no concept of deviating from them. And those mushrooms you mentioned? A fungal colony is arguably a single organism.
There are many other examples I could list, but the point is that there is so much variation and so little reliable overlap that trying to use them to justify claims that hierarchy in human society is inevitable requires diluting the word almost to meaningless.
It’s the usual right wing sleight of hand, intended to justify maintaining a status quo which the speaker finds advantageous, or at least comfortably familiar.
And since they can’t imagine anyone thinks or feels differently, they they assume anyone suggesting that a given hierarchy needn’t be there is in fact nefariously plotting to impose a new, different hierarchy with themselves at the top.
It’s honestly pitiable.
One true ‘recent’ inventor: Shuji Nakamura
“Necessity is the Mother of Invention.” – Plato
“However, GREEDis more than willing to take that Mother and do HORRIBLE things to her.” – Deus
That Brainalyzer sounds like something Enlongated Muskrat was pitching. Now, the nefarious aspect seems more plausible. Art imitates life.
“Would you trust Facebook or Twitter or Playstation/Sony or literally any company to install hardware into your brain?”
I would trust a doctor to install a approved medical device into my body.
Like people already do with pacemakers and fillings, every day of the year.
A doctor is not even close to the same as a corporation, especially money vacuums like Dave listed.
Regulatory capture and the worldwide retreat of democracy in the,face of fascism and corruption make that approval a tissues thin shield
Doctors are slaves to whomever controls their credentials.
For example I’ve seen doctors state that there was no danger to burnpits to dispose of toxic waste.
And Chubbyemu has a video on that topic “A Soldier Was Exposed To A Burnpit. This Is What Happened To Her Organs.”
So temper your faith with a little healthy skepticism, otherwise there will be those who will exploit it.
Another case in point. I worked with a psychiatrist at a large psychiatric hospital. Dr. C was personable, well liked and generally pleasant to work with. He was regarded as knowledgeable with regard to a forensic patient population. He has written a couple of books on Texas history. He also believed that all attractive and or intelligent people were descended from people who had mated with space aliens. He was also shilling for a company that manufactured a “Brain Wave Stimulator” that was supposed to sympathetically stimulate Alpha waves in the brain via a couple of electrodes attached to the ears. It was FDA approved but my own observation was that it’s efficacy was questionable, at least in a psychiatric setting. After he had subbed on my program it came out that he used information from the use of the device at the hospital where we worked to write a paper supporting the use of the device. S#!t hit the fan when it turned out that he had not requested permission to use the data and hadn’t run any thing through the hospital’s ethics committee. Dr. C. got fired (or was told to resign. He worked on my program but wasn’t a part of my supervisory line.) and every one of the devices was gathered up and along with every bit of associated literature was destroyed. The moral of the story is that even competent doctors can be lured with easy money and that is how you get those medical testimonials that companies are so proud of in their commercials.
“I would trust a doctor to install a approved medical device into my body.”
What if it has a hackable interface? They only have to beat the security once….
“Knowledge of your organization’s protocols for potential attacks on medical devices should be shared during new hire orientation, security training or both. Clinicians should understand the risks that cybersecurity threats of medical devices pose to patient safety and the specific controls in place to reduce those risks.
Each organization should have IT security professionals to help answer any questions on the policy and governance associated with medical devices. If your organization does not, ask your supervisor for information and/or resources allowing you to learn more about the threat. Vendors or manufacturers of medical devices may need to be engaged to understand vulnerabilities, risks, and appropriate protection and response measures.”
https://405d.hhs.gov/
I think that should have been “software” rather than “hardware”. As for implanted hardware, there are already instances of people with fairly critical implants who have had to deal with the companies that made the implants going out of business, so repairs, or even routine maintenance (no machine is 100% reliable indefinitely) are unobtainable.
Even if you trust the doctor installing it, do you trust the corporation that designed/developed it?
Because that’s what DaveB’s asking. Not about the doctor doing the surgery, but the design of the device itself.
