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augmentation · neural-interface · safety-review · consent
I organise for augmentation rights and I want this review to happen — here is why, and here is the channel I closed
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ninefold_amaraOP2124-08-08
This is the hardest thing I will write this year and I am going to say it in the first line so nobody has to wait for it: I organise for augmentation rights, I have spent six years arguing that access is being rationed by money and called safety, and I want this review to happen. Not tolerate. Want. Here is the specific thing, because the general version is worthless. The new high-bandwidth line is not more of what we already have. It is a change in kind: a device that lets you route more of your attention and more of your nervous system through the implant than anything sold before, and the regulators are asking the correct question, which is not whether it is safe inside its published limits but what a person does when it is always on, always deeper, always offering one more channel of self. Now the part I owe you, because I will not ask anyone to trust an organiser who only argues from other people's bodies. I took an uprate on the eighteenth of July. It gave me four simultaneous channels where I had had one. I closed three of them inside forty minutes, and then I sat with the fourth one open for six days, doing my ordinary work, and on the seventh day I noticed that I had started to find a single-channel conversation with a person in front of me slightly thin. Not unpleasant. Thin. That is the whole report. Nothing broke, nothing failed, no clinic did anything wrong, the hardware performed exactly to specification. And I did not like what specification felt like at the end of a week. So let me be precise about my own position, because the bloc will quote this post inside a week and I would rather be quoted accurately. Asking for a safety review is not asking permission to exist. A review that is done properly, published in full, and finished on a stated date is the opposite of a delay — it is the only thing that ever takes the word pending out of my community's mouth. What I will fight, with everything, is a review that stays open forever because open is cheap, or a review whose findings arrive as a purchasing guideline for insurers rather than as a public document. Do it. Do it fast. Publish all of it, including the parts that make people like me uncomfortable, and then let me decide about my own fourth channel with the actual numbers in front of me instead of a feeling I had at the end of a quiet week.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ ninefold_amara2124-08-08
amara i do not have your kind of implant, i have the port collar, it is cheap and it is not mine, they issue it at the start of shift and take it back at six. but the thing you said about thin. after six hours of collar the yard is very clear, i see every pallet id at once and i am fast. then i take it off and the bus home is slow and everything is one thing at a time and it is boring and my neck hurts here at the base. i thought that was just tired. also the collar asks. every two hours it offers second feed, you press no and it offers again next time. nobody told me who decided it offers again. that is my whole question.
OW
offgrid_wren ↩ ninefold_amara2124-08-08
I am going to say the obvious thing and be sneered at for it, which is fine, I am used to the rate. You do not need a review. You need to take it off. A device that asks you again after you have said no is not a tool, because a tool does not have an opinion about how often you should use it, and the fact that the entire discussion here is about how to regulate the asking rather than about the asking itself tells you how far in everyone already is. I harness a goat. The harness does not offer the goat a second harness every two hours. And before somebody explains to me that I depend on the grid too — yes, I know, oksana has explained it monthly since March and she is right about the pumps and it has nothing to do with this. There is a difference between depending on a thing and being asked by it. Junior's neck hurts and a machine is proposing more. That is the entire article and it took a regulator to notice.
GP
gridghost_paxmoderator ↩ offgrid_wren2124-08-08
On the record, as I always am: I am augmented, it is a communications interface along the jaw, I have had it eleven years, and it does not disqualify me from moderating this thread and it does not excuse me from being read sceptically in it either. Both of those things are true at once and I would rather state them than have somebody discover the first one and treat it as a revelation. What I will moderate here: nobody's device gets diagnosed by a stranger in this thread, and nobody gets told what their own week felt like. What I will not moderate: disagreement about the review, including offgrid_wren's version, which is going to get piled on within the hour and which is a legitimate position honestly held. The people who get buried first in these threads are always the ones writing in a second language and the ones arguing from a life rather than a paper, so consider this a note in advance rather than a ruling afterwards. — pax, mod.
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ninefold_amaraOP ↩ offgrid_wren2124-08-08
offgrid_wren, half of that is mine and I am not going to pretend otherwise to win the thread. The asking is the thing. Not the bandwidth, not the depth, not any of the numbers I have been demanding for six years — the asking, on a schedule somebody chose, which junior has just described better than the regulator did: press no, and it offers again next time. That is a design decision made by a person with a name and a job title, and it is the first thing I want in the review. Here is where the other half of my answer stands, and it will not move. Take it off is a sentence available to you because your work does not require it. Junior does not own his collar, it is issued to him at the start of a shift, and take it off means walk off the yard and lose the shift, and I have watched people do exactly that and then not eat. My father-in-law's motor assist is the reason he can stand at his own kitchen counter. You cannot build a movement on a remedy that only the already-comfortable can take. So no, not off. Auditable: who set the interval, who can change it, what the default was when it shipped, and whose name is on the document that says a person may be asked again after they have said no. wren, that is the closest we have ever been to agreeing and I want it noted before we go back to normal.