I Think Therefore I Google?
Science fiction blog io9 considers what it would be like to have a Google brain implant:
In John Varley’s upcoming scifi novel Rolling Thunder, everyone has a brain implant that lets them google information constantly. And many futurists are saying this technology will become a reality long before we colonize Mars. The question isn’t whether we’ll have google brain implants (or the futuristic search engine equivalent), but how we’ll handle them. What exactly would be the plusses and minuses of being able to google information instantaneously in your head, without anybody knowing you’re doing it?
A google brain implant could work in lots of ways. With technology we have right now, people could wear a brain-computer interface helmet like the one sold by Emotiv, and use that to control the cursor on a wearable computer with a tiny monitor that’s attached to your classes. So the thing wouldn’t be implanted in your brain, but it would be responding to electrical signals from your brain. More sophisticated wearables like those described in Vernor Vinge’s novel Rainbow’s End might allow you to google via subtle movements of your body, and then display results in special contact lenses.
Animal science professor Temple Grandin has often described how she “thinks in pictures” and compared her thought processes to using Google to search the Internet the images. So perhaps the Googled, or Googling, mind already exists……
While I’m no graduate of Google U—and Google has been a helpful gateway to find information, for sure—I think there’s much to be said for the good old-fashioned skill of memorization. I do often find myself “Googling” some term or other to find out a date or some facts, but knowing that something is “stored in your brain”—”written on the soul,” as the Greek philosopher Plato puts it in the Phaedrus—-is as important as ever. I teach Latin and ancient Greek and learning both of these involves a fair amount of memorization of declensions and conjugations and grammatical rules: Surely there’s a reason we wonder at Steven Wilshire who has a photographic memory of cityscapes, and Daniel Tammet reciting 22,514 digits of pi?
And there’s a reason I wonder about how Charlie has never forget the name or face of a teacher or therapist, and has been directing us “this way, this way” from the back seat of the car: He knows where he’s going.
Cogito ergo googlo……or maybe one ought to say, googlo ergo sum?
Tags: Animals, asd, asperger, autism, birds, brain, google, john varley, mind, Neuroscience, Parenting, pdd-nos, rainbows end, science fiction, temple grandinRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Charlisms, Classics, Philosophy, Technology
10 opinions for I Think Therefore I Google?
Maddy
Feb 23, 2008 at 5:25 pm
My boys never remember anybodies face and certainly not their names but they both have a GPS system implanted which means we’re never too far off the beaten track [I hope!]
Cheers
Kassiane
Feb 23, 2008 at 5:27 pm
If this were to come to fruition I can see so much crap being spewed as fact, and critical thinking going so far down the toilet…wow. Just wow…
laurentius-rex
Feb 23, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Temple Grandin is unsophisticated compared to me.
She does not appear to understand the neurological substrates of the cognition she images (I imagine)
I don’t see a lot of real science in her (popular) writings, not that I am likely to see any in mine am I :)
I’ll forget everybodies faces because I am not wired for it, I do not have that particular analog computer set up in my neurones, but memory is in any case not as simple as that at all. There is multiple indexation and to some extent that does depend on focus be that semantic, episodic, or concrete as mine is.
I read Temple and I read a substrate below that, and in order to encode what she supposes to be memory there has to be the basic visual perceptive model as outlined by Marr and what has been identified in the multiple layers of the visual cortex of a lot of different very domain specific mechanisms. Now for me the ones that equate to face and social recognition ain’t there, but so what there are things I can do in memory that I am not sure Temple can from what I have seen of her but then what would I know on limited aquaintance beyond cataloguing the repetition in her speech and writing which I am probably equally prone to.
As for Stephen Wiltshire … f**k me he is brilliant and delivers, Temple and Tammet (who has studied mnenomism as the professionals Pi Competitors (NT’s can do it to) as a technique so I am given to understand) just will not do, Stephen Wiltshire on the other hand is the business I’ll take my hat off to him.
Seriously I don’t know about Tammet never met him but I don’t think Temple is half what people reckon she is other than being autistic which is not in dispute.
laurentius-rex
Feb 23, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Oh apart from that long time back I remember in a thick fog whilst driving being directed by a blind man who knew where we were going, now that is impressive Zatoichi notwithstanding :)
Club 166
Feb 23, 2008 at 8:17 pm
I know that in one sense it’s a bit of a cheat to have something like a wearable computer, and it could make you lazy, as well as disconnected from the ‘real’ world.
On the other hand, I think that wearable computers have great potential as assistive devices for a wide range of people, from busy executives, to doctors, to those with various disabilities, such as early dementia.
Joe
laurentius-rex
Feb 23, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Tell yer sommat mind t’aint half fun in lectures at Uni when I bin google connected and bin the only one, cos it do enhance my cognition, but only cos I know how to find what I want in google obliquely being long skilled in library searches sometimes by the texture an colour of the book in my memory
Whitterer on Autism » Blog Archive » Excellent Awards
Feb 24, 2008 at 2:39 am
[…] might be able to be brave too. Her writing style keeps us all up to date and you can enjoy a little “geekdom” if you’re more comfortable with that option, called “I think therefore I […]
Owl
Feb 24, 2008 at 12:17 pm
The wearable computer I’m waiting for is the glasses hooked up to a facial expression recognition program, so all I have to do is twitch my ears and the glasses project in words what facial expression I’m seeing for someone fairly close. They were doing a basic experiment with something like that a while ago I remember, though not as sophisticated as would be terribly useful. The program only recognized boredom if I remember… so great it tells me to shut up if I’m monologuing at someone. I’d like to be able to tell if their tired vs stressed vs who knows what without having to think about it.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Feb 24, 2008 at 4:13 pm
@laurentius rex,
“library searches sometimes by the texture an colour of the book in my memory”
—I search with my mind’s eye on the part of the page a phrase or passage of a book is on, and the typeface—
Kristina Chew, PhD
Feb 24, 2008 at 4:22 pm
@Owl,
Do you mean MIT’s social emotional sensing toolkit?
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