The year is 2050 and researchers have developed an advanced method of replacing 99% of your brain’s functions for digital software/hardware. The process is slow to ensure individuals aren’t simply making copies of themselves. But in return, “digital immortality” has been achieved.

This is the future proposed by futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson on his blog Futurizon. “[B]y around 2050, 99% of your mind is running on external IT rather than in the meat-ware in your head,” says Dr. Pearson. “Assuming you saved enough and prepared well, you connect to an android to use as your body from now on, attend your funeral, and then carry on as before, still you, just with a younger, highly upgraded body.”

Dr. Pearson notes that this marvelous technological innovation would likely reach the hands of the rich first, with those deemed low-income having to wait for another decade or so. However, the more important issue brought up is that of data ownership.

DO YOU OWN YOUR BODY?

The issue of ownership has been a frequently debated topic throughout our existence. At one point in history (and even today, depending on where you live), when you were a child, you didn’t actually own your own body. Child-labor laws were practically nonexistent. If a company wanted to use a child in the manufacturing sector for cheap labor, there was nothing that the child could do about it.

Similarly, even today, women are also having to debate the extent to which individuals own their own bodies — more specifically, debating the extent of one’s reproductive freedoms. For most of the developed world, a woman’s right to have an abortion is undeniable. It’s their body and, thus, their right to decide whether or not a fetus should be terminated. However, here in the United States, it’s a topic that never seems to have a final conclusion.

In the near future, will these same issues manifest themselves in the wake of mass artificial limbs and organs? If you were to receive a bionic heart, for example, to replace your organic heart, will the company who manufactured and provided said heart grant you full ownership? Will you be able to hack it and modify it yourself without running the risk of legal repercussions?

In today’s world, there are no laws which prohibit a company from placing legal restrictions on a person’s prosthetic limb. If a company were to deem you unfit to represent them by wearing their prosthetic limb, they could easily recall it and leave you limbless.

The medical establishment today doesn’t want to see you pursuing technologies that’ll make you “more than human.” As one recipient, Enno Park, came to realize, if you were to receive a cochlear implant, you don’t actually “own” that cochlear implant, despite the fact that it’s now integrated into your body and provides you the gift of hearing (go to 2:00 in the video provided below). If you were to attempt to modify said implant in order to enhance its ability to detect and translate sound waves, your implant could potentially be taken away from you or, at the very least, lose your insurance. Thus, lose the privilege of the company fixing your implant in the event that it becomes damaged.