Reading This Post Will Make You Sneeze

Human beings are weird.

Just to review a couple more bits of evidence to this regard I've personally come across recently:

Working for food makes it taste better.

If a menu has healthy food on it, we're more likely to pick something unhealthy.

Along similar lines, triggering our "I've done something good" switch makes us more likely to do something not-so-good, like in this study where simply looking at an eco-friendly website leads to stealing.

Oh, and daydreaming makes us sad.

Our brains and bodies seem to want to make us act against every moral and common-sensical principle we like to think we adhere to. I imagine that it will eventually be demonstrated that being loved makes us hate ourselves, experience makes us dumb, sharing makes us selfish, chocolate makes us cynical and sleeping makes us dead.

It seems strange to me that so much of what we do is preprogrammed, predictable, messed up and unconscious. We all of us like to think of ourselves as thoughtful individuals who do everything we do for a reason, based on a personal system of morals and preferences. But we're totally wrong. We're not drivers taking our body-vehicles down whatever road we choose. We're sitting on the roof with a fake steering wheel, coming up with explanations for why we go where we go, how we totally meant to turn left there or right here or go off that cliff there - when really, the car is being driven by a mischeivious chimpanzee, or maybe a malfunctioning robot, or no one at all.

I think in the future (you regular readers didn't think I'd stray from that topic for long, did you?) we might achieve a complete understanding of how humans tend to work, including knowledge of all our counterintuitive intuitions. We might even achieve a holistic picture of the principles that drive human behavior - which won't make us perfectly predictable, of course, because we still have free will and individual differences and so forth, but will make it more like we are at least sitting on that roof of that car with some bananas on a fishing pole to entice the chimp one way or the other.

At such future time - or, heck, right now - we might all benefit from taking a class, in high school or earlier, on How to Be A Human Being. It would consist mainly in participating in experiments that demonstrate our own weirdnesses and subconscious processes to us, so we can be better decision-makers in the future. Wouldn't have to be anything as extreme as the Milgram experiment (although we should read about it), but simply having many of our own cognitive biases demonstrated to us by, for instance, playing simple gambling games to demonstrate the negative effects of the sunk cost fallacy, etc., would make all of us better people and so much less vulnerable to exploitative advertising, con artistry, groupthink, political trickery, and Internet trolls.

It's a pipe dream, but even if it makes me sad pondering it, I'll do it anyways.

Can You Give It Up? The Facebook Saga Continues

A massive sidenote to preface my main post:

I think we talk about Facebook so much both here on These Gentlemen and - what with The Social Experiment - in our culture as a whole, because it is simultaneously the harbinger of, most prominent symbol of, and testing ground for an entirely new way of organizing society and approaching human relationships. No doubt about it, the way individual people and groups(who can afford computers) interact with each other is in the process of being changed by online and social media more drastically - and definitely more rapidly - than almost ever before; definitely moreso than by television (which is proprietary), moreso than by the telephone/telegraph, possibly even more so (particularly when you consider the "rapidly" modifier) than by the printing press. OF COURSE we're going to want to talk about it; it's practically the beginning of a new stage of evolution - albeit a voluntary one - and it's affecting us in new and unexpected ways that we were never even equipped to consider in the past. (Compare to other online systems like Wikipedia and email, which, while revolutionary, are essentially speed/access upgrades of systems we already had and were equipped to handle.) In certain circles, Facebook is becoming, or has already become, as bedrock a cultural signifier as etiquette, dress or diction - which is a strange thing, when you think about it, for a single, branded virtual business enterprise to be. At the very least, you can say that about social media as a whole, if not Facebook specifically - one's "online presence" is an element of our lives that we manage as diligently/haphazardly as our love lives, careers and hobbies. No wonder there's a movie about it.

ALL that said, my real subject: quitting Facebook.

