Let the chips fall where they may

OK, big news. A scientist somewhere has implanted a chip in someone's brain. The chip in his internal skull talks to an external computer. Certain mental states make the computer go "beep boop." It's a brain-bot interaction. Small, maybe. But you gotta start somewhere. The cyberpunk revolution has begun.

Maybe. Or maybe not. There's a difference between PR science and real science. This strikes me as the former...

This is no more a "man-machine" interface than a pirate with a peg leg is a cyborg.

Sure, it's an extension of humanity into the realm of the mechanical. But then, McLuhan's big point was that all technology is an extension of ourselves. TV tubes are an extension of our eyes, radio an extension of our ears, computers an extension of our brains, etc...

So, in that sense, a pirate with a peg leg is a cyborg. But I don't think that's what the cyberpunks were talking about.

If you look at the cyberpunk universe (and I'm mostly talking about Gibson's universe) certain basic technological leaps have been postulated.

The most basic being the readable-writable human brain.

At the moment, we're stuck inside our skulls, on the inside looking out through our eye sockets. I can tell you what I'm thinking or imagining. I can write it down. But there's no direct way you can experience it (unless you're a telepath, which is a different story.)

There's also no way for the memories in my skull to be uploaded and stored; no way for my brain to download conversational Japanese; no way for my brain to operate peripheral mechanical devices by pure conscious thought.

The cyberpunk universe postulates hardware/software sophisticated enough to change this. Descartes' mind-body problem turns into no-problem...

In the cyberpunk universe, you, the user inside the subjective privacy of your own skull, can directly access entertainment, information, whatever; operate machinery via pure conscious thought; hook yourself up to peripheral "puppet" robots for sexplay; make backup copies of your childhood memories; earn a living as a courier by storing other people's memories in your head.

This mental permeability also allows the badguys to get inside your head and fuck with you.

Something tells me that this is all going to happen someday. At the moment, as far as I know, scientists are just beginning to be able to operate primitive prosthetic limb replacements via neural impulses. Nothing that actually works yet. A jerk here, twitch there. Maybe one day, walking...

But it's still a long way from that to watching movies via a port in your head.

I'm not really knocking what the prof did -- just the overreaction to it, the premature victory party. Technological change ain't continuous -- it evolves by a kind of punctuated discontinuous disequilibrium. You can make all the incremental improvements you want. But every now and then, something comes along that's different in kind...

Like mechanical reproduction and storage media.

Once upon a time there were no photographs, no records, no audiotape, no movies, no video. You could draw somebody's picture. You could write down what they said. But there was absolutely no way to get an objective record...

A tape-recorded deposition is different in kind from a written record created by a Roman scribe with pen and ink. A photograph is different in kind from a painting.

What the cyberpunks are talking about is like that. When it happens -- everything will change. (And nothing will change.) But it hasn't happened yet. It hasn't even started. It's just an SF dream. So, for the time being...

Let the chips fall where they may.