Hypothetical technology you couldn't adjust to.

[AM City Watch]

My view of futuretech is rather heavily influenced by Transmetropolitan. It's a universe where there's a major fast-food chain specializing in clone-grown human meat, advertisements come in tight bursts of light and sound than unspool into your dreams, and auto-cannibalism memes are used in terrorists attacks.

It's also a universe where it's possible to pick up a bag of anti-cancer trait on your way back from buying cigarettes, home-appliance nanoforges can produce anything from clothes to food, and energy is free and infinite, because Mercury is covered in solar panels.

I doubt our own future will be quite so dramatic, but I'm willing to take the bad along with the good.

 

[The Heik]

Anyway, long story short, it got me thinking; is there some sort of technological advancement or a great change the next generation is simply born into, that you don't think you could come to terms with or accept?
Be it something as widely detailed as cybernetics; humans being implanted with technology used to enhance or correct the body (yay for Deus Ex!) - to virtual reality hubs that allow us to explore the world safely, removing the inclination to actually go outside and see things for ourselves.

Hate to point this out, but we already have cybernetics. It's just not in the way you think. Things like vaccines, dental implants, and skeletal reinforcement struts are artificially created compounds that exist in your body for extended periods of time, letting you exist in environs and situations that you wouldn't be able to normally aka rudimentary cybernetics. Most of industrialized society are and have been cyborgs for a long time, it's simply not as "animated" as we'd expect.

OT: I really can't think of any technological advancement that I'd couldn't cope with. The fact that I was raised to embrace change notwithstanding, Any technology that manages to run the whole gamut of safety/legality testing will likely be beneficial in the long run (give or take teething problems).

Take for example the "Time Window" technology. Yes there is a chance that people can abuse it, but I really don't think that's likely. First of all, ripping a window in time can't be an easy thing. It would require and significant amount of energy and resources to pull off, which would limit it's occurrence to a handful of implementations. Moreso, I doubt that just anyone could access it, as just looking into someone's past willy-nilly would be a major breach of privacy, resulting in the offender being arrested and the invention's company being sued into the ground. It'd most likely be reserved for recording significant historical moments or things in which the judicial system is involved (crimes and the like). So the likelyhood of having someone look into your private life would be highly unlike, unless you've either broken the law or have done something of particular note that would necessitate clarification.

Besides, I'd point out that most everything we do nowadays is monitored to some extent anyways. It's not like you'd really be any less exposed at this current moment than with the time window tech if someone really put their mind to watching what you do.

 

[putowtin]

You won't ever get me to use e-books so you don't even need hypothetical technology for something i won't ever adjust to. I like my reading material in paper, thankyouverymuch.

this

not having physical copies of my games...
yeah I dont like digital distribution...so what *grumble*

and this

and I really really really don't like (won't use the term hate) 3D, it's shit!

 

[Saulkar]

For me it would definitely have to be the equivalent of a psychic network connecting all people and all computers together vie electronics. I find the idea very terrifying. Something mirrored in Romantically Apocalyptic.

Spoiler: Very big comic

ENTRY: 377:

For several months of torture, the Directorate kept me in their offices, making me file paperwork on their "test subjects", all while I kept sending applications to the "Dead Zone tourism" branch, to get away from towering cubes of the Directorate, away from cities and transmitter towers that were slowly frying my brain.

Centuries of industrial pollution were inevitably changing the biosphere of our world and the Directorate knew it better than anyone, yet they did nothing to stop it, profit had to be maximized, production had to be increased, customers had to be satisfied. Holes in the ozone layer, irreversible changes in the atmosphere, radioactive fallout, wild-life mutations, the days growing darker and the sky turning black - none of this mattered to them.
These changes must have been so gradual that no single generation was able to protest it.
Everyone was happily, playfully, and joyfully ignoring the world outside of the protectorate city Domes and Directorate Cubes. Why bother with the environmental damage reports when the latest celebrity trends are so exciting?
Mercury in the atmosphere?
Pff, Fred Mercuro X just released his latest album available for download straight into your brain!
Satisfied and spoon-fed by ANNET 24-7 people begun to forget what the outside looked like.

The Directorate sold the Dead Zone as "Entertainment" and great fun was had by all, exploring ruined landscapes and documenting "strange beasts of the wastelands" on your mind-pad.


