The Humanoid Boogie

[Thanks to The Bonzo Dog Band for the title.]

A couple years ago, on an internal company blog, I commented on the ways in which the right hand of the information technology industry not only doesn't know what the left hand is dong but often seems unaware that there even is a left hand. Breathless dispatches in technology trades about mashups, Web 2.0 (or is it 2.1.0.5 SP 2 now?) and other ways for everyone to connect to everyone else sit cheek by virtual jowl with sober articles on how we're losing the cyberwar with spammers, malware distributors, identity thieves and other net.swine. Don't the people who write these things ever talk to each other? It's as though they live on different planets.

I had similar When Worlds Collide experience the other day, albeit on a different technological front. It happened as I was listening to NPR's Science Friday talk show. The guest was “futurist” Ray Kurzweil expounding, as he usually does these days, on advances in computer and medical technology that will make us all cheerful cyborgs, living longer and happier lives through the integration of humans with computers. Listening to Kurzweil paint a rosy picture of the posthuman future, it's easy to forget to ask some fairly simple questions about it; questions that host Ira Flatow never thought to bring up.

Questions like: where are we going to get the power for the man/machine hybrid? Or: how much will this wonderful cutting-edge biomedical technology cost? Who's going to pay for it? And, for that matter, who's going to be able to afford it?

Given that in 2005 (the most recent year for which data are currently available), nearly 47 million Americans (just under 16% of the population) had no health insurance - and therefore no access to health care - those are hardly irrelevant questions. Indeed, even Americans with insurance are seeing their out-of-pocket costs increase. Add in the fact that employer-based health insurance is quickly turning into a luxury and you have to wonder how many of us really will get to be posthuman.

This was brought to my attention rather dramatically a few weeks ago when I got a new CPAP machine. A CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) device is a fairly simple bit of technology that effectively eliminates snoring and sleep apnea. Those of us who suffer from those conditions know only too well how beneficial these little devices are. Not only are we less tired, but we're also less at risk for serious health conditions in later life, including stroke and cardiovascular disease.

Once the newer machine was delivered, of course, I had no use for the old one. As I'd had it for over six years, my insurance company had long since declared it my property. I therefore decided to give it away on freecycle.org.

What happened next was a stark illustration of the difference between Ray Kurzweil's future and everybody else's present. Within less than five minutes of making the offer on freecycle, I received well over a dozen replies - and kept getting them even after I posted a notice that the machine had been taken. All of them told essentially the same story: they had sleep apnea, they had insurance - and their insurance refused to pay for a CPAP machine.

Bear in mind that this is well-established and relatively inexpensive technology with a proven track record of correcting a condition which, left untreated, can lead to serious illnesses which are much more expensive to treat than sleep apnea. If insurers are so focused on short-tern costs that they won't even cover something this basic, how likely are they to ever cover the kind of Buck Rogers stuff discussed on Kurzweil's web site?

Meanwhile, the millions without any insurance are lucky to get a flu shot.

That doesn't mean the posthuman future won't happen. It will just happen to the shrinking percentage of the population that can afford the latest and greatest nanotechnology. Without drastic reforms to America's health care system - which delivers less care for more money than that of any other first-world nation - Kurzweil's future will be a dystopia of nearly immortal elites governing the destinies of highly mortal masses.

On the other hand, maybe we commoners aren't supposed to have acsess to that stuff. Maybe we're just supposed to buy the high-priced nutritional supplements Kurzweil is hawking on another site.