03/05/2004 Technology future

Technological progress will become exponential. In the next 100 years, the world will achieve what it has achieved in the last 1,000 years of past progress. Microchips implanted in your brain at birth will make most instruments and protocols obsolete. Your brain will become your computer / telephone / television / DVD player recorder / transmitter etc.

Email will be wiped out - since all thought is essentially electricity, people will be able to send electrical pulses and signals to each other.

The concept of pain will be eradicated from this world. You will be able to retrieve thoughts that are pleasurable and ‘think’ them immediately - so, even when you are hurt, you can pick up thoughts of pleasure from the archive and ‘think’ them, so you will never feel pain. This will be automated so that there will not even be a nanosecond between being hurt and feeling pain. So, in effect, hurt will begin to mean pleasure.

You will be able to receive and send ‘thoughts’ - with and without picture. You can even put certain kinds of thoughts and certain senders on your ‘brainspam list’. One in every two ‘thoughts’ that are sent to you will be a ‘bad’ thought - like today’s viruses, they will seek to contaminate your thought process. There will be ‘mind security’ companies who will give you a set of thoughts to act as firewalls, antivirus etc.

Freedom of thought will remain as strong as ever but it will have a new definition ~. you will have the freedom to think, but not to the ownership of your thoughts. Property rights will be carefully protected but will not include the right to your thoughts. All your thoughts will automatically update a central chip (database) in real time. This will be owned and monitored by the government for reasons of national security. All thought, once thought, will be owned by the government.

But the central database will also be scanned by marketing companies to find out what you think. They will then send you sales ‘thoughts’ which you can respond to simply by ‘thinking’ or ‘not thinking’ that you want to buy their product. There will be court cases and laws to restrict ‘thoughts’ that can be sent by them - like today’s ‘do not call lists”.

As my IT friends would put it: Most of this functionality already exists. We just haven’t implemented it yet.

PS: I couldn’t resist adding this:

The H1B and Green Card processes will continue as is. Some things take more than just 1,000 years to change.