Verily I say unto thee, that Mark Kent spake thusly:
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> When I first studied CS, back in 2000/1, I can remember how ridiculous the
>> idea of putting the entire human knowledge in a matchbox seemed. A lecturer
>> spoke about it. These days, Wikipedia neatly fits an SD card. It's no
>> matchbox. It's something you can conveniently put in a person skull and I
>> bet that some day in the future we'll see more microcomputer assisting the
>> body in one form or another, from the inside, on a regular basis. The idea
>> os knowledge enhacement that interacts with neuron is probably well ahead
>> though. Think about the effects on input/output methods.
> You're in the realm of the cyberpunk genre of science fiction novels,
> from the likes of William Gibson, Greg Bear and others, where they write
> eloquently about neural implants of this kind. Worth a read, if you
> haven't read them already, in my view.
>
> You're right, though, the idea of getting whole encyclopaedias on a tiny
> device still seems a little weird, even after all these years of
> watching storage get smaller all the time...
Other than the "cool gadget" cyberpunk aspect of this technology, there
are some very serious and greatly needed implementations, such as
assistive technology for the disabled.
Imagine replacing the "memory" of those suffering from Alzheimer's or
senility, with some micro-device containing a memory module and search
software. Or restoring the EQ [1] balance of autistics with emotional
response suggestions generated from tone, posture, and facial expression
analysis software. "Fixing", supplementing, or even replacing certain
broken higher-brain functions could actually be implementable in the
future, given advances in chip design, miniaturisation, software,
psychology, and the field of medicine in general. It needn't be
"implants" as such, it could just as easily be something one wears, like
a magical "fix my brain" PDA ... for the disabled.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQ_SQ_Theory#Autism_and_EQ_SQ_Theory
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| I found [Vista] to be a dangerously unstable operating system,
| which has caused me to lose data ... unfortunately this product
| is unfit for any user. - [H]ardOCP, <http://tinyurl.com/3bpfs2>
`----
Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux) on sky, running kernel 2.6.20-1.2307.fc5
19:15:02 up 5 days, 3:26, 2 users, load average: 0.38, 0.33, 0.34
|
|
