last week doctors finally put an artificial eye in to a person allowing some one who's been blind for 30 years to see (albeit rudimentaryly) Sony announced its new bio-battery. with plans to increase efficacy and decrease size (isn't that always the plan?). the first mechanical chip has been approved to be implanted in the head to "cure" obsessive compulsive disorder. the leading thoughts on how our mids work have come to the conclusion that our thoughts and actions are the result of neurons passing electrical and chemical signals amongst them selves. that is that our "Us-ness" is chemical. the debate over our sole is relegated to the sidelines, because regardless of our sole, MDMA makes you enjoy touching stuff, and serotonin levels induce love. as our understanding of us grows so will our vocabulary. "I am hunger." will be replaced with "I have low blood sugar". I have a cavity. And the wireless head set i use to listen to music as i walk home was running low on batteries so my music kept cutting out.
ok let me put these seemingly random pieces together for you.
So im walking home from a computer programing class. past a row of recycling bins. the smell from the "organics" one wrestling my nostrils as my music keeps cutting out on my head phones. every so often the cinnamon gum I'm chewing falls in to the tooth that has the cavity giving me a singe of pain. i naturally keep sticking my tongue in the hole. feeling where the dentist will have to put his plaster mixture. somewhere, formed from the mixed beat of my steady walk, syncopated music, and gum-pain-tongue dance, it dawns on me. If my blue-tooth head set were actually in my tooth I would have a way more enjoyable walk. also, my conversations would have better sound quality. the speaker could be replaced with a solid vibration allowing the sound to reach my ear strait through he bone. no more worries about traffic noise. and the mic? well its in my mouth all ready! the only down side is that having to sleep with the charge cable hanging out of my mouth would be a hassle... especially considering i have been known to grind my teeth. if you dislike the small jolt of electricity thats released when you bite on tinfoil with a filling, imagine waking up to a jolt of electricity after you chewed through a cord in your sleep!
thats when i remembered the news article of Sony's bio-battery. It had said you could probably run a car for over a hundred miles on a single bottle of Pepsi. well if they can shrink that system down, my blue-tooth tooth could charge its self just from the food i already eat. people this is going to happen! I'm not near as addicted to my cell phone as most of the people i see in school. and id opt for this in a heart beat. the absolute only 2 things that could hold me back are,
- the cost
- its not real yet
cause lets face it i cant afford to get the cavity thats causing me the most part of this pain fixed to begin with. and the whole mark of the beast, you cant buy or sell with out technology stuff, well if I'm going to hell its for worse actions than having an awesome dentist. if i believed that stuff id give up my interac card... aint gunna happen yo!
think about it this is going to happen. seriously think about it, because every thing from here forward is cantered on this fact. it was a long walk and i had plenty of time to think about it. so ask your self if you can accept that ill some day have a blue-tooth in my tooth.
what an advantage this would be. if i had one of those smart phones i could have all the information in the world put straight in to my ear at any time. not just collage tests, but think about how much of an advantage you would have over every one else at your place of work if you could get any answer from Yahoo instantly. imagine what a disadvantage you would have if every one else where you work could instantly get any answer and you would have to go back to your desk and google it?
so when this happens, its going to be popular. you will have very little choice. either get one or get a way worse paying job. it will be the equivalent of just saying that you refuse to use telephones nowadays. oh ya and even the jobs that don't require you using a phone... you cant get those jobs if theres no way for the employer to get a-hold of you for the interveiw...
one of the news articles about the man with the electronic eye quipped about this man being the first cyborg. I'd say not truly a cyborg, but an interesting notion. he is the first to have an electronic eye that sends information to his neurons but this is how its going to happen at first small peripherals that we can plug in to our selves then more and more integration. this is going to happen!
then consider as we look more and more to our brains as chemical computers. we aren't very good at it now but we are trying and devoting billions of dollars to research. anti depressants and Ritalin and a whole slew of drugs are coming out trying to alter the flow of our brain functions. to correct the machinery that houses us. they have even come out with a chip that can be surgically installed in the brain to help those with ocd. in short we are actively trying to "hack" the brain. we want to be able to program the hard ware to run the way we think it should.
the part to worry is we are going to be able to do it! I'm no Luddite, I'm not trying to scare you of this brave new hybrid world. Its Going to happen! trying to stand against the growth of new ideas never works. we couldn't unmake the atom bomb, and saying no to nuclear energy only works in places where there is little financial gain to be made. if you doubt this consider that we thought we had eradicated smallpox from the face of the earth. mankind's greatest victory! Then some one realized after the terrorist attacks that a person could gain from having the smallpox virus and using it as a weapon. suddenly we started to manufacture it so we could work on new cures. eradicated doesn't mean comes back.
so back to the worry part. as we develop ways to bend our minds and bodes to our whims what we need to do is seriously think about what those whims are. or are going to be. currently we value money, it makes you afford to look good and to be comfortable. others see you look well and are drawn to like and trust you. so we are likely to want to make our selves better to earn.
if we look at Ritalin we can start to see why long term planning and work needs to be done now. what this drug is designed to do is to make children better students and easer to control. well making them better behaved students, is one thing we miss that many grow up to have dependencies on other drugs. (illegal and not)
our current values of "good child" is making for reduced adults of the same people. we can be an incredibly short sighted creature. (ahem environment)and one that is after the immediate reward. well if we continue to develop our values around monetary things and image, as we hack our brains it will be to make us better earners and spenders. our developments will make us happier to earn and work and spend. in short we truly will become "cogs of the machine"
if we concisely spend our time trying to teach better values to our youth than we hold (I am aware of the inherent contradiction) then as they grow and start writing the programs and chemicals that we all will implant, maybe they will have loftier goals and a brighter version of the future. this is going to happen, but what are we going to do with it when it does is determined by what we do now.
No comments:
Post a Comment