I have, in the past couple months, wavered over a decision to attempt one of two... let's call them "modifications to my social-interactive experience." The first, less drastic (and not really "quitting"), would be to make a Facebook post to the following effect:

-If you want to remain my Facebook friend, please respond. If you can see this message, it means I DO want you to stay Facebook friend, but I am only going to keep you on if you actively respond.-

Totally emo, I know. But bear with me.

I don't post a lot on Facebook, so I don't have a lot of knowledge of who pays attention to - or cares about - my online face. This might make it seem like there's no reason for me to ask people to confirm their interest in me, since they get very little actual information about me in return; but the point isn't a visible exchange of status-posts and updates, but rather the knowledge of awareness. If someone and I remain Facebook friends, then we are both mutually aware that we can keep up with each other; it's an invisible connection.

I suppose the reason I have considered doing this is because I have begun to find it upsetting that I have 450 invisible connections and can't find anything to do on a Friday night - or any more direct method of soliciting serious conversation than a socially passive-agressive 'BRETT is bored, somebody call him' status update.

This is not to say that I feel completely alone or anything (my next four or five Fridays are all booked, I am proud to assure you, O Internet readers), but that the contrast is disheartening and cognitavely dissonant. In reality, I have the same number of friends and casual acquaintances as any twentysomething whose friends keep getting married - a number which naturally lends itself to not being able to hang out with someone every night of the week, which is typical and fine. But - online I have an army of hundreds, with all of whom I share passive, invisible knowledge of awareness, yet none of whom I'm close enough with (even narrowing down to those who are in close physical proximity) to go out and grab a spontaneous bite on a Monday evening.

It's the dissonance that's the problem.

Of course, the fear with enacting this plan is: nobody will respond.

At the very least, I would have to leave a sufficient window for infrequent-Facebook-checkers to catch my post and reply. But even given a chance, even people who would like to remain friends or to maintain knowledge of awareness with me might not respond, for the same self-defeating, lazy reason why people just automatically reply "maybe" to any Facebook event invitation. (Why? Facebook is passive. The more we feel we are being forced into being active, the more we can't be bothered... even if we spend hours upon hours on the site. We have to maintain the myth, at least for now, that Facebook is just a diversion/helpful tool, and no, definitely not our virtual agora.)

Which is why I've considered the more drastic second measure of leaving Facebook entirely, either for a week- or month-long "trial period" or "for good." (This would also, theoretically, include all other social media with the exception of Skype, which is just an Internet videophone and which is my only means of contact with foreign-nation-bound friends - but let's be serious, Facebook is the core of the whole enterprise.) The point of this would be to escape the peculiarities of Facebook communication - my farewell post would go something like this:

-Brett is leaving Facebook [for a while/for good]. The only ways to communicate with him will be on the phone, through email or snail mail, and on Skype if you live in a foreign country. I will have no status posts to read, and will not read yours; I will not be on Facebook chat, AIM or Gchat; I will not see your twitter or anything else. I hope this will lead to me communicating with you more, not less.-

It's a scary thought, not the least reason for which is that I've become dependent on Facebook for my WORLD NEWS. Seriously, I no longer read any news source directly; I merely wait for something to become enough of a hot item that it appears in someone's status post, and then I either click their handy article link or Google the topic. The same goes for my friends' personal news; without Facebook, there are slightly-distant friends I would not even know were getting/had gotten married - and would STILL not know about it, as much as a year later, because every piece of information about their nuptials has come through instant messaging or Facebook-stalking.

Many of the articles I've read about quitting Facebook have focused on the giving-up-an-addictive-time-waster angle, akin to giving up television so you can read more books and get outside (although a good number do touch on my perspective). But I'm more concerned with the social and personal cost of invisible relationships. It's a strange, unnatural strain on the mind, methinks, to be so totally aware of people one essentially doesn't even care about (in the truest, intimate sense of 'caring'); it's social grooming without the socializing, without the actual contact, without the actual reward.

