But they are there.
And now, any customers who reject the idea of payment via plastic are
out of luck making purchases on an airplane, even though these are
face-to-face transactions which have traditionally been conducted via
cash. Are those who reject payment via plastic being coerced to adopt a
method of payment they don't want? Arguably, they are.
Another example: last year I helped my daughter register for
college. She attends a state university here in Colorado. We completed
a good deal of the registration process via her online account with the
school. I also use this account to track and pay her tuition bill. As
far as I know, there is no outright requirement that every
student have access to a computer -- although Internet access is a
given; it's piped right into the dormitories, where all first-year
students are required to reside -- but the assumption is made
many times over, in terms of how the university communicates with the
students, how classwork is assigned, how a student accesses the library
and other resources, and so on.
Would it be fair to say that students at the University of Northern
Colorado are being coerced into adopting computer technology? For the
vast majority, no. Many of them have been playing computer games since
before they could speak in complete sentences. But students who wish
not to adopt computer technology are put in a very difficult position.
Arguably, they are being coerced.
When we talk about accommodating the non-adoption of technology, the
classic example offered up is the Amish. On Sunday's show, my co-host Stephen Gordon
reiterated the point that no one is going to force human augmentation
on the Amish. This seems a reasonable projection, seeing as how we have
not forced credit cards or the Internet or air travel or state
university education on them. But without forcing them to
adopt these things, have we as a society used some subtle (or perhaps
less-than-subtle) forms of coercion on the Amish? Possibly. But if we
have, a number of them have shown themselves to be resistant to it.
But there is a distinct catch with the Amish example. The Amish have
rejected virtually all aspects of the industrialized world. There is a
clean break. They accept technological development from the plow to the
wheel to the axle to the bridle. Tractors? No thanks. They fasten their
clothing with hooks and eyes. Buttons, zippers, and velcro are all vain
and therefore verboten. (There are odd and growing exceptions to these restrictions, but maybe they are just evidence of coercion at work.)
The Amish have carved out a well-defined plateau of technological
rejection. It's easy to recognize and therefore fairly easy to
accommodate. But once an individual or community starts up the slope of
technological development beginning with the industrial revolution, we
are much less accommodating to technological rejection. If somebody is
okay with having a telephone and electricity in their home, then surely
they have no problem with radio, TV, Internet, and so on. This is not
to suggest that any specific point of technological rejection is wrong
-- there could be any number of reasons to accept radio but not
television, or coax but not wi-fi -- but the assumption we have made as
a society is that if you're all right with any one example of
industrial or post-industrial technology, you need to either make your
peace with the rest of it or work out your own accommodation.
Don't like paying with plastic? Fine. Enjoy the complimentary ginger
ale and skip the pay-TV service. Don't like computers? Not our problem.
Go to the public library and try to piece together a do-it-yourself
higher education. But good luck finding any books without using the
computer; I think card catalogs are pretty much gone, now.
So can we create and maintain "societies where relinquishment of
technological interventions is not only permitted, but actually
practicable; not only allowed, but accommodated?" Apparently we are
willing or able to do so only where sharp lines of demarcation exist.
If you reject the continuum of industrial and post-industrial
technological development, you reject the whole thing. And if you
accept it, you accept the whole thing.
Which leads me to another reader comment, this one coming from
reader Julian Morrison in the comment thread for another bog post I wrote
entitled What Changes? What Remains the Same?
I know what I'd predict: a lot of broken conceptual boundaries
that people had lazily assumed were features of the universe. Life
blends into machine, computer into mind, information into matter. The
concept of species all but goes away; humanity itself becomes a
continuum. Gender smears out and becomes very subjective. Your
personality might be dispersed over several bodies or share one. Real
individual uniqueness (which we nowadays would call "freakish") becomes
the rule and not the exception.
