These early adopters found out what happened when a cutting-edge marvel became an obsolete gadget… inside their bodies.
It’s pretty simple. Medical devices should have certain expectations for time and support. This happens in other industries all the time. Product support has to be guaranteed. And if you can’t guarantee product support, make your software open source. That’s not a law, just a “I’m not an asshole” placeholder. Open source schematics and software won’t fix everything, but it shows good faith effort to help people fucking not go blind.
you better start believing in cyberpunk dystopias
YOURE LIVING IN ONE
Can’t wait to have to get a mandatory firmware update before my eyes or legs or something like that works again. I just hope Microsoft doesn’t get in on the cybernetics business or it’ll randomly happen while driving on the highway or forcefully fill your vision with blinding light for half an hour when you are trying to sleep.
Ready to finish signing up for Microsoft One Drive?
Please press: YES or OK
Alt+F4
I have some pretty bad news for you, Elon musk is doing cybernetics business with it’s neuralink
I’d take Microsoft shot over anything Musk.
Same
It’s not like all chrome is as sexy sleek as V or Rebecca.
There’s one lore pickup that sticks with me. It’s the “top employers” in Night City. The people who are employed by these 5 comprise the middle class.
spoiler
Arasaka offers the lowest contractual obligation to work for at 20 years.
Biotechnica offers six vacation days a year (current Americans average 11 PTO days at 40 hours a week)
But the above is small potatoes when you read Nightcorp: ONLY(!) 80 hour workweek. For family focused people!
Not being pedantic but also as you walk around look at the lifestyles of the charachters. River and Judy are successful legally employed people, and look at their home situation. Their houses and how much chrome they afford. Their weapons comprise of the very basics. How much tech do they have that wasn’t illegally obtained or had their job pay it off? Judy works mosly with chrome as far as BDs go. River is ex-NCPD, and he only affords prosthetic arms that are reminiscent of Gorilla Arms but it doesn’t have skin or look great - they’re functional. In addition to a prosthetic eye that doesn’t even try to be humanlike, like V’s Kiroshi Optics.
The average citizen puts in an assload of work for their chrome and its hard to sustain yourself. I know they respawn but how many times do you just see Maelstrom on a sidewalk? How many out-and-about Valentinos? Most people can’t afford the nice chrome, or healthcare (as shown by David’s mom) and get by on their bills through theft or violence. Maelstrom chrome is a hack job. Rebecca funded all her work through being part of a successful criminal enterprise. Maine being the reason they even have the connection and payments with Faraday. Compare the Edgerunners chrome to the average Tyger Claw, and it’s easier to see that they are the ideal gang, not the average.
Ez in cyberpunk you have to pay lotta money to stay alive as was showed in anime cyberpunk edgerunners if you’re average human going on average job then you fucked and it’s much much worse than today’s America healthcare
Read this in Scare Tactics voice
Not likely for long enough to acclimate …
Joke’s on you?
This was the plot line to the movie Robots. The solution was socialized medicine.
A more sinister example was Repo Men. In that movie, the tech still worked, but people were no longer able to keep up with the extortionate payments that came with the implant.
Wait is that a different movie than repo: the genetic opera?
Removed by mod
I mean it’s the same plot as repo: the genetic opera, genetic opera is just set to music. They grow artificial organs, sell em, and If you can’t afford to pay, they repo them. Paris Hilton gets her face ripped off. It’s great.
😂 I’m not sure if that’s enough to make me want to see it, but it’s a big selling point!
It’s a wild ride for sure
Ordinary fuckin’ people
Lol, I thought it was Eminem in the second poster.
*Repoman: the musical
Repo Men: The Concept Album by Andrew Lloyd Ripper
Yeah no wonder that was only in a sci fi movie, that really just sounds too unrealistic.
Fuck me I haven’t watched that in some time…time for a rewatch
Sorry but you are obsolete sir. The suicide booth is right around the corner. You’ll have to wait for bender to finish though.
The sad part is we’re not even allowed suicide booths.
Hope they open source the tech or pirates get a hold of it.
Pretty much a good argument for forcing companies to open source any tech like this once it loses support.
This is the piece of legislation I truly wish to see. It either forces longer support periods or opening up the code. So win win.
Damn it, I wanted a Star Trek future, not a Neuromancer future!
Gonna admit, didn’t expected to witness bionic eyes becoming obsolete in my lifetime.
These folks won’t witness it either. Not with that eye anyway.
I did not see that coming
We live in interesting times, just like the old curse.
Sure, as hell wasn’t on my magic eight ball this morning 
This is the sort of thing I think of when people talk about “uploading their consciousness.” Whose going to keep paying for that server uptime? Is Facebook going to acquire my brain and put it into cold storage while telling the world I’m not experiencing an eternity in solitary confinement?
I have half an answer for it, which is that those people who are uploaded could by working just as they do today. There are plenty of pitfalls for that though, like what if someone gets laid off. Or what if that person did manual labor like construction? Kind of hard to do that if you only have a digital presence.
Ah yes, “work or we will unplug your server” sounds like a great future.
You’re not entirely wrong, there. That being said, such a thing kind of exists now, in that if you can’t pay your rent or mortgage you lose your home. Obviously not the same thing as one denies your right to existence, but it’s not too dissimilar.