“I would trust a doctor to install a approved medical device into my body.”
Which means the company doesn’t need to buy you, just the doctor. Cheaper that way too.
This is it a really pleasing way to introduce Peggy to the greater world of Aliens/Succubus/Demons that she feel into. I get the feeling that the moment she found out about THAT part of Dabbler’s personality she was more than interested in finding out more.
The whole of this fleshing out just makes me more curious to find out how they Heck Math got involved.
Wasn’t he recruited on the premise that fighting supervillains would be a challenge when his skills had exceeded any other mortal competition?
I got Dabbler reference. Had Maxima Dremed of a Jeannie?
As much as I dislike it, I cannot disagree with Dabbler’s cynicism.
That’s one reason I really hate all the Ancient Astronaut stuff. It all basically comes down to because we can’t figure out how ancient people did something and we must be smarter than they were they must have had help from aliens. No, ancient people were just as smart as we are and it’s even more impressive to think that they were able to do the things they did without modern technology.
It is also disproportionately aimed at ‘brown’ communities. Most ancient astronaut theories posit thing such as ‘the egyptians were clearly not advanced enough to build these pyramids’ or ‘the Mayans also built pyramids, how could they have possibly figured that out?’ They don’t question how the various castles and cathedrals of Europe were built.
If anything they might have been somewhat smarter from needing to deal with problems we simply don’t have to deal with currently (although in the future… how fast can you learn?). They also had a lot of time to sit and think problems through to figure out how to build flood control systems and ancient sacred oil vending machines and clockwork astrolabes. Just look at any of our modern recipes for food and other things, some of them are outrageous and require specific steps that sometimes are meandering in the most weird ways just to get ingredients. Like bread. It isn’t just grinding wheat into flower and getting water, it’s also cultivating and picking and shucking and a lot of other things. Then someone decided “what if I just didn’t make bread. Leave it here for a week and come back. Wait, it’s now sweating? Smells kind of bad. Meh, I’ll drink it! Oh, tastes nice. Feels like eating rotten fruit to!”. And boom, there’s human civilization happening.
But, yeah, it’s a lot more impressive to see what humans can accomplish when they make a dedicated effort.
Dave: “Any publicly traded company is afflicted with institutionalized enshitification”
Really??? Only publicly traded companies? Private companies are altruistic?
You have much more faith in humanity than I do.
A privately-owned company can be altruistic, or at least a decent “person.” Most aren’t, but some are – I think Steve Jackson Games and Gaming Ballistic are both good companies (as in they are both good “people” and produce good products), for example, and both of those are privately-owned. An employee-owned company can probably also be good. But publicly-traded companies will basically sacrifice everything else in the pursuit of keeping their shareholders happy, and what the shareholders want is profit. A privately-owned company can have principles beyond “Make moar money!” A publicly-traded one generally can’t. I mean, theoretically it could if all the shareholders decided “Don’t be Evil” was more important than “Wake up, you need to make money.” That just generally doesn’t happen when you have a large group like that.
(As an aside, the prevalence of false dichotomies is one of the big problems society has these days. Everything has to be one extreme or the other – either all private companies are good, or all of them are bad. Either everything about capitalism or socialism is wonderful and great, or even the whiff of capitalism or socialism is a bane on existence. Either you’re with me, or you’re my enemy. None of that helps matters.)
A lot of the differences in behavior between publicly traded companies and sole proprietorships comes down the the simple fact that the latter risks a hell of a lot more of their personal wealth by being shitty, while shareholders can flit from company to company like locusts and fields.
The diffusion of accountability there is very similar to how a bureaucrat in an authoritarian collective faces no real immediate repercussions for their decisions over the “less equal”.
What Varyon said. The instant a company goes public is the same instant their real customers shift from actual consumers to shareholders. A private company isn’t necessarily altruistic, they might slash and burn rainforests or dump a million tons of microplastics into the rice fields of some country that 99% of American consumers can’t point to on a map, but they do have a vested interest in making an actual good product. Which doesn’t excuse outright evil of course, but at least some private companies might also go to great lengths to support its employees and the environment, because they actually have high-minded ideals and also don’t have a board of directors pressuring them to squeeze every single fraction of a penny out of their supply chain, employees and consumers.
