Section 7
Impedance matching
Control must keep pace with what arrives. That is the whole condition.
The harder cases need one constraint. The book calls it impedance matching.
Your control capacity is the rate at which your modelling can take new events into your record without breaking the loop by which you read yourself. It is finite. It differs from person to person. It differs across one life. It can be specified in principle. In many cases it can be measured.
The augmentation’s drift rate is the rate at which the augmentation supplies events your build has to take in.
Run the three clean cases again.
A passive prosthetic supplies at the rate the biological limb would have supplied, or lower. The drift rate is comparable to your control capacity, or below it. The matching holds.
A pacemaker supplies below the grain of your modelling. The body’s biology takes it in without your modelling having to register it. The drift rate sits below where your modelling is involved at all. The matching holds.
A cochlear implant supplies at the rate the hearing brain has been processing. The drift rate is comparable to what that brain can carry. The matching holds, even though taking it in may take time, and the brain may have to recalibrate.
When the matching fails
The matching fails when an augmentation supplies events faster than your modelling can take them in without breaking the loop.
The loop is what the earlier books, in their chapters on persistence and choice, showed to carry a person’s going on. You read your own states. You model how they connect to what you commit to next. You commit to the paths your modelling has taken in.
The loop runs at a rate your build supports. Push events in faster than it can take them, and one of two things happens.
Either the loop slows. Your modelling lags behind what is arriving. Your commitments stop tracking your own state, because your state is changing faster than your modelling can register.
Or the loop breaks. Your capacity to read yourself collapses, at the grain where the augmentation works. The book calls this fragmentation.
This is the failure mode.
An augmentation whose drift rate exceeds your control capacity does not upgrade your build. It produces a build that can no longer read itself at the grain where the augmentation works.
The build keeps running. The body’s biology keeps coupling. The augmentation keeps coupling. The body persists. But the loop has broken. And the loop was what made the build an operator, a reader who can say no, in the first place.
The verdict is parasitic, at the level of the build.
Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 8 — Transhumanism and the Augmented Window. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/08-transhumanism-and-the-augmented-window/. The film, Bandwidth does not upgrade you: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-8.1 to APP-8.5.