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Fager 132's avatar

And the Luddite checks in: Hard pass. The chip technology will not stay one-way. It will be a very, very short step from using implants to direct your thoughts, to having your thoughts directed by the implants. At which point they will no longer be "yours" in any meaningful way. Anyone who enjoys the non-stop software updates to his phone will love the updates to his chip’s software. If you don’t believe me, ask me: Canada’s government produced this https://archive.is/d3dOt irritatingly-written document, “Exploring Biodigital Convergence,” exactly four years ago and lists “Change human beings—our bodies, minds, and behaviours” as a goal by page four. “Change” will no longer be a voluntary, internal, self-directed process. It will be imposed on you by the people who know better than you what you *should* be. And who approved Neuralink implants? The FDA? That's the most captured regulatory agency in world history. I'd eat Dumpster lettuce before I trusted anything the FDA said, including, “You're standing under a falling piano. Move over.”

The NSA (and FBI and CIA and DoD) is in your email, texts, and phone calls now. Everything you write, everything you say, and everything you look up on the web. It’s called “data mining” and not “data carefully curated after obtaining a warrant” for a reason. Do you have a driver’s license? Your photograph is in the feds’ facial recognition surveillance database. The US is a country in which on a good day our privacy is already considered optional, and far more often as an obstacle to people who want to control, surveil, monitor, and change us. Anyone who clicked the “fascinated” button on the survey here should use the freedom he still has to search “fusion center” and “real time crime center” and then reconsider whether “fascinated” is really the word he’s going for.

Putting a chip in someone's head is no more evolution in a legitimate biological-genetic sense than a pacemaker is. I don’t know what Musk means by "increasing the bandwidth between humans and computers,” but that sounds like a computer problem, not a human problem: It’s the machines that should be adapted to serve us, but that’s clearly not the point of this technology. AI already makes it extremely hard to distinguish real from fake, and I agree that it’s an existential risk to humanity, so exactly how does embedding it in a human brain mitigate that risk? It doesn’t. It can’t.

Quadriplegics aside, why would anyone want to link his brain to a machine, anyway? To what end? Everyone already walks around with a supercomputer in his pocket, and what do people do with those incredible multi-terabyte all-in-one talk-film-write thingies besides judge each other on Tinder? Four years ago people in this Information Age couldn't even be bothered to look up "common cold" on Wikipedia, and they haven’t done it since, either. Exchanging a swipe or tap for a thought will not transform such people into browsers from the tree of knowledge. But then, this technology is not for them, although it's packaged and sold that way. It's for the controllers of the technology, who want to control *people*. Even if you turn your phone off, you can still be—and are—tracked everywhere you go. Why? Who benefits from that? Not the phone owner. There’s no innocent, benevolent reason for non-stop surveillance. What, so emergency services can find you the next time you stray from a national park trail and get lost? Pfft. The decision to allow a chip to be implanted in your brain is irrevocable. Even if you retain the power of decision-making after that, what happens if you want the thing removed? That’s not a kitchen table operation. That is a leash that you will never get off your neck.

Whether it’s called One ID or Neuralink or Contact Tracing or Vaccine Passports: It's not that I don't trust the people developing this stuff. It's what I trust them to do with it.

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Based If True's avatar

How much do you think a Neuralink should cost for the common citizen?

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