It is worth noting that this is the result of the shift from stake-holder capitalism to shareholder capitalism. There was a time period where the boards were expected to consider all the stake-holders in the companies interests including both workers and the public. I’m not saying it always happened, but it was the expected approach and people paid attention. You can find well publicized accounts from back then of CEOs refusing pay raises that put them too far ahead of their workers, etc.
Another thing we can thank Reagan for getting rid of.
I’ve met all of Critical Role…..they’re a company… :)
You’ve all probably met the die-hard Elon fans. You know, the ones who bought a Cybertruck. They would be tripping over their own grandmothers to let their hero put a chip in their head.
Careful if you out Elon like that people will find you……bad people
Dave, you left out Sony’s arguably most nefarious deed. In 2005 computer whiz Mark Russinovich outed Sony for installing “Call Home” root kits on their MUSIC CDs. Then, compounding their malfeasance, to miitgate their first virus they supplanted it with a second one!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
However, the problem has its roots in the lackadaisical incompetence of Microsoft of the 1990s:
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/autorunning_away/
If there is a will there is a way and, for sure, someone will always figure out a way to use something good for nefarious ends. Dabbler was very correct in her prediction.
No pulling punches today, I see
Eh… IIRC, “Thanks” would be “Shukran”, and “Thank you very much” would be “Shukran jazeelan”, but that’s from classes ten years ago, and it was just FosHa so it’s both extremely formal and not a language anyone *actually* speaks.
I think it’s a good example of how “cheating “ a language might not get every aspect of its use in the long run
All the Arabic speakers I know usually just say Shukran (or Shukraan), yeah. It was even in a discount code a company sent me when I bought soap from them. I’d be willing to accept “Shkran” as an alternate romanization, I guess, but it definitely made me blink.
Everybody remembers General Jimmy Doolittle for the raid on Tokyo, but he basically invented modern commercial air travel. Kelly Johnson is remembered for inventing aircraft in the 1950’s that are only now being bettered. He also invented 14 management rules that have bettered the lives of many white collar workers. Everybody hates “The Red Baron”, but Manfred von Richthofen’s combat techniques have saved the lives of way more pilots than he killed.
To get away from military stuff, Shuji Nakamura was told to lay off the pursuit of the blue LED many times, but his dogged persistence made white LED light possible and probably reduces carbon emissions by a million tons a year.
Great people are out there doing great things all the time. The shame is that the general populace does not venerate them.
Shuji Nakamura got a Nobel for that as well as a couple smaller awards, during the most recent award ceremony the presenter mentioned the us government estimated LEDs saved the equivalent of 200 nuclear power plants worth of power worldwide per year as of 2024 and that number was expected to double over the next decade. Not just lights, but monitors, tvs, even data transmission arrays in data centers which are notorious power hogs.
Just as effective as a brain implant to cause pain, the same could be done for pleasure. Both would have the same effect on people, they would pretty much paralyze people, make them dependent on the chip for their very lives. Just look at what social media has done, that chip would do FAR worse. Whether it’s pain or pleasure, a brain interface is a very bad idea, unless humans can grow up and stop trying to control each other… Or kill each other. A.K.A “The Great Filter”.
Sooner or later people either understand that giving up personal autonomy is a Bad Thing no matter the method or reason…
The ones that do that sooner are way less likely to have to fight their way out of slavery.
I believe it was Larry Niven who came up with the concept of the Droud – an implant that, when supplied with power, stimulated the pleasure centers of the brain, basically leaving the person blissed out until it was turned off; it was incredibly addictive.
Of course, an implant that can do both could be a pretty serious instrument of torture. When someone can choose to send you to either Heaven or Hell with the flip of a switch – and can just as easily pull you out, or toss you directly from one to the other – that’s a terrifying situation indeed.
