Technocreep (18 page)

There is also a “Cadaver Calculator” that asks you twenty questions then tells you how much you are worth to medical science, for instance: “Congratulations, Your Dead Body is Worth $4165.”
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But why bother doing those when the market already sets a price for a human body?

A report from Hyderabad, India, claims that “500 unclaimed or unidentified dead bodies were sold from the Osmania mortuary in the past two years.”
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This article also gives a rough price list with “Rs 20,000 (about $325 US) to Rs 30,000 for bodies of those who died in accidents and Rs 30,000 to Rs 40,000 for bodies of those who died of natural causes.” It also notes that bodies of younger persons are more in demand.

The probable destination for these cadavers is private medical colleges in India. North Americans are much more discreet about this process, though their medical schools need cadavers too. Instead of relying on dedicated alumni to pass away and leave their bodies to their
alma
mater
, many schools use the service of a “fee-based service organization” called ScienceCare.
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From their website, it seems that many of the donated bodies wind up in pieces, used to test medical devices and for other purposes where human tissue is required.

Of course, organ donation is certainly the best and highest use of a human body, and something everyone should consider. To their credit, the folks at Science Care encourage organ donation and their site says “most of the time individuals can be BOTH organ donors for transplant purposes as well as whole body donors for medical research and education.” Although they cost more than actual cadavers, and cannot be dissected, some medical schools are switching over to plastinated bodies for their anatomy labs.
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Anyone who has seen one of the human taxidermy exhibits, in which plasticized bodies are put on display, will know that there is another possible afterlife for your mortal remains.

I interviewed Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the originator of the process and the force behind the hugely successful “Body Worlds” exhibitions. He told me about the early days of developing his patented process, with bodies exploding in ovens. Unlike his competitors, von Hagens operates an active program soliciting body donations. His Germany-based website reports “about two visitors a day seeking inclusion in the Institute's body donation program.”
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A medical student once told me a touching story about an elderly woman who wanted to give her body to science but was concerned it would not be treated with proper respect. She insisted that a note travel with her cadaver, saying “Dear Future Doctor: I hope you learn a lot from probing my body and will treat it with respect. I just thought I'd mention something. Remember when you thought you would fail that organic chemistry exam or not do well on the med school interview … well, I was praying for you then.”

Sadly we cannot attach sweet notes like that to the data about our bodies as it gets passed around and monetized. It would not do much good anyway. How do you ensure that data about your body is treated with respect by an automated big data decision process, running on a corporate or government computer? Decisions about the fate of our digital
corpus
are made in nanoseconds with all the precision and coldness of algorithmic logic.

Our living bodies are always capable of providing one of the three factors (“something you have,” “something you know,” “something you are”) for identifying ourselves to our technology. Biometric technology shows up regularly in Hollywood films. In one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's movies,
The 6th Day
, he spoofs a fingerprint-controlled biometric identification system with a cloned version of ­somebody's finger, but drops it in the process. He utters the predictable line “I'm all thumbs today.” Having worked with Hollywood scriptwriters I am pretty sure that one got a laugh in the writer's room. Yet the collection of biometric data is very serious business, and something that many people intuitively feel they should resist.

Many years ago, in an attempt to counteract fraud, a New York-based bank started requiring a fingerprint from customers when they cashed or deposited checks. The bank quickly stopped using it when clients complained that they did not want to be treated like criminals. This Touch Signature® product is still being used by pawnshops and furniture rental outfits. According to a 2002
New York Times
article, the Texas Bankers Association bought 80,000 of the inexpensive blue ink pads and sold them “to nearly half the banks in Texas and to banks in 37 other states.” There are still countries where voters are fingerprinted and Princeton University researchers have noted that, while fingerprints on ballots may allow for better auditing of election results, there is also a serious risk to “the secrecy of ballots in any system that keeps paper records of individual ballots.”
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Some jurisdictions, such as Venezuela, have long used fingerprint scanners to control entry to polling stations, and, as of 2012, thumb scans were also required to activate the electronic voting process.
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This raised fears that how you voted was being recorded. This is creepy because the average person really has no idea what is going on inside a complex piece of electronic gear like a voting machine.

Nor do most people realize how many fingerprint scanners are used in industry. They are used by employees to clock in and out of work. Airport employees use a fingerprint scanner to access restricted areas, and travelers are increasingly being required to undergo finger or iris scans in the interest of security.

The biggest recent leap in the consumerization of fingerprint recognition was the 2013 introduction of Apple's iPhone 5S with its built-in fingerprint scanner. While Chaos Computer Club hackers defeated the technology within two days, biometrics will undoubtedly become commonplace on consumer devices.

If your phone does not have a fingerprint reader, don't fret: you can always download a novelty application like “Fingerprint Lock” for Android mobile phones. It does not actually scan your finger—it just pretends to do that, so you can impress your friends and give some illusion of security. You actually unlock your phone simply by touching a secret spot on the screen.

Like a $2.95 dummy security camera, this bit of “security theatrics” is probably better than no protection at all. It is also worth noting that Chinese-made Lenovo laptops have had fingerprint readers for almost a decade, and some businesses have opted to purchase this brand expressly for that reason.

One the most interesting recent uses of fingerprint readers happened in an unlikely place, a chain of very high end stores that sells things like Prada scarves and purses.

