"The person you're talking to could much more easily pretend to be somebody they are not by googling information and feigning expertise."

it's like annalee is watching me while i post

I believe this is the kickoff premise of Neal Asher's first Cormac novel, Gridlinked -- i.e., the protagonist, an agent of "Earth Central Security," the AI that is primus inter pares in the AI-dominated human society that has filled the galaxy, has spent so long tethered, mind and spirit, to the universal information network that he is losing or has lost something that distinguished him from an AI in the first place, and hence made him suitable for his job.

Other books in the same "Polity" setting revisit the issue, with intelligent nonhuman creatures being exploited by humans until they manage to obtain net implants that let them communicate and access information.

Am I the only person disturbed by the likelihood of serious brain injury as a result of this type of thing being commonplace? Not to mention infection, and a big ass wire jutting from your skull.

Cool idea, I'm just not sure I would be willing to sacrifice my health for this technology. However, you know, there are some serious pockets of humanity out there...

I love having so much information at my fingertips
and being able to fit it in the palm of my hand.
Like on my ipod touch.
But cramming it, or even surgically implanting it,
anywhere inside my body,
let alone in my brain, is retarded. Sorry.
But it's great fun in SF!
Really speeds the plot along but can get a little "cube of forcey"
without a judicious pen.

Let me be the first to hack you.

@cronick: Let me be the first to web spam your brain!

If I was going to have something implanted in my brain I'd want something besides Google, like...
...math processor
...dictionary
...translator
Google probably wouldn't make my top 10.

On thing that can't be compressed is the timeline of approving these technologies in animal and human trials, which could take decades. Saying that we'll have the technology to do this tomorrow is a long way from being to walk into a clinic and have it done. And yes, curmudgeonly luddite that I am, I'm going to be one of the people campaigning very hard to keep that testing cycle nice and loooooong.

An episode of "SG1" had a planet's population all wired together with brain interfaces that allowed them to instantly access historical records, etc... But unbeknownst to them, the master computer was constantly changing the info in their heads, in order to disguise the fact that it was killing off the population and shrinking their habitable environment to preserve shrinking resources.

@Eaton Yorke Hunt: people already receive surgical implants to make up for other organs in their bodies, why not their brains too?

This is also reminiscent of the "microsofts" from Gibson's Sprawl series, allowing instant info just by plugging one in; this is just online. I'd be concerned about having my brain hacked.

what about the "brain pals" from john scalzi's old mans war series?

Con: Cybermen

The person you're talking to could much more easily pretend to be somebody they are not by googling information and feigning expertise.

Once someone has that sort of access, wouldn't that be expertise? No feigning involved. Am I feigning expertise when a student emails me a question about a technicality and I look it up on my bookshelf rather than recite it from memory?

@baltwade: You're joking, right? Google has all of those features...

We'd have to rearrange the educational system such that it's centered around how to search, how to organize information, how to apply information to formulate arguments and ideas.

Oh wait, maybe this is something we should be doing now. :)

But can my brain run Linux?

SEO's like myself will rule the world

oh, and my brain is DEFINITELY running Linux.

We'd have to rearrange the educational system such that it's centered around how to search, how to organize information, how to apply information to formulate arguments and ideas.

Oh wait, maybe this is something we should be doing now. :)

+1

I don't necessarily like the idea of brain implants, but if we had glasses/sunglasses/contacts that could do this, that would be bad ass, and have like a receiver in your pocket.

This seems much more likely...and yes, definitely Linux.

Yay now Google can read our minds.

@Dooga: imagine what the government would be like if decisions were automatically made based on retrieving preferences from every relevant individuals experiences instantaneously. the entire system would stop being about marketing a representative to the public just to gain political power to actually serving the people.

@tetracycloide: All six of the stents in my father's arteries are necessities, as are the electrodes in my friend Jim's brain that will hopefully soon zap the parkinson's away. You are not speaking of choices but survival decisions. Again, in SF, a networked brain can be an effective device. And I don't deny that there may someday exist in our future a fringe who desire this kind of radical modification, but I doubt that any competent and sane surgeon/engineer/programmer would be willing to perform the procedure. Come to think of it, I don't think I know any surgeon/engineer/programmers. The risks to health are far greater than the benefits. My argument is with futurists who think this is inevitable.

@cardsharp: Yes, and it's better if this new system's interface is not in your brain in a physical sense. As I tell my ten year old all the time, " We just need to turn that shit off sometimes."

@Eaton Yorke Hunt: those aren't survival decisions they're quality of life decisions. not long ago neither of those decisions would have been made because they were radical and no competent and sane surgeon/engineer/programmer would have been willing to perform them. the technology will continue to develop and eventually it will reach a point where the risks involved are so small it would be crazy not to get the implant, just like it currently is with stents and electrodes.

So many possibilities with this, so very exciting. I think the most interesting aspect is the way that it is dealt with in the Ian M Banks Culture novels.

