Cyber Amputee Syndrome

As you may have noticed when I get to running I tend to be hit with these awesome world transforming ideas. Today's Awesome Running Idea #2 ( the first one was the terraforming idea) is: Cyber Amputee Syndrome

In the future people are going to be commanding their computers with their mind. Already there are examples of our playing around with this technology of controlling computers with their thought, which I am too lazy to find and link to right now, but take my word for it, it's out there. I'm pretty sure they even demoed it at some big tech gathering for bigwigs like Steve Jobs.

Just think of it, in the future you'll never have to reach for the mouse because mouses will be hopelessly outdated. You'll simply think left and your cursor will move left.

Now I am no techy so I can't tell you exactly how this is going to work or when it is going to come about or anything like that. What I am able to tell you is what it is going to lead to.

In the future children will learn to control the computer with their mind much like today's children learn to ride bikes, something they learn young, master, and never have to really think about again. The noticeable difference here however is that tomorrow's children will likely learn this computer interaction much earlier than modern children learn to ride bikes, ingraining this behavior far deeper in them than bike riding today.

I am going to distinguish this post from those that will follow it and suspend judgment of this eventuality. Good or bad is irrelevant here. However, as a consequence of learning to use computers at a young age much like one moves one's arm, if these children come to be stranded on a desert island they will suffer from Cyber Amputee Syndrome.

Used to constantly controlling machines with their thoughts the absence of machines will have the same effect on these children as losing an arm or a leg.

As an offshoot of this thought I began to contemplate the effect of computers being so pervasive in our lives. I started thinking that mankind, will become increasingly like an ant colony or a beehive or some other colony organism. Individuals will increasingly diminish in importance and give rise to a hive mind or collective.

It is only a small step from controlling computers with our mind to putting computers into our mind, and with technological advances I can only imagine what we now know as internet will only become more widespread to the level that there is virtually nowhere you can't be in constant wireless connection with everyone else.

With these advances how can one really say what one person knows? It would be pointless to ask a student to give a presentation of Oppenheimer because the student will have instant access to the best papers written on Oppenheimer by the best and brightest minds in the world. Indeed they will even have access to the papers Oppenheimer himself wrote (I assume they should be declassified by then). Super smart search programs, Google 5,000, will be able to give the student a summary of the relevant information as it will have been digested and culled by so many others before that it will have been broken down in manageable bits even a grade schooler could understand.