The film The Terminal Man (1974) deals with this subject in a tangential way. The implant was intended to stop the recipient’s seizures, but due to a doctor’s miswire during installation bad things happened.
See Larry Niven’s ‘Known Space ‘ stories and the concept of ‘Drouds’ and ‘Wireheads’. its has already been done in lab animals since the 50’s and 60’s.
It’s Already Happened.
Second Sight Medical Corp created the Argus II bionical eyeball, which was sold across the world. It was rather basic, restored the ability to see light/dark, and make out some shadowy figures. However in 2019 the corp went out of business without warning and left hundreds of patients with no way to upgrade or replace the Argus II eyeball.
https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2022/06/how-an-investigation-gave-voice-to-people-whose-bionic-eye-implants-went-obsolete/
I’d say Boyan Slat should be up there on both the list of recent inventors and the list of good CEOs. His business, the Ocean Cleanup, is aiming to go out of business by 2040. That’s literally their goal. https://theoceancleanup.com
There are others that have come across my feed, but I can’t remember their names or projects. … I wonder if I bookmarked any of them *bookmarks are a disorganized mess, though*. >>;
Okay, just learned about TIME magazine’s kid of the year, Herman Bekele. He’s invented a skin-cancer preventing soap, currently in development with scientists to improve it. Looks good, and since it’s geared with an eye towards having it available to places where skin cancer treatment is really expensive, at the moment it costs 50 cents a bar to make. Still needs to go through testing and such, though, so here’s hoping! (Both that it makes it to markets, and that its retail cost doesn’t wind up exorbitant.)
Dabbler’s invoking the Prime Directive better than Starfleet could :/ Besides when you think about building Peggy a Cyborg leg, what’s going to stop people trying to whisk her off and dissect her for the fancy-pants tech? the only way to safely introduce it is on a global level, kind of what Deus is doing now.
How many anime are there that feature this kind of stuff, for good and bad? Fiction writers have already predicted how this can go really, really well, and also really, really badly, sometimes in the same story universe.
It’s a good example of how “cheating “ a language might not get every aspect, most of the time unless trying to be extra formal, thanks in Arabic is just “shkran” , at least in Jordan
Apparently it’s open season on CEOs now. The open question is who put the hit on the United Healthcare guy, and why.
I am amused at Max and Dabler each trying to get the other to loosen their moral codes
read up on all the shit that united pulls and the “why” is VERY easily answered
You already answered your own question by describing the target.
Now for something not relevant to morals and ethics: does Dabbler usually have 1 blue eye and one green?
Yup, since her first appearance. One of them is Bionic. Guess which one.
Yes. It’s been used as an intentional reveal of her identity on several occasions, such as when she was interrogating the redneck about Sciona’s group after the Reliquary break-in.
Dabbler has always had one blue eye and one green eye, one of them is a cybernetic implant that she can take out at will
Yes, but which one is which? Is the eye she was born with the blue one or the green?
Chapter 182, she pops out her left blue eyeball. Year 2014 in the archive.
Machine-Nerve interfaces are trivial. Wanna guess when the first artificial eye that involved direct brain stimulation was tested? Got your guess written down? It was 1967. The setup involved individual vacuum tubes for each pixel and this meant more than 5 pixels was considered [i]weight prohibitive![/i]
We make agonizers right now. They are called shock collars and people use them on their pets.
Making something that can change how people perceive income inequality? There are multiple social/psychological ways to do that and have been for millennia (who uses what, and which might be applied where today I leave as an exercise for the reader). To do it by direct brain interface? That is so far beyond a simple nerve interface it’s hard for me to find words. It’s like saying “Sure I could teach the Humans how to ride horses, but then they’ll be colonizing the galaxy in a week.”
The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. It contains more synapses than there are stars in the entire visible universe. It’s also highly plastic. To induce consistent, subtle, changes in attitude via direct nerve input would require the chip to have such sophisticated AI that it’s own brilliance would be a far greater threat than it’s effects on the host.
