(continued from yesterdays post).
The desire to become augmented is an appealing one. The issue arises when we examine the socio-economic conditions under which human augmentation would occur, which brings us back to our quote at the beginning of this essay. Under the current world economic system wealth is distributed extremely unevenly with a small fraction of the world’s population controlling a vast majority of wealth and resources. It is important as artists and designers that we begin addressing these issues now before it is too late for the digital future.
The extremely wealthy already exploit the world’s poor and middle class for labor and production of services off which they profit immensely. It is this class of people that will be able to afford the best and most advanced augmentations to their beings (the robotic hand for Pierpaolo Petruzziello cost 3 million dollars), under a capitalist system, allowing them to become hyper-intelligent and live to near immortality.
It quickly becomes easy to imagine a dystopian future in which these super-augmented individuals may not even consider themselves human any longer, viewing the rest of human populations as mere live stock, similar to H.G. Wells “The Time Machine”. Or in Jaron Lanier’s latest book “You are not a gadget.” A new reign of digital feudalism will come into effect, with most of the worlds labor force replaced by robots controlled by the ruling elite, middle and lower class humans will become digital peasants, working for free just to be allowed to exist (Lanier).
These possible outcomes are frightening to say the least which is what brings me to the crux of my work as an artist and designer in the digital realm. We seem very interested in increasing the power of our bodies, or the intellect of our minds, or the length of our lives all through technological means, but I see very little interest or research in augmenting the things that make us most human, when a warm cat sits on our lap and we smile, when we lovingly laugh at a toddler who stumbles while learning to walk, when we feel sad because we see a lonely man eating a sandwich by himself in a park. It is our ability to recognize the universality of our human condition within each other that makes life most rich.
It is empathy that I am most interested in augmenting. I believe that we can invent technological means to enhance the empathetic response in each other, allowing the world to see that we are all reflections of each other. This would foster greater understanding and cooperation among humankind allowing us to achieve the level of unison that will be necessary in conquering global problems such as climate change, environmental degradation, world hunger and eventually interstellar travel and the next phases of our evolution.
