23 August 2006

Cyborgs

By nature, I am a bit of an alarmist. It was a tendancy aggravated by a career in the mayhem business. Sometimes I think I am getting over it.

I would get more agitated about technology if I wasn't employed by a company that peddles the stuff. Working makes time slow down. We are delivering an amazing new capability to market, but it has been agonizing slow, in subjective time.

Let's call it six or seven years in the making, leveraging earlier technology, addressing the minor technical miracles that have to happen. It has taken maybe a quarter of someone's working professional life to do it, end-to-end, and that is perhaps why we are not all walking around stunned by what has happened.

Take the internet, and cell phone technology. It was not so long ago that the cell was a novelty. I remember the first time I borrowed a buddy's phone to make a call, and the nervous look on his face as I burned some of his precious minutes.

Air time costs just about nothing now, which is one of the reasons the industry is in such trouble. It all happened in the blink of an eye. The next lab over from the one I deal with is doing something called “quantum computing.” It is fairly esoteric, far beyond my liberal arts brain, and involves manipulation of electrons to perform calculations at a rate that would take your breath, if you could move your diaphram that fast.

We can't of course. The geeks at the lab are already playing with rows of electrons. The technology is here, living among us. It just has not made the leap into the product that changes your life.

I got a call from an FBI agent the other day. He thought he was calling my house, since I kept the phone number for sentimental reasons, and I was actually in a car, passing through the ruins of a town that is still called Toledo, in Ohio. The FBI wanted to ask questions about someone they thought I might know.

I wasn't of much assistance to the Bureau, but I wondered how I was dragged to the top of his phone list.

It is not a far reach to combine the quantum computer, and nanotechnology, and the cell infrastructure to imagine what the next level of all this is. Powerful wireless computing reduced to a size that fits in a pair of glasses, perhaps.

I feel like I am talking about rocket-ships in 1955. I do not have the vocabulary to describe where this go as a product line. I am absolutely convinced that my children and their children will take it for granted that anyone with the money will have instant access anywhere to all knowledge and all sensation.

They will not call themselves cyborgs, and only that is certain. That term for a man-machine hybrid will be a quaint term out of antique science fiction, like the Governor of California is.

All the pieces to make that happen are already here, after all. There are legions of people like me who are diligently putting together the infrastructure to do it, one cell phone tower and one electron at a time.

I imagine we will be able to translate this coming miracle into something completely banal. After all, once it arrives, it will not be a wonder, but just another necessity. It is quite curious, really, this foot-race between technology and the Dark Ages, which may wind up in precisely the same place simultaneously.

So I checked through the e-mail this morning, sighing at the number of messages in despair. I experienced the same dismal consequence of this technical miracle that you do. Step away from your machine for a day or two and the tide of information is so overwhelming that all one can do is hit “Delete! Delete! Delete!” in a frenzy of self-defense.

This method of communication has existed in this form for a perhaps a decade, two at the very most. I remember my first job when there was simply too much information to process. That was in 1990. Now I have developed the capability to pick and choose my realities.

This morning brought a note about some Shia clerics in Iran who are calling for my incineration. Actually, quite a number of them.

I don't think they are technically savvy enough to do it themselves, but they certainly have an audience of people who are. I marveled at rhetoric, checking back to ensure that I understood the context, and the date and place that the words had been said.

I could not fully understand why the words of hate had appeared in my e-mail queue. Was this something that happened all the time, and I was only acquainted with it because someone wanted me angry? Should I take offense that someone is calling for the annihilation of my civilization, or should I ignore it, like I did the string of advertising messages that I deleted without emotion?

There was a note that said the Corps is recalling Marines who have left the service, some of them years ago. This happened to another generation who were called back to the aftershock war in Korea. They were not volunteers, at least not for that one.

They apparently need “shooters” and logistics specialists. I have only been a private citizen for three years, but I suspect that they do not require my skill set, which is of a more gentile and subtle discipline.

If they do, I presume it will come in an official letter to my physical mailbox. Considering the numbing number of threats that are accumulating, I have identified a market requirement for instant access to all knowledge and all sensation .

The only thing that is even barely startling about all this is that there appears to be an emerging market need for mass destruction under a pall of mediaeval imagery, and it will all arrive at precisely the same time.

I'm not equipped to handle it. Only the cyborgs will be able to deal with it all.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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