Sooooo….. you’re going to elaborate on how Cora apparently changed everyone’s mind then, right?
I mean, this whole arc started with Cora mentioning that the leg is ready and nobody at the table was like “but interfaces = mind control and agony and also you should accomplish that on your own I’m not giving you the key”.
Cora grew a new biological leg, not built a cybernetic one. The only nerve interfaces are ones Peggy was born with.
Dabbler is talking about bionic limbs, while Cora grew an actual biological replacement limb, which won’t need an interface chip to work.
The thing with Cora is that she is providing a product that is at least superficially indistinguishable from the real thing, not the technique for making it. Peggy gets a biologically normal leg not the technology for growing it. The complications have been discussed previously but the leg wouldn’t violate the directive. Think of it as a person going to another country to have a medical procedure that doesn’t exist where they live.
I am amused at Max and Dabler each trying to get the other to loosen their moral codes
As a writer I’m all for speculative fiction serving up big gobs of cyberpunk (with all attendant issues Dabbler waves at here), but if I put on my Great Mancini turban and hold the envelope to my forehead my answer has be be . . . Try again later. Really, I will be enormously surprised if we see anything like common commercial brain implants for “cyberjacking” in the next decades, certainly for nothing less than severe medical need. I doubt we’ll ever see anything like it in this century. Why? For the same reasons we don’t have flying cars.
Flying cars have been a staple of science-fiction since the mid-1900s, but although we now have the tech to make something that answers to the general description of flying cars, and have for decades, we have yet to see a commercial road-to-air flying car. We’re finally creeping up on it now . . . but it will cost more than a middle-class home.
Additionally, we could have had “flying cars” decades ago in the form of one or two-seater ultralights for commuting, but they’re still strictly recreational. That’s where the economics leaves off and the externalities come in; like public safety laws. Imagine how much more dangerous roads would be if we could use them as takeoff and landing strips at whim, or our city skies could get with unrestricted low-level flying. Collision city. When we do get those million-dollar flying cars, they’re going to be so severely regulated that you might as well have just bought a personal helicopter or pro-engine plane.
For the same sorts of reasons, I doubt that brain-chipping will ever become a common choice, again outside of medical necessity. The externalities will always outweigh the conveniences.
I think we should concentrate on fully autonomous cars before we go for flying. People get into enough trouble in two dimensions so I shudder to imagine what some get up to when you add a third. If you could manage a self-driving air car I think it could be very useful in urban areas, with some kind of control system to let cars communicate in order to avoid collisions and plan the most efficient route. Stacking traffic vertically would greatly expand capacity without building new roads. Some existing streets might even be converted to walkways, parks and gardens. (I’d probably want to maintain at least a basic street grid, if only for emergency vehicles.) Barring some totally unforeseen breakthrough, air cars are always going to have a fairly limited range due to the energy costs of flight. This would be less of a problem in urban areas. Imagine being able to commute to work quickly since there’s less congestion. Your car could then land on the roof of a parking garage, drive itself to an open parking space and plug itself into a charger so its’ ready to take you home at the end of the day. Possibly even better, most cars could be operated by something like a taxi/ride-share service. Instead of needing to buy a car, just whistle one up when you need it. Keeping cars in service instead of spending most of the day sitting in a parking lot would reduce the total number of cars needed. (Yes, I realize keeping the car running most of the time would accelerate wear and tear, but the cost of more frequent service and replacement would be spread among all users and would probably cost each of them less than owning their own.) It could also improve mobility for people who can’t drive due to age or health issues. Eliminating, or at least greatly reducing, the risk from impaired drivers would be another bonus.
The technology necessary to make this work isn’t quite here yet, but most of it is just an extension of existing tech. Current self-driving cars are far from perfect, but they’re already safer than the average human driver. (When they do crash it’s often caused by a human driver in another car.) Given range limitations, people in rural areas are likely to remain mostly earthbound for a lot longer and commercial aircraft will continue to be more practical for long-distance travel.
