Yup – no bullshit. Read it here.
Now, if I seem a little alarmist, it’s not simply because of the Terminator and Matrix movies (which are both gold-standard for sci-fi movies on the subject, by the way). It’s because as I watch the world around us grow increasingly “integrated” and more and more web-dependent, I can’t help but think that the William Gibson novels of my youth (the author of Neuromancer, which coined the term “cyberspace”) are about to become a reality. I was telling one of my daughters how cool it was for her and her peers to have the internet as high school students. Imagine for a moment (those of you old enough to remember having to schlep to a library in the snow to complete a history paper) the current world without instant internet access. It’s pretty incomprehensible. With a handheld device, I can voice search on Google for just about any piece of information imaginable and get the answer with no more than a few clicks of a mouse or press of a button. Who wouldn’t pay to be permanently ‘wired’ – if it could be done safely with an implanted chip?
If it seems like a fantasy, know that we already use implants for any number of patients with paralysis. In 2004, Time magazine published this article about a brain chip implant that allowed a paralyzed man to “check email and play computer games simply using thoughts. He can also turn lights on and off and control a television, all while talking and moving his head.” Time magazine, Oct. 21, 2004. You think we haven’t gotten a little better technology in the last 7 years?
The final barrier – and perhaps ultimate freedom – for online users is anonymity, which is currently limited by ‘currency’ – or the need to pay for things with an actual credit card or bank account that would be tied to a person’s real identity. But what if that went away? Well, guess what? It has.
Newsweek published an article (June 19, 2011) about a new online currency called bitcoin, which is being traded in a black market fashion. The currency is, according to the article, “basically just a little bit of encrypted code that can be zipped over the Internet and stored in a digital wallet. The concept was proposed by a mysterious hacker named Satoshi Nakamoto (no one knows who he is, and the name is believed to be a pseudonym), who published a white paper describing a way in which computers connected over the Internet could be used to create an unregulated ‘cryptocurrency.'”
Governments (including our own) are already talking about regulating it or trying to do away with it… which is tantamount to making it more desirable for a large portion of the world.
The Brave New World is coming, like it or not; and I’m not so sure the singularity will wait until 2045.