Cyber augmentation (hearing aids, cochlear implants, etc.) are often a means to become more empathetic, because it allows deeper connections.
As someone who suffers from ADD, I simply won't be able to recall forever everything someone and I said, so I use technological augmentation in the form of writing down birthdays, for example. When I'm at meetups, when a conversation huddle ends, I'll write down notes, or more likely, send a custom linkedin connection request mentioning what we talked about.
The result is that we have the same, empathetic, human conversation as before, and also next time we talk, I can ask them about their startup or hobby, and also I wish them a happy birthday every year, which I think is a net positive without any downsides.
A common rebuttal, but I don't think the tradeoff (on average) is worth it when the technology becomes sufficiently advanced. (Of course, it's worth it for some people, but the resulting technology makes society worse on average.)
And you are forgetting all the destructive technology required to get to the "benign" ones.
Negative trade-offs are not directly related to individual products, but to the technology they depend on and the technology that can follow from them, plus our tendency in capitalistic society to invent whatever can be invented for incremental advantages. For example, AI note taking (benign) requires AI (overall bad) and can imply future technologies (greater surveillance). The bad parts cannot be separated from the good in modern global capitalism because we have no oversight mechanism to do so.
Cyber augmentation already exists, and it's going to be used for what it's going to be used for.
In my case, it's being used in the way I described, increasing the depth of human connections. So the question is, how does my usage result in "human beings to become more mechanical and less empathetic towards life"?
As someone who suffers from ADD, I simply won't be able to recall forever everything someone and I said, so I use technological augmentation in the form of writing down birthdays, for example. When I'm at meetups, when a conversation huddle ends, I'll write down notes, or more likely, send a custom linkedin connection request mentioning what we talked about.
The result is that we have the same, empathetic, human conversation as before, and also next time we talk, I can ask them about their startup or hobby, and also I wish them a happy birthday every year, which I think is a net positive without any downsides.