During a recent family trip to Disneyland (the happiest damn place on Earth), I was struck by the way people used cell phones to stay in touch with members of their group. To be truthful, with four kids from 12 to 17 in tow, we were doing the same thing: deciding where to meet, checking on kids who stayed until the park closed after their parents pooped out, finding out what the wait time was for Space Mountain and generally treating our phones as a way of having a casual conversation with someone not in the immediate vicinity. Sort of like having a voice that carries long distances with pinpoint accuracy, or a poor man’s version of mental telepathy.
As prosaic as this may all sound, I think it’s a cloudy vision of a radical change that’s not too far ahead: We’ve begun to wire ourselves up to the network.
I’ve written before about Ray Kurzweil’s belief in the so-called “Singularity.” Kurzweil predicts that, by 2050, humans will transcend their biology and implant their consciousness in machines. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. No, this is more like “The Bionic Woman” or “The Six Million Dollar Man” (remember when that sounded like a lot of money?) than the starchild of Kubick’s “2001.”
If you believe in the theory of evolution, you know that, in hunting societies, people with better eyesight had a survival advantage over those who didn’t (mitigated somewhat by the fact that the group only needed its hunters to have good eyesight). The fact that our eyesight deteriorates as we get older didn’t matter, since no one lived to be that old, anyway. The progress of agriculture removed some evolutionary pressure from the mix, and then someone got the bright idea of creating glasses to correct vision. Now we have LASIK surgery. We’ve gone from creating an artifact to correct vision, to correcting the visual mechanism itself. Someday, barring the arrival of Singularity, we’ll grow eyeballs in a vat and reconnect them to your optic nerves.
Back to those cell phones at Disneyland. There are three basic elements to a cell phone: the speaker, the microphone and the radio (all made useful by software, of course). Let’s look at what’s required to make my body a functional cell phone. First, for a variety of reasons, the cellular radio itself would be external. My wired-up version of the human ear already exists, albeit in imperfect form: the cochlear implant (CI), which helps the deaf and profoundly hard-of-hearing sense sound by directly simulating auditory nerves inside the cochlea.
I’ve listened to simulations of a cochlear implant at http://www.utdallas.edu/~loizou/cimplants/, and I’m not ready to turn in my ears just yet (and of course, in my perfect world, these sensory enhancements would have on/off switches). For more on CI, check out this IEEE Spectrum article titled “Brain Power” (http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/3433).
What, then, about the microphone? I’m sure you’ve had the disconcerting experience of responding to someone who appears to be talking to you, until you notice the Bluetooth headset hidden beneath their hair or tucked into their opposite ear. Really, what we want is the ability to speak without producing sounds.
NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have funded research into this problem. Both spacemen riding a noisy rocket and forward infantry being stealthy in the jungle (or desert) could benefit from the ability to transmit speech without a microphone, as would anyone who’s had to put up with a rude cell phone user.
In late February, Ambient Corporation demonstrated the Audeo (www.theaudeo.com), which uses a neckband containing sensors that relay nerve impulses from the wearer’s vocal cords to a computer for processing and interpretation. The video is less impressive than you might think, because there’s a delay between “think” and “speech” that’s caused by the enormous amount of processing required to match a pattern of nerve impulses to a particular word. But I remember being impressed at postage-stamp-sized video clips from a CD-ROM back in 1991, and today I can watch HD episodes of “Lost” over the Internet. Computers get faster all the time, and what seemed magical a decade ago is commonplace today.
I’d love to claim credit for the idea of a cell phone embedded in the body, but it’s an idea science fiction writers have been tossing around since the 1970s. Ironically, Cory Doctorow wrote of a future Disneyland, whose inhabitants had cochlear implants and “subvocalization” microphones, in his novella Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which you can download for free (www.craphound.com) or have sent to you as bite-sized daily email installments via DailyLit (www.dailylit.com). (As a complete aside, Doctorow is a fascinating fellow, and I recommend both his fiction and nonfiction writings to you.)
Of course, implantable cell phones may never happen. Cochlear implants are still associated with a high incidence of post-surgical infection, and a March article in The Economist points out the risk of implant obsolescence: the first recipients of cochlear implants are now faced with the choice of a repeat surgery to implant the next generation of higher fidelity sensors. And a neckband microphone is even stranger than a Bluetooth headset. On the other hand, people already willingly implant some pretty strange stuff to look better. How much more willingly would they accept implants that improve their lives in functional ways? Remember that before LASIK, sane people had surgeons cutting their eyeballs with knives so they could see better (radial keratotomy).
What I can tell you is this: being able to carry on a conversation wherever we are has enormous value and emotional appeal. Whether we embed it in our bodies or simply miniaturize it to the point of invisibility, technology that improves our ability to converse (and choose not to be disturbed, if we so desire) will someday be readily accepted by the general public.
