Alerted by New World Notes, I attended the lecture by Kevin Warwick on Uvvy Island this afternoon, antitled “Upgrading Humans, Why Not?”, where he presented his experiences as a cyborg.
At the Q&A sessions I asked him two questions, which he was kind enough to answer.
“The UK has shown to be able and find the balance between advanced research, and public policy, contrary to the US, in stem cell research, for example. Is your feeling that cyborg implementations will be more contentious?”
He said that he felt that since implants were a help to people with disabilities, they would be much less contentious.
As a closed source proprietary implant’s maker could decide to obsolete my interface, to me it seems that open source is the only possible way. Are you familiar with open source software and hardware, and do you agree that they are the right choice from the users’ point of view?
The first answer here was a little bit off the mark, since he equated closed source with commercial, as if open source could not be commercial too, but then when I remarked that the problem was the patenting of the products which would make me a criminal if I tried to reverse engineer them even if I needed to, he gave a further answer very much aligned with my views. He said that patents could indeed be an issue in the full development of implants.
I also shot a video which I will be uploading shortly.