Tech Trends in Practice. Бернард Марр

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      Key Challenges

      As the examples in this chapter show, we’re clearly well on our way to augmented humans. The prospect of humans merging with machines no longer seems like the imaginative plot of a sci-fi movie – but is a genuine goal for some technology companies. But with this ambitious goal comes some major challenges.

For one thing, if projects like the mind-reading technology being developed by Facebook and Neuralink do succeed, it could have huge implications for privacy. Do we really want AI to be able to decode our thoughts? And do we really want that data in the hands of for-profit companies like Facebook? I know I don’t. Before technology like this becomes the norm, there would need to be some serious leaps in people’s understanding of the precious data they’re giving over to these companies (considering that most people today, in my experience, massively underestimate the things companies like Facebook and Google already know about them). And the companies offering this technology would need to make genuine strides in how seriously they take data privacy and ethics.

      And at a societal level, we could be heading towards even greater divides between rich and poor, between the haves and the have-nots. Technology is promising to help us live longer and healthier lives – maybe even the chance to live forever – but probably only for those who can afford it. Imagine a society in which the rich are effectively superhumans that live forever, and everyone else is enormously disadvantaged. Not a happy thought, is it? (There’s also a wider ethical question around whether we should want to live exceedingly long lives, given the huge strain that would put on our planet.)

      Finally, as humans begin to merge with machines, we may ultimately need to rethink what it means to be human. Will, for example, AIs be covered by human rights legislation? And what will the term “human rights” even mean when humans have transformed themselves into something entirely new?