As for neural implants, I agree that early models are likely to be limited to cases where they can help overcome severe disability. Because of both evolving technology and security concerns I certainly wouldn’t sign up as an early adopter. But as the technology matures I can imagine people using them for non-medical reasons. Like many other technologies they’d probably start out as either toys for the wealthy or expensive tools for business and government, but further technological evolution and economies of scale could eventually make them available to the masses. Granted, I won’t even try to predict any timeline on this.
Disclaimer: I’ll cheerfully admit I could be wrong about everything I just wrote.
Getting an implant to interpret the signals needed to drive leg muscles would be orders of magnitude easier than interpreting the neuron signals/pattern for the concept of “leg”, much less changing the patterns to conform with concepts like “income” imposed from nefarious corporations or political parties.
There’s that too. When computer technology first started to really hit its stride, computer scientists thought truly self-aware computers were “right around the corner.” They had no idea how truly complex organic brains were or what it would take to emulate them, so . . . True brain-hacking technology won’t truly arrive until we’ve advanced far beyond our current understanding of the brain.
The software side of implants is a hot mess already and I can’t see it improve under the current economic model unless there are strict laws and regulations that force corporations to be better.
But what I think is just as critical is the hardware side. Look at our current consumer electronics. Most of the stuff on the market isn’t supposed to work for more than two years, at best. You’re supposed to replace your phone, car and other stuff every few years and to “encourage” that, the lifetime of the product is limited by design.
So, who’d want to undergo brain surgery to get a device that might break down in a few months, which would require more surgery? What about maintenance and repair?
But, let’s assume that only high quality materials are used, there are strict regulations and excellent QA… your implant would still be obsolete within a few years. What happens then?
We already had the case that certain medical implants stopped working because the company who made them went under and shut down the servers.
Progress, especially in fields that suddenly receive a lot of attention/investment capital, can be really fast. We might go through generations of implants within a single decade.
What happens to Gen0 once there’s a breakthrough and new technical standards are in use for everything. What happens if you have the equivalent of a Betamax player in your brain while everyone else uses VHS? Or, worse, skipped some steps and is using Blu-Ray?
Early adaptors would basically be guinea pigs because human testing is very restricted (for a good reason). There are also legal concerns, for example who is liable if that chip fries your brain? Even if you signed a disclaimer beforehand, the company still has to deliver a working product.
How often would you undergo surgery per year, just to keep things working? Is the inherent risk worth it? Who’d pay for it?
What kind of power would this give to corporations? If your curren phone turns to shit thanks to updates, you can easily get a new one. If your brain implant breaks down, would you even have any alternatives?
What happens if the company you work for pays for your implant (because they are necessary for the job) and then you want to leave? Or get fired? It’s not like you can hand it back like your keys or company phone.
In my opinion, we’re already past the point where we, as a society, understand the technology we’re using and have adapted to it. A lot of the stuff currently in use might as well be magic because the majority of people has no clue how any of it works. You wouldn’t believe the stupid discussions I’ve had as an IT security specialist.
Every few years there’s a new trend and it gets pushed by hard by greedy people with zero integrity. They know it’s bullshit, they know it’s a scam, they know it can’t deliver on its promises. And they still sell it.
Doesn’t matter if it’s “the Cloud”, blockchain or KI… or smart devices or social media, most people who buy into it don’t understand it, aren’t aware of the risks and the often narrow use these things actually have. The damage potential only becomes known to the public after something bad happened several times and it’s no longer possible to hide.
Why would brain implants be any better?
I’d argue that you have a couple of things backward. Competition forces corporations to be better. Stricter laws and regulations often serve only to force them to pay off politicians. Yes, I’ve seen graphs showing how much better things have gotten due to agencies such as OSHA and the FDA. But the interesting part is that those graphs almost always start with the agency’s founding. Extend them back a few years and they often show that things were already improving. It’s a bit like private actors were already rounding second or third base when the government jumped in and claimed a home run.