I predict that the continuum Julian is describing will be the next
clearly defined area of rejection or acceptance. Human augmentation /
redefinition will be the new plateau of rejection. Ray Kurzweil
describes a world in which people who have opted not to undergo
augmentation -- or at least not significant levels thereof -- are a
distinct, recognized, and respected minority called MOSHes:
Mostly Original Substrate Humans. MOSHes will be the new Amish -- those
who have decided not to start up the slope of human augmentation.
So will we be able to preserve and accommodate the MOSH lifestyle in
the same way we have the Amish? It's difficult to make predictions
about how economics will work in aworld in which human augmentation has
become commonplace. Nato's example of a law preventing employers from
requiring RFID implants has less to do with human modification than it
does with recognized boundaries of individual liberty and a right to
privacy. What happens when modifications that don't necessarily raise
those issues come into play?
For example, suppose that synthetic blood with nanotech corpuscles
were to become available in the next few decades. By making much more
efficient use of oxygen, it has been suggested that this kind of blood
replacement could provide athletes with an incredible performance boost
-- running at sprinting speeds for a half hour or more, staying
underwater for two hours, etc. But let's put aside the implications for
sports. Imagine the implications of this technological development for,
say, commercial fishing.
My guess is that the commercial fishing industry would adopt this
technology whole-heartedly. The fishermen significantly reduce their
risk of death from drowning or hypothermia and -- as a non-trivial
bonus -- the job becomes a lot less physically taxing (which would
probably reduce other risks, as well.) Management would like it because
of the efficiency gains they would achieve with these "boosted"
fishermen, the reduced risk of liability for killed or injured
fishermen, and -- presumably -- the reduced need to source and train
new staff to replace those who have been killed or injured.
This is all assuming that nano-blood has been tested, approved, has
few negative side-effects, and is readily available for something
approaching a reasonable price. If so, it's great news to everyone except those
fishermen who don't want to adopt the new technology. Would they be
coerced into taking on an unwanted augmentation or risk losing their
job to an augmented replacement?
With the facts in play as described here, I would have to say yes. As with the RFID chips, a law could be
passed requiring fishing companies to hire non-augmented fishermen, but
there is ultimately a public policy issue of safety around putting such
a requirement in place. Not only is the non-augmented fisherman at
greater risk of death to drowning or hypothermia, his shipmates would
have a harder job to do -- picking up his non-augmented slack -- and
would arguably be at greater risk themselves.
This kind of scenario would play out in hundreds of different
occupations, with hundreds of different augmentations disrupting
standard definitions of expected performance levels and allowable
levels of risk. One factor that might mitigate this disruption -- if
"mitigate" is the right word -- would be the wholesale automation of
many of these occupations. An augmented human might provide better
performance and less risk than a non-augmented human, but a machine
could easily out-perform and under-risk either. If automation of labor
outpaces human augmentation (which has certainly been the case to
date), then both augmented and non-augmented humanity are faced with a
potential crisis of livelihood. If human augmentation begins to outpace
automation, then it will be non-augmented humanity that faces this
crisis first, followed by augmented humanity later.
Assuming the latter scenario, one possible way to avert the crisis
would be the establishment of a MOSH sub-economy. If MOSH fishermen
can't serve on a crew with augmented fishermen, surely they would be
able to band together and form their own crews. Their level of
productivity would make it difficult to compete in the open market, but
this might be addressed either through government subsidies or by the
establishment of a specialty market. People might decide to "buy MOSH"
the way they have in the past opted to "buy American" or the way many
currently choose to "buy organic." MOSHes would probably be inclined to
be as exclusively MOSH in their purchasing behavior as possible.
Meanwhile, augmented humans might see purchasing a certain amount of
MOSH goods as a socially responsible thing to do -- like recycling or
buying organic.
With these or similar accommodations in place, non-augmented
humanity would -- like the Amish -- be able to survive and even thrive
on their chosen plateau of rejection while the rest of humanity works
its way up to the next plateau.
Cross-posted to The Speculist.