The Cyborg...
I'm writing a script, formatting a TV series, and planning the cultural revolution, or should be. Instead I'm writing this as a form of procrastination and to, I suppose, think out aloud. You see, I was just watching a monkey with his head wired up to a computer, controlling a mechanical arm with its thoughts alone. Before you think I have a monkey in my office with which I perform diabolical acts, I would just like to say that I was watching it on the internet. It beats porn any day... Well, perhaps... But that's not all. There was a sufferer of "locked in" syndrome, which is a situation where you're conscious without being able to do anything. They wired him up and were teaching him how to make the computer speak with his thought processes alone.
Moving a cursor with the mind is kids stuff. Now complicated actions can be created by merely thinking of them. Science is deciphering the signals that the brain sends out to its various interfaces with the world. But it is not a one way process. For they have also found ways of wiring up the brain and turning the animal to the left, to the right, and generally motivating them to perform a range of actions like a puppet. This is over-riding the brain's own inclinations and perhaps altering some of those inclinations. In short, we have the makings of a cyborg, half human and half machine!
Instant Digression...
This doesn't particularly alarm me. My entire social life is organised by computers and phones. To be able to do this without the hassle of having to risk repetitive strain injury sounds like a great idea. To be able to be "telepresent" somewhere and not have to take a long haul flight sounds like a good idea to me. And even these less alarming technologies are two way streets. The way I think, what motivates me, and how I conduct my social interactions are all dictated to me by the technology I find so seductive and convenient. In fact, right now I'm writing this because it is far more seductive than working on a higher impact form of communication, but also one requiring a lot more effort.
Instant communication and instant social gratification is addictive. We love it! It replaces fame and achievement, assuming those two things ever really went together, as a motivating framework. We are all slackers now! Companies worldwide are finding that their staff spend inordinate amounts of time on their phones, on their facebook, on practically anything but the job in hand. It is addictive! And one assumes unproductive though maybe not because a lot of work is not productive so much as manipulating perceptions of productivity and more importantly "value."
The Slacker Economy...
The big bucks go, not to the toiler in the field or factory, but to the guys with the bluetooth headsets schmoozing in expensive clubs arranging stock market manipulations and company acquisitions, even companies that themselves do not have any profit. Immediately one can think of the likes of Twitter! It's worth millions if not more but earns nothing and has no business model that anyone can divine.
And this economy is sucking in exchange that is being printed by banks and governments to keep it all ticking over smoothly. Food is cheap nowadays. In fact in the west there is far too much of it and everyone is getting fat. Shelter is cheap and its prices have to be kept artificially high by the government printing money and forcing down interest rates. And everything else is unnecessary. Yet we crave it because it serves the purposes that our human minds need serving: we want sex, we want prestige, we want someone else to do all the ironing! Technology comes to our aid and we suck it up.
Franky Says War No More...
We also want to beat the crap out of each other as well and technology gives us a chance to level the playing ground, or stack the odds in our favour. And when the weaponry is so horrendous that nobody dares use it, other than crazy guys, one sees war between states fall away, being replaced by lesser conflicts, the kind that happen with sticks, machetes, and suicide bombings. States do not get overthrown by these things, though they might get modified, come to arrangements, or just contain things, very often utilising all manner of technological superiority. Hence, if we look closely at the conflicts of the world the reason why they are where they are, is because the Internet connections in such places are just not up to snuff. The barbarians in the mountains might now and then invade our cities, but they either get civilised by them or are sent packing with a bit of loot and little else.
Civilisations can have great technology and still be wiped out by marauding primitives, though most of the time it is nature that does the wiping out. The rivers run dry, the seas break through some wall, or earthquakes and pestilence break the economic system and the political cannot respond. Short of a comet crashing into the planet, or maybe global warming of an overwhelming nature, it is hard to see us losing all the present technological knowledge and returning to a state of nature. And all those who would control the freedom of association and thought and information, as well as mere rumour, that the Internet gives us, do so to take power out of the hands of the majority and hand it to a minority who consider themselves ideologically purer and therefore morally superior to the masses.