When "neural lace" technology is combined with godlike A.I. he suggests that the result will be anarchistic, resource-rich socialism with no government or money. With everyone in constant communication and Machines running the difficult stuff, we will be free to do whatever we want to - and difficult decisions can be voted on by general consensus. My suspicion is that googling our brain will cause profound societal change.

Research into neural implants and the creation of true A.I. brains are probably linked. Once we can understand enough of the brain to interface with it electronically, we are surely that much closer to creating A.I.

Then the future can begin!

read this, thought stars in my pocket, registered to comment, then scrolled down and found delany...gotta love it

interesting post, but i see how all of these pros/cons are immediate effects of the population having access to a service like google through a brain - tiny monitor interface. the long term effects could be rather interesting... take externalisation for example. this is a process of your brain not remembering information it knows it can get instant access to, given it is needed. we would certainly remember less, but concentrate on the efficiency of doing research and information integration. a paradigm shift in education would eliminate cheating as we know it, since the information would be availible to us anywhere, anytime. there are probably gains from this that are difficult to imagine - see how different cellphones are used by people who were born way before the became commonplace and today's teenagers.

i see how this would be a difficult step to get yourself modified like that, but the benefits in a radical change of life quality and the potential gains from more effective thinking outweight the costs by far. since by the time this would be possible out search engines will become more effective. the adaptation curve will go slowly at first, but once people with modifications like this gain a viisble over those without it, it will climb very steeply. it wont be like having access to all information anytime, it'll be something going further, i think. plus, since we have a brain interface and a screen on our retina, why stop at google? why not dive into an extended reality? the anime dennou coil comes to mind, yet the technology there was underused.the interface itself was very cool thou.

in civ3, it's interesting to note that when you develop "the internet" the effect this has on your civilization's populace is that INTELLIGENCE GOES UP.

it's weird to end up thinking about life through a game but i think that the game gets it really quite right. people are a lot smarter these days simply because they have sooooo much info at their finger tips.

it used to be that you either knew something or you didn't. if you didn't, you either asked until you found someone who knew (most likely encountering people pretending to know a thing they don't) or took a trip to the library.... unlikely.

now, you can find out everything from thermodynamics to fundamentalist literature at howevermany words per minute you can crank out.

brain interface will amplify this.
--------------------------------------------

interesting problem seems to be with the meat however. for some reason, there seems to be an upper limit to human intelligence. you can get really quite brilliant but at a certain point, you seem to hit some form of autism... maybe like opposing diagonal lines (intelligence, level of autism) passing on a graph....

wonder if a really intimate link with all that info will really drive people nuts.

jin

Viruses would be a bitch if you've got NeuroImplants.

You'd start seeing things around every corner, and you won't even know it's only a virus.

I'm a long-time Lifehacker reader/commenter; I believe this is my first post here. Kudos to you, Annalee, for such an insightful post. I agree that over the next 10-50 years this could be a real issue.

I feel as if I already operate using the 'external collective brain' to some degree. Using my 3G smartphone and Google, I can look up, in about 30 seconds or less, just about any miscellaneous fact that I need. Maps (GPS phone), images and videos included. The weak link in the interface is the fact that this is still done using a device and my fingers, so the input is slow. When you think about it, all that's needed to make this a reality is a faster interface--brain implant, eye gestures, etc.

As we rely on external sources for basic factual information (still of course using our minds for logic and analysis), I do worry that we'll begin to lose something. For example, the portions of our brain responsible for wrote memorization: will they atrophy due to the fact that we don't memorize much any more? Will this inflict currently unforeseen collateral damage on other parts of our brain? Perhaps contemporary neuroscientists have already studied this...

Has anyone seen the 'Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex' series? Worth watching in it's own right, but particularly interesting in relation to this particular discussion. The series deals with computer-human hybrid brain issues, in a very trenchant manner. There is even some thought given to future diseases that may be caused by 'cyberization' of the brain.

I recall one scene in particular involving 3 characters: two of them are having a complex discussion in involving a barrage of literary and cultural references. The third character, eaves-dropping, interjects and remarks that they're having a fascinating discussion, but he couldn't follow it because he didn't have an 'external memory device'. In other words, he understood the logic and essence of the conversation, but his brain wasn't connected to the internet, so he couldn't 'look up' a lot of the specific references.

Perhaps a scene from our not-to-distant future... Funny thing is, I can recall at least two times in the past 3 months that I've been in a group discussion and I snuck out my phone to Google a historical reference that I didn't get at first. I looked it up on the sly and kept plugging right away at the discussion without missing a beat. Would have been easier with a brain implant...

I wonder if this would have an impact on Dunbar's number, as you would be able to manage relationships with more people because the access to offline data would allow extended grooming.

@DrMathochist: Beat me to this very point.

@Eaton Yorke Hunt: Says you. I don't believe you ever need to turn that shit off. ;)

wouldn't it also be possible that one may confuse memories and things looked up on google since the information is just as readily available

Con: Google is already Big Brother, this would be even worse.

Honestly, they're at least as vile as Microsoft, but everyone inexplicably loves them.

Summary: Functional direct brain interface=good; Google=bad.
YMMV
-Kle.