ENTRY: 398:

My transfer is finally approved! Such Joy.
Ironically, my only relief from my daydreams and nightmares is the Dead Zone. There are no ANNET transmitter towers in the Zone, except for the mobile transmitter in the All Terrain Vehicle, but it works like ass and the tourists whine about how they can't constantly mind-text to each other and have to resort to the "outdated" methods of "moving your lip muscles to communicate".

I will show you the World.
Scorched earth, shattered splendor.
Tell me, tourists, now when did
You last let your hearts decide?

I can open your eyes
Take you wonder by wonder
From the mountains of garbage,
To the glowing green seas.

A whole new world
Where the dead cities sleep.
We shall visit them now,
On an all terrain vehicle ride.

 

[BlackWidower]

Digital Distribution. I'm simply not used to it. I believe, if I give you money, I should get something out of it. Either you do something for me, or you put something in my hand. What do I get if I buy a song on iTunes? I don't get to hold it in my hand, I know that.

 

[Alcamonic]

This cloud system. I like to have my work and pictures on a least one portable hdd or usb memory.

I use it of course, but always an unplugged backup somewhere.

 

[Hasido]

I would like to think that I'm so open minded that I would accept any new technology, and make efforts to understand it.


What is more likely is that I won't care.

For the view any time in the past thing, I don't care what others think, and if anyone is going to think that anything I did was weird, wrong, or whatever, what do I care?

Some kind of Lotus-Eater Machine [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LotusEaterMachine] is created? Oh well, society collapses in one of the happiest ways possible, with everyone fulfilling their desires.

A society is created where there are no jobs to be done, because machines do it for us? Sure whatever, now we can focus on advancing art, medicine, and science. If we can't, then they have reached their end, and now the only thing that matters is enjoying life.

AIs? They are people too.

Aliens? Also just as worthy as any other person.

Everyone gets mind-controlled for maximum conformity, while believing this is what they want? Your opinion is based on your current state of mind anyway, so I don't understand how this is a problem.

Flying cars? I never really cared to begin with.

Jetpacks? Seriously, I don't leave my house enough for me to care about modes of transportation.

The ability for me to recognize when I have over done a post and should start wrapping things up instead of continuing on with my thought process? Yeah I guess I could use that.

 

[Ieyke]

You get set in your ways, I was an infantryman in the Marines... so I scoffed at the air force because of their low risk high altitude bombing runs and envisioned them as gutless (I'm jaded, screw you! I made the choice to put my ass on the ground in front of the enemy even though I scored high enough on the ASVAB to have any job in the US military and I'm proud of my giant balls ).

This whole 0 risk UAV thing that's sweeping the military is making me sick, back in my day at least there was a pilot in the high altitude bomber

Silly humans.
In my day we fight to the death with swords, not hiding behind cover with guns.
(That I'm an anachronism is a different matter.)

 

[Syzygy23]

The only thing I couldn't adjust to would be automatic robot enemas.

 

[matts]

You get set in your ways, I was an infantryman in the Marines... so I scoffed at the air force because of their low risk high altitude bombing runs and envisioned them as gutless (I'm jaded, screw you! I made the choice to put my ass on the ground in front of the enemy even though I scored high enough on the ASVAB to have any job in the US military and I'm proud of my giant balls ).

This whole 0 risk UAV thing that's sweeping the military is making me sick, back in my day at least there was a pilot in the high altitude bomber

Ha! Funny, that reminds me so much of the attitude that most knights took to the indroduction of archers and later gunpowder to the battlefield

 

[matts]

not having physical copies of my games...

yeah I dont like digital distribution...so what *grumble*

Say what???

??

Really!?

That is the most awesome ting evar in the history of history!! Darn I hate all those CDs and DVDs...

Also, yaaay eboks

 

[matts]

You won't ever get me to use e-books so you don't even need hypothetical technology for something i won't ever adjust to. I like my reading material in paper, thankyouverymuch.

I will have to agree with you there! Nothing quite like holding a book in your hands. Plus I take some silly pride in my bookshelf setup

Hahah, yeah I love eboks but I couldn't be without my normal books and my awesome bookshelf either. Those things will never go out of fashion q-:

Plus the smell of paper... going to a bookstore
But for me, I love both ebooks and normal books

 

[matts]

Virtual reality.