Will I do it? Probably not. Maybe I'd try the month-long-moratorium, to see if it does actually increase my face-to-face socializing from friends who have suddenly lost the illusion of being in touch with me; it might make an interesting series of articles, at any rate. But I'm probably not bold enough, and far too dependent on it, to go whole hog, for either version. Without it, there are people who I do, actually, care about, and am interested in, who I would be completely out of touch with; there are events I would miss; real-time HELP ME WITH THIS THING, PLEASE COMMENT dramas I would be left out of; and in general, I would have the feeling that I'm being left out. Or who knows; maybe I wouldn't.

(I interrupt here to note that I am definitely not at an extreme in my reaction to social networks; on one hand, you've got the hikkomori in Japan, and on the other you've got folks who successfully use social networks to *increase* their physical contact with their friends via more efficient planning and coordinating and day-to-day life tracking.)

I can't help feeling that these dissonant feelings will have to be parsed out and the conflicts resolved - for my brain which is wired for the calculus of face-to-face society to reconcile with the brave new world of online society - because this is definitely the future. The old has to integrate with the new. It's like the history of architecture - we wouldn't have been able to progress to building glass-metal-and-concrete skyscrapers and Sydney Opera Houses if not for the knowledge we've been accumulating since as far back as Rome and earlier, dealing with stonework and arches and domes. These are the Roman times of social networking; we have to learn to become natural, masterful users of these rather crude materials before we get to the next level (full-on integration of all Internet-accessing devices - phones, computers, GPS devices, cars - with our personal online presence, automatic non-intentional updating, retinal-implant webcams, etc.) or the whole structure may collapse.

Get Healthy for the Future!

An experiment: a soundtrack for this blog post. Go here and listen to that in the background while reading! (There's no video to speak of, so don't feel you're missing anything while not watching.) It's THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE.

Speaking of the future...

I had a thought the other day while riding my bike for some much-needed get-out-of-the-house exercise. It's often said that our technological innovation increases at an accelerating rate. It's not a great leap to believe that within this century, we will see at least a few of the most mind-boggling amazing technologies from science-fiction and futurist prediction:

Space tourism, nanomachines (good ol' nanomachines), AI, teledildonics and giant mind-controlled mechas, virtual reality, mood organs, or, most relevantly to this post, curing aging.

So I thought:
Wouldn't it suck something awful if I got old, decrepit or died before these technologies were achieved?

We (I assume most readers are of my generation) may just be living at just about the cusp. There's no way to tell, of course, but it's entirely possible that these technologies - particularly ones that halt, cure or reverse aging and damage to the body - will be invented and implemented just in time for us to be too damn old to get any benefit from them.

I know I would be damn upset if, when I'm 60, space travel suddenly becomes as affordable and accessible to the average person as a trip to Six Flags... and I can't pass the physical. Meanwhile, folks just ten years younger than me - or folks who are my age or older, but in better health - can not only pass the physical and make the trip, but, thanks to medical improvements, will be able to remain in that state of health for decades and decades, taking weekly trips to Freeside space station to play zero-G hoopball with sexy robots.

So, methought... I better get healthy for the future!

The tricky thing about living when we live now is that people living in the time periods before and after us might be said to have good reason to treat their bodies poorly when they are young. The generations before us could argue that it was better to enjoy your body while you were young - rough it up with sex, drugs, loud music, tattoos and piercings, sports, junk food, weekend-long gaming sessions, etc. - than to be all prim and proper and careful with it, only to find out you'd gotten old anyways and your youth was wasted.

And the generations ahead of us might have the medical technology (easy body repair, mind-body uploading, nanobiomachinermagimechanicals, whatever) to abuse their bodies as badly as they wish, because the damage isn't irreversible.

But we, living now, may just have incentive to really do our bodies good so that we can preserve them until technology allows us to be more reckless.

The tricky thing, again, is that, barring a highly unlikely major breakthrough in the next couple years, we won't know until it's too late to change strategies.

