Thursday Book Report: We Have the Technology

So We Have the Technology by Kara Platoni is not really about fitness.  Don’t tell anyone, but it is perhaps more of a philosophy book than a technology book.  Why am I writing about it?  (Besides that I finished it and needed to write a post, of course…)  Well, because the book is about human perception and how technology is changing it.

The chapters on each of our senses trace out the biologic mechanisms as far as we know them.  They explore prosthetics and investigate our innate filtering and sorting systems.  Underlying that whole discussion is our whole definition of “normal” functioning.

Other issues that arise include who is creating the technology, who controls it, and how much is too much.  A fitness example cites my beloved Fitbit.  I choose to wear it and track various things.  But what if my company (not MY company, but my company if I worked for someone else) asked me to wear one and track my data for health premium calculations?  What if my Fitbit evolved to track other things, like my medications or my cholesterol level?

Then there are the people who are trying to add superpowers.  Who doesn’t want superpowers?  But maybe not magnets implanted in our hands, or a camera installed in our eye sockets.  Issues abound.

When I was done reading, I was not particularly freaked out.  Technology has always changed the world and culture has evolved to deal with it.  What I did think was that each of us might want to think about what and how we perceive things, about why we want various perceptions, and about how that might influence all of our decisions, including our fitness choices.