2021-06-20
Man interfaced with AI? Robot humans? Hyper-Intelligent Humans?
This document is offered by a government web-site and I make no comment about it one way or another - except to say that some sort of "human augmentation" is definitely coming down the track towards us and if we do not or cannot understand it we will be unable to control it.
Note that there are copyright and usage restrictions to this documentation, which seem incompatible with its publication on the general internet. I assume that this is a simple oversight, but I may be wrong.
Almost inevitably, it seems that augmentation is first and foremost being driven by the military - no great surprise there but maybe it tells us something about the priorities of those who rule over us. Or it could just illustrate that the military are of necessity our primary group of advanced thinkers.
If we are unable to control it then it is very likely that it will control us.
I think it behoves us all to be aware and to take an open-minded approach to the ideas put forward, in order to consider how we may devise appropriate fundamental guidelines for the oncoming developments. Such guidelines may be along the lines of the Nuremberg Code, but I suspect that additional factors may need to be considered.
This is not necessarily going to be difficult, although grappling with new concepts is never trivial. At one point in the past, the sword was actually a simple (in today's terms) example of a human augmentation (it was of no use to pigs or armadillos!). It gave us a startling new ability at the time and the world was never the same again. It illustrates the fact that we have been augmenting ourselves for centuries, millennia even, but we didn't call it that.
A more recent example of augmentation would be the mobile phone - and contrary to some viewpoints, the mobile is not (yet) integrated into our hand (although some do treat it as though they would welcome the development).
So maybe this idea isn't as scary as some would have us believe, even though it's possible to imagine some extremely scary sci-fi type ideas.
In any case, it's coming, so buckle up and get to grips !
