Paradigm Shifts

Dance is the new Pop

'Shawty' is the new 'Baby'

Auto-tune is the new sampling

Sampling is the new falsetto

Electronica is the new Jazz

Jesuscore is the new Alternative

Alternative is the new Classic Rock

Country is still country, but it's much more profitable now and they'll let just about anyone in.

Rock is dead.

The Prophet

Let me tell you about our many fine products, Neo

Sony patents 'real life Matrix'

IMAGINE movies and computer games in which you get to smell, taste and perhaps even feel things. That's the tantalising prospect raised by a patent on a device for transmitting sensory data directly into the human brain - granted to none other than the entertainment giant Sony.

“This was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction technology takes us”

Wrapping up "Creepy Brain Tech Week" with this gem from New Scientist. This patent is just a little CYA from Sony so that, in the event that direct-to-brian virtual reality technology emerges within the next 20 years, they are ON that mofo. Seriously, this is just a convenient mix of corporate PR and R&D wanking, but I'm sure that at least a handful of very forward-looking executives somewhere are drooling over the licensing potential of cerebral beaming entertainment.

Even should this "prophetic" technology become available and even ubiquitous within my lifetime, I'm not sure I'd ever be comfortable with using it. Given their horrible customer service track record, I'm not sure I'd like to give Sony the opportunity to poke around in my brain with the ultrasonic equivalent of a big stick. What if they broke it? I'd have to send it back to them at my cost and wait for a replacement or a refurbish from the factory, and that takes six months, assuming the ship doesn't get held up in San Diego. Then there's the warranty card and the third party maintenance fees... I just wouldn't be up to dealing with that, especially after damaging my motor cortex with a bad copy of "Bikini Gun Bunny Adventure III."

We can rebuild him

Bionic eye will let the blind see

It comprises a computer chip that sits in the back of the individual's eye, linked up to a mini video camera built into glasses that they wear.

Images captured by the camera are beamed to the chip, which translates them into impulses that the brain can interpret.

What interests me about this piece is not necessarily the bionic aspect but, again, the software. So we now know how to (roughly) interpret neurological data in the motor cortex to create motion, and we know (we think) how to transmit data to the visual cortex to produce images.

This is still at the raw meat-packing stages of the technology - physically jamming electrons into the occipital lobe a few dozen at a time to produce blurry pseudo-sight. Taken to it's logical future conclusion, though (full-resolution data transmission), can someone equipped with this implant ever truly trust the images he sees? Is there another way of stimulating the chip's electrodes in such a device that bypasses the camera in the eye? I'm getting a Gibson/Stephenson/Watts vibe here that makes me want to dig out and dust off Neon City again.

Care for some antifutureshock meds with your coffee? Warren Ellis knows what he's talking about.

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.

Big Bang Created in Lab

The newest big scary thing at the RHIC. Up next on the development table: portable apocalypse in a jar. Collect the whole set.

Black Hole Created in Lab

Maybe. Pretty soon, everyone will want one. But act now, they're going fast. Seriously.