Need a law - implanted medical devices require lifetime support / Open source and release all proprietary source code if the company goes bankrupt.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
43 points (97.8% liked)
Transhumanism
190 readers
1 users here now
Community for transhumanists, discussion of transhumanism, news about transhumanism-adjacent technologies, information on related technologies, transhumanist philosophy, and things you are doing now personally or in an organisation to push forward the technology and political foundations for transhumanism.
Definition of transhumanism I'm using:
The promotion of widespread access to - and development of - technology to alter, improve (by your own definitions), integrate with, or completely replace your body and control your very identity, in the name of self-determination and autonomy - up to and including immortality and total digitization, but not only that!
Also, an exploration of the consequences of the types of development associated with transhumanism and the positive and negative responses to it.
I actually use a more philosophical definition personally but this is close enough to what I think transhumanism is.
Community rules:
- No bigotry - in particular, if you're on a transhumanism community and hating on trans people, maybe think about that for a few minutes to realise how silly that is :)
- No advocating for eugenics or malthusian ideology ("too many people")
- Be vigilant about snake-oil claims - this is important general advice for reading about longevity research.
Given that this is also hosted on a somewhat infosec oriented instance (infosec.pub), I hope we can discuss some of the privacy aspects of transhumanism and related tech too :)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Agreed, I can't imagine how terrible this would be.
I feel like if you're having something implanted in you, you should get a copy of the schematics and code under an open source licence.
At the very least the schematics and code should be kept in escrow in case the company goes bankrupt or just decides to stop supporting it.
At the very least, hey this is EOL, here is the source to the firmware, here is a firmware update to unlock updates
This is a very compelling argument for government ownership of a controlling interest in all biotechnology. Your device will be perpetually supported--at taxpayer expense if necessary. That a device could no longer receive improvement can be allowed to be a possibility, but that it could become a novel medical hazard is something that should be prevented at all reasonable cost.
The only way to ensure that this kind of innovation remains documented, and a person is always available who is paid to maintain expertise on it, is to back it with the government. That comes with its own set of problems, but a medical implant is not a pill you can stop taking or a prosthesis you can disconnect. It's with you forever, and in the future it will necessarily be prohibitive or outright impossible to remove. These advances in technology have to be accompanied with advances in polity.