An interesting area of discussion that emerged with users was around what was an appropriate recommendation, or simulation to be given. The general approach of the service proposal was that it could be wide ranging and encompass large categories of your life, offering anything from health simulations to career simulations. The simulations were illustrated to give people a more engaging way to interact and understand the outcomes of their actions, but most users found these illustrations inappropriate for anything other than very practical choices.

There was wide disagreement among the group about how and when people wanted an intervention from the app. Some said that it could feel overbearing for the intervention to be regular. Some said that it would be best if it intervened regularly in small health choices that have larger long-term implications (like dietary choices for instance). Others felt that technological services like this could only help with decisions that are failed by absentmindedness, therefore the service could intervene to improve the decision.

This variety of opinion is evidence that services that become intertwined so intimately with people’s lives, either need to learn to be adept at responding to the users’ cues for assistance or they need to have active personalisation built in the service experience.

People found the concept of categorising different aspects of themselves useful as a mental exercise. And for many of them, it helped them feel positive about themselves because, to them, it meant they had varied and complex characters. Many participants also talked about how the recollection of sides of themselves, which are now less active, was both nostalgic and powerful —because although that side of themselves was less active, they felt it still belonged to their identity and seeing or describing it enriched their current view of themselves.

Although most participants felt that categorising sides of themselves was meaningful and rewarding, they struggled to see how digital categorisation would be helpful in their lives beyond simply being a reminder or an archived part of themselves. The proposal essentially suggests that a divided conceptualisation of the self, might expand people’s self-understanding. And that reminding people of their potential to be multifaceted could encourage them to explore more. However, this relies on a large assumption that the categorisations would be sophisticated enough to be taken seriously and would inherently convey a message that, ‘people can be whoever they want to be’. To the participants engaging with the proposal, this was not a safe assumption and the feature was unappealing.

If we simply consider the fact people felt enriched and more powerful having recalled categories of their personality (without the strategy employed by Mymes), it is clear that it is a valuable component of people’s self-reflection, and therefore, perhaps there are still some interesting questions to be explored in this space with different concepts: Could reflecting on oneself through the lens of different personal identities help people feel more free to explore and act in ways outside of their current ‘preset character’? Could it help them understand themselves in more depth? Could it help people to act with more control?

One of the most interesting symbols that emerge from this experiment is that most of the participants expressed discomfort with the concepts, but all of them felt that they would try them to some degree. A lot of the hesitations that people describe are as you would expect —They are concerned with permanence, side-effects, losing control by sharing their data, ideas of fairness etc. Some people had strong aversions to some of these concepts. However, even with these strong feelings, they often explained conditions under which it would be acceptable to them. For instance, if friends were doing the same thing, if there were safety assurances or if the pay-offs were high. Ultimately, some users described how their existing aversion would likely fade if the concepts became more accepted by people around them.

In some instances, they gave examples of using other performance enhancing offerings that they had previously held concerns about. This is a clear example of how people’s fears of drastically different futures may only be a temporary obstacle to the emergence of these technologies. Participants seemed frustrated that they can’t manage and control themselves exactly the way they want to in order to be who they want to be. If a service can help them get closer, they may overcome their concerns.

An area of discussion that this proposition rapidly presents is about these augmentations’ implications on work and on employment. People describe how the augmentations may help people progress professionally, but that in competitive industries those people may end up being required to augment themselves in order to maintain and perform or indeed to continue climbing a hierarchy. In turn, this creates a counter presentation to the idea that these products may bring people power and choice. On the other end of the spectrum, the people ‘below the API’, who may not have the means to access augmentations may find themselves less competitive in the job market and could even end up agreeing to be augmented by companies in order to work. In this circumstance, we are forced to examine more closely where the lines should be drawn between ourselves as people and ourselves as employees or as useful assets.

All participants also described a fear about the degradation of authenticity should these products become more ubiquitous. People described concern about the struggle that may ensue understanding which elements of a person are truly them and which are parts of a service they ascribe to (the same sentiment was expressed with physical capabilities( . There is seemingly a sense of unfairness and exclusivity about the availability of the augmentations that fractures people’s fundamental expectations of everyone they encounter in the world. Would this be diminished if everyone could simultaneously receive the same upgrades? At what point will our technologically enabled capabilities define us as transhuman?