A Note About My Speculative Futures

I do not think my utopian future is all that far fetched. We already use prosthetic limbs. I can easily imagine that we will try to develop ‘prosthetic’ brains and with what seems like ever increasing rates of diseases like althzeimers and dementia clearly there may be a need (assuming some other miracle cure is not found). A lot of occupational therapy goes into supporting individuals who have begun to use prosthetic limbs; to teach them to live with and use that limb. I can imagine that even greater levels of support and training would be needed to help someone integrate supports for their brain. One of many complicating factors is that diseases such as dementia do not necessarily progress in a gradual or linear fashion. It would be difficult to determine at what point the AI is expected to provide support and when it remains in the background. I also appreciate that diseases like dementia affect people in more ways than memory loss; that’s just the element I chose to focus on in my story. Diseases aside, I think there are also interesting questions to be asked about what we are supposed to forget as we get older. I do not think we are meant to have total recall throughout our lives. Would the ability to have perfect access to all our memories be a good thing? I am not sure.

For my dystopian future I chose to consider what the dark side of something that I am mostly very much in favor of might be… a world with greater levels of empathy. I note that VR is currently being employed to give individuals empathetic experiences and is something that, for example, a number of charities have started using to raise awareness and illicit more donations. Which seems like a good idea when it is something that an individual can choose to experience. But what if it wasn’t a choice? What if it was a mandatory part of a prisoner release process or what if parents could sign their kids up for it like some do for ‘weight loss camps’? My wife and I do try to teach our kids empathy and we do complain when we do not think they show as much empathy as we would like. We try to create real world experiences for them to develop their empathy (e.g., have them volunteer) and have conversations with them about it. Most parents are doing some form of social engineering with their kids. But it still feels like crossing a line to me to force a child to undergo some kind of VR supported empathy enhancing process. In saying this I recognize that I do have some bias when it comes to accepting technological solutions to certain human problems, like the development of empathy.