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I know that research is being done and strides are being made. But to all those who are more well versed in this subject than I, how likely do you think it is that any of us are going to live long enough to actually benefit from the various means of augmentation?
As far as I understand, we would need to discover safe uploading or longevity treatments just to get a glimpse of what may be predicted here.
Your thoughts?
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Depends on how you define 'benefit'. A lot of what OA terms 'augmentation' tech is currently focused on restoring function or ability to people with injuries and medical conditions. So we are already seeing the beginnings of people controlling computers with their minds. There are also some basic games that do this via external neural interfaces (sort of).
If the external stuff becomes sufficiently subtle we may see people starting to use it for various things within our lifetime. More intrusive tech would probably require a certain amount of culture shift (or some big advantages) to get people to want to do it in any great numbers . Culture shift may be harder to predict in terms of timelines.
Coming at this from another direction - we are also seeing gesture interfaces starting to be talked about or appear in game consoles and cell phones and search engines seem to be getting good at 'figuring out' what we are looking for with less information. Depending on how far this goes, we may get a wider range of machines that figure out or even anticipate what we want with minimal information or by drawing on less than obvious sources. Environmental Optimization Protocols of a sort might arrive sooner than we think.
My 2c worth,
Todd
