Otherlife, and the importance of OpenSource Software

I would categorize the movie “OtherLife” as a Psychological Thriller. At a certain point in the movie the protagonist ‘Ren’ has to have Otherlife administered to her in order to test a custom tailored routine for an investor.

Ren is shook with fear as the drop falls into her eye. The software she was ‘dosed’, while based on her code, was modified by her coworker. Ren self doses herself with Otherlife regularly, however, it is her code and she can trust it.

Ren has every right to be scared. She is trusting her entire mind with propriatary code. One person, her trusted coworker accidentally introduced a bug by merging in Ren's software fork. This results in 365 ticking to 001 and brings Ren to a crisis.

Had Ren been able to read the code before testgin the stimulation she would have probably been okay, or at the very least able to blame herself.

This demonstrates the importance of FOSS in waking life

As technology becomes more and more integrated into our lifes, bodies, and minds we trust more and more propriatary code. For example, Android. While the operating system is open source, almost the entire User facing software framework is held together by Google propriatary ‘Play Services’ framework. Almost every Android user willingly lets Google collect statistics on their location, device usage and financial information without even knowing what Google's code does with their data.

Technology will continue to advance, we are slowly reaching a point where we have to battle over the ethics of AI, Biological Software, and integrating circuitry into our minds and consciences. If this software is no Open Source and verified by The People we will open ourselves up to a terribly enslaving vector of exploitation.

It is no secret that inorder to rule over a body of people you haveto take away their desire to disobey, to think freely. If we continue to accept propriatary software into our lives as we continue to integrate technology into our bodies we run the risk of giving it all up to one benevolent force.

It is shocking to imagine a world where you cannot think freely, where every thought you have is uploaded to a server somewhere and analyzed. No one would have the ability to lie, no one would ‘put things lightly’. We would all fall back into a safe state where we always feel monitored. We would lose our identities.