Star Trek: Voyager has boldly
unleashed a new terror on the world. The show’s creators have tapped into the collective unconscious and found the very heart of darkness. They have unearthed the two scariest words in the English language and put them together in one show: Borg Teenagers!
What a story arc: computer implanted kids and ex-Borg Seven of Nine as mommy! The kids are ditched on an abandoned vessel when the Borg escape a pathogen ravaging their ship. Voyager rescues the kids and entrusts them to the care of Seven of Nine.
The Borg, that horrific race of half computing machines/half carbon life
forms, have always struck fear in my soul with their greeting, "We will assimilate you. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to serve ours."
I remember when the Borg were introduced during Star Trek: Next Generation. The Enterprise was thrown into a part of space where they encountered the Borg for the first time. I watched these hybrid creatures and wondered what kind of future could create these freaks. I was able to sleep with sweet dreams when I reminded myself, "It’s only a tv show with particularly creative writers."
Little did I know this future could be right around the corner. Wired Magazine reported, in recent months, that a scientist successfully added
neural implants to his body. Over the coming year, he and his wife will be implanted in the next phase of the experiment, and computers will send their nerve and possibly mental/emotional information to other so they can share the same experiences (similar to the Borg hive mind). Can you spell D I V O R C E!
To fuel my paranoia, I read Ray Kurzweil’s book "The Age of Spiritual
Machines." Kurzweil predicts a not-to-distant future where humans will get neural implants on a routine basis. A brain job instead of a boob job? This is your brain on Viagra (Oops, sorry. That already happened). I could accept all this if it was just another part of the crackpot sci-fi literature I sometimes enjoy reading. But Kruzweil has juice... real
creds... inventor of speech recognition technology, inventor of music synthesizers...
Now, I’m afraid to go to sleep. With every new announcement of DNA
built IBM processors & nanotechnology breakthroughs, I fear the worst - the tacky surgical
"enhancement" before and after pictures. Move over liposuction ads! Here comes neural implants which will be made possible because we can now build technology at the atomic or DNA level. Engineering this technology to easily fuse with our existing neurons has already been successful in several experiments.
By 2020, computers will exceed the computational ability of the human brain. Do you think our modest natures will allow this to happen for long? Nope! We will want to know everything our computers know, and neural implant technology will make it so. We will become one with our machines. The machines will claim to be human. We will believe them.
Will we end up in the world portrayed in Star Trek: being bullied by our
machines or paying the price for these radical advances in artificial intelligence? Be reassured by the following quote: "Artificial intelligence is the science of how to get machines to do the things they do in the movies," Astro Teller.
Uhhh, ohh!
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"Brain
Jobs Cheap: Before and After"
