You've already outsourced part of your mind. Your phone holds the numbers you used to know, your calendar holds next week, and something in a data centre finishes your sentences.
That's the easy version. You can still put the phone down and walk away.
The next version goes inside. Brain-computer interfaces have left the lab: movement given back to people who'd lost it, speech to people who couldn't speak. Hard to argue with.
But the same devices read signals from inside your skull, and those signals go somewhere, to a company, under terms you didn't write, in a market with almost no rules yet.
In 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers opened a paper with a question nobody has properly answered since: "Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?"
It was a thought experiment then. It isn't now.
Say there's an implant that improves your memory by half, and it's safe. Do you take it? Do you take it once your colleagues have? Once your employer expects it? Once your child asks for one because everyone in her class has one?
Somewhere in that sequence, a choice stops being a choice.
Turning this over with us: Kasia Odrozek. She leads the Business Council at UNESCO implementing the Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, teaches on the Master in Responsible AI at Elisava, and before that ran the trustworthy AI insights team at the Mozilla Foundation. Her whole practice is anticipatory ethics, working out where a technology takes us while there's still a decision left to make.
A few things we'll be sitting with:
Are we already cyborgs, and does the answer change anything?
If technology changed your personality, would you still be you?
Which futures should we refuse, and who gets to decide?
Kasia's position, and the reason this is a conversation and not a briefing: the whole thing is dressed up as inevitable. In reality it's just a decision.
Round three for Sobremesa(tech) in Barcelona. Same format: long table, good wine, no easy answers, no rush to leave.
Small room.