From: Joel Pitt (joel.pitt@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Apr 13 2006 - 21:45:59 MDT
On 4/14/06, Philip Goetz <philgoetz@gmail.com> wrote:
> Today, upper-middle-class Americans have most of their money tied up
> in their houses. In the future, there may be a window of time in
> which personal augmentations are available but very expensive, and
> people may walk around with hundreds of thousands of (2006) dollars
> worth of hardware on or in their body. Will this result in a great
> increase in muggings and murder?
>
> Evidence against is that people already walk around with cell phones,
> PDAs, and laptop computers that are very valuable, but this doesn't
> seem to have increased crime. Evidence for is that wearing jewelry or
> an expensive watch is supposed to increase your chance of being
> mugged.
Some other points against:
- In order to remove said hardware it may be necessary to actually
kill the carrier (I doubt they'll stick around to do a proper surgical
procedure to remove cybernetics). This means that you can't just
decide to mug or threaten someone to hand the stuff over, you have to
decide you are willing to kill someone. Some muggings do result in
murder - but it seems unlikely to be planned by the mugger.
- Assumedly the cybernetic hardware would result in people being
potentially connected to the world 24/7 - If someone does accost you
you could hit a virtual panic button to send a snapshot of your retina
image to the authorities. Admittedly the muggers might get hi tech and
be able jam wireless connections...
Of course this all depends exactly how these technologies are implemented.
-Joel
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:56 MDT