You missed my point. I realize we're talking about merging the individual with the technological. My point was that you reference your preferences about seeing your daughter chipped. Your preferences are 100% irrelevant because they're based on today's norms.
Individual preferences are at the heart of the matter: machinery inside the human body is creepy. But, I concede wholeheartedly that benefit exists. For example, using robotics to replace a severely damaged limb. It shouldn't be hard to think up more examples.
Directly integrating with the human brain is another matter. I can see some possibility of a chip helping people with dementia or stimulating nerves to get paralyzed limbs working again. EM sounds like he wants it to go far past that. Aside from the medical experiments gone wrong in order to learn enough to make integration possible, there are the real possibilities of a computer overriding a human's own thoughts or a bug causing great neural damage. And for what gain?
We need to accept, as technologists, that the human race's biggest problems are not going to be solved by technology. Education, cultural exchanges, politics, and time will ultimately bring us to a better point than today. We can assist by providing better tools, but we aren't going to be the heroes coming through with the miracle fix at the eleventh hour.
We need to accept, as technologists, that the human race's biggest problems are not going to be solved by technology.
we aren't going to be the heroes coming through with the miracle fix at the eleventh hour.
I really don't know what you're talking about. Technology will continue to progress. Except for temporary pauses, technology has always advanced and always will. If you don't adopt it it doesn't matter. Your children will.
I don't know what this stuff about "we aren't going to be the heroes". Who said anything about that? I think you need to read Musk's words again. He isn't saying, "We have to do this because it's good." He's saying, "We'll be forced to do this to keep up."
And he's right. If you don't you'll be left in the dust, relatively poor and powerless while alive, and soon dead and irrelevant. It's not about right or wrong and there are no heroes.
>Technology will continue to progress. Except for temporary pauses, technology has always advanced and always will.
That's not really true; just ask the ancient Romans. When the Roman Empire collapsed, technology took 1000 years to get back to what they had. That's a bit more than a "temporary pause".
> When the Roman Empire collapsed, technology took 1000 years to get back to what they had.
No, it didn't; overall, the cutting edge of technology continued to advance from the Roman period during the 1000 years after its fall (wherever in the typical 117 CE to 476 CE period you want to mark as the "fall"), even in the region where Rome had been dominant, although the distribution of some technologies and techniques suffered.
This is completely wrong. The Romans had aqueducts, they could even fill up the Coliseum with water for water shows. The Romans had concrete, and built many buildings with it. What did Europeans have after the collapse? They went back to building stuff out of wood and brush. Even castles and cathedrals were built of simple blocks, not concrete.
When the Empire collapsed, there was a massive loss of institutional knowledge. Specialization of labor completely disappeared: people left the city and their specialized labor jobs to work as feudal serfs. They did this even though Roman law forbade it, because the imperial leadership saw what was happening, but people preferred to go live as serfs so they could eat rather than starve in the city.
Name any technology which actually advanced during the Dark Ages. There aren't any. There's a reason it's called the Dark Ages: literacy plummeted and people stopped writing things down.
