Marwa Kotb and Deirdre Dagar’s first speculative futures remind me very much of a sci-fi novel that I read when I was a kid, Devil on my Back by Monica Hughes. In the book, people live in colonies that are secluded from nature and everyone has a computer implanted on their neck. The computer provides information instantly to users, but it turns out that in doing so, people lost a sense of humanity. The protagonist discovers someone outside of the colony without the implant and thus starts to question everything he knows. Spoiler alert, it turns out that the implant also was controlling its wearers.
Technology is supposed to augment human abilities, to enhance something that we can already do. For example, a calculator makes calculations go faster. It is dangerous when we allow technology to replace what we do, and especially dangerous if what it is replacing is our thoughts and patterns of thinking. Like in Devil on my Back, the loss of humanity is not a farfetched outcome if we allow this to happen. Predictive text is something that I see as replacing, not augmenting, human thought. When predictive text appears and we use it, we have just replaced something that we were going to say with what the computer is saying. How do we know that we weren’t going to say something different had we not seen the predictive text? Marwa’s My Brain Chip describes a great example of this where the protagonist Sabine starts to think of something in class and her implant finishes her words for her. Sabine thinks of the prediction as a brilliant idea and her robot teacher agrees. Sure, the implant gave Sabine a great line, but it also negatively impacted her development; it took away the opportunity for Sabine to think, which is detrimental because the only way to become better thinkers is to engage in more thinking.
It is the law of the universe that for every action there is an opposing action and that it takes two to form a relationship. It is absurd to think that if we intertwine our lives with technology that the effects only go one way. We design technology, but technology designs us back. In education, we learn about the self-fulfilling prophecy where if a student believes that they are bad at math, for example, then they seek less help because they think that there is nothing that can make them be better at it, and then this leads to the student being actually bad at math because they make poor decisions about their learning. So, what does having an implant that tells us what to think do to our self confidence and notions of the self? Will we eventually believe that we are helpless without the implant? The conclusion of Marwa’s story highlights this point acutely. Sabine’s friend, Ali, is denied the implant because he was predicted to have a 10% chance of becoming a terrorist. Well, depriving Ali the tools to be successful in that world’s school system is likely to radicalize him.
Deirdre’s story, Data Overdrive: How much data is too much data? is a great sequel to Marwa’s story. For technology to augment us, it must collect data. When we think of the complexity of problems that we want technology to solve, we arrive at the conclusion that the data we must feed to technology must also be at least equally complex. We naturally arrive at the question, how much data is too much data? Surveillance is a scary thought because if there is surveillance, we start thinking what the surveillance is used for. In Devil on my Back, the surveillance was used to ensure the survival of the colonies, even if it meant doing horrible things to people in the name of maintaining peace. Deirdre’s story reminds me of the module on algorithms and the importance of ethical coding, or human coding.
I particularly like what Deirdre named the company that runs the data collection in her story: Datum Fortis. When I hear Fortis, I think Fortis BC, the gas company. I think of the monopoly Fortis BC has and imagine that data collection might similarly be monopolized in the future. Just as a steady stream of gas is essential to us, a steady stream of data will become essential in the future for businesses, much more so than gas. “Unity and munity” has such a nice ring to it! How clever.
Both Marwa and Deirdre’s stories link to mine about the implants to block ads. When I think data collection, I think, for what? And the answer to, for what, is often, ads. In the age of personalized everything, ads are no exception. What better way to deliver ads than to target them to each individual? Money shouldn’t be wasted on mass advertising when the message cannot be reached to 100% of the audience. If people had implants, well, how scary would it be that throughout your day, you would hear ads? How intrusive would this be? Would ads play while we are asleep? Would companies bid on the attention economy in new profoundly scary ways? I think of our stories in this task as making up a sci-fi trilogy:
- My Brain Chip
- Data Overload
- Freedom Sight