Friday, December 5, 2008

Steve Connor: The chips are down for futurology

Over the years I've found that the most enjoyable scientific predictions fall into this category, which we like to called "futurology" to give it a quasi-scholarly grounding. In 1996, a futurologist employed by BT predicted that in 30 years we will have a silicon chip powerful enough to record all of your visual experiences as they happen.

It would be inserted behind your eyes and linked to your optic nerve. The futurologist called it a "soul catcher" and confidently predicted that it would mark the "end of death" – all your lifetime memories could be downloaded as a sort of action replay of your life.

Fortunately for the BT futurologist, 2026 is still a long way off and few of us will be around to remember his prediction, although I can say that we are still far from being able to connect the silicon wafers of computer chips to the carbon-based architecture of the human brain. So my guess is that we won't see the end of death in our lifetime, so to speak.

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Posted by Peacedream

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