I'm paranoid right now, the horror of realizing that my entire life could be nothing but a fabricated program inserted into my mind at my own request no less as a form of escapism would break me into millions of pieces.

Think total recall but with more gore and less bad facial morphing effects.

Virtual reality is basically the ultimate gaming platform. Once we have that, there's nothing else to improve on. You'd be able to play Pokemon in real life, have a zombie apocalypse, and that's only the beginning. I probably wouldn't even care if I spent 23 1/2 hours a day lying on a chair with absolutely no sunlight or human contact.

But that's the thing, how do you know if what your playing isn't real and the supposedly 'real' life isn't some delusion brought up by your zombie addled mind.

*Shudder*

You don't
But then again it is not a very useful philosophical assumption, Descartes ftw

 

[matts]

Virtual reality.

I'm paranoid right now, the horror of realizing that my entire life could be nothing but a fabricated program inserted into my mind at my own request no less as a form of escapism would break me into millions of pieces.

Think total recall but with more gore and less bad facial morphing effects.

Virtual reality is basically the ultimate gaming platform. Once we have that, there's nothing else to improve on. You'd be able to play Pokemon in real life, have a zombie apocalypse, and that's only the beginning. I probably wouldn't even care if I spent 23 1/2 hours a day lying on a chair with absolutely no sunlight or human contact.

But that's the thing, how do you know if what your playing isn't real and the supposedly 'real' life isn't some delusion brought up by your zombie addled mind.

*Shudder*

But is it important? I mean, if you can't tell the difference between reality and VR then surely you should just pick the best one and live there? That's what I never got about the matrix. Oh no we're living in a VR program where we can potentially live a vaguely agreeable lifestyle rather than running from squid robots and eating tasteless mush. Screw that! Plug me in and use my body as a freaky battery. As long as I don't know the difference I couldn't care less.

Reality is all about perception.

I have to disagree with you there. Some of us care about what is actually true/real. Though I highly sympathize with your argument I could never be enthusiastic about being completely detached from reality. To me what is real has an intrinsic value. Also, even if we were in the matrix there would still be an objective reality out there.

 

[matts]

...to virtual reality hubs that allow us to explore the world safely, removing the inclination to actually go outside and see things for ourselves.

Like in that movie, Surrogates? Assuming we get to that point, I would be highly uncomfortable living in general if we got there to be honest. I wouldn't want to use a surrogate but I would know that most people would be using one. It wouldn't make me want to kill myself, I would just feel extremely vulnerable (more so that I do now anyway). Especially considering that I wouldn't want to get one on lease and probably couldn't afford to buy one outright. Once enough people get one jobs won't want default humans doing potentially strenuous work.

Surrogates aside, nano-machines. By which I mean, if we get to the point where we can have a nano-machine injection once every X years. If I was born into it fine but having grown up in the age of LOLzsec, Anon and, computer viruses in general, I've seen how vulnerable high-security installations can be broken into. One hack-attack on a nano-machine's programming hub could taint a batch of the bastards and wreck unknown havok on the people who've been injected. I would assume that anyway, the punk kids getting injected wouldn't know or, care.

One more! Teleportation. Star-Trek style wherein all of your cells are broken down and reassembled elsewhere in the space between one second and the next. For this one I wouldn't do it mainly because it would mean I'd be disintegrated in one spot and a perfect copy of me would reappear in another. That copy would go about his business while the original me would be fucking dead. There would be no way of knowing if my current, original consciousness can survive that type of transportation because the only person who can say so is you, yourself. Of course your perfect copy will say "Well gosh, that was easy." but the you who stepped on pod A down the road will have been reduced to less than a memory.

When games go 100% digital that's when I'll stop gaming. Sort of.

Also this: Once games are 100% digital I'll likely only game on my phone or MP3 player, and on the physical consoles I've collected through the years.

I never quite got that argument. It seems to stem from some sort of superstitious thinking about soul or something. You are the particles that make you up and the chemical messages that are conducted via nerve cells.
If an exact replica of you is made, that IS you by definition. Every molecule of your body is changed pretty often anyway so...
True, your stream of consciousness will seize and then resume somewhere else, but so does it when you sleep!

 

[nothingspringstomind]

I still buy CD's. Not out of a refusal to conform or anything, just the fact i like to own a hardcopy of everything i possibly can. (If there was a way to burn PSN dlc to the game disc, i would.)

