McGwire, Pistorius, Montag, and you

So, what do you think about Mark McGwire finally coming clean and admitting to steroid use? What about Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee sprinter with carbon-fiber, prosthetic feet: should he have been denied a chance to compete in the Olympics?

What about Heidi Montag? Is it exemplary that she has undergone 10 plastic surgeries in one day in an effort to excel at her profession as an entertainer?

And what about you? Are you going to have the augmentation it will take to compete in the 21st century job market?

You might be wondering what McGwire, Pistorius, and Montag have to do with you. Perhaps McGwire and Pistorius don’t have much to do with you, assuming you aren’t into hitting homeruns or sprinting competitively. So maybe you can forgo the chemical steroids and mechanical prosthetic limbs. But what about the Montag example? Various studies suggest that supposedly attractive people are more successful in their careers, even though they don’t aspire to be stars of the screen or stage.

Here is some advice from the Institute of Cosmetic Surgery: “In today’s extremely competitive business world, men wear their resumes on their faces. Being qualified isn’t enough anymore. You have to look qualified, too.”

Perhaps you believe your technical capabilities vastly outshine any shortcomings on how qualified you might superficially look. But various drugs that alleviate the need for sleep have long been available. Suppose as a condition of employment, a prospective employer required that you take such medications and work 80 hours or more per week.

Such examples only scratch the surface of the forthcoming age of augmentation, according to futurist Scott Klososky, speaking at the annual Automated Imaging Association Business Conference held last week in Orlando, FL. He traced the history of technology augmenting human capabilities, from mechanical cash registers handling basic arithmetic, through mainframes supporting the aggregation to data, to the Internet supporting the sharing of data. He eschewed the term “artificial intelligence,” saying it implied fake intelligence, in favor of the term “augmented intelligence.” Augmented intelligence, he said, implements rules-based systems from the human brain, and implements them in code that, for example, supports the self-learning text-processing system implemented on the Apple iPhone. He outlined applications for augmented intelligence in which, for example, an augmented-intelligence system could interview a psychiatric patient by phone and detect symptoms of depression.

Klososky said augmented intelligence is being followed by augmented reality, in which heads-up visor displays will augment what you are actually seeing with additional information-perhaps the name of a person you meet and whose identity you have forgotten.

Klososky went on to describe the layered Internet, a “paraverse” in which an individual’s avatar participates in various parallel universes. He described virtual meeting rooms populated by such avatars, which don’t sit stone-faced but rather acquire attributes that indicate their agreement or disagreement with various points raised during the meeting.

But what’s really needed, he said, is an updated human-machine interface. The keyboard, he said, originating with the mechanical typewriter, is hopelessly outdated, despite efforts to deploy laser projections of the QWERTY layout. It will be replaced, he suggested, by a true brain-computer interface-a neuroaugmentation that works at the speed of thought.

Getting back to McGwire and Pistorius, Klososky suggested the emergence of an NLB-Natural Baseball League, which may complement the ABL, or Augmented Baseball League. Similarly, he said, we may have a Special Olympics, a Natural Olympics, and an Augmented Olympics, for competitors like Pistorius.

What about you? Are you ready for an implanted USB-like port that allows you to move beyond the keyboard and instantaneously download French 3.0 into your brain for $50? Or the latest academic papers and competitive information related to your job?

Klososky suggests the first question at your next job interview might be, “What augmentation do you have?” If you answer, “Nothing, I’m natural,” the final word you’re likely to hear is, “Next.”