Augmented Reality

Apple’s new Vision Pro goggles have taken augmented reality (AR) to the next level. Rather than trying to put digital content onto the real world, they convert the real world into digital content and augment that. (This, at least, is my reading of the ‘virtually lag-free’ statement on Apple’s web page.) Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series occasionally riffs on the potentially dystopian aspects of AR, such as in the episode ‘Men Against Fire‘ and ‘White Christmas‘. But AR has some interesting implications from an ecocyborg perspective.

These googles are effectively augmenting their humans — they, like many everyday IT tools we take for granted — turn us into cyborgs while using them. Critically, however, they are a ‘shortcut’ to ecocyborgs. They can change our perceptions of the environment around us digitally, rather than through engineering. Do ecocyborgs necessarily have to be meat (and/or veg) ware? Must they be entirely physical phenomena, rather than at least partly virtual? By altering how we see the world around us, these kinds of tool might be able to help us live comfortably in spaces we would ‘naturally’ find uncomfortable. It is not so difficult to imagine a company running your habitation telling you to leave your goggles on for ‘the best user experience’…

Much more interesting, however, is that the virtual augmentation of physical space manifests multiple realities. If everyone is wearing goggles, there is no longer a single, common, shared world-out-there to discuss. Instead there are multiple, independently constructed realities — parallel digital overlays on the (single) physical world — that cannot necessarily be unified. Ecocyborgs are the death of nature; augmented reality the death of science. Sort of. You’ll still die if you walk off a physical cliff your goggles have told you is a more pleasing plain. But maybe your grieving friends can use simulations of you to continue to interact with their conceptualizations of you after you are dead. (Another theme explored by Black Mirror.) Perhaps this can be done so seamlessly that they don’t even know you are dead — for them, you are still alive, so long as they keep the goggles on.

The potential of AR is immense — imagine visiting a ruin and being able to see it restored. The meeting use case explored on the Vision Pro website could render travelling for conferences a thing of the past. However, the ability to wilfully alter one’s reality is a power that can easily be misused. Your goggles could, for example, ensure all the people you see are beautiful people — which is the thin end of a potentially very sinister and/or creepy wedge.

A central principle behind the ecocyborg is the coevolution of (post-)humans, (post-)environments and technology. We change our environment, supposedly imposing our will on it — making it more ‘us’ — but forget that changing our environment changes our ‘selves’, which logically and ironically makes us less ‘us’. The self that made the decision to change its environment is not the self that ends up living those changes. Each of these changes is mediated through technology, which also coevolves with humans and their environments in accordance with demand, materials, trade and pollution.

AR allows us to change at least the appearance of our environment with no more physical effort than the click of a button or the swipe of a hand. How will that change us? Will it make us more tolerant of deficiencies in unaugmented reality? Why go to the effort of mowing the lawn when AR can just show you your garden with a mown lawn rather than the ‘unsightly’ long grass? Or will it make us less satisfied with the way things are because AR is always showing us something better? Will we become so attached to AR devices that we wear them habitually, or even start to experience mental or physiological symptoms when the devices are switched off or run out of power? Are there religious uses for AR? Maybe fundamentalists could use AR to show demons and angels fighting over strangers’ souls, or perhaps even censor material around them that is contrary to dogma. Flat earthers can see the world as though it really is flat. Could AR mean the end of the beauty industry? Perhaps we will generate avatars of ourselves for others in AR to see us how we would like to be seen… Will it then be rude — even discriminatory — not to use AR to see people how they want others to see them? And what about the clashes of different people’s augmentations of reality? Will we fight over them? Will we hack others’ ARs to force them to see things our way — or even to see a flat plain when there is a cliff? At a larger scale, will companies pay AR manufacturers to cover up evidence of environmental misdeeds — nobody sees the polluted river unless they take their headset off — by then a sort of ‘red pill‘ experience?

More importantly, does AR mean the ecocyborg is no longer necessary? I think not. The Vision Pro is to sight what the Sony Walkman was to hearing. But humans have many other senses and needs, which ecocyborgs will be required to satisfy: hunger, thirst, thermal comfort and immune system training at a basic level, but also gadgets and the energy to power them, sanitation, circular consumption and distribution of materials, and space to allow free expression.

The Real World

One memorable encounter I had with the term ‘the real world’ was at a conference of the trades union I’m a member of, which represents a mix of workers in the public and private sectors. In an obvious dig at the public sector workers present, a motion was presented to conference with the phrase “the real world of profit and loss”. In a similar vein, the Oxford English dictionary offers “we live in the real world of limited financial resources” as an example of a sentence containing “real world”. The kinds of people who don’t live in the real world include academics, actors, artists, celebrities (unless they’ve come from Humble Beginnings), dreamers, environmentalists, intellectuals, politicians, teachers, vegetarians, vicars, and young people. The question of what is real has occupied philosophers for millennia, which is ironic, because those fond of using “the real world” in the manner indicated would probably assert that philosophers don’t live there.

