UPDATED 14:01 EDT / AUGUST 08 2012

NEWS

H+ Teaser Video: The H is for Post-Apocalyptic Transhumanism

Science fiction has always been a gold mine for the hopes and dreams of geeks everywhere—in fact, people might still think about the whole meme of “It’s the 21st century, where’s my flying cars?” One of the aspects of data technology is that it helps us become more than human, in fact, every device that we carry with us or keep in our homes networks us with a vast store of information and knowledge moreso than any other before, every smartphone, tablet, PC, laptop, is an extension of humanity as with any tool.

The video series being teased on YouTube right now, H+ (two irritatingly short but narrative packed episodes are available right now) provides an insight into futurist ideas of how transhumanism and augmented reality might pan out.

However, with any tool—especially communications—there’s a danger with mass adoption and dependence and there lies an expectation and a fear that science fiction writers often tap into to write visceral narratives about how technology designed to benefit humanity can go horribly wrong.

Augmented reality or cyborg-augmented people?

This question comes up in a lot of science fiction media and some of the best examples are from the Deus Ex series, especially profound in the most recent Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The technology almost exists today to produce bionic limbs and interfaces that permit people to have superhuman strength—but certainly not mobility, we’re not there yet—and the question becomes: when we do produce that technology will people amputate limbs in order to articulate themselves with a cyborg appendage?

The same question is being filled with H+ with a computer mechanism that can be implanted directly into the brain to provide high fidelity augmented reality and a direct connection to the Internet of their day. In the first episode we see people talking about the bioethics of the chip and the horror elements creeping in with the flickering static of the television broadcasts and people arguing over mass adoption.

This foreshadows the premise of the H+ dystopia story in that the new technology can be hacked.

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution the same sort of problem occurs, a dependence rises around the cyborg technology and there’s also the effect that it can be assaulted, hacked, and people using it driven insane. After all, if we directly wed ourselves with machines we can find ourselves with inseparable hardware. In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash there’s a short snippet about a fellow who had one of his bionic eyes hacked by an advertiser and who now suffers stupid ads scrolling in his augmented reality at the bottom of his vision.

These fears are reflected in modern day with people who have reprogrammable pacemakers (using RFID or wireless) where exploits are found in the authentication mechanics enabling a malicious hacker or even a virus to screw with their heart rhythms. While it’s extremely useful to allow the pace maker to be accessible without having to cut through a person’s skin, it’s still arguable that some things shouldn’t be networkable.

The future is always stranger than we envision

Right now, the potential for augmented reality is huge. We have the Google Glass project looming over the market like a vast cloud of potential and hype—this is 21st century transhumanism, the mobile device extending the power of the person and hooking them into an augmented world. It’s inelegant and clunky, but directly derivative from the mobile device paradigm. In some ways, if we manage to develop it correctly it might even be our next-best-communication and collaboration device for everyday people and even the enterprise sector.

We live in a disposable device economy right now. Producing equipment that lasts less than five years at the outset (sometimes 1 year in the case of most cell phones) to be replaced by the next fad. It comes with a gigantic amount of waste. So changes are the way we’ll continue to augment ourselves will not be surgically—it will be cosmetically with devices that we wear on our heads, on our faces, in our clothing, and on our shoes.

And just like the lessons from the upcoming video game Watch Dogs, these devices will know a great deal about us and we’re going to have to pay attention to our own personal security as well as privacy when we integrate them into our lifestyles.

Being connected is a tool, it’s a transhuman and almost superhuman tool; but in the end the way that we as a society grow from it will be decided by how it’s adopted and how careful we are about implementing it.


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