I've suffered too much lost data due to catastrophic hard-drive crashes or physical damage to the machine in question to go truly all-digital.

That, and the systematic removal of ownership that an all digital future promises is hella scary.

 

[Hydroplatypus]

Virtual reality.

I'm paranoid right now, the horror of realizing that my entire life could be nothing but a fabricated program inserted into my mind at my own request no less as a form of escapism would break me into millions of pieces.

Think total recall but with more gore and less bad facial morphing effects.

Virtual reality is basically the ultimate gaming platform. Once we have that, there's nothing else to improve on. You'd be able to play Pokemon in real life, have a zombie apocalypse, and that's only the beginning. I probably wouldn't even care if I spent 23 1/2 hours a day lying on a chair with absolutely no sunlight or human contact.

But that's the thing, how do you know if what your playing isn't real and the supposedly 'real' life isn't some delusion brought up by your zombie addled mind.

*Shudder*

But is it important? I mean, if you can't tell the difference between reality and VR then surely you should just pick the best one and live there? That's what I never got about the matrix. Oh no we're living in a VR program where we can potentially live a vaguely agreeable lifestyle rather than running from squid robots and eating tasteless mush. Screw that! Plug me in and use my body as a freaky battery. As long as I don't know the difference I couldn't care less.

Reality is all about perception.

I have to disagree with you there. Some of us care about what is actually true/real. Though I highly sympathize with your argument I could never be enthusiastic about being completely detached from reality. To me what is real has an intrinsic value. Also, even if we were in the matrix there would still be an objective reality out there.

I have to agree with Korenith on this one. I actually spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about this a few months back. Not with respect to VR but with respect to dreams. Think about it they usually feel real when you are in them, so how do you know if this reality is real or not? I eventually decided that if I had no way of figuring out which is which I would stop caring and just live as best a I could in whatever world/dreamworld I was in. I would hold much the same view for VR technology. If I can't tell then I don't care.

Also in the matrix movie I would have no problem with machines using me as a battery. I would have a problem with them killing the free human race, but not with the battery/VR idea itself. I mean if the real world sucks so much why would I want to leave my better virtual world? It isn't like leaving would serve a useful purpose.

In a more realistic scenario where I know which is which I would make sure to spend time in the real world, so I don't forget about it. Also because if I know it is real I would care about it more. That being said I would still use VR, and if conciousness uploading was developed would probably go for it (eventually) as it seems cool

Also I wouldn't likely chop of parts to replace them with cybernetics, but will get cool implants when we eventually make them, and if I got into an accident I would certainly get the cybernetic replacement.

 

[Darknacht]

not having physical copies of my games...

yeah I dont like digital distribution...so what *grumble*

This disturbs me somewhat as well. What if Valve goes out of business? Then what happens to all my games on Steam? Looking ahead at the more distant future that is, in the near future that's not likely to happen. And having a physical copy makes it really feel like you own the game to me...

hopefully they'll do somthing where you can back it up to a physical copy and wont need the internet to use it...or somthing to apease us stubborn gamers,

like how they had those first DVD players that also played VHS

Just use GamersGate. You can keep all of your install files and copy them to a disk so that you don't need the Internet to install your games and if they go out of business you still have your games. Its like steam but with better sales and less DRM.

You can view anything from the past.

Anytime, anywhere. You know what this means? It means if your neighbour is a pervert, he can watch when you undressed last night. Rabid fans could watch their favorite stars make love. Every single embarrassing and personal moment of your life is available to anyone with the inclination.

I would be less worried about some pervert neighbor or strangers looking at everything I have ever done then I would be about people I know. My wife does not need to know everything I ever did as a teenager and could you imagine the background check you would have to pass to get a good job. Also even the generation born into this would probably hate this your parents would know everything you ever did. This would probably cause so much stress that people would become Luddites and begin to destroy and ban the technology.

 

[zerobudgetgamer]

Well, a modern technology I'm not used to is the loss of tactile feedback, or "touch screens" as the lay man may call them. Seriously, when I press a button, I like it to feel like I pressed a damn button. I don't like sliding my finger around a touch screen, since I have serious OCD when it comes to keeping those sorts of things clean; if I can't use a stylus, it's just not for me. This is compounded with keyboards. As it stands, I need the subtle tactile differences of a keyboard to know what I'm typing without looking; if I were using a keyboard on a tablet, not only would I have to look at it constantly, but my fat fingers have been notorious at hitting the wrong key constantly.

