Is your iPhone your new frontal lobe?
I recently pitched a big six studio creative executive, the kind of guy who likes to make movies with Jennifer Aniston and small puppies, and also sometimes movies with with Will Smith and small puppies. I offered him a tech-noir thriller, set in a futuristic San Francisco where a newly implemented android police force keeps the city crime free, and a regular guy, who after being told by the police that his wife has committed suicide, pretends to be an android to infiltrate the force and discover the truth about his wife. The exec didn’t really like the idea, and so immediately I knew it must be a smart one. One of the powerful themes I wanted to explore was the impending convergence of man and machine, and the point at which we will be unable to distinguish between the biological and the manufactured.
Only after the pitch did it hit me - are we much closer to this than we all realize?
You only have to think about your smartphone. We’ve all been there: you’re at a dinner party, and nobody can remember the name of the dude from Boy Meets World whose brother was the guy on Blossom who always went “Whoa!”. You pull out your iPhone and Google the answer, and that super-important-nagging inquiry is solved and suddenly you’re the party hero (Matthew Lawrence, DUH). There are other, more important examples as well. You’ve been driving ten hours and can’t remember the address to the hotel you’re staying at, and Google the way there. The point is that instead of relying solely on our brains for answers, we’re relying on a combination of our brains and a machine. This machine, our smartphone, happens to be with us basically as often as our brain is with us.
Thus, you can think of your smartphone as an extension of your brain. Both retrieve information for us. It feels like there is a fundamental difference between your brain retrieving information that you inherently “know”, and your smartphone retrieving information from the collective “know” - but this is only because the technology for retrieval hasn’t caught up to the speeds of our brain (arguably the most complex computing machine ever created). In our lifetime, machines will be advanced enough to mimic the immediacy of our brain, and we’ll be able to grab information from our minds as quickly as we will from Google.
It’s one of the reasons everything is going mobile. We’re getting closer to the convergence of mind and machine without even realizing what we’re doing. This is the force that is driving the next generation smartphone, Google Glass. Glass is bringing us closer to the melding of man and machine by fostering an enhanced reality and improving the speeds of information retrieval. In a few short years since the iPhone, we’ve created something better, although still not as good as our brain. That technology will exponentially improve, and the next iteration will happen more quickly. And the next more quickly, and the next after that more quickly, until the point at which we can Google information as easily as we can recall thoughts and our memories are backed up in the cloud and we are regularly infused with nanobot blood cells and the topic du jour on The View won’t be the merging of races, but the merging of races and machines, until we’re all indistinguishable.