Where the reach ends

Five questions this chapter names and hands on.

This chapter sets out the structure of augmentation. It does not settle every question beside it. Five are handed on.

Measuring control. What counts as your control capacity at a particular augmentation? The chapter makes the capacity load-bearing. Measuring it, case by case, is its own work. The chapter does not pretend to do it. The test runs at the grain where the capacity can be specified. Measuring it in particular cases is the institutions’ responsibility. And they would have to honour what the test reads.

Augmentations below the modelling. Some augmentations work at the level of biology, below your modelling. Pacemakers. Dialysis. Some medicines. Your modelling does not have to take them in at its own grain. The test runs cleanly where the body can take them in. It runs differently where taking them in needs further changes to the build, which the chapter has not set out in detail. That detailed reading is open work.

Augmentation across a population. Where augmentation is widely available, its conditions include the conditions of the larger structure. The dignity-floor supplied at level one, the lowest level of care. The access conditions the book’s later chapters take up. Augmentation with unequal access shrinks the shared room in a parasitic way, at the level of the build. One class of corridors widened. Another not. The difference spreading through the shared room across whole populations. The chapter names the condition. Chapter Twelve, on resource allocation, takes up the responsibility for access directly.

Rates that rise. Some augmentations begin with a drift rate below your control. Then the coupling intensifies, and the rate rises past what your control can match. The test reads the augmentation at the rate it is actually running at. An augmentation that begins inside the matching and leaves it over time fails the test at the moment the matching fails. The detailed reading of such changing augmentations is open work. The chapter does not pretend to close it in full.

Layered augmentations. The chapter has read each augmentation as one object. Some are more complex. Their parts run at different layers and give different verdicts at each. A neural interface may restore movement cleanly at the layer of motor control. The same interface may supply extra input at the layer of thought, faster than your modelling can take in. The test gives a verdict at both layers. Such a device must be read layer by layer, not given one verdict for the whole. The detailed account is open work.

These are limits, not failures. The chapter sets out the structure of augmentation. The further reaches are next work: in the book’s other chapters, and in the institutional debate its later chapters open.

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.