If we go further down the line to when Holographic projections take over for screen and keyboard, we'd potentially lose all tactile feedback altogether; I really don't know how they'd get that stuff to be solid enough to type on, so I'd have to guess it'd be like that laser keyboard that's out there now. It'd take me a long time to get used to that, and I'd still be grumbling about it until the day I die.

 

[Tilted_Logic]

OK I have acually gave this quite a bit of thought.

I think that your viewing this backwards.

Because we were born in the technological age, I think we will be able to adept to most new technology, but will be able to adapt to a lack of technology. What happens if we have another giant shift in culture that makes technology no longer used for entertanment. What would we do then?

Very good point! I think certain people could have a very difficult time adjusting. I know for me personally, I can go on a camping trip, go weeks without a computer or cellphone and be perfectly fine. Being in a blackout though is another matter; if I'm not prepared for the lack of technology, I can never find my lanterns

I read it a very, very, very long time ago, but that's about how I remember it too. It was so ubiquitous at the point the story took place that even if anyone had wanted to control it it would've been unenforceable. If I'm not mixing it up with another similar story, I think that's the one where they were originally trying to see into the distant past, but it turned out that it didn't work very well for that (more degraded/lossy signal the farther back you go) but it worked great for more recent stuff...like ten minutes ago. That's the kind of thing that causes a lot of chaos at first and people don't know how to cope with it, but eventually they'd just kind of have to accept it.

You're jogging my memory now I do recall at the end of the book they had discovered a way to view events millions upon millions of years in the past. It's Stephen Baxter though; even when I am fully awake it takes my full dedication to comprehend the science he's using in his novels.

Your book's horrible hypothetical technology for one.

Would you elaborate on that?

Many people, and it seems frighteningly common in the most recent generations, have this idiotic notion that any change is progress, and therefore a good thing.

Which is bollocks (also it's a fairly recent idea largely formed by enlightenment thinkers in the 18th century, it is not some self evident truth, just a cultural idea that has been ingrained in western society for a mere 250 or so years).

I don't fear change itself, some change is always inevitable and a part of life, but that doesn't mean every change is good. You can indeed change things for the worse.

And I agree wholeheartedly; I didn't mean the original post to come off sounding as though people choosing ignore technological changes are foolish - not by any means. Same goes for the so called 'advancements' we're making. I'm constantly impressed by the rate of change, and the speed at which we manage to improve some of our inventions, but that doesn't mean I'm being blindsided by the fact we are certainly opening ourselves up to more complicated problems and issues. Someone earlier mentioned the disconnect between people now that we can all communicate so easily via technology - taking the personal element out of conversations can be a blessing for some, but in the grand scope of things we're losing our ability to truly connect with one another I think.

Hate to point this out, but we already have cybernetics. It's just not in the way you think. Things like vaccines, dental implants, and skeletal reinforcement struts are artificially created compounds that exist in your body for extended periods of time, letting you exist in environs and situations that you wouldn't be able to normally aka rudimentary cybernetics. Most of industrialized society are and have been cyborgs for a long time, it's simply not as "animated" as we'd expect.

Take for example the "Time Window" technology. Yes there is a chance that people can abuse it, but I really don't think that's likely. First of all, ripping a window in time can't be an easy thing. It would require and significant amount of energy and resources to pull off, which would limit it's occurrence to a handful of implementations. Moreso, I doubt that just anyone could access it, as just looking into someone's past willy-nilly would be a major breach of privacy, resulting in the offender being arrested and the invention's company being sued into the ground. It'd most likely be reserved for recording significant historical moments or things in which the judicial system is involved (crimes and the like). So the likelyhood of having someone look into your private life would be highly unlike, unless you've either broken the law or have done something of particular note that would necessitate clarification.

To your top point, very true. In my post I was thinking more along the lines of visible/noticeable implants - something like a cellular device built straight into the ear. And to the remainder of your post, in the book, nearly everyone had the technology; I don't recall the scientific specifics behind it, but it was readily accessible and unregulated because it would simply be impossible to monitor who was using it. The device was like a pinhole sized wormhole that could be embedded directly into the eye. The chance of something like that in our future, especially being wildly available, seems quite unlikely to me, but the whole post was about hypotheticals.