The next big scary thing?&nbsp;Photographer: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images
The next big scary thing? Photographer: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images

Marc Andreessen, true inventor of the Internet, noted venture capitalist and Silicon Valley man-about-town, thinks that there are three "next big things" in technology: Bitcoin, online education and health software. Google's world-conquering execs Larry Page and Sergey Brin have made a bet on the self-driving car, while genius child-emperor Mark Zuckerberg has bet on virtual reality. Now those guys may be titans of tech, but dang it, I'm a sci-fi fan, and I read the news, which means that you should listen to my idea about what the Next Big Technology really is.

I think it's cyborgs.




Why is cyborg tech so earth-shattering? Because it represents a qualitatively different kind of technology. Most of the things that humans make -- houses, airplanes, nuclear weapons -- are ways to "hack" the physical world around us. Virtual reality, and things such as video games and movies, are ways to hack into alternate worlds. But cyborg technology is about hacking ourselves. It means a change not just in the way humans interact with their surroundings, but a change in what it means to be human in the first place.


For example, there's mind-machine interface. The people trying to build artificial intelligence from scratch must realize that our brains represent a fully intelligent platform waiting to be upgraded. As machines replace more and more of what our brains do, there will be increasing returns to the ability of humans to interface with machines -- this is already happening, with the soaring salaries of software engineers. But direct mind-machine interface goes far beyond the keyboard-mouse-monitor nexus.

Another example is artificial memory. This is already possible with mice in a very limited form. Artificial memory is a cognitive enhancer, but it also represents an opportunity for a form of immortality -- instead of uploading your mind to a computer (as Ray Kurzweil and others hope to do), you could just keep copying the memories that make you who you are, and gently integrating them into a new brain.

A third example is artificial sensory input. Imagine if you didn't have to strap on an Oculus Rift to experience virtual reality, or put on a Google Glass to experience augmented reality -- imagine if sights and sounds were piped directly to your brain. You could see your house as a castle (while keeping your neighbor's house the same, of course). You could browse the internet in your brain.

There are other big ones: artificial learning, augmented intelligence. But perhaps the most (literally) mind-bending possibility is desire modification (or "D-Mod", as I called it in a blog post a while back). This means direct mechanical modification of one's mood, motivation and even personality. That sounds scary -- and it is! -- but most of the ways we want to modify our desires are perfectly benign. We want to get rid of depression. We want to focus more at work. We want to be able to quell addiction, stick to our diets, calm down quickly when we get frightened or angry. We've actually been inventing technologies to try to do these things for millenniums -- meditation, drugs, etc. D-Mod technology will simply become more effective when it comes in a chip.






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