Evolution is basically the dominant traits/genes surviving throughout generations. In a sense, due to our cognitive ability we can and could bring on certain traits and even biological traits and behaviours. It would take reinforcement through many generations but an example would be our appendix. It was originally used to process shrubbery such as grass during our early Neanderthal stage; but over the generations we evolved to harvest our food sources from animals etc., leaving the appendix dormant. If we, and our following generations persistently ate grass, we could cause the appendix to re-develop down the line.
In terms of the augmentations in Deus Ex, it would be difficult to say. Im an avid health and fitness nut, and i pride myself in success through hard work and personal motivation. Augmentations to me would cheapen that for me. However, for those who have lost limbs, be it old age, effects of war etc. it posses a huge advancement. It comes down to the individual and their needs to me. But who wouldn't want to have greater strength? Who wouldn't want to run faster, jump higher, cloak? Deep question guys :D
I would be all for augmentations they would allow people to live out there craziest and wildest dreams! Except that wouldn't be an entirely good thing because some people are crazy... But i would love a leg augmentation so i could run or swim faster.
Or XBL if you hate yourself. Also seasons one and two are on DVD for about twenty dollars. It's actually surprisingly smart. In season one they actually reference Bartleby the Scribner.
Sorry to break the tangent from Archer for a minute, but -
I'm all for the advancement of humanity and technology - the more we learn and develop, the more we should apply it to ourselves to benefit our species.
HOWEVER we also have a very big problem with overpopulation. If we were to, essentially, make ourselves too good/too resilient, how will we provide shelter and support for every new, seemingly immortal being?
There has to be a balance, or planet colonisation. Invest in all that moon land now!
The current and/or historical idea of "augmentation" needs to be divided into two categories. First, there is the category of necessary action to preserve a life, or to aid in (perhaps not strictly) necessary abilities. Examples of this would be a pacemaker, regulating a heartbeat to help preserve the life of the person, and a prosthetic leg, or peg leg, or whatever, that allows a person to walk after losing a leg to amputation. The second type is unnecessary, like breast implants or cosmetic surgery. People purchase these to augment their appearance, and while (at least theoretically) it makes a person more attractive, it seems this does not create any divide between people (I've never heard of any sociological study that separates people into breast implants vs. no breast implants, or cosmetic-surgery recipients vs. natural appearance).
The "Deus Ex" idea of augmentation is extremely cool. Those types of augmentations would allow someone superhuman abilities, which we all know would be awesome. But they do not serve a necessary purpose. Yes, Jensen received medical treatment, which may have included technical augmentations of the nature described in the first paragraph. But the other augmentations he received were actually violations of Kant's Humanity formula. David Sarif did in fact save Jensen's life, but it seems that the necessary medical treatment wasn't the end. Jensen's utility to Sarif seems to be the primary motive, indicated most clearly by the blade put into Jensen's arm to ease assassinations. Sarif treated Jensen as a means.
Applying this idea of augmentation to the real world, though, brings up a large sized problem. Now I'm no Marxist, I'm no Occupier, I'm no rich fat cat, and I'm no pro-business capitalist, but there is a fundamental truth that the world does have a divide between rich and poor. Increasingly, that divide is becoming a divide between the obscenely wealthy and the rest of society. Augmentations of this sort would cost a lot of money, and further divide the rich from everyone else. Permitting augmentations of the second type, the super-human abilities, would actually destroy the value of merit. Perhaps phrased better, the permission of augmentations would have wealth absorb merit. Regardless of the natural merits of those not wealthy enough to purchase augmentations, the rich could purchase more augmentations that put their skills at a level with which no natural human could compete.
Another moral question brought up is the more general question science frequently faces, and oftentimes seems (to me at least) to ignore. Science wants to advance, and scientific advancements are a good thing. But what ought science to do? The question "can we do it?" must be accompanied by, or preceded by, the question "should we do it?" Augmentations of the Deus Ex kind could provide some cool stuff, but they could also provide the means for sheer brutality in warfare, between governments or corporations, while simultaneously diminishing the plausibility of the poorer groups of people to defend themselves.
