What's next for digital tech?

[myrthman]

I think this idea may have been inspired by the PlayStation9 commercial a few years ago and also the surge of people seemingly talking to themselves because of a little new thing called Blue Tooth.

Digital technology keeps getting smaller, more powerful, and faster and it's evolving faster than we can keep track of. I've speculated (yay!) that the next leap in technology could be cerebral implants that allow anything from cell phone conversations with a click of the jaw (complete with total voice recognition controls) to virtual reality games piped directly to the optic and aural nerves.

Download movies from Netflix or Blockbuster and watch them anytime you want, even in philosophy class! Enjoy the latest music mere seconds after the band leaves the studio! Check your calendar at the blink of an eye to see if you can go out with Stud McMuffin or if you need to go home and wash your hair! Access childhood memories and play them back across your retina for really accurate recollection (this would of course be called Google Brain). Record home movies without having to search for the camera!

And get this: don't ever worry about having to charge the batteries. As long as your heart is still beating and your brain is still ticking, the necessary electric power will be available to your implant. The only precautionary notes (and the only reason I'm even telling you is because my lawyers insist on it) are these: don't get water in your ears and stay away from microwave ovens.

I think this could lead to a great story, especially if there's one guy who refuses to buy into this new technology, like my grandmother did with cell phones. Maybe a short story called "Upgrade" or "Brain 2.0" or something. Thoughts and comments would be appreciated.

[rwley]

I'm with your grandmother and the other one guy; nobody's putting that in MY brain. No enough infrastructure to support it, I guess would be the problem.

How do you not get water in your ears when you wash your hair or swim? Earplugs are so darned uncomfortable!

I think it's a great idea. If you hack in are you a mind reader? How do you turn it off? Can you ever get offline?

I hear enough voices in my head, I think this would make me crazier than I already am

[Jeff Gerke]

Yeah, very fun idea, myrthman. Go for it!

I think it could go one of at least two ways: the "technology is to be feared" approach or the "technology will save us" approach.

In the first, you make it a cautionary tale about the dangers of advancing too quickly or aggressively. The new Battlestar Galactica series showed that only the old school, non-networked Galactica survived the Cylon assault because all the other battlestars were networked and it was a network-specific attack.

So you could have it so that only the stick-in-the-mud fuddy duddy hero isn't affected by the sinister virus that is affecting all those foolish early adopters. If only they'd been more skeptical of technology!

In the second approach, you show that it is only with the hero's fancy new gadgets that he has a chance of surviving and evening the odds against the horrible new threat to humanity. This is kind of a James Bond or Bionic Woman approach.

There's a new computer game out called Crysis. It's a shooter game in which you, the hero, are equipped with a prototype personal armor suit with four settings: super-speed, complete cloak, super-strength, and maximum armor. You toggle between the settings depending on the kind of danger you're in at any moment. Each of the settings has limits, so it's not a Superman suit. But it sure does help when you're up against hundreds of well-armed baddies.

My point is that you'd need to decide what you're wanting to say about technology. What statement are you wanting to make?

Another approach would be to simply let this technology be the backdrop against which you story is told. It's neither good nor evil; it's simply the way we live. Minority Report and Blade Runner would be good examples of this. Nobody objects to most of the tech in those movies. It's just the tech level of the given societies.

Any way you slice it, this is a fun idea.

I say again: go for it!

Jeff

[kouter]

I use this same type of technology in my novel. Its not the focus of the story however so its just in the background. This type of tech is pretty common in cyberpunk fiction. I based alot of my ideas off of the Anime series Ghost in the Shell. In that series they really delve into the social implications such technology will have like ghost hacking: someone hacking your e-brain and using you like a puppet to commit crimes and terrorism. Pretty cool anime.

Check it out!

[knightofhyn]

I can say that the idea of the massive network of neural implants and instantaneous access of information has been done. It was the new Twilight Zone, I believe. The story revolved around a large group of people with implants and one man who was part of a group of the minority, the 'Blind' I think they were called. Where anyone else would just download the information they needed, he had to actually read.

Eventually the system went rampant and began to demonstrate curiosity. Of course, this was at the destruction of the users by using their brains as external processors to work on things it couldn't' figure out through the primary processor (one was how many shades of red there were, I believe). This is modeled after a real style of virus, but the name of it is escaping me...one example is forcing a computer to find the last digit of pi. (For those who don't know, there isn't one.)

[Spokane Flyboy]

I thought of GitS as well, Kouter. A book also did that is titled Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. They have neural implants which they use to periodically upload their memories to later put in their clone should they die, as well as to track other things such as their money - which is actually merit based.

[scintor]

Beware of the trap involved in this form of Sci-Fi technology. Many authors use this type of technology to say that the soul is just a set of electronic pulses along a complex pathway. You can use technology to transfer the soul to another vessel or even copy it as much as you like.

In a set of unwritten stories that I have running through my head, advanced technology keeps running into a barrier I call The Breath of Life. This means that you can copy something down to it's component atoms and unless it has the Breath of Life there will never be a person inside. Gives the unbelievers fits.

Scincerely,

[e-mail]

[torainfor]

I'm in the middle of Elizabeth Moon's "Vatta's War" series. Many of her characters have cerebral implants. Among other things, they can hold top-level company information, call other implants, and connect a captain with her spaceship so she can control and monitor the systems.

[Divides the Waters]

scintor said:

In a set of unwritten stories that I have running through my head, advanced technology keeps running into a barrier I call The Breath of Life. This means that you can copy something down to it's component atoms and unless it has the Breath of Life there will never be a person inside. Gives the unbelievers fits.

Now this is something I want to read!

[Spokane Flyboy]

scintor said:

Beware of the trap involved in this form of Sci-Fi technology. Many authors use this type of technology to say that the soul is just a set of electronic pulses along a complex pathway. You can use technology to transfer the soul to another vessel or even copy it as much as you like.

In a set of unwritten stories that I have running through my head, advanced technology keeps running into a barrier I call The Breath of Life. This means that you can copy something down to it's component atoms and unless it has the Breath of Life there will never be a person inside. Gives the unbelievers fits.

Scincerely,

[e-mail]

In the story I mentioned, it operates from the assumption that there is no soul, therefore a person is only matter and electrical impulses. It was an interesting story none-the-less.

[knightofhyn]

Found it: The Outer Limits (the new series, not the original.)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_of_Consciousness_%28episode%29