Everyone knows everything...
If history tells us anything, the minority that restricts information begins to believe its own propaganda and loses grip of reality and then power. One would like to say there is a happy ending in this and that democracy therefore prevails but life isn't quite as straightforward as that. Usually you get a messy period of competing powers who take ages to agree to disagree and play by a set of rules that rules out killing each other. But whatever the political machinations, it becomes hard to un-invent things we like having, like cell-phones.
But in the future perhaps cell-phones will head the way of broadcast TV, which for a while seemed to be the opiate of the masses. Now it is video on demand and youtube but perhaps sooner than one thinks, the chip in the brain will connect us all up with each other and give us all instant access to all information instantly. And perhaps it will make us all capable of understanding that information and capable of using it to invent more technology.
Where was I... Ah, yes, The Cyborg...
At this point you can see the individual melting away. In fact one can see something of the ape that is the human, being replaced by a machine that might have its own preferred ways of distracting itself. Man-Machine bosses of the future may well be concerned that not enough work is being done calculating the invoices of some galactic intellectual property market, and far too much is spent on surfing the infinite range of prime numbers. One isn't even sure if individuals will quite exist at all. And as for consciousness, one has no idea what it is now, and even less idea what it will mean when all the components of our brain that appear to be marshaled by some pre-conscious will that is observed and claimed as its own will, by an intermittent consciousness that sparks into life when we awake and when we are not concentrating on an all absorbing task, are all marshaled by an infinite number of interlinked consciousness. It is hard enough, working your way through that sentence, let alone conceptualizing the existential nuances of this new mind.
This eventual man/machine integration might not be as far in the future as one thinks. Ray Kurzweil, a noted futurist, calls it the "Singularity" and reckons that it will happen in about twenty years. Given how useless speech recognition programmes are, one has doubts about the timing, but there is no doubt that we are heading in this direction and that there may well be surprising leaps in our computing power that will bump us all into the "Matrix".
The Quantum Computing Cometh...
Quantum Computing is not as difficult to understand as people make out. Essentially when one looks at the components of atoms one does so by measuring various radio transmissions, in short stuff like all that twiddly squealy stuff and white noise you get with bad connections and dodgy reception, is measured and mapped out. It has been discovered that certain patterns occur so much percentage of the time, and other patterns have another probability of occurring. Scientists measure things like polarity, or spin, or flavour, and look at frequencies and pulses and characterise these as signs of the components of an atom. From quarks to protons to electrons and neutrons, and a whole range of other bits and pieces, what they are actually looking at are patterns of numbers that various measuring devices find. And all these little pieces of pattern can be manipulated to switch a switch, i.e. hold information. The more refined the measurement is, the tinier and tinier the thing is that can carry information. That's it. That's all you need to know of quantum computing. It can get huge amounts of information out of one atom. Not a chip, an atom. And there are quite a lot of these.
Grandiose Conclusion...
It might be some time before we can manipulate the entire universe and make it into a perfect place, whatever that might be, but a leap in this technology will have massive repercussions. And it will happen because research in this is cheap. Unlike going to Mars, it doesn't take a huge amount of the GDP to do it. Any self-respecting technical institute has a quantum computing department. One might even say that a break through here makes going to Mars redundant. If one can extract information from the planet as if one is there, then to all intents and purposes, we are there! Quantum computing has the potential of doing just that.
All of which makes one want to keep fit, brush one's teeth, avoid nasty accidents, and look forward to the moment when one can simply plug in and commune with the universe, or at least a big bouncy bed full of well oiled hot babes... the ape hasn't quite been facebooked out of me yet! But twenty years from now? Well, maybe forty years... I guess I can just about hang on for forty more years before I get a completely new body. Though maybe, I can start with a new set of teeth, a decent hearing aid, a set of bionic eyes, those vertebrae that are causing me such irritation can be replaced by something with a bit more spring in there, and what's the little toe all about anyway?
So... back to work... and if you have been reading. Let that be a lesson to you. One small click on a Tweat is just the beginning of a couple of hours pointless ruminations.