Of course, I'm presenting a false dilemma here. It's not like it's not possible to enjoy yourself, party hearty and often, and still, as is preferred in our culture, keep in good health and keep your body looking good (the incentive being sexual appeal instead of personal health). The question is whether it's worth it to, I don't know, expend the effort to become a strict vegetarian gym-rat Zen monk marathon-runner on the off-chance that, when you turn 63, you'll be able to laugh in the faces of your run-down peers as your still-lithe body is now ready for decades upon decades of life-extended sex, drugs and space-adventuring.

I don't want to go on too long, particularly with all those links, and risk your awesomely retro Kraftwerk awesomeness background track run out, so I'll end somewhat abruptly here, by turning it over to you, Dear Reader, by asking you one question:

When you go about trying to improve your health (exercising, dieting, making New Year's Resolutions), are you doing it more so you can be fit and good-looking for Right Now, or are you doing it so you can be hale and hearty in Your Future?

Thresholds of Truth (a.k.a. Futurism, Episode 3)

I humbly propose that in the future we will reach the Photographic Truth Threshold.

We are already closing in on it, thanks to Photoshop. The PTT is the point in time at which you can no longer believe that a photograph, no matter how realistic looking, wasn’t faked, either in part or in its entirety. Specifically, it may be the point at which photographs are no longer admissible evidence in courts of law, at least not without strict standards to their origins and handling (e.g., having official chain of custody on the camera from the moment the photo was taken), because even an expert could not identify a fake any more.

Take a look at this woman. She’s not a particularly attractive woman, is she? Am I cruel for saying that? Not really, because she doesn’t exist. She’s a face created via averaging many faces to create a prototype “unattractive female face.” (The site also has prototypical male unattractive, and both gender attractive, faces, for the curious; I just picked that one because it was first on the page.) Surely it’s not much of a stretch from images like that to simply creating a photorealistic human being out of thin air.

Photoshop itself is becoming more and more accessible. Once, you would need complex tools and understanding, or at least a lot of patience and skill, to de-blemish a model’s image a magazine. Now, there’s a one-click tool that will do that for you. It’s not long before there’s a tool that identifies face structure and allows you to realistically wrinkle the skin in a photo, or move the cheekbones, or change the apparent ethnicity, or gender. Eventually, it may be commonplace for not just highly skilled graphics designers, but random shmoes like you and me, to have a program on our computers that automatically de-blemishes any photo we post of ourselves online, click-free. (The main obstacle to this right now is that, eventually, you have to meet people face-to-face...)

But the PTT is only the beginning.

Next after the Photographic Truth Threshold will be the Videographic Truth Threshold. Video is, after all, just photos in rapid sequence; it’s really just a matter of more work, realistically faking a video, plus a little understanding of make videorealistic movement. Certainly Avatar had moments of near-realism, but we’re not just talking about blue people.

To understand the technology that is going into this, watch this video. It’s kind of techno-babbly, but believe me when I say it makes sense by the end.

The implications, once this starts to become just a little bit a reality, are dangerous. Of course, if someone fakes a video of a UFO, we’ll all be incredulous (what happens if someone captures a real UFO? We’d never believe them), but if someone does something more innocuous and believable, like make it appear a person was in a location they weren’t, we could get into trouble. Presumably, if you could disguise the underlying coding or remove the traces of changes, no one would be able to tell through technological means; or at the very least, the ability to detect a fake would be inaccessible and highly advanced, so if some prankster made it look like you pissed your pants in a video, you’d have a hard time disproving the visual evidence.

Not to mention, if, say, a news network with a political agenda wants to make a point, they can fake the video. If the experts say its fake, they can produce counter-experts who say it isn’t, because, you know, they’re a news network. As of right now news networks and would-be propagandists are pretty much limited to carefully cutting and selectively reinterpreting existing documents of verifiable reality; but if they can insert a false smile at the right point here, or add someone in the background who wasn’t present there, all bets are off. Or, to take an alternative and less massive-conspiracy-theory scenario, imagine a grainy store surveillance video being manipulated.

Quick, without looking at the telltale video descriptions or comments – guess which one of these is CGI, and which one is not: Exhibit A - Exhibit B.

