Item — HN Reader

It's not just the government. The government sneakily adds stuff they think only they can exploit, but skilled non-state actors can exploit hardware features regardless of whether it was put there by the government. And as we get widespread diffusion of increasingly capable AI, it will become easy and cheap to do for pretty much anyone, and so will defense.

Assuming bio-digital integration continues (i.e., humans keep pace with ASI via neural interfaces), the long term solution is total hardware sovereignty, aka the digital equivalent of bodily integrity and autonomy. We have to miniaturize and widely diffuse fab technology such that computer manufacturing can be done in local small businesses or even at home: automated chip fabbing, 3D printing, and assembly in one fridge-sized appliance you can buy at the nearest supermarket, and it can make parts to build another one of itself.

It's basically reproduction, but for the digital part of your body instead of the bio part. You should be able to design and fab your own custom chips, PCB, and chassis to build your neural interface from scratch, and write personal defense software that actively adapts to threats - a digital immune system. You'll also have the option to delegate some or all of that to a collective, but it would mean losing your individual sovereignty and becoming part of a larger organism in a symbiogenesis or multicellular evolution kind of way.

1 comments

>bodily integrity and autonomy

Which you already do not have. And what you do have, is being eroded further.

You live in a world where you can be forcibly caged for a faulty manipulation of symbols you did not even consent to learning! You can be caged for doing things for your "own" body; in turn, repairs to your body can be denied and even deemed "impossible" because your physical existence threatens someone's illusions.

Maybe hunter-gatherer bands could've been said to have been autonomous. But the individual? Simply a replaceable embodiment for vast, impersonal forces. Your body and mind have always been property of the society that manufactured you. You do not own even your cherished the illusion of autonomy; it's just another behavior taught to you to make you produce more for your masters.

That's a somewhat accurate description, and you could even replace "society" with "universe". But what I'm defending is precisely the apparent feeling of autonomy, which is just called "autonomy" in colloquial terms omitting the philosophical baggage. I don't think it's fair to call this illusory, because you have no basis to define what an illusion is if you accept that all you know and all that you are is the product of universal influence. Included in that universal influence is every instance of experience from which your understanding of the concept of "illusion" was derived, so "illusion"/"real" would refer to the same thing in your worldview.

Now, taking a pragmatic materialist stance: we are obviously bound by physics and cannot move in certain ways. We can predict what action a person will take from their brain activity before the person becomes aware of their decision themselves. But what the brain does to convince you that oneself is in control is probably the exact thing that's required for life to thrive. It was the evolutionary path taken, and it's also the future I strive for, and I hope others would do the same.