New Taboos by John Shirley Page A

plethora of devices.
    There’s intelligent collaboration with technology … and then there’s
mindless dependence
on it. A biomedical engineer has already designed an ECoG (electrocorticography) chip that does not disrupt brain tissue; instead it floats atop the blood-brain barrier, sensing the output of neurons and transmitting them to prosthetic devices, to machinery we wish to control, and so on … and some researchers expect the ECoG chip to make electronic telepathy possible.
    Nanoengineers at Princeton have developed a superthin electronic skin that puckers and stretches like real skin. It can be adhered invisibly to your forehead; it could be hidden in the throat and used for subvocal communication. It can communicate with the internet, it can transmit data from your body … many of you willnow be thinking of other examples of human/machine interfacing coming along, and this adds to the
frisson,
the anticipation of a technological “singularity” that supposedly will lead to a kind of
Übermensch cyborgian
elite. The fear of death that has generated most of our religious myths has also generated the myth that we can create a second machine body into which we’ll supposedly project a copy of ourselves. And—puzzlingly—this recording in a three-dimensional form is regarded as immortality. But the human essence is a whole that’s more than the sum of the parts; consciousness still remains mysterious to us, and selfhood is not a series of likes and dislikes recorded into a program.
    The real singularity will be simply an unprecedented cybernetic intelligence explosion to many orders of magnitude. That, I do believe,
will
happen—is beginning now, accompanied by a vast increase in interactivity. But the Kurzweilian singularity that allows us to interface with machines until, in his words, “there will be no distinction between human and machine,” will not come about sustainably because the psychological and social consequences would be so dire.
    People who are quadriplegic have stated that they feel less emotion than they did when they could still feel their entire bodies. The projection of the self into electronics reduces our relationship to the body, the seat of our emotions, and for several reasons that might lead to an increase in psychopathology.
    And empathy may be a precious commodity in the future. Most people unconsciously cut off their empathy when they’re feeling endangered. When the populationincreases to eight and nine and ten billion, we may instinctively become, as a race,
less empathetic
—unless we actively struggle against that kind of degeneracy.
    The superrich may become
especially
elitist and detached when they get exclusive access to rejuvenation. It’s fairly evident that some form of rejuvenation, and certainly extensive life extension, will soon be possible. It is thought that the first person to live three hundred years has recently, somewhere, been born. With a probable ability to grow new replacement organs to suit an individual’s DNA in a lab; with Sandia labs’ specialized nanoparticles that blast problematic microorganisms and cancers with precise microapplications of drugs; with methods for teasing stem cells into regeneration, regenerative drugs like sirolimus, and other innovations—we will effectively have rejuvenation, for those who can afford it.
    Let’s be honest. Rejuvenation is sure to be a tremendously expensive process, and it’s possible that the
only
the superrich will regenerate. Some of you younger people, now in your twenties, may in seventy-five years be tottering around, quite ancient, and see a youthful Paris Hilton still walking around. Or you may see Dominique Strauss-Kahn, looking younger than he looks right now! Do we want Dominique Strauss-Kahn chasing hotel maids in the year 2095? He’ll catch a lot more of them! There are some very good wealthy people in the world, who