What’s odd is that I’ve never heard people talking about hunter-gatherer societies living in the real world, yet arguably they are better placed to survive in the landscape than I am. (As I said earlier, I live on the landscape, not in it…) Nor indeed have I heard of hunter-gatherers telling others to live in the real world. (But then again, I don’t hang out with them much…) I think it’s fair to say that “the real world” is about money (with overtones of there not being enough of it for the silly thing you want to spend it on). But money is the one thing we can be absolutely sure is not real. If there’s any reality that’s socially constructed rather than empirical, it’s money.

The ecocyborg, however, is not for hunter-gatherers, but for technically augmented post-humans to sustain their existence in. Like it or not, the “real world” will become what we construct: the boundary between social construction and empiricism will thereby be blurred. For those with the power to make it so, reality will be what they want it to be, and they might even be able to alter themselves in ways that will make the reality they want work somehow. Is this world a place finally fit for dreamers, idealists and the various pariahs listed earlier to live in? Or will it be one that more severely reinforces the exhortations to “live in the real world”?

In computer games, the laws of physics do not need to apply. We can fly, cast spells, shoot laser beams at aliens, and cross interstellar and intergalactic space in seconds. A purely digital existence, then, sounds like one that truly allows us to create the realities we want and inhabit them. But the memory and CPU cycles needed to store and process our consciousness will surely be no less a limitation on a digital existence than sunlight, fresh water, and edible plants are on our physical existence. Our virtual selves would then compete for RAM and clock ticks, and end up divising some sort of system to distribute them in a way that is somehow agreed to be fair. (Or have a system imposed oppressively by those with more power and privilege.)

Whether the ecocyborg is physical or virtual, then, we can expect there to exist a scarcity of one resource or another, and social norms to emerge (or be carried in from earlier cultures) to help decide how those resources should be distributed. Maybe that’s what’s real about the real world.

Habitats for Humans

Animal welfare campaign organizations articulate their case around ‘five freedoms‘ that animals under human control should have: freedom from hunger or thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain and disease, freedom to express normal behaviour, and freedom from fear and distress. Perhaps because we don’t like to see ourselves as being free rather than ‘under control’, nor indeed do we like to see ourselves as animals, it’s not clear to me that we seek to grant ourselves the same freedoms in the habitats we create for humans. There are parallels between the five freedoms and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The second and sixth of these are ‘zero hunger‘ and ‘clean water and sanitation‘ for example, while the third is ‘good health and well-being‘. But discomfort, expression of normal behaviour, and fear and distress are more tangential.

In the UK, planning legislation has been relaxed allowing the conversion of unused office accommodation into flats, some with floor areas as little as 13m². Though this might seem a pragmatic approach to resolving the country’s housing crisis, ‘zoning‘ in city planning can mean offices are built in places that do not provide convenient access to services that residents need. With accommodation such as this being chiefly aimed at the poor, this ‘inconvenience’ means exacerbating hardship.

The trend, however, as been more generally towards smaller room sizes in new build British homes, as developers seek to maximize returns on investment. While an article in the Journal of Happiness Studies finds little evidence of larger living space leading to greater subjective well-being, another article in Building Research & Information reviews various health issues that can be caused by being short of internal space in homes. The main basis for the health issues is argued on needs for privacy and space for socializing, and the article concludes by saying that one fifth of English households have insufficient internal space. Insofar as socializing and needing privacy are normal behaviours, these changes deny humans a basic freedom.

The question of what is ‘normal’ behaviour for humans is an interesting one. Our day-to-day lives are very different from those of people 100 years ago. As for our genes, evidently ‘native’ Europeans with lactose intolerance haven’t even caught up with the invention of agriculture. (To the extent that right-wing extremists drink milk to prove their ‘supremacy’ — don’t tell them about lactase persistence among African pastoralist communities.) Normality is heavily culturally determined, of course, and culture can change more quickly than genes, but still, it’s possible some cultures are out of step with what human bodies and brains have been programmed to expect. Is patriarchy ‘normal’? Or sitting in a chair all day staring at a screen? Or commuting? Or microwaving a TV dinner? Is there any part of our daily lives that really allows us to express normal behaviour for humans?

Freedom from fear and distress is interesting too. The film ‘The Matrix’ posits that the first ‘paradise matrix‘ was rejected by human brains — they kept trying to wake up from it. Indeed, in popular psychology ‘paradise syndrome‘ is described as a feeling of dissatisfaction despite having achieved a great deal.

