Gearslaving

I get a quiet thrill of being tapped into the universal unconscious spirit of human progress whenever something happens that I have previously written about, however tangentally.

...BrainGate consists of nearly 100 hair-thin electrodes implanted a millimetre deep into part of the motor cortex of his brain that controls movement.

Wires feed the information from the electrodes into a computer which analyses the brain signals.

The signals are interpreted and translated into cursor movements, offering the user an alternative way to control devices such as a computer with thought.

About six years ago my friend Mike and I set about writing our own updated Cyberpunk SF world. At some point, flush with creative energy, we actually held delusions of publication, but those dissipated when confronted with the realities of design, print costs, work, school, and life. Still, we each produced a huge amount of copy and raw ideas that are still creatively useful.

One of those ideas was the ViOp implant, a brain-machine interface (a staple of all Cyberpunk fiction) that could translate raw cerebral electrical impulses into coherent computer code. We dedicated a lot of time to developing how exactly the machine would "learn" to interpret human thought and what sort of applications this would have in real life. The concept of "cyberspace" was too 80s, so we took two distinct routes of development, the ethereal and the pragmatic.

On the the ethereal side, we posited that the ViOp, while being able to interpret simple commands like moving a cursor on a screen, would also have a low signal to noise ratio. Background thinking - the subconscious - would be hard to filter out. Other human brains, however, when connected via the ViOp, could read that noise as projected thought. That led to the creation of a pseudo-spiritual post-humanist online universe with all sorts of weird social and political implications.

On the pragmatic side, we thought about brain-controlled cars. Imagine putting your hand on the gear shift and being able to steer on thought alone. Imagine having total awareness of your vehicle from the grip of the tires to the efficiency of the fuel injection piped into your head, and being able to respond with the ease of propelling a foot forward or taking a deep breath. Imagine blowing the doors off a cop car as you careen down a futuristic city street in a dark distopian underworld. That's Gearslaving.

Awesome.