I think your argument about short-lived products may also be a little backwards. When technology is changing rapidly it really doesn’t make sense to make products more durable than they need to be. I’m sure manufacturers could make a phone designed to last 10 or 15 years, but it would cost significantly more. Customers who expect to upgrade in 2-3 years aren’t willing to pay the premium. Cars, OTOH, are more durable than ever. Many don’t require anything beyond a bare minimum of maintenance (oil & filter changes, maybe new tires) until 50k or 100k miles. It wasn’t all that long ago that a car with 100k miles on the clock was considered on its last legs and typically required near-constant repairs to keep running. There were exceptions, but most of them involved owners who were downright fanatical about maintenance, or commercial vehicles that were built tougher and got regular professional maintenance. Modern cars also tend to remain in production longer with minimal changes. Back in the 50s and 60s car makers might totally restyle popular models every two or three years.
The reason for this is foreign cars. Ask ANY mechanic. American cars are designed to start going wrong around 70k miles (where many owners sell them before having to fork out for major repairs), and to basically die around 100k miles.
European cars, particularly German ones, were made for 100k+ before things wore out, and Japanese cars did much the same, both able to last 200k miles in many cases.
So, it’s by design. The only reason foreign cars don’t totally dominate the car market here is tariffs and the cost of replacement parts being so high as a result. American cars might have status, but in terms of quality are not world-class at all.
Part of it is because the factories being used are often still very, very old, WW2 and before in many cases. They are making new ones, but we’re still behind the curve.
We are even further along than that. There is a technique called “Direct Brain Stimulation” that is used to alleviate symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Punch a couple holes in your skull, shove an electrode or two into the brain goo, wire them to a little controller under the skin over your breastbone, and et viola! No more shakiness!
Scares the living fuck out of me.
“If I have seen further it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” It’s always been the case that discoveries build upon work by multiple people; and sure, it’s more people on more shoulders now, but a solid half of the reason you don’t hear about individual inventors now is because the nature of publicity has changed, not the nature of science.
The last time I heard about an inventor was the guy who invented the blue led. It was a big deal, but I still had to google his name.
“Swiss army toes”. Would that by chance happen to include toe missiles?
(looks around to see if Pander is listening)
This is why I like Dabbler, may act like a total goofball but is way smarter (and ethical)
Trust, like respect is earned not given. I tried credit cards and debit cards. I pay more attention than I realize even when not paying attention if you take my meaning. I still have a debit card, but it refuses to work for me. I no longer have a credit card and have zero need. I keep zero banking information of any kind on my spy…phone. I pay cash for everything local. I am the opposite of cashless much less trusting a chip.
Honestly, there’s no invention so miraculous that we can’t ruin it by getting our trademark human tackiness all over it. Look at computers in general, and weep, ye mighty.
I Dream of Jennie Dabbler needs to be the next vote incentive.
because she thinks it’s important for a race to have its own heroes” – that argument at least is incredibly stupid. If there is an alien up there with the cure for alzheimers or an immortality vaccine, then I want them to come down here NOW. People who have an affliction of any kind will not care who invented their cure.
Even Peggy probably would have preferred to get a new leg immediately when compared to a ten year waiting period on one leg.
I find it heartwarming that no one has yet suggested that the reason we know names like Newton and Einstein is because they were swift enough to hide the fact they bought Glorglo’s used books, and pass the ideas off as their own.
Humans already have cheaper and far more low-tech solutions to do those horrible things to each other than a brain chip would ever be if you don’t have the factories for mass production and medical robots to put them in. The surgery alone would be too expensive and risky, any dictator with the necessary wealth would be better off investing that money into infrastructure and other ways to make their population actually like them. And if Dabbler’s still that worried, she could just use an interface that attaches to the severed end of the leg nerve directly instead of being implanted into the brain. Humans already have a primitive version of that (the nerve is surgically moved to directly under the skin, and a sensor reads the electric impulses to move the prosthetic), and the only downside would be that the prosthetic wouldn’t have all those cool extra functions.