Web-enabled Brains?

How possible would the concept of web-enabled brains be? I know its not possible now, but who’s to say 10-20 years down the road it won’t be? Allow me to explain.

With a wireless internet connection connected to some system in your head, you could retrieve information from the Internet, instantly. You would need some way to display it of course, and some ‘Thought-To-Text’ recognition but how cool would that be? You would be the smartest human in the world.

You could know every definition for every word in every language, you’d know the weather for every city in the world at any given point in time, etc. the possibilities would be endless…

Has anyone thought of this before?

So? Who thinks in 10, 20, or 30 year this will be available? :slight_smile:

I dunno. You’d also have instant access to every urban legend, every conspiracy theory web page, every site chock full of misinformation, every bizarre obsession or meaningless trivia page (“InsideMyRefrigeratorCam.com–So, does the light really go off when the door is shut?”), every piece of e-mail glurge or spam, and every stark-raving lunatic rant on the Web. And that’s not even mentioning the porn sites.

K3v1n wrote

Sure. It’s a pretty standard topic in the right circles.

Consider this: Today in the laboratory, we can hook to a nerve and discover when it’s firing. Scientists are working on an artificial hand that will function so that you think about grabbing a cup and your hand grabs, i.e. just like a real hand.

Today in the laboratory, we are able to hook into optic nerves and create sight. There are actual cases where blind people have gotten some level of sight. Not nearly sight like normal people enjoy, in fact not even enough sight to be useful yet, but sight none-the-less.

So, we already - today - have crude input and output interfaces directly into the human brain. How far away can it be before we create a more general interface, such as you describe? You’ll be able to think of a problem and know the answer. I suspect 30 years isn’t out of the question.

But what happens when you accidentally download a virus?

Seems to be you would effectively be fucked up in the head

Fellow name of John Barnes wrote a novel titled Candle that sort of touched on this. The major historical background for the story was the “Meme Wars”. In the future, the world was descending into pretty much World War III; technology had lots of people with essentially web-enabled brains. Now, cyberwarfare was a big thing along with the old standbys of bombing and troop movements, so each military tended to use its own OS to stymie virus attacks.

Then someone finally figured out how to program a universal translation routine–which enabled programs to translate themselves to function on any operating system–which they didn’t take into account also meant…the human brain. The Memes were viruses able to infect the human brain to propagate, and they evolved at an exponential rate into true intelligences; the book itself took place long after the dust of the Meme War had settled; the one that had triumphed was called One True, which ran as an emergent program sort of parallel/distributed-processing on every brain on the planet.

Neat stuff.

There was an Outer Limits i saw a while back (the modern version of the show), where everyone was hooked up via their brains and an interface to a central computer with all of the knowledge of the world. All anyone had to do was to think of what they wanted - instant information. In fact, no one knew how to read books anymore, since it was all done by thought. The only person not linked was a guy who had some sort of problem where his brain wasnt able to interface with a device, so he had to do things the old fashioned way…read.

Problem was, people started dying off when the computer started going haywire. Turns out the way to turn off the machine was a diagram in a book. All anyone had to do to activate the shutdown was look at this specific diagram.

Took a course on Science, Technology and Society in
college. Currently our computers are still too big to fit
inside the skull. Communication between wetware(that’s the brain to non SF fans) and hardware is still primitive, limited and slow.
Thirty years sounds about right, for direct neural interfacing to become possible.
I recommend the series Doom 2099. It’s a thoroughly cyberpunk look at the future: Megacorporations have replaced governments, neural interfaces are as common as cell phones, there’s a thriving black market in stolen information etc. One issue features a net-assassin named Fever. Online he is an infamous killer. In real space, he’s a nobody. So he hooks himself up to machines that feed, clean, and exercise his body and spends all his time on the net.

Forget John Barnes and all the others. H. G. Wells himself wrote on just this topic in 1938. As with many of the themes in science fiction, Wells has already been there and done it better than most. The World Brain.

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by MEBuckner *
**

Kinda gives “Pop-Ups” a whole new meaning, don’t it?

An idea which Wells stole from Olaf Stapledon’s ‘Last and First Men’ written five years earlier.

Stapledon never gets the recognition he deserves. grumble

I don’t think anyone will ever find web-enabled brains worthwhile enough to develop. Simply having access to large amounts of information is not going to make you any smarter (by my definition) than you are now. You would still need to understand the information, be able to think of ways to apply it, etc. Perhaps you might be able to save a few minutes compared to how one uses the web to obtain information now, but it will take you just as long to digest the information and think of ways to use it. If you imagine some sort of artificial intelligence hooked into your brain to help you think, then again I don’t think there is much benefit compared to that and interfacing an AI using a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. If you don’t want to have to understand anything the AI tells you, but instead be able to act immediately, then I suppose you would have to abandon the keyboard, mouse, and monitor, in favor of a direct link from the AI to your brain. But then you are nothing more than a piece of hardware. I think it would be easier to build a robot to act directly on the AI input than it would be to turn yourself into a robot.

having access to instant data via the brain-net will make you dumber. writing caused us to stop remembering things. Why bother memorizing things when you could write them down?

With the internet (or something similar) available to store information, there will be no need to remember anything. people will forget how to remember.

The internet has worked its way into my brain. If I can’t remember something, I go to a search engine and find it, even if it isn’t very interesting, just because it’s so convenient. So when I was on a trip and couldn’t think of leann rime’s name, I had no way to remember it other than hoping it would eventually bubble to the surface of the compost lying around in my brain, which it did a few hours later. Instead of having tools for recalling momentarily inaccessible information already in my head, I found myself preoccupied by strategies for finding the name on the search engines–country western music, blue, grand old opry, and so on. I was coming up with keywords useful in an internet search, but useless to me in actually remembering her name.

ten years ago I would have scoffed at the notion of the internet changing the way people think and interact. Now I have much more respect for the revolutionary changes wrought by instant access to information.

Monitors have been developed that project a monitor image directly onto the cornea via laser. It makes the monitor appear as if it were huge and at some distance away, like working at a 10-foot monitor screen across the room, completely readable. The projector was small enough to wear around your neck. It could be built into some goggles. In a generation, it might be built into the frames of glasses, or in an implant that can be placed directly inside the eye. Virtually all of the stuff in your computer is involved in I/O, not in computing itself, so you shouldn’t think of a computer as being a huge box, or even a slimline notebook. the ram and chip are tiny and could be implanted under your skin on your skull or other part of your body. The revolution that needs to occur is in I/O–getting information to ram and back out of ram in a usable form. You could print your thoughts wirelessly, save them to disk, and do far more–trick your body into thinking it isn’t hungry, know your exact location at all times, find the fastest route through a series of cities, and so on. Putting this information to use would take intelligence, as well as knowing the difference between an urban legend and a news report.

And if you catch a crippling virus, well nothing could be more crippling that believing you aren’t good enough or are too fat or not smart enough or are unloved. When these things happen, it’s easy enough to identify the victim. He votes republican. I expect that wireless implanted computer viruses will have similarly easily diagnosable symptoms.

That brings up another problem–memory (in the PC form.) How much memory would a single thought take? How big would an ‘image’ file big captured from your eyes? How many ‘megapixels’ would an image from your eyes be? Can this even be measured?

This subject continues to fascinate me the more I think about it. There should be a novel written about this kind of stuff, and the problems and solutions it provides. Maybe if I get bored enough I’ll write one. :wink:

Heh - I thought the OP meant this: http://www.webbrain.com/