A recent article over on Wired discusses a Brain-Machine interface. Nothing really new in the article, but there is an interesting section that goes along (sorta) with what I said earlier about forced adoption.
One potentially troubling aspect of cognition-enhancing drugs is coercion: If people take drugs to get a performance boost, others need to take them just to keep pace.
According to James Hughes, director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, that’s not a big deal. “It’s exactly the same question we face with literacy, or wearing a tie,” he said. “In Japan, for the last 20 or 30 years, you had to go out with all your workmates after work and drink if you wanted to get ahead. Otherwise, you were considered weird. That’s putting something in your head.”
They are using coercion in this sense to mean that you are forced to do something out of the normal to get along in society. In that light, there are really a lot of things that fall into this category. Would I really shower if people didn’t care if I smelled??? Sure, sure, of course I would! But I think this is taking a specific set of examples (tech adoption) and overly broadening them to ruin the argument. Having to go out to drinks with coworkers is not the same as having to have a machine interface implanted in your head!
The article just raises some questions and doesn’t really provide any answers (probably because they don’t exist yet). But it just serves to point out that these things will be more of an issue in the coming future.
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