Of course, this only applies to visuals. Faking audio seems like another matter, but consider the advances we’ve had with ProTools and Auto-Tune, that can make a rank amateur vocalist on an detuned ukulele sound at least pleasant, if not quite like a pop star.

If the technology improves, however, and we can learn to manipulate the recorded sound waves so minutely that we can change the timbre of someone’s voice – then we’ll be in trouble.

Lastly, and most distant-future-fantastically, will be the Reality Truth Threshold. Assuming advances as mentioned in my post on brain-computer interfaces, there could eventually be a time when nothing you experience is necessarily real; someone could be screwing with your sensory input. Of course, on some level, that’s not technically different than right now – any introductory philosophy student will tell you that for all we truly know we could be brains in a vat, or inside the Matrix – and additionally the possibility of hallucination and schizophrenia cast our subjective experiences into doubt – but when we’ve observed the actualization of technology that allows the manipulation of sensory experience, it’ll be a whole different box of cats we’re dealing with. After all, the Matrix is only a theoretical possibility as far as we know at the moment, and schizophrenia can’t be artificially and intentionally induced (though a little LSD can help…), but if the technology is produced and verified, you’ll no longer know for sure when you’ve woken up in the morning that someone hasn’t implanted something in you and tweaked things just a little bit, so that whenever you step into the shower, the water feels cold, even though it’s actually scalding. You wouldn’t know the difference until your skin started peeling off. (Or the stall filled with steam.)

(I readily admit this is an idea oft-noted in sci-fi; but very rarely, as far as I am aware, does the writer of sci-fi have his protagonist in a world which is *actually* reality, but no one can be sure if it is. Always - because it's more interesting plot-wise - it turns out that it was Not Real All Along. But, if this comes to pass for you and me, it Will Be Real, but We Won't Know For Sure.)

So there, I’ve gone from near-future actual possibilities to sci-fi doom scenarios. But isn’t that always the slippery slope? Till then, have fun enjoying each other’s Facebook photos… while you can trust them.

Will Your Future Children Get Giant Mechas For Christmas? (That They Control With Their Minds?)

We can know that a technology might just be a wave of the future if the Pentagon is dumping Heaps of Cash into its research and development. Such is the case with possibly my personal favorite Holy-Crap-Do-We-Realize-The-Implications emerging technology: brain-computer interfacing.

The idea is very simple. Put electrodes in the brain, on the surface of the brain, or, less invasively, on the ends of nerves. Electrodes read brain signals. Electrodes interpret said signals and tell a machine to do something.

Holy Crap, Do We Realize The Implications?

Yes, folks. Giant Mechas. Also, teledildonics. (Alternate post title: Will your future [adult!] children get teledildos for Chanukah?)

Very recently, a human being was given a robotic hand, which he was able to successfully control, and even reported feeling sensations through it. Even more recently, ProDigits, the first commercially available bionic hand, debuted in Britain (price tag quoted as 57-73 thousand dollars). Prior to this, the most successful experiment was giving a monkey a bionic arm in addition to its intact, functioning one (the functioning one being immobolized with a 'nerve block').

Both human and monkey test subjects were able to control the robotic arm with their thoughts; and it seems their brains adapted to the direct neural control fairly quickly – as the monkey article puts it, the monkey’s brain accepted the robot arm into its “neurospace.” In other words, it seems it became just as natural for the monkey’s brain to control the robot arm as it was to control the monkey’s real one. Which makes sense, if you think about it and have ever driven a car – I’m going out on a theoretical limb here, but I would bet we all have the experience of controlling the vehicles we drive directly and subconsciously. When learning to drive, inside our brains, at first it was all “I push pedal down halfway, car goes faster,” but now it’s just “car go faster.” I’m guessing the same natural feeling of body extension is what one would experience, being hooked up to a robot arm.