Every year the retailer hired temporary sales clerks for the busy pre-holiday sales period. This store, not wanting to annoy its high end clientele, also routinely accepted returns without requiring a purchase receipt. Often, in January, they found that they were unable to match a purchase transaction for the return of expensive items like $2,700 handbags. The culprits often turned out to be those temporary workers, who simply took the merchandise off the shelf and refunded it to their own credit cards.

To avoid detection, the dishonest salesperson would put the illegal return through on the number of an unwitting long-serving employee. Long after the temp had left the job, that veteran clerk would be hauled in to answer for a crime she never committed.

The retail chain's head of security came up with an ingenious and inexpensive solution: to this day you will notice sale clerks there discreetly reaching under the counter to access a fingerprint scanner which seals each and every transaction.

The main effect of the proliferation of fingerprint scanners is to ease us into the idea of routinely using our bodies as identification. Research is progressing on using other unique features of our bodies as biometric identification, from our “breath signature” to our cardiac rhythms. These days, the ones that read your finger usually check for a pulse, just to make sure the finger has not been borrowed.

Most people intuitively find death to be creepy, which is why almost every language has some euphemisms for it. Now, technology is finding ways to make it even creepier.

The Swedish company Pause Ljud & Bild is selling coffins outfitted with corpse-controllable music systems and 4G Internet access, just in case. The CataCoffin features “divine tweeters with external cooling and one hell of an eight-inch subwoofer, fine-tuned to the coffin's unique interior acoustic space.” The developers have even gone to the trouble of arranging for a matching tombstone to supply subterranean power, and updatable playlists on Spotify.

At $30,000, these things are not exactly flying off the shelf. Most people seem more inclined to order the Lady de Guadalupe Steel Casket from
Walmart.com
for $1,199, though the concept of putting the remains of your loved one into a product ordered online from Walmart strikes some as an example of terminal cheapness.

No matter which coffin you choose, the South Koreans have created an interesting use for it. In a bizarre trend that speaks to the country's escalating suicide rate, South Koreans are turning to “fake funerals” to learn to appreciate their lives. Eulogies, final letters to loved ones, and time spent inside a coffin form part of the experience.
Vice Magazine
sent Yuka Uchida to have her own creepy “Well Dying” experience in the woods near Seoul.
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Uchida found the process useful in some capacity, suggesting that “by telling you that this is your final day, and making you focus on nothing but yourself, then making you enter the private space, the casket, this session creates an ideal opportunity for contemplation.”

On a more modest scale, a company called LivesOn offers “your social afterlife.” Those obsessed with Twitter can now depart this realm knowing that “when your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting.” In a review of it, Theo Merz notes that the service, if it worked well, would allow us to get the three things he says everyone longs for: “1. To cheat death. 2. To see ourselves as others see us. 3.  To have a second version of ourselves, which could deal with the drudgery of the everyday.”
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The app uses artificial intelligence to learn about your style while you are still around, and then attempts to carry on your persona indefinitely. You may also appoint an Executor to manage your legacy account, and perhaps decide when you've finally tweeted enough.

LivesOn is currently a free service, and while it is still unclear how they will make any money, they do talk about a “Recommendation Engine” coming soon. Presumably your fine taste and good reputation during life, which you can no longer sully by any indiscretions, will be of some value after you're gone. Your favorite brand of headphones and those special romantic getaway hotels might continue to benefit from your glowing postmortem endorsements.

In planning for your life after death, you might also want to consider pet care. Various websites currently offer to care for pets after the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. One of these claims that “for a small donation of £69.99 pounds, we will make sure your pets are well fed and taken care of long after you and your family have been taken up.”
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Next to the picture of cute kittens and puppies, the site explains “Just because we are atheists doesn't mean we are not animal lovers. We adore all kinds of pets and would love to look after your pets after you are gone.” However, they will take your money now. It might actually be cheaper to get your pet a mail order Doctor of Divinity degree for $32.99 plus shipping and handling from
TheMonastery.org
.
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That credential might carry some weight in a brutal post-Rapture world.

Techno-zealots like Ray Kurzweil assure us that we will soon be uploading our consciousness to a computer. In his 2005 book
The Singularity Is Near
, Kurzweil predicted that ongoing progress in biotechnology would mean that by the middle of the century, “humans will develop the means to instantly create new portions of ourselves, either biological or nonbiologicial,” so that people can have “a biological body at one time and not at another, then have it again, then change it.”
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He also claims there will soon be “software-based humans” who will “live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected bodies and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms.”

There are certainly credible candidates for this already and we have met some of them, including Hank, the Coca-Cola chatterbot, and BINA48, the humanoid robot in Vermont. Perhaps the most compelling is IBM's Watson, which makes up in smarts and databases for what it lacks in physical body. IBM has created a whole new division to move Watson into real and profitable lines of business like health care and city planning.

Humanoid robots are creepy in several ways. If we don't know how the artificial consciousness is operating, it falls into the mysterious realm of technology. More frightening, perhaps, is the loss of control over the conversation when we find ourselves engaged in dialogue with what turns out to be a very intelligent non-human entity.

In this book, I've tried to be very forthcoming about technologies with the understanding that almost all can be used for good or for evil. There is one that gives me some ethical qualms, and that's the topic of “wireheading.” I would just feel terrible if somebody used this book as a jumping-off point to engage in this practice and did harm to the most precious thing on earth, a human brain.

Still, there are hobbyists experimenting with direct brain ­stimulation in a quest for the ultimate pleasure, enthusiastically ­risking permanent brain damage. This quote, from the aptly named website
highexistence.com
, describes this nirvana they say they hope to attain: