Smartphone ownership is nearly universal. It isn’t mandatory, of course, but you’d be seen as an eccentric if you didn’t have one. Rejecting smartphones means you’re old-fashioned, possibly a bit of a crank.
There are pros and cons to having a smartphone. As a society, we’ve decided that on the whole it’s much better to have one. Of course, there’s an astronomical amount of money at stake. Imagine how much revenue depends, directly and indirectly, on the near-universal ownership of smartphones and tablets. There’s the demand for the hardware itself, for the raw materials to build that hardware and the infrastructure to assemble it, to improve it, to ship it around the world. There’s demand for transmission lines, cell towers and data networks. There’s demand for the operating systems, for the middleware that operates the cameras and regulates the batteries, for the hundreds of thousands of apps you might want to download. There’s demand for the endless content that appears on those apps and for the advertising time and real estate on hundreds of millions of smartphone and tablet screens. Beyond all that, there’s demand for the huge amounts of energy we need to make it all work.
There is very little that is completely independent of these devices. So, yes, you can do without a smartphone. But it isn’t easy.
It won’t be long before there is a similar concerted effort to make brain-implanted chips seem normal. It is a matter of years, not decades. These won’t be chip implants permitting paraplegics to regain their independence. These will be implants marketed to everyone, as smartphones are now. And if you decline to have a chip grafted onto your brain, you’ll be a backward, out-of-touch misanthrope.