Currently, the intent is to allow replacement limbs for amputees. A similar but more primitive version of the concept has already been actualized and that allows people to spell words by controlling a cursor on a screen with directed thoughts – or, in a much cooler application, play Pong. But, if one thinks about it, the possibilities are endless and staggering.

First of all, realize that the technology essentially uses the firing of a set of neurons in the user’s brain as a trigger for an electronic/computer function. There is no limitation to what that function is. It may be natural to think of using one’s arm-twitch brain signals to twitch a robot arm, but a computer could just as easily use them to control a robot leg. Or a robot mouse. Or a microwave. Or, yes, to play Pong – or World of Warcraft.

(If you think we have already strayed into fantasy, see here. Or here. Or here. A game of "The Adventures of NeuroBoy," anyone?)

In fact, there’s nothing to prevent a simple system being set up whereby when the user flexes a bicep, a bell rings. Or an alarm goes off. Or, with a little more effort, an electrode gives that user an electric shock. Now, change the trigger signal from “flexes a bicep” to “flexes the muscles in the genitals” or even “brain involuntarily increases blood-flow to genitals” and you have a sexual denial system. Or, in a version less attractive to scary fundamentalists and clever fetishists, one could set up a system whereby when the user gets turned on, a small capsule imbedded in their bloodstream releases Viagra to give them some help. (Please note that Viagra is known to have an arousing effect on females, as well.)

Let’s keep pushing. If you can make any detectable signals from the brain equal anything that a computer can make happen in reality, what can’t you do? You could potentially send an email to a friend or update your Twitter – while walking down the street and seeming to do absolutely nothing at all (all you do is think the right commands, and your mobile device does it without leaving your pocket). You could potentially control your own limbs with your thoughts – an application being considered by researchers, for the purpose of restoring limb usage to people with nerve damage, but which could also be used to do stuff like make your eyes point opposite directions or vomit on command (if you so desired) or deliver yourself an internal shot of insulin if you have a diabetic attack. And you could, potentially, drive a car without using your hands or feet – or without being in the car. Or without being in the same hemisphere as the car.

Which brings me to the giant mechas, a.k.a. neurorobots. Staples of Japanese manga and anime for decades, these massive war-bots allow a tiny, well-trained individual to fight Extreme Battles while looking Damn Awesome doing it. If we could build such a machine – which, considering our struggles with mobile robots, could be a ways off, admittedly – then with an advanced brain-computer interface, a soldier could control it directly through brain signals, without joysticks or keyboards. The soldier could control it from a remote war room. The soldier could control it while it flies into outer space. Yes, folks, the soldier of the future might be… a video gamer.

(Actually, the soldier of today might already be a video gamer, what with drone planes and robot bomb-sniffers. But we’re talking remote-inhabited mobile infantry here, not support and artillery.)

I predict a geek sport in the eventual future in which teams create their own weird mechas, dressed up like Evangelions or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, control them as a team (Bobby’s thoughts move the legs, Jenny’s thoughts fire the cannon) and battle them in arenas.

But that is only the beginning – I mentioned teledildonics, right? – because so far I have only talked about one-way, inside-out brain-computer interfacing.

The other way – going from outside in – is also under early development. Scientists have been able to make elementary recordings of what a cat’s and a human’s eyes have seen, and a technology called BrainPort allows visual signals to be sent to a blind person’s brain (similar to a cochlear implant for the hearing-impaired), amongst other applications.

These two technologies are complementary. One lets you control a computer and, by extension, anything a computer can control; the other lets a computer control, or least activate, your sensory experiences. Put them together, and what do you get? Forget controlling a giant mecha. Try being a giant mecha.

Imagine this giant war robot has video cameras, touch sensors, microphones. All we need is the technology to input this sensory information directly into your brain, and you experience the physical existence of the robot. Preferably, your natural sensory input from your real-life body is shut off temporarily; putting on blindfolds and getting in an isolation room would probably be sufficient, but nothing says we couldn’t figure out how to completely prevent you from experiencing the room your natural body is in. (Remember the 'nerve blocking' from the monkey-arm experiment?)

