I recently upgraded from my beloved but aging 6 megapixel Nikon D70 to a shiny new 24.2 megapixel system. Shortly afterward, I had dinner with an acquaintance who, among other products, sells professional quality digital view camera backs. To my surprise, his top of the line sensors only weigh in at 80 megapixels of resolution. I realize full well that pixel count alone doesn’t dictate quality, but I would have expected that high end pro equipment would go into the hundreds of megapixels – gigapixels, perhaps.
But this gives rise to another question: at what point does technological improvement become redundant? After all, if there’s a level at which a digital display contains more information than the human eye can differentiate*, why bother?
Ah, well then, obviously the next step is to upgrade the human eye.
And that may not be a joke. The creation of a direct neural link to hardware, visual or otherwise, would probably mean the biggest change in the world since the invention of the wheel, if not fire. As one of my co-workers pointed out, the limiting factor in cell phone development is the human hand. Current state of the art might well allow for all of the components of my iPhone to be crammed into something the size of my little finger, but the necessity to allow for physical manipulation of the controls makes that impractical.
Once that technology can be distributed here and there throughout your body – a node on your hand to answer calls, your retina overlaid with a HUD, an antenna plated onto your skull, the audio feed direct into your aural nerve, and so on – the nature of our interaction with technology becomes completely different, as much a part of our personal kinesiology as nodding our heads or blinking our eyes.
Not surprisingly, the concept is fairly common in science fiction. William Gibson’s
Sprawl trilogy includes “simstim” as one of its props. The concept is that headsets would allow the audience to experience a full sensory duplicate of a celebrity's glamourous life directly from the star's point of view: visual, auditory, sensual, etc.
The exact process is characteristically undefined, but the most evident part of the technology is implanted artificial eyes, complete with corporate copyrights etched around the iris, that somehow transfer visual input into a digital format as well as functioning as eyes. (Presumably there are equivalent devices to allow for transmission of the other sensory inputs – in spite of the, ah, comprehensive nature of the experience, there’s no suggestion that all the critical aspects of the performer's anatomy are replaced.)
The technology of the Sprawl also allows for users to add sockets that allow them to access experiential information from silicon chips** and as a result be able to speak other languages or fly airplanes, at least as long as the chip is in place.
Samuel R. Delaney’s 1968 novel
Nova posits a more physical approach, with interface sockets on both wrists and at both ends of the spine. These sockets allow the user to plug into any and all types of hardware, turning everything from flying a starship to operating the power winch for a fishing net into the same sort of directly experienced physical activity as climbing a flight of stairs or sweeping the floor. The result is a changed world, where everyone’s work has become a direct physical part of their lives, with a corresponding increase in personal fulfillment and worker satisfaction.
The real question is not whether or not this sort of technology is feasible. Medical technology is already taking its first fumbling steps into allowing blind people to perceive the world through hardware connections to the brain. The question is a far more fundamental one: would sockets be a privilege or a requirement? This is a question that would depend entirely on how the interface system would be integrated into society.
On one hand, it could become the mark of the elite, where digital eyes and biomechanical hands would only be available to the now-infamous one percent, a sort of bionic bling. The other option is that it would become the mark of the underclass, a clear sign that the possessor has quite literally become part of the corporate machinery.
Hopefully there's a third option, an option closer to Delaney's future. where everyone would gain from the process, creating a world which was simultaneously larger and yet more personally connected than the one we live in now.
- Sid
* The resolving power in pixels for the human eye is a difficult question, depending on whether you count all the photoreceptors or just the colour-sensitive cones concentrated in the central foveal area of the retina. Depending on what you pick as a cutoff, we may or may not have digitally exceeded the eye already.
** Daringly called microsofts: you can almost
hear the copyright lawyers salivating...
