| by Andrew Tobias |
STOP THE PRESSES!
From the New York Times yesterday: "Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts . . . "
My conception has long been that technology is on such an astonishing exponential trajectory – we've begun mapping the human genome, for crying out loud! Oh, look, we've finished! – that one day soon we'd be able to download our consciousnesses into a brain bank, basically, where we'd be able to do almost all the things we do now . . . email our friends, watch Seinfeld reruns, order movies on demand, play web boggle, go for virtual treks to Machu Pichu . . . a world in which the big addiction would be not cocaine or meth but the orgasm button.
(In a brain bank, you wouldn't literally press buttons. But how far are we now from being able to send electrical impulses from our brains? Not very far.)
Class warfare would be primarily between the virtual humans, like me, with 500 years of compound interest enhancing my vast fortune, and the physical humans, like some 25-year-old with an actual screw driver. I'd have $50 trillion (a good chunk of it in Borealis stock); but he would have the ability to disconnect me.
F Well, it seems we are not so far at all from "being able to send electrical impulses from our brains," thereby to control our TiVos. (And if Ray Kurzweil is right, as I wrote in that same column, we might not even need to surrender our bodies.) I know this is a tiny bit creepy. But consider the alternative.
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