I don’t need to guide your imagination too far from there. It is only a few steps from the melding of these two technologies – which, remember, are under development – to all the wildest dreams of science-fiction. The Matrix? Easy (if you have enough computing power). Controlling another person’s body – in fact, switching bodies? Yep.

However, I believe things start getting really crazy when you remember, again, that there is nothing that says the relationship between the natural half of the equation (either the brain’s natural signals when going inside-out, or the natural world when going outside-in) and the computer-controlled half (the robot arm, the computer-generated sensory experience) has to be logical or typical.

Artificial synesthesia is possible; when the computer camera sees the color red, it can make your brain smell potatoes. If the computer camera is installed in the back of your own eye then you can be looped into yourself so that whenever you see the color red, you smell potatoes. Or whenever you taste potatoes, you hear the entirety of an Irish jig. Or whenever you hear an Irish jig, you automatically become aroused. Or whenever you become aroused, you’re suddenly, as far as your personal sensory reality is concerned, in the jungle, complete with visuals, smells, and the sensation of being strangled by an anaconda. (I’m sure it’s somebody’s fetish.)

Which brings me to teledildonics. Currently, as in that article, teledildonic technology is limited to stuff like the Sinulator, a pair of sex toys that simulate what is being done to the other sex toy remotely. Now we all know that sex has been one of the biggest motivators for improvement in technology – the porn industry was one of the first to get into both videotape and the Internet, so doubtless once these technologies start becoming a little closer to reality, baser human desires – and cold hard cash – will motivate all sorts of innovations. (How long until the first bionic penis replacement? Anyone wanna start a betting pool?) Innovations like a sex doll that you control with your thoughts (for yourself or someone else’s perverse enjoyment). Or celebrity porn stars who have sex with a volunteer who doesn’t mind getting Being John Malkovich’d, and a thousand users download themselves into his neurospace, and thus a thousand people have the same sexual experience. Or, scariest of all, direct stimulation of another person’s pleasure centers, which, following sci-fi author Larry Niven’s realistic vision of it, would be a technology so addictive its users die because they neglect to drink water or eat.

Now I don’t want to sound perverted. The applications are, of course, not strictly sexual. You could, for instance, play Super Mario Bros. 3 as Mario – as in, you become two-dimensional and stomp Koopa Troopas and grow to double size when you (YOU) touch a mushroom. If you can hook up your brain-interfacing computers to a network and thus to other people’s computers, you can have your theme music play in everyone’s heads whenever you enter the room. Or set it up so that if you feel an attraction to someone in the room, and they feel an attraction back, you both instantaneously “know” and can skip the awkward flirtation phase (okay, so that application was sexual). Or have a conversation with someone without speaking out loud – but you can still hear each other’s voices. For that matter, in the experience of you and the person you’re conversing with, you see each other’s mouths moving, and hands gesturing; but the rest of the world perceives two people sitting silently, unmoving - i.e., telepathy. (The military is researching precisely this application for battlefield purposes.) And then there’s whole-body uploading – where you more or less permanently inhabit another physical body, whether artificial or natural, whether looking like a human or like a frog or a anthropomorphic pencil. Basically, things can get weird.

Of course, the potential for abuse and crime is there too, but I’ll leave that to your imagination (or nightmares). I’ll also leave to your imagination the possibilities available when you consider that our perception of time is subjective, and therefore potentially controllable by sufficiently advanced interfacing.

To wrap up on that note, remember that, while all of this is fantastic, and the more out-there possibilities require the invention of some technologies that aren’t even conceived yet, for the most part the difference between where we are now and a world in which a person in Chicago and a person in Paris hook up by inhabiting sex robots on the moon is strictly a matter of degree and of combining technologies (like brain-computer interfacing and the Internet) that are currently separate. This technology is coming fast; I drafted this article in summer 2009, and only had the monkey experiment to refer to at that point. In a year or two, mark my words, once the technology is combined with this one and the motor functions and feedback are refined, people who can afford it (and of course it will get cheaper over time) will have completely undetectable replacement limbs; and it will only be a matter of time after that before some enterprising and slightly insane rich person gets themselves a third arm. So while I’m not saying we’ll be living in Tron anytime soon, don’t be surprised if within a decade or so, Team Mecha Battle Extreme!!! debuts on Japanese TV, or at least most forms of blindness and paralyzation are bypassed and effectively cured.

