There is a 1967 movie starring James Coburn called The President's Analyst. It's a spy flick, a parody, and the supervillain, in the end, turns out to be The Phone Company. Coburn, as the President's psychoanalyst, is kidnapped by The Phone Company and asked to persuade the President to adopt what may be the first mobile contract in history. Here's the scene:
Quite prophetic, all things considered. I certainly would not allow any brain/machine interface chip implanted in my brain. Something wearable, like the technology that the Open Water startup wishes to develop, I might be amenable towards.
So, and then, what with mobile tech pulling down a trillion in revenues a year, far more than anything else has ever done, and signifying mobile tech becoming pretty much ubiquitous across the planet. You do the prognostication. We will all be borgified sooner rather than later.
People wearing brainwave-translating hairnets hooked up to mobiles: electronic telepathy, no more privacy, the ending of barriers of timer and space (at least, within about a 5000 mile range or so), and breaking down the borders of ego, and we end with a global hive mind.
Not that that's new. We humans have had hive minds for at least a quarter million years, and it's called a society, or a polity. It's just all significantly speeded up is all.
I guess the question is, once again, what kind of global hive mind will we have?
So far, not a loving one, that's for sure.
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Question: How do we control all the upstarts? Well, wrong thinking will be punished. But I don't think a pain and pleasure center stimulation will be sufficient. I mean, me? You put an Agony Booth* next to an Orgasmatron*, and I will treat them like a sauna and snowdrift.
ReplyDelete* Agony Booth from Original Star Trek episode "Mirror Mirror", Orgasmatron from Woody Allen's Sleeper.
DeleteAre you a Gibson fan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer
ReplyDeleteOne of the more intriguing aspects (to me at least) of what this way comes, is that it will by no means be a democratic process. What you use to interface with the Matrix will determine your status and capabilities in the same. Up to and including of course the Kurzweillian wet dream of mind uploading and digital immortality http://www.kurzweilai.net/daily-mail-well-be-uploading-our-entire-minds-to-computers-by-2045-and-our-bodies-will-be-replaced-by-machines-within-90-years-google-expert-claims
interesting that 'meritocracy' like the term 'Big Bang' started out as a satirical phrase. Which is not to say it will go down that way. My suspicion is, like the brain, you will have hierarchical and distributed networks. But I can't help thinking this may be our only chance to have a hyperlinked mind with some 7 billion nodes, in turn aided by exabytes and kiloquads of ancillary electronic processing. That kind of cloud doesn't happened very often, and we will no doubt either miss the boat with the big die-off, or squander it all on porn, e-drugs, and online gaming.
DeleteAfter the peculiar success of computational genomics, I'm increasingly inclined to believe that this is what happens to all successful sentient species - that in fact - this may be a rather routine next step.
DeleteWhen a species emergent self-awareness comes to grips with the ground of its underlying deep structure - in the high-order simulation we experience as reality - this is the jumping off point. From dust we have come, and to immortal sentient dust we shall return.
No Fermi Paradox, just a great transition after which representative members of a species digitize and reincorporate themselves into deeper more permanent structure of reality. Ouroboros indeed..., from bacteria to eukaryotes we have come, and back to something looking far more like bacteria we will go.
Something efficient, small, durable, and massively internetworked. Seeds to be emitted toward some of those thousands of habitable worlds cosmic telemetry has revealed to us over the past decade?
One thing is for sure, unless we really gear up on the fissile technologies, there will no place in space for ape-shaped humans. As I've said before, if you are an ape, any environment outside of Earth sucks to live in.
DeleteOh yeah, just like these Interwebs, by design, no phookin-way these neurowebs EVER get properly locked down. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com.sci-hub.cc/retrieve/pii/S1878875016302728
ReplyDelete