We are entering an era where many of your daily routine is already known by your phone. Granted, it lacks the intelligence yet to act on the information that it is having. But this is changing fast. Soon the phone will be your personal secretary. I know these systems exist, like Siri, but i mean, soon half of humanity will use these systems. What will happen if your phone becomes your mom, your girlfriend, and the local police officer in one device ?
Right now already people cannot even find the bathroom without consulting their phone first. Imagine your phone will advice you on everything you do ,like 'you should not take a chocolate ice cream because you ate pasta already yesterday, and myBrain2.0 tells me that you wanted to loose weight'. Or 'if you turn left now , you will meet a friend'. Or 'in the shoe store you are now passing, there is a model available in your size that you probably want (and can afford right now)'.
It is only a matter of time before the machine brain takes over the human brain. Probably there will always be people who will never outsource their brain, but it is possible that these people will be marginalized in society simply because they do not follow the herd. If their phone does not see who you are and what skills or interests you have, will people want to talk with you ? or will you be treated as an 'un-scannable' ?
It is very well possible that it is inevitable.
The reason i say that is, because the near future will make extensive use of reputation systems. And if you have a bad (or even no) reputation, people will avoid you like the plague. Since it is virtually impossible to make every human to use an online name linked to their real-life identities, every online name has to be checked for their reputation. People who are serious about themselves will voluntary join these systems. And if that is becoming the norm, it will mean that people who do not use these systems, will be left out. So in the future, you will want to be 'scannable'.
So if your phone is linked to the person, and it has an AI that is smarter then the human, will the phone *become* the human ? Will the human be reduced tot he means of transportation for the phone ? Will your dating app automatically chat with the dating app on the other persons' phone? will these apps fall in love with each other?
Let me pause here a little. Of course this blog post is not only about the phone itself, but the phone in combination with other smart devices to come. One of them will be a device that biometrically links the phone to yourself. for example, there is a wrist band on the market (the nymi) that measures your heart pulse ECG, which is unique for every human. So it lets your phone know that you are alive and near your phone. Another phone extension that is around the corner is augmented reality glasses, like Microsoft is working on, or even contact lenses that display the information inside your eyes. But the idea remains the same, you are making use of an external brain.
Another important aspect here is that this blog post is not about massive data mining persé. It wont be googles fault. The structure of the internet is changing into a model where massive data mining might not even be possible. and i can very well imagine that you can shield certain data from your phone to protect your privacy. The future will be decentralized. but that's for another blog post.
So, will we become slaves to our external brains? I think we won't. The phone will act as an extra brain, not as an overlord. Everything that the phone does, we told it that we like that action from it. So we will not be slaves, but we will be in a trans-humanist transition into a partially electronic human. It will be by choice that we render our old biological brains obsolete.
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