And to finally end on a wild tangent, this might be why we’ve never discovered intelligent life in the universe – perhaps whenever it gets to a certain point of technological development, a species simply closes up into virtual reality, stops bothering with space exploration, and has perfectly calibrated virtual orgies and tea parties until the end of time.

Facebook and Death

Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and whatever future sites and technologies replace them, we will all be acutely aware when every single person we know dies.

At the moment it's not so obvious. Most of the Facebook generation is young, and the individuals who use these online tools are the ones more likely to be able to afford a computer and so less likely to be living in conditions that make them more likely to die young. (Got that?) But in twenty years or so, when our generation starts heading into late middle age and heart attacks and strokes begin to take their toll, it will become an increasingly regular occurrence to find out, via Newsfeed or Tweet, that someone you once knew passed on. The kids you went to high school with and haven't seen since that reunion. The ex, or the weekend fling, whom you stopped talking to long ago. The former co-worker (the one you flirted with, the one you rivaled with), your former best friend's boyfriend's kid sister, your college professors.

It will be strange, I imagine. It will be the saddest part of our wide-cast net of human awareness. It is easy now - or used to be easier - to travel through life as if walking through woods; your nearby companions are right there with you, and some friendlier acquaintances and more distant relatives are occasionally obscured by the trees and undergrowth, and way off in the distance showing their faces only when crossing a meadow are those folks you only maintain the most casual of contact with. On such a passage, a distant individual might stop appearing for years (or for ever), and you'd never know the difference; they could just have taken a slight detour behind the thickets. Your view allows some knowledge that there is a whole world out there, but it is mainly a personal, close-knit journey.

Thanks to these social connection innovations, the path we take, or will take, will be more like that on a great, flat plain, or maybe inside an infinitely large glass building with see-through tubes and bridges everywhere, or even on the inside of a Ringworld. You can see for miles and miles, and there are a LOT of people out there; only the horizon obscures them from view. If that fellow you friended after talking music tastes with at the bus stop twenty years ago and never spoke to again suddenly drops down dead, you can see it happen even at that great distance; especially because you can see all the people closer to him turning their heads, like rubbernecking on the highway.

As we get older, there will be more and more bodies littering the clearsighted landscape. (In this metaphor, there may still be distant forests in which the older, unconnected generations are walking largely unseen; only the younger generations traverse the vast plain, at least at the moment.) Mortality everywhere. I suspect, and I hope, that it will actually bring us all closer together - if your traveling companions drop off while tramping through the woods with you, you're suddenly alone; but in this wide-open landscape, you can see that way off over there are some other folks looking lonely, and you can cross the distance to join them.

The only question is, as this blogger asks, is if we'll be able to control the social-network announcement of our own deaths. As she points out, an individual might not want to have their Facebook page memorialized or their friends to announce their passing online. Do we have the right - or ability - to take ourselves out of the landscape? As social networks become more prominent, does a person have some (legal or moral) propriety over their cybersphere presence? Most likely, no matter how strenously a person objects, in the near future no one will be able to prevent their online presence.

Stuff to think about. And if you're curious, this article describes the current Facebook policy towards death of a member.

So, to sum up plainly: I think it’s highly likely that in our futures we will remain continually aware of the basic life-status of nearly everyone we ever meet; at the very least we’ll be aware of anytime someone dies. In the past, someone you lost touch with would simply disappear from your sphere of knowledge and you’d probably never find out if they outlived you or not. Thus, we’ll see far more death than any previous generation. But at the same time – I hope – this will ultimately make us less lonely and more connected.