That is a dark assessment of the human psyche: a belief that happiness is impossible or unbelievable. Normatively speaking it could almost be seen as a tool of mass-manipulation, encouraging people to accept unhappiness as a way of life. For the architects of the ecocyborg, it poses a difficult question. If we really believe the world needs a little fear and danger in order to keep us happy, the ecocyborg cannot be a 100% safe place. We may even already be seeing a reaction to this among those who pursue ‘adventure sports‘. What are the designers to do, then? Deliberately create places with the potential for harm?

The five freedoms are articulated around moral responsibility towards captive animals. We may not think of ourselves as animals or as captives, but clearly the more a society imposes constraints on its citizens, the greater the responsibility it should take for their welfare. If we cannot live anywhere we want, but only in built environments we can afford; if we cannot do whatever we want to enhance our lives, then to some extent we are confined. I contrasted urban and rural environments for the very different attitudes we have towards freedom in them in an earlier post. When the ecocyborg takes over, there will be no rural environment, no nature and no wilderness. Captivity will become the norm, and we owe it to ourselves to think about how we can enrich habitats for humans to maximize welfare.

Owning the Ecocyborg

The ownership of natural systems has been the subject of wars for millennia. But these are mere territorial disputes. Ownership of designed ecosystems is a matter of intellectual property rights. Designing an ecosystem that can sustain human life, one in which circularity is maintained, where all waste products are eternally converted into goods, is a significant intellectual challenge that will require a great deal of investment. That investment needs to be protected from freeloaders who would just copy what others have done without making any investment in developing the knowledge to do it. We have already seen this with some of the controversy around GM crops, such as farmers being sued for ‘copying’ seed.

But how might we see this ownership, as inhabitants of an ecocyborg? First, your living space would definitely be leased or rented. This is true for many people anyway, so at face value, no major implications except for those who are used to thinking in terms of home ownership. However, leasehold payments, which are used to keep the grounds attractive, are being exploited by some developers as a revenue stream. You might find you need to be able to continually generate economic value in order to sustain your rent. Life-as-a-Service, which currently is more lifestyle-as-a-service, could become rather more literal, especially if we develop cyborg functionality that allows you to be put into suspended animation, or otherwise shut down and rebooted later, whenever your skills and knowledge are worth paying for.

Building on LaaS as an idea, besides being able to sustain yourself, there is the question of your offspring. If you decide you want children, will you violate the licence terms of your habitation? Perhaps you will need to pay for a habitation upgrade in order to remain on the right side of your contract. The ecocyborg will also need to be able to sustain this additional life. It only has a certain designed carrying capacity, and if this is breached, there will be consequences for other inhabitants. To avoid any awkwardness, maybe the drinking water or food contains contraceptives, and these are switched off once you have the finances in place to support your habitation upgrade.

Third, there would need to be careful agreements about the ways in which you could personalize your space. Perhaps there would be predefined options you would choose from; or maybe some OEM certification process confirming interoperability with your ecocyborg. We already have planning law (in the UK at least) that imposes aesthetic as well as functional constraints on what you can do with your property. But gated communities take things further, with restrictions on plants you can grow, colours you can paint your house, pets you can have, and even leaving your garage door open.

Fourth, there might be constraints on who you have to visit. Our bodies interact constantly with the environment, exchanging chemicals, genetic material and viruses. For example, the food we eat and our gut flora entail a direct exchange of genetic material with our environment. People might even need some sort of modification to their genome to ensure compatibility with the ecocyborg they inhabit, or medication. There could be a need for visitors from ecocyborgs made by different manufacturers than yours to undergo a lengthy decontamination and quarantine process after visiting you.

It is the exchange of material from one ecocyborg to another that I imagine could be the most problematic. Concern about invasive species already imposes constraints on what you can take from one country to another. But rather than being an inconvenience (to humans — for native flora and fauna invasive species are an existential threat) as is the case currently, invasive materials in an ecocyborg could threaten its human life support systems: Did the designers of the ecocyborg consider the possibility of this material being brought into their system? If so, in what volume?

Industries would of course also be interested in knowing each others’ secrets and designs. This is where the exchange of material is so potentially dangerous to intellectual property. A visitor from an ecocyborg on the other side of the world could take material home and allow their ecocyborg manufacturer access to knowledge developed and owned by your manufacturer; and vice versa of course. You might then find there were constraints on where you could go as an inhabitant of your chosen ecocyborg. The ecocyborg might be designed to take steps to defend itself, using enzymes, nanobots, and terminator genes, but these too would be desirable intellectual property for rival ecocyborg manufacturers to try and get hold of.

In short, ecocyborgs are corporate spaces, owned and managed by their manufacturers. Inhabitants of ecocyborgs cannot be the owners in the traditional sense we have today of owning the property you live in and having the right to do what you like with it. In ecocyborgs, property is theft … from the manufacturers.