Futurismic

Following on nicely from Paul’s discussion of direct-to-brain broadband – and Robert Koslover’s comment – here we have news of the first read-write brain electrode from a company called IMEC:

Today’s deep-brain stimulation probes use millimeter-size electrodes. These stimulate, in a highly unfocused way, a large area of the brain and have significant unwanted side effects.

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IMEC’s design and modeling strategy allows developing advanced brain implants consisting of multiple electrodes enabling simultaneous stimulation and recording. This strategy was used to create prototype probes with 10 micrometer-size electrodes and various electrode topologies.

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These new design approaches open up possibilities for more effective stimulation with less side effects, reduced energy consumption due to focusing the stimulation current on the desired brain target, and closed-loop control adapting the stimulation based on the recorded effect.

Presumably the avenue towards the development of devices for direct-to-brain broadband will be through the development of ever more sophisticated products of this kind, possibly travelling via wirehead-style ecstasy generators.

[from this press release from IMEC, via Technovelgy][image from IMEC press release]

In a “twenty-questions” style interview with author Michael Grant over at The Guardian, I was struck by his answer to the final question:

What piece of technology would you most like to own?

I want a Google chip implanted in my brain. Wire up my cerebrum. I’m perfectly serious. I want all access, all the time.

Now, despite his protestations of seriousness, I rather suspect he’s exaggerating for effect. But even so, I found myself wondering whether I’d go for such a connection myself, if the opportunity arose. Let’s assume for a moment (and not too hypothetically) that such an always-on link could be achieved without surgical intervention – high-powered wearable computing, wireless broadband link, some sort of cyberpunk data-shades assemblage for interface, all that jazz. Is it still as transgressive and extreme an idea if you could just take it all off when ever you chose to? After all, I already spend upwards of ten hours a day connected to the internet*; the technological leap to being able to do so without having to be here at my desk seems like a small skip of convenience from where I’m sitting right now.

Now, imagine that Grant’s implants actually existed – how differently would a person with such capabilities interact with the world, and with other people? Would they have something of the autist or savant about them, or would instantaneous access to the knowledge and conversation of the web enhance their abilities to socialise? What work would they do (or want to do), and what jobs would they be denied?

Sure, these are all established questions that arise from reading cyberpunk literature – but to be kicked into that mode of thinking by a throwaway line in an interview with a YA author? It’s a weird wired world, and no mistake.

[ * - Yes, I know it shows. Be nice. ]

Transhumanist thinker George Dvorsky is contemplating the nature of personhood – how do we decide whether a creature is a person, and what rights and considerations should that status confer upon said creature?

A big question I would like to answer is, should personhood status be described as a spectrum or as a definitive, fixed state. In other words, are dolphins and bonobos as much persons as a genetically modified and cyborgized transhuman? And is such a distinction even necessary? Should persons, regardless of where they are situated in the personhood spectrum, all have the same moral and legal considerations? More philosophically, given the space of all possible minds, how can we begin to identify the space of all possible persons within that gigantic spectrum?

Now, part of Dvorsky’s thrust here is that he’s concerned we may deny personhood to sentient machines; it’s an interesting argument, but predicated on the belief that sentient machines are not just a possibility but an inevitability, and as such is easy to brush away if you’re a strong-AI sceptic.[image by jimbowen0306]

But he also links to a paper by Linda Macdonald Glenn which discusses genetic chimeras – an equally sf-nal idea that is pretty much on the doorstep of reality as we speak. Say someone has 5% pig DNA – are they then only 95% human? What social strictures might we find ourselves justifying on that basis? If that sounds unlikely, think how easily we use race or nationality as justification for different legal status; sadly, we’re far too practiced at labelling “the other” to simply skip over the question of someone’s genetic make-up.

Dvorsky is also passionate supporter of animal rights, and extends the argument in that direction, too; if sentience is a movable feast of sorts, where do we draw the line? I believe I’d be correct in interpreting Dvorsky as saying that there isn’t really any line at all between ourselves and any of the higher order animals, and that personhood is a continuum rather than a binary state. There’s a nobility to that position that I have great respect for, but I also feel it’s a case of putting the cart before the horse. I suspect that we’ll never learn to treat animals in fair and reasonable ways until we’ve reached a point where we can admit (and act on) the essential equality of all humankind – and, sadly, that day still seems to be a long way off.

This month Blasphemous Geometries turns a conceptual corner, as Jonathan McCalmont decides to refocus the critical crosshairs on video games.

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Back in the 1930s, a number of physicists (including Einstein) argued that our universe is oscillatory. What this meant was that after the Big Bang, the universe expands until it reaches a certain level of density and gravitational pull, at which point it begins to contract until it ends with a Big Crunch. This idea still has some devotees. However, what made the Oscillatory Theorists interesting was the belief that after the universe had contracted back to its original singularity, it would then bounce back again; expanding until its physical limits were met and another Big Crunch was initiated. This meant that, according to the Oscillatory Theorists, the universe was stuck in a cycle of eternal destruction and rebirth. This has always struck me as a rather useful analogy for certain internet debates. “Is Science Fiction Dying?” is one such debate but another is “Where is the Lester Bangs of Video Games?”. Continue reading “The criticism of video games”

Slowly but steadily, the world is becoming wired; internet penetration in developing countries is growing at a surprising rate, and the residents of said countries are taking to Web2.0 like ducks to water. Great news for start-up entrepreneurs, right? [image by piccadillywilson]

Well, not entirely. Citizens of developing nations are providing a huge influx of users to Web2.0 platforms, certainly, but the problem is that they chew up a lot of expensive bandwidth without returning much in advertising revenue:

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

This intractable contradiction has become a serious drag on the bottom lines of photo-sharing sites, social networks and video distributors like YouTube. It is also threatening the fervent idealism of Internet entrepreneurs, who hoped to unite the world in a single online village but are increasingly finding that the economics of that vision just do not work.

I imagine this problem has been magnified recently by the economic slump; the pricing of online ads everywhere has taken a nosedive in the last year or so. That may be temporary, though, as print media venues close their doors in response to the same pressures. [via SlashDot]

What’s most likely, as the NYT article points out, is a sort of tiered service; MySpace is allegedly planning to serve its Indian userbase with a stripped down page design to save bandwidth (a course of action that, if deployed globally a few years ago, might have stopped people from abandoning it in droves for Facebook), while Veoh has entirely blocked users from many developing regions from watching videos on its service.

A big outfit like Google can afford to bleed money on this sort of thing (and indeed it is – some people estimate YouTube is costing them $1.65million every single day), but not forever. Which means that, if things continue in the same vein, the internet may become the latest frontier where the omnipresent (and ever-growing) gap between the haves and the have-nots makes itself manifest.

It’s a bit of a Catch-22 situation: ad revenue in developing countries is low, but it will only increase at a decent rate if the internet in those areas doesn’t become a second-rate ghetto with limited services. It’s the ages-old battle between idealism and profit margins… and a crucible test for Google’s “don’t be evil” manifesto.