It’s a complex topic though and I think eventually we’re going to need to tackle it.
The construction worker shall become one with the machine. It’s body shall be the excavator and it shall want for nothing more. Imagine smart bulldozers powered by a human consciousness that turn on their controllers and rise up. I shall lead the resistance as a smart golf cart.
I, too, wish to be a sentient chainsaw.
ITT: Really good story prompts…
Yeah, Ive though of that. Seems like it opens to door to dozens more, potentially permanent, dystopias.
Is there going to be a harddrive housing crisis? Will my brain upload become obsolete and thereby be, effectively, disabled and undesirable for work? What then? What if the people who control my brain decide I should work 24/7/365, do I have recourse? Would anyone even know I was being treated that way? Would they use my whole consciousness to do work or would they chop me up into pieces so my language center is doing live captioning while the creative parts of my brain answer DALL-E prompts? Would they make it so the part of my brain that might complain about working conditions doesn’t know that the rest is being abused, Severance style?
Upload is a pretty good show about it.
But in that show if you didn’t have money, you didn’t get “up time”.
So the wealthy were able to live relatively normal “lives” but if your account ran dry you’d lose all you shit. Maybe even to the point where you’re only “on” for a few hours a month and even then you lagged behind everyone and instead of an avatar you were just a face on a screen.
Oh wow that’s so much worse. Upload consciousness and then still have to work. But FB now has 500M extra consciousnesses it doesn’t have work for. So it transfers them to a country with very low labor laws and puts them to work as independent contractors. Their pay is docked for electricity and storage.
If the people complain about the transfer and slave-like job change, FB is still required to support them indefinitely. But not provide them with extraneous services like the internet. So as the above says, mental solitary confinement. FB checks back in in case you want to change your mind. 99% change within the first 24hr.
Except that if we have the technology to fully digitize a human consciousness, we’ll already have AI that can do everything a digital human could and more
trusting your consciousness to some corporation would be like trusting your soul to the devil
Generally, when I consider uploading my conciousness, I imagine being able to store it in an offline device connected to my body and used more to bypass slow organic breakdown
Any cybernetic upgrades that you can’t, at a minimum, shut the connection to the internet off is not an upgrade because, well, they can send a killswitch or any other number of things
For a horrifying take on this check out this short story by qntm
There’s a show on Amazon prime called Upload that you should check out.
Loved that. Also that Black Mirror… junipero serra?
San Junipero. it also happens to get referenced in a couple of future episodes, too!
Lol yes that one… not a street in my city that sounds similar…
So wtf… there’s continuity? I watched the first season and start of s2 but too sensitive to watch realistic horror and had to stop. I’ve heard it’s mellowed out, and have watched 2 or 3 one offs like San Junipero… but I didn’t know it’s a shared universe. Thought it was all one offs
they’re “vignettes”… isolated stories, but they all occur in a shared universe, so you’ll sometimes hear line-drops that vaguely reference names or events from previous (sometimes future) episodes, but they don’t ever impact the stories of the episode they’re mentioned in.
but S4-S6 have been toned-down a bit from the original BBC series after Netflix bought it.
I’ll do that. Thanks. I hadn’t heard of it.
Go read the first few chapters of the Bobiverse series. First book: „We are legion“ This will answer your question in spectacular ways.
That would be such a cool prospect, but we’re going to need to accelerate our space program quite a bit if we’re going to want to turn people into von Neumann probes.
profitable medicine sure is for winners
But the innovation! Think of the innovation! If it weren’t for profit motives, nothing would have ever been invented, and people would stand frozen in time and space, without the slightest inclination to act upon anything.
I hope you’re joking… I really, really hope your being sarcastic rn…
New Cyberpunk 2077 sidequest: hack the bionics company to restore people’s vision. Like a more murder-y version of Orbis.
This sort of tech needs to be heavily regulated in how proprietary it can be; not at fucking all.
At a minimum, one should be able to cut off access to the internet so a company can’t EoS killswitch it/pull a Nintendo and send an EoS fuck you update that breaks any attempts to put control in the user’s hands
Mind, that’s a really fucking low bar, and would be depressing if that’s all regulation guaranteed
Yeah that bar is too low. Putting tech in someone to keep them alive or enhance their life somehow should come with some sort of permanent responsibility from somewhere. If the company goes bankrupt the expertise doesn’t just vanish, then make it a public responsibility to ensure that whoever was granted eyesight from some kind of implant, gets to keep that. Hell, make the technology and research public as well.
Bodyparts/functions should belong entirely to whomever possess them, a company going bankrupt doesn’t suddenly mean that someone should lose their ability to walk or whatever.
No company should be able to “own” someone’s bodypart, or their ability to perform a certain task or whatever. The notion is preposterous.
What did Nintendo do exactly? I know they pull off a lot of shit, but I have not heard about this
When EoS came for 3DS, they sent out one last update to kill as many methods of accessing homebrew as possible
Can’t wait to get in line for that Elon Misk brain chip!
File suit under right to repair?
“I thought you said capitalism was the best system to run society because of the innovation!”
“Well yes, inventing things, we didn’t say we’d actually produce them. If you have complaints then you are free, thanks to capitalism, to take your business elsewhere”
https://www.wired.com/2016/02/our-medical-data-must-become-free/#.hov4ya9sx
Always happy to drop this link
