With how society has reacted to the meta glasses, it has me wondering about optical implants. They’re going to be here eventually, and presumably will have cameras in them out of necessity. I’m sure there will be a whole thing about getting ones that aren’t back doored by a corp, but we are also talking about curing blindness. This isn’t something everyone will skip on due to a fear of surveillance, simply because blindness can be so difficult to live with.

Are we careening towards a deus ex scenario where the majority of humanity villifies and ostracizes anyone with augments? I always expected that to a certain degree, religious folks especially being what they are, but the reaction to smart glasses has me concerned that the discrimination against people with optical implants might be way more extreme than I expected, from groups of people I would have previously considered level headed when it comes to technological advancements.

Anyway, I was just curious to hear from others what their thoughts might be on the subject. Do those of you that despise smart glasses think you’ll have the same moral issues with optical implants? What could be done to avoid the issues you have with the glasses when it comes to implants, if anything? Do you intend to discriminate against people with augments if you live long enough to see them in widespread use?

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    It’s a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he’s not already conspicuous enough, he’s wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him. Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider, these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.

    Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro’s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

    —Snow Crash

    Neal Stephenson had it be ostracized.

      • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
        7·
        1 day ago

        And believe it or not, this is a REALLY old book. If you notice, it used the word Metaverse 30 years before Zuckerberg did. He’s read the book, he ripped off the name, and he’s trying to recreate a dystopian society.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          5·
          1 day ago

          Hah! Google did Snow Crash’s Earth (well, not exactly, as in Snow Crash, there were streaming video feeds available as a data source, and Google Earth only uses static tiled images, but…)

      • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        Definitely a good book, but you do have to be able to mentally get past the really, really stupid name Stephenson used for the story’s hero/protagonist.