The Imagination Set Free

To interact with our computers better we're shrinking the bulky headgear we have to use to see and hear alternate realities down to something the size and weight of a pair of sunglasses---very expensive sunglasses. Eventually, they might shrink to the size of contact lenses. As computer power improves, the bulky handgear we must now wear to let the computer decipher our gestures will also eventually vanish, to be replaced by tiny video cameras or laser beams that let the computer monitor all our movements---facial expressions included---simply by analyzing images.

Once we've passed that point, perhaps fifteen years in the future for cheap systems, the technology might shrink even more and eventually slip inside our bodies, just as pacemakers and birth control implants already have. As computers continue to shrink in size and cost and grow in power and complexity, we might one day use neural implants to interact directly with our machines. Two decades from now, some of us may start choosing to be artificially augmented. We would then be attached to what would truly be our very personal computers.

Electronic cochleas that let the deaf hear already exist. Of course, they are still crude. It takes at least a month of healing after implantation, then several weeks of adjustment to the new stimuli before patients can hear with them. But by using those devices, otherwise deaf patients can recover 30 to 40 percent of their hearing.

Artificial nerves also already exist. Some paraplegics have had thin wires, which are connected to a tiny computer in their abdomen, implanted in their paralyzed legs. Flexing various of their upper body muscles tells the implanted computer to apply power to various leg muscles. Within a few months of training, patients who were once told they would live in a wheelchair for the rest of their lives walk again.

It is already becoming practical to electronically read the signals carried by individual nerve fibers. Researchers have made permanent connections to the leg nerves of rats by cutting the nerve, inserting a chip with about a thousand tiny holes between the cut ends, then letting the nerve fibers regrow through the chip's holes. With such an implanted chip, they can read individual pulses traveling up and down the nerve fibers and send artificial pulses down the fibers to move muscles. Such implants could eventually give amputees lifelike control over their computerized artificial limbs. Eventually, computer implants might even give us manual remote control of all sorts of objects over long distances or at small scales.

In the far future---thirty years ahead, perhaps---we might not even need to invade our bodies to gain these powers. Even now brain scanners can detect minuscule electrical currents in our brain and use them to control machines with our thoughts. Various military units are already experimenting with controlling warcraft mockups with such brain scanners. Controllers simply think about moving the mockup in a certain way and, using biofeedback, a display helps train them to influence the mockup's behavior.

Of course, all that technology is still primitive---and very expensive. One day, however, the disabled may use it to direct their wheelchairs, or their own disabled bodies. The blind and the deaf might use it to see and hear again; and armed forces might use it to control jets and ships and tanks. Ten years later, all of us may use it to guide our vehicles and household appliances.

From such technology we might build strength-amplifier suits for soldiers, or for miners and workers in other heavy industries. Perhaps we will use it to aid our memories and enhance our intelligence. When we have artificial eyes and ears, it's but a step to giving ourselves artificial memories so that we can replay past scenes and recall exactly what someone said or did.

Further, when we can block normal nerve impulses, a computer could replace those pulses entirely and so create a totally synthetic reality. Whatever impulses we send to our muscles could be used for any other purpose. You might jack into your car and receive kinesthetic feedback on its condition. But it need not stop there. Future executives might jack into their companies just as they jack into their cars. When that kind of technology comes, it will no longer be virtual reality, it will be real reality.

Direct interaction with machinery, for example a car, could speed our reaction times by eliminating the time it takes to move our muscles. We could also use it to prevent sensory overload in pilots by giving them more direct control over their planes and removing clutter from the cockpit. Or we might use it to put a display in our field of view that we could use for everything from annotating sales records to aiming a tank gun.

Eventually we might modify our pets and ourselves to carry all sorts of technological enhancements directly hooked into our nervous systems. For example, in the future some of us might see heat or ultraviolet light as easily as we see visible light today. Imagine what that might do for the security industry alone. Imagine guards who can shoot guns they don't even hold. Imagine cyborg guard dogs armed with grenade launchers.

All these abilities will trigger yet another change in our perception of reality, perhaps the last one. This time it won't be simply a change in perception or memory or acuity or skill, but a change in reality itself. Perhaps our deepest distinction is that between our own bodies and our environment---the self and other---and that distinction crumbles when we can jack ourselves into any device in our environment. In such a world, the environment becomes us and we become the environment.

In forty to fifty years, the best, most expensive, alternate realities might become as detailed as reality itself. There might be no way to tell the difference---at least for sight, sound, temperature sensation, motion, and (perhaps) touch. Smell might take longer, not because it's impossible but because it may be expensive; and unless we go to neural implants, we may never get taste at all.

The question "Is it real?" might first become irrelevant, then meaningless. The use of synthetic experience may grow so widespread that some of us will have to make a conscious effort to act as if reality were real. For some of us, everyday reality might become just another alternative reality, one whose natives take unkindly to being treated as if they were figments of someone's---or something's---imagination. Perhaps a new fashion for unmediated realism will arise, a backlash from all the artificiality we live in. Or perhaps not.

Will we, in the very far future, use neural implants to brainwash people, record dreams, read minds, exchange experiences directly with each other, and give ourselves endless pleasure and prisoners continuous pain? A strange new world is coming, and coming fast.

It is unknown---and unknowable. We're headed for it at breakneck speed, accelerating as we go. But we don't know where we're going. About all we can be sure of is that it probably won't be any of the cozy futures we think we spy today as we fashion our own little bits of it. It will probably be something wholly other, something alien, because that's what this level of corrosive change does to things. It mutates them into something rich and strange. Lacking any formal way to predict the future we're now so busy crafting for ourselves, we can rely only on poetry and metaphor to draw its lineaments and encompass its strangeness.

Of course, all this---even if it does come to pass---isn't something we have to think about today. It's all unthinkably far in the future.

Isn't it?

In the Screen of the Machine