The Tech Invasion is Almost Here
Human society has been increasingly dependent on technology for its functions since hundreds of years ago. This started with the use of simple machines and mechanisms, all the way to complex silicon-based computers. Throughout these milestones, there has been an increasing amount of regulation that each kind of technology undergoes to ensure that the human-machine dynamic benefits the humans exclusively.
With the announcement of Neuralink last year, it is clear that the next plausible step of technological innovation is the full integration of humans and technology, via the linking of our brains to our devices. This marks the beginning of an unprecedented level of access that technology will have to humans. Never before has there been such a deep integration of biology and technology.
In 2021, human beings are finally on the brink of complete human-technological integration. The mainstream marketing of robots and personal assistants (like Amazon’s Alexa, Astro and Ring), have made it so that the integration of biology and technology is almost complete. Hence, we’ve reached a state of symbiosis with the same technology we’ve essentially exploited for many generations. This brings up more and more interesting questions, relating to how far the technology can go, and how deep these forms of tech can dig to help out its human users.
With the looming presence of Neuralink, and the release of robotic personal assistants by mainstream Big Tech corporations, we desperately need to prepare for corporations having deeper and deeper insights into our lives. With Neuralink’s supposedly unbridled access to entire sectors of the brain, with Amazon’s already-existing information ecosystem with all of its users, we need to clearly mark out areas in our lives that cannot be touched or influenced by these technological developments.
Neuralink for one, has made an explicit commitment to follow a tight set of privacy regulations, during the design and development of their technology itself. It would be an extremely hard product to sell to people, if it was exposed that their technology could hijack information from your brain without your explicit consent. The trade-off for consumers here is giving up the sanctity of their literal mental space, in return for a higher degree of information access and communication.
This same commitment to privacy needs to be brought forth by Amazon also, with their new slew of home-integrated products like Alexa and Astro. If corporations don’t integrate privacy measures into their product at the stage of its conception itself, then we must assume that these corporations are acting in bad faith.
When we invite tech into our homes, we implicitly allow our tech to monitor us, whether we like it or not. Under the guise of ‘user-friendliness’, several corporations have chosen to access small pools of user data in order to give them better and more targeted advertisements, amongst other features. That would spell the worst case scenario in terms of tech like Neuralink, wherein the user’s thoughts could be influenced and accessed by the system, allowing them to provide the user with eerily appropriate advertisements, for products they don’t even know they needed. Just imagine the controversy that would arise if Neuralink was exposed to have accessed users’ brain signals to analyze the needs of the user, or even plant seeds for ideas within the mindspace itself, something that sounds straight out of a Christopher Nolan movie.
Similar fears have been expressed with Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, wherein users’ preferences for products and services could be accessed by the Virtual Assistant’s system, in order to influence consumers’ purchases on a macro scale. Commitments to privacy and integrity of user data need to be made by the corporations looking to have a substantial presence within your home, and within your day-to-day life.
If such commitments are not made, we may reach a point where adopting new and invasive technologies are paused, simply because of the social implications of wearing and integrating with a piece of technology. Think of 2014 and the release of the Google Glasses, which caused several social missteps for users, and those interacting with the users too. Unbridled access to human emotions, private human interactions and the human nervous system could in fact create rifts between users and non-users — a form of soft discrimination that people may be undergoing even today.
The mega-corporations that are spearheading this new human-tech symbiosis have the burden of ensuring that their users’ data isn’t misused at all. When tech gets more and more invasive, the principles governing the use of this technology needs to be appropriately restrictive as well. That’s the compromise we need to deal with, if we want to have any hope of safeguarding our humanity at all.
Project Tinker is a Bangalore based startup aimed at helping ideators with the tools they need to build amazing ideas. To learn more about our services and philosophy, visit project-tinker.com
