What is your biggest hope/dream/desire and fear/nightmare/anxiety for human-technology relationships?
Cyborg Selves in Digital Culture
COMM 190: UCSD Dept. of Communication Junior Seminar Fall 2013. Instructor: Marisa Brandt
What is your biggest hope/dream/desire and fear/nightmare/anxiety for human-technology relationships?
Cyborg Selves in Digital Culture 
My biggest fear/nightmare for human-technology relationships is that technology will overshadow the human aspect and humans would become useless in a technologically, overpowering world. For example, restaurants such as Stacked provide customers with the ability to order their food and pay for their bill on an iPad, which is creative, but essentially takes away jobs from waiters or waitresses who would be completing this job on their own. In today’s society, we depend on technology through school, work, and most things, but it appears as if our dependability is becoming greater and greater, thus raising my fears and anxiety more and more.
My greatest anxiety is the fear that I won’t even be able to go to a coffee shop with someone without something mechanical or electronic disrupting our social interaction. I talked a lot about how this has affected me in regards to my sister on my blog response to this past week’s readings. My greatest desire is that humans recognize that it is our job to be in control of our machinery. Steve Mann’s advice to augment human capacities through technology rather than replacing human capacity is what I hope scientists would keep in mind in the advent of these electronic innovations. Enhancing human life has been a goal in many centuries (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, etc.)…but the humans must remain in control rather than diminishing our autonomy through technology.
My biggest hope for human technology is that we find a way to make wearable computers affordable to everyone. If this is going to work and benefit human-kind then it has to be available to all. I believe that by doing this we can overcome some of the fears and anxieties some people may have about new technology. For example some of the concerns that people have about being secretly recorded or their image being captured with Google Glass. Steve Mann argues that there are cameras everywhere we go and we are under constant surveillance. Yet, the fear of someone using a wearable computing device threatens our false sense of privacy in the public sphere.
post by Vanessa T
My biggest fear is that as we continue to make progressive developments in the technology sphere, humans will lose the desire and drive to perform living tasks and operations for themselves. Technology will be relied upon to perform everyday tasks and functions-due to precision and productivity; humans may lose sight of their their physical and mental agency, because they are seldomly doing work. Rather, work is being done for them.With so many eager minds at work, I think the challenge for the human population is to find a balance between technological and individual growth. It seems that for some of us, our minds are ahead of our physical bodies, and it is imperative to develop a way to keep both aspects of human functionality on an equal, but progressive, playing field. If not, I feel that the existence of the autonomy of the human self is in great danger of being technologically overridden.
The relationship between the physical and digital world has transcended from once a tool that had the capacity to aid the physical world to now encapsulating the physical world. Although I do hope for technological strides and advancements, I do see a rather sharp decline in regular day-to-day human productivity. However, I do dream that technology will one day have the ability to cure and provide aid to any ailments. However, the relationship that we have with technology has become so dependent that we are losing sight of normal human functionality. That said, I do hope that the physical and digital world can coexist in a way that is progressive and balanced. If not, I fear our humanity and sense of self will be subjected to much grief and isolation.
My hope for human-technology relationships is for technology to assist humanity in seeing the world in a more elaborated way. For example, in terms of medical applications, I hope technology will advance further in assisting doctors in their research towards helping those who are in need of medical attention. However, even within such an outwardly noble cause, unintended consequences will still occur. Technology as a tool for human survival can alienate others in different ways, even if they are meant for good. Life saving/changing technological developments will become a question of who can afford it and who can’t? Who will live and who will die? My fear is that technology would redefine humanity completely. The more humanity is bound to technology, the more it is dependent on technology, just as it is dependent on the biological body and language as a tool for survival. Thus, the more dependent one is on technology, the more human the person is. Those who aren’t as bound to technology would be considered incapable of being what is defined as “normal”.
My greatest fear is the total lost of agency that the humans would experience due to the take over of technology. It’s especially scary thinking of our bodies being merged together with this technology that the normal ways of living and what constitutes us as human beings are completely lost as well. The blood cell size cell phone that the man predicted in the video we watched in class also kind of freaks me out. Imagining my cell phone and all the capabilities of my cell phone being embedded into my person. I would essentially become like a robot, being able to control this super computer inside of me with my body. This merging together of technology and my body, and my body being able to control this technology is the part that freaks me out the most. If technology advances so far that we lose ourselves in this technology completely and the very things that make us human are lost is really what scares me. And I already see it happening today, where our social interactions, which is something that is fundamental to us being human, are completely dictated by technology. Altogether, I just am really scared of losing myself, or humans losing themselves, and all of us no longer being human.
My greatest dream for technology is that it makes peoples’ quality of life better. I see it as a facilitator and extension of human limitations, but am especially hopeful for its development in the cognitive science and medical fields. If someone who has lost some faculty can regain the same quality of life that they had before through some technological replacement or augmentation in a way that they were fully satisfied with the substitution, I’d be happy. Say, if someone lost a limb in an accident, if they could not only have a replacement limb that were physically there, but also a neural connection with the replacement that fulfilled their psyche as well, I’d say that my dream has been fulfilled. For technology to provide a seamless service for people in a non-intrusive way would be great. My biggest fear of technological advancement is in AI. I get the creeping fear that AI and machines are not only replacing people on the mechanical, physical level, but also at the creative level. If we come to rely so heavily on machines and computational devices that our own creative, innovative faculties are deemed obsolete, then we, as a species, are also defunct. While I do believe in technologies acting as extensions of our mental capacities and facilitators of thought processes, I don’t want them to ever supersede us in faculty.