Not necessarily a neuralink specifically, just any genre or type of cybernetic implants, if they were or will become available. I’m super hesitant on anything interfacing with my brain so I’d probably stay organic, except like if I lost my eyesight or hearing.
Lotsa old people get hip replacements.
Stick to mechanical stuff that cant become enshittified later.
RIP if you need a pacemaker
Better pay your subscription
Hip replacements with a step counter coming soon
No.
I’ve seen how often tech breaks, gets controlled, becomes unsupported, and can never really get things “right.”
But like you said, if it’s that or blindness, sure. But I’m not chopping off good parts.
I’ll take blindness… at least I can still tell them to feknoff when they try to sell me more trash
I would need a few things met:
- No data flow back to my brain
- Open source
- Not flagged as disallowed by TSA
- Programmable (kind of goes with OSS)
- Actually useful
- Extremely minimal maintenance
If all of these were met, HEEELLLL YEA
Can’t wait to accidentally brick my eyes trying to install an ad blocker lol
Oh man, I just wish I had an eye based blocker right now. These political ads in the states are bleeding into my no ad watching life
No data flow back to my brain
Isn’t that just a current generation prosthetic?
Yes, to solve a medical issue or to genuinely improve my existence.
But if we’re talking about something really advanced with software in it I need open source. I’ve already read real news articles about ocular implants where the company that supports them went out of business. Second Sight Medical Products.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to have an implant in my body that’s been bricked due to some corporate bullshit.
For Funsies? Likely not, no.
For medical reasons like steering a prostetic, yeah, maybe.
It depends.
If it is somehow able to be powered by the sugars in my body, doesn’t need external recharging, and does not have any network connectivity, especially if it’s an upgrade to what I currently have, probably.
If it fails any of those three tests, then probably not.
Yes, just seeing the headline was a yes - but yeah nothing for the brain, just robot arms and legs and eyes for now
Out of curiosity, what advantages do you see yourself getting with robotic limbs? If I were to do a body part it would probably be spine for all around better body support.
You know that nut and bolt that’s in an incredibly stupid place and you’d need like 4 adapters and a swivel just to reach it but then you have to also hold the nut in place so you’d need pliers designed by Dr Seuss to be able to grip it without not getting in the way so you just tighten with the tips of your fingers in little wiggles and hope it will hold?
Fuck that, my finger and thumb have the torque of an industrial impact wrench and I can disassembled a fucking train like I’m opening soda bottles.
Yeah pretty much what you said, better body support to help with aging… fuck that sounds so lame compared to me wanting robotic limbs in my twenties so i could jump really high and punch shit
Yes, if they’re not owned and controlled by some corporate entity.
Considering how unlikely that is, I’ll probably never get cybernetic implants.
Only if they’re open source, and even then its a big if.
It would need to have a firewall, only allowing outgoing requests
If you’re going to trust a corporation to casually touch your brain, you’re not using it, so you should do it!
As much as the weakness of flesh disgusts me, I wouldn’t touch cybernetics with a ten foot pole, unless they corrected a major disability/were lifesaving.
I mean, technically, I already have one. My heart keeps stopping so I have a loop recorder implant that talks to my phone and reports back to my cardiologists.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/implantable-loop-recorder/about/pac-20579708
Absolutely not
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60416058
These people permanently changed their bodies in ways that will have lifelong impacts (as one example they can never have an MRI) just to be abandoned.
I really wonder about the blindness one. Cameras are simple now, we just need a way to feed the information into the brain. It doesn’t need to be anything as fancy as an eyeball, just glasses with a camera.
It’s been done. There are some people with cybernetic optical implants which give limited vision.
The company that did this went bankrupt, and a patent troll bought the patent. The implants are now rotting away inside the heads of the original test subjects, and no doctor knows how to remove them because the procedure is also part of the patent.
I’ve been fixing machines long enough to know I don’t want to. Flesh is weak, but flesh adapts. It also doesn’t get an internet connection, which means I get to sleep at night.
Edit: Thought about this a little more. I think a better frame for this question is whether or not you’re comfortable accepting the flaws and limitations inherent in our bodies as they are. Obviously I, as an able-bodied person, am more comfortable accepting that my body isn’t perfect. Someone with significant disabilities wouldn’t hesitate to fix what causes them pain, discomfort, or applies cruel limits to the life they want to live.
I can accept that other people would choose to change, and their reasons are their own. I have no right to force them to accept a body that they hate, for the same reason no one should force me to accept a body that I hate. The Deaf community has had years and years to debate the ethics of cochlear implants, and their impact on their community’s cultural values. I’m not Deaf, just a little HoH, but I try to pay attention to what they’re talking about for reasons like this.
But as a trans person, I can accept that my body isn’t ideal. There are things I would happily change, for the sake of personal comfort. But having put a great deal of thought into it, I would be much happier to live in a society that understood and respected how I perceive myself, and how I want to be perceived. It would render the desire for those aesthetic changes a point of preference, rather than emotional necessity. An accepting culture has been better for my dysphoria than an acceptable body.
It is a complicated philosophical question. I think the right answer is that people should have the freedom to make that choice, and it shouldn’t be mandatory, dangerous, or open a path to exploitation.
Only if the software stack was GPLv3 licensed (or whichever was the most aggressive version of the license) and the computational hardware was reasonably open as well, preferably completely open like RISC and maybe a fully open UEFI.
I need to trust anything that is going to become part of me.
