- Pacific
Will
we plug chips into our brain?
The
writer who coined the word cyberspace contemplates a future stranger than his science
fiction
BY
WILLIAM GIBSON
Maybe.
But
only once or twice, and probably not for very long.
With
their sharp black suits and their surgically implanted silicon chips, the cyberpunk hard
guys of '80s science fiction (including the characters in my early novels and short
stories) already have a certain nostalgic romance about them. These information highwaymen
were so heroically attuned to the new technology that they laid themselves open to its
very cutting edge. They became it; they took it within themselves.
Meanwhile,
in case you somehow haven't noticed, we are all becoming it; we seem to have no choice but
to take it within ourselves.
In
hindsight, the most memorable images of science fiction often have more to do with our
anxieties in the past (that is to say, the writer's present) than with those singular and
ongoing scenarios that make up our life as a species — our real future, our ongoing
present.
Many
of us, even today, or most particularly today, must feel as though we already have silicon
chips embedded in our brains. Some of us, certainly, are not entirely happy with that
feeling. Some of us must wish that ubiquitous computation would simply go away and leave
us alone. But that seems increasingly unlikely.
That
does not, however, mean that we will one day, as a species, submit to the indignity of the
chip — if only because the chip is likely to shortly be as quaint an object as the
vacuum tube or the slide rule.
From
the viewpoint of bioengineering, a silicon chip is a large and rather complex shard of
glass. Inserting a silicon chip into the human brain involves a certain irreducible
inelegance of scale. It's scarcely more elegant, relatively, than inserting a steam engine
into the same tissue. It may be technically possible, but why should we even want to
attempt such a thing?
I
suspect that mainstream medicine and the military will both find reasons for attempting
such a thing, at least in the short run, and that medicine's reasons may at least serve to
counter some disability, acquired or inherited. If I were to lose my eyes, I would quite
eagerly submit to some sort of surgery that promised a video link to the optic nerves.
(And once there, why not insist on full-channel cable and a Web browser?) The military's
reasons for chip insertion would probably have something to do with what I suspect is the
increasingly archaic job description of "fighter pilot," or with some other
aspect of telepresent combat, in which weapons in the field are remotely controlled by
distant operators. At least there's still a certain macho frisson to be had in the idea of
embedding a tactical shard of glass in your head, and crazier things, really, have been
done in the name of king and country.
But if we do it at all, I doubt
we'll be doing it for very long, as various models of biological and nanomolecular
computing are looming rapidly in view. Rather than plug a piece of hardware into our gray
matter, how much more elegant to extract some brain cells, plop them into a Petri dish and
graft on various sorts of gelatinous computing goo. Slug it all back into the skull and
watch it run on blood sugar, the way a human brain's supposed to. Get all the functions
and features you want, without that clunky-junky 20th century hardware thing. You really
don't need complicated glass to crunch numbers, and computing goo probably won't be all
that difficult to build. (The trickier aspect here may be turning data into something
brain cells can understand. If you knew how to get brain cells to manage pull-down menus,
you'd probably know everything you needed to know about brain cells.)
Our hardware, I think, is likely
to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like
our hardware. Our hardware is evolving at the speed of light, while we are still the
product, for the most part, of unskilled labor.
But there is another argument
against the need to implant computing devices, be they glass or goo. It's a very simple
one, so simple that some have difficulty grasping it. It has to do with a certain archaic
distinction we still tend to make, a distinction between computing and "the
world." Between, if you like, the virtual and the real.
I very much doubt that our
grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that
which isn't.
Or to put it another way, they
will not know "computers" as a distinct category of object or function. This, I
think, is the logical outcome of genuinely ubiquitous computing, of the fully wired world.
The wired world will consist, in effect, of a single unbroken interface. The idea of a
device that "only" computes will perhaps be the ultimate archaism in a world in
which the fridge or the toothbrush is potentially as smart as any other object, including
you, a world in which intelligent objects communicate, routinely and constantly, with one
another and with us.
In this world, there may be no
need for the physical augmentation of the human brain, as the most significant, and quite
unthinkably powerful, augmentation will have taken place beyond geographic boundaries, via
distributed processing. You won't need smart goo in your brain, because your fridge and
your toothbrush will be very smart indeed, enormously smart, and they will be there for
you, constantly and always.
So it won't, I don't think, be a
matter of computers crawling buglike into the most intimate chasms of our being, but of
humanity crawling buglike out into the mingling light and shadow of the presence of that
which we will have created, which we are creating now, and which seems to me to be in the
process of re —creating us.
"To Achieve World
Government it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism,
their loyalty to family traditions and national identification" Brock Chisholm - Director of the World Health Organization
"A society whose citizens refuse to see and investigate the facts, who refuse to
believe that their government and their media will routinely lie to them and fabricate a
reality contrary to verifiable facts, is a society that chooses and deserves the Police
State Dictatorship it's going to
get." Ian Williams Goddard
The fact is that "political correctness" is all about creating uniformity. Individualism is one of the biggest obstacles in the way of the New World Order. They want a public that is predictable and conditioned to do as it's told without asking questions.
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." Thomas Jefferson