Wonder if a "natural" class of people would arise, waving off the technology and going it the old fashioned way. Like the Amish living off the land.
When is the last time sent a handwritten letter?
When is the last time used a pay phone?
When is the last time used a foldup map or paperback dictionary?

I was having drinks with some friends before hitting the town. I left the apartement a couple of minutes before eveyrone else to have a smoke [the ladies like it] and I saw a pay phone. Not having seen a pay phone, less used one in mebbe 15 years I decided to call one of my friends up.
Once everyone realised that I was calling from a pay phone they all started laughing. So retro, dude.

Hai. When can I has teh brain implants, pls?

Lovely article and very funny. Slight spelling error though: "Every time Google ads a cool new service." It should be 'adds.'

Just as soon as we all get google implants, google will announce that they're changing their motto to "Don't be evil... JUST KIDDING SUCKERS!!!!!"

Great, I'm going to have to deal with people who flutter their eyelids and then announce, "I know kung fu."

its all fun and games until someone accidentally installs "bargain buddy".

On cheating in tests:
The test moderator could have a shutdown key of some sorts (Given by Google to the school/university/institute/whatever that has a valid reason for a key like that and requests it) that they could use to temporarily suspend the Google chip when the test is running. Of course then there'd be hackers trying to get around this. But hey, nothing is perfect!

On annoying ads:
The people annoyed by the ads (yes there WILL be ads) could pay a monthly fee to remove them and maybe get some other benefit.

CON: People installing MS Windows on their brains; millions of humans turned into zombies by MS crap, MS "Genuine Advantage" (sorry, your brain is not properly registered with Microsoft; we'll have to deactivate it"); and bad automatic MS updates.

PRO: Forget where you put your keys? Just google it.

CON: Isn't this how the Borg got started?

Great.
There goes Price Is Right.

Drew Carey: "Well, you've all bid the exact amount... again."

I can see where this is all going. There will come a day when the lo-techs will be ostracized and forced to live in the woods.

There is no way I'm putting a computer in my head. I'll be a lo-tech for sure.

story sounds like a rip off of an new Outer LImits episode where people got their collective knowledge by reference in a giant google like network.

The concept of learning is diminished since everyone is so dependent on easy referencing of information, on demand.

Con: It would could cause elitism, with different versions and upgrades.
I can imagine this happening in 2 or 3 years as a small chip either fastened to you're head or implanted in your skull that can project onto an eyeglass. Problem is that what I just described would still need a keyboard...

it depends on how far you want to take the whole "tech and brain thing" really

go far enough and you can say

pro: be able to learn how to do anything instantaniously (a doctor, lawyer, mechanic, plumber)

con: would destroy the worlds economic system. the only jobs that would have any real value then would be unskilled ones. skilled jobs tend not to be hard, they just require you to know alot. take away the difficulty in learning the material and they lose damn near 100% of their value. however, unskilled jobs are not about knowing anything...they're just about putting in alot of hard work and a great many deal of hours.

Hmm, I wonde what happens when someone googles something while driving? The info flashes up before their eyes.... they never see the pole they wrap their truck around.

Or will we have automated cars before google-brains?

Hi,

I hate to burst John Varley's bubble but there was an awesome sci-fi book that came out around '02 which dealt with this very subject called FEED by M.T. Anderson. [en.wikipedia.org]

Very few have probably heard of it because it was marketed as a "teen" novel, but is actually better than most adult sci-fi works.

so few people out there would have clarity of mind enough to formulate a decent search string in which to search for.

@MrThunderfield: at the point before the embedding of the screen in the retina, when people are wearing contacts as a screen, for any physical testing, the administrator/teacher/proctor/whateveryouwannacallthem could make sure that every student/testee removes the contacts.

PRO:
always available google talk/aim/IM service, although i precieve that google talk would dominate at that point.

CON:
you may occasionally forget to set yourself as invisible to your boss,when you told them that you were sick and you were really taking the day off to go out doing whatever.

Nice to connect to Secondlife
But for sure all your real time real life data you generate, will be logged onto the scary US Defense*s
Sentient World Simulation
[www.dailygalaxy.com]
[en.wikipedia.org]

This sounds great, until some find away to circumvent whatever security measures are in place. So, then your brain gets hacked, or you become part of DOS attack.

Nice...

@HansDog:

The would almost certainly be 'naturals', at least for a while.

When is the last time sent a handwritten letter?

That one's been a couple years.

When is the last time used a pay phone?

Last Monday.

When is the last time used a foldup map or paperback dictionary?

Wednesday.

I wouldn't be a 'natural', but I am Old-Fashioned Man (tm).

I don't like using the internet for things like dictionaries, because they're either pay-services or of dubious accuracy, IMO. Hardcopy dictionaries and the like are better sources. I always use hardcopy maps of unfamiliar areas, I'm a real stickler for mapping and think e-map quality/accuracy is insufficient.

I don't have a cellphone, and don't want one. Eventually they'll evolve into something so useful I'll have to get it, but in their emergent form, I hate them so much.
-Kle.