I would be too afraid of being somewhat controlled by them. Kinda like the RFID chip thing, as nutty as that makes me sound. (By controlled I don't mean literal control of my body, just used to influence me or ect.)
If it wasn't for that or the fact it would be majorly expensive, then sure. I don't really care about the "specialty" of my body. I would like to keep my human eyes, though.
There wouldn't be any fear of being controlled by them. That's just silly nonsense. If you're looking at augmentations, real world artificial body parts, then there no way they would ever end up taking over you. That whole Doc Oct thing from Spider Man 2 is fantastic narrative device, but 100 percent unrealistic.
It's like worrying that your car can take you over. And the car analogy is pretty apt for this. Any artificial body part is going to be pretty 'dumb', spending most of it's computational power on just reading our intentions and sending back the proper information. Its you driving it, it can't think own it's on in any real meaningful way.
And while the augments from Dues Ex (well some of them at least) are plausible in the real world, we're no were near having that kinda of augmentation. OP estimation that we can have that level of cybernetic advance in 15 years is laughable.
There's a lot of issues with cybernetics implants.
First, the body doesnt like foreign elements. It does an especially good job at isolating them, then breaking them down.
Second, we don't know how the brain (conscious or unconscious) actually control limbs. We're still very much in an infancy at this level, but we havent really made any improvements. You hear the story of a paralyzed person controlling a computer with their thoughts, but what you don't hear is how unreliable it is, and how inaccurate it is, and how unresponsive it is. And we adopted that tech for the use of limbs, but they're shoddy at best. Fist, we can't tell what's noise from muscles simply moving around, or twitching. And when you're being active, there a lot more signal noise in the body. We can't filter through it. We dont know what is the actual signal. And we dont even really know where limbs are really controlled, there some evidence to suggest that the Spinal Cord might actually be closer to a Data Trunk and a secondary CPU. And if limb control is in the spine, that makes things even harder.
We don't know how body knows where the limb is that. There a technical term for it, but it's your sense of where you know your body position even without seeing it. We have no idea how that is done. Complete and utter mystery.
We cant even measure all the neurons firing instead a person head right now. And from a recent article in WIRED, we probably wont for another two hundred years.
There wouldn't be any fear of being controlled by them. That's just silly nonsense. If you're looking at augmentations, real world artificial body parts, then there no way they would ever end up taking over you. That whole Doc Oct thing from Spider Man 2 is fantastic narrative device, but 100 percent unrealistic.
It's like worrying that your car can take you over. And the car analogy is pretty apt for this. Any artificial body part is going to be pretty 'dumb', spending most of it's computational power on just reading our intentions and sending back the proper information. Its you driving it, it can't think own it's on in any real meaningful way.
And while the augments from Dues Ex (well some of them at least) are plausible in the real world, we're no were near having that kinda of augmentation. OP estimation that we can have that level of cybernetic advance in 15 years is laughable.
There's a lot of issues with cybernetics implants.
First, the body doesnt like foreign elements. It does an especially good job at isolating them, then breaking them down.
Second, we don't know how the brain (conscious or unconscious) actually control limbs. We're still very much in an infancy at this level, but we havent really made any improvements. You hear the story of a paralyzed person controlling a computer with their thoughts, but what you don't hear is how unreliable it is, and how inaccurate it is, and how unresponsive it is. And we adopted that tech for the use of limbs, but they're shoddy at best. Fist, we can't tell what's noise from muscles simply moving around, or twitching. And when you're being active, there a lot more signal noise in the body. We can't filter through it. We dont know what is the actual signal. And we dont even really know where limbs are really controlled, there some evidence to suggest that the Spinal Cord might actually be closer to a Data Trunk and a secondary CPU. And if limb control is in the spine, that makes things even harder.
We don't know how body knows where the limb is that. There a technical term for it, but it's your sense of where you know your body position even without seeing it. We have no idea how that is done. Complete and utter mystery.
We cant even measure all the neurons firing instead a person head right now. And from a recent article in WIRED, we probably wont for another two hundred years.
