The possibilities of brain implants

Mitch Denny has been building on top of my recent post about non-invasive brain interfacing.

When most people react in horror to the concept of brain implants I see only posibilities. Can you imagine being able to access programs and information at any point in time, wherever you were.

Imagine if you will, I’m standing at a bus stop, all of a sudden I get an IM message from a customer who has a critical problem with their application which is loosing them hundreds and thousands of dollars. Right then I book a flight and order a taxi, while I am in the taxi I book my accomodation. The customer IM’s me again with a dump from the event log of the application which I open up in analyse.

While I am sitting on the plane drink a nice glass of red I crack open the source files and see if I can spot the problem. By the time we touch down I have found the problem in one of the core libraries and have applied a patch and whilst waiting for the customer in lobby I kick off a compile.

We go to a meeting room where the product team have assembled. There are about five people there, some I know and others I don’t. They all have the same kind of implants and they all link wirelessly. I transfer the freshly compiled code to the tester along with the source code diffs and they devise some new test cases to ensure things worked. They build and run their tests, everything works (OK – this really is a fantasy now) and they transfer the QA’d code over the the infrastructure guy to deploy onto the staging server which he does right there in the meeting.

The system is live – time to play Halo 4, except this time we run around the building with the heads-up-display providing the special effects. All of this could have been done remotely - except for playing Halo

Great work Mitch! But terribly geeky.

How about THIS scenario instead:

I'm on vacation in Orvieto, Umbria, Italy. I walk into it's majestic 14th century Duomo, stare up at the beautiful frescoes painted on walls of the Brizio Chapel and blink twice. Immediately a video overlay appears in my vision of a noted local art historian giving me a lecture on Luca Signorelli. The images I can see on the walls, faded by time, spring to life and are enlarged 20x by blinking three times.

When I've had enough art history, I think to myself "what's for lunch" and a 3D representation of the Michelin Man appears in my line of vision and guides me to Restaurant Dell'Ancora
on the Via di Piazza del Popolo for lunch. He then chooses from the menu (based of course on my diet which he understands down to the kilojoule) and orders both my food and a nice bottle of Sagrantino de Montefalco 1998 in Italian which plays through the speakers in my shirt collar.

 

Comments

[Michael Specht]

Freaky guys, Mitch is describing the exact world I would love to live in. We are getting close, not to the brain implant bit, but with NetConnect, tablets and other items.

[LeoRivas]

I love to find people so open minded about the future of technology, and who sees advantages more than prejudices about how we'd manage on such reality. If you love to see what future might look like on a overtechnologised world, i'd suggest you to read Masamune's Ghost in the Shell series (the anime also is great, two movies and a tv series). Apart from action, bullets and robots, there are a lot of social issues that may arise on a networked-brain age, such us mind-hacking, false memory inserting hacking, potential loss of privacy and even mind control. On the other hand, you have endless possibilities to get enhanced bodyes, replacement parts, even immortality as transferring your brain data and 'soul'(ghost) into a robotic body or machine.. as you can see, having IM online on your brain seems not so impossible at all, if you search google for 'brain implants' you'll see there are a lot of research on the subject, id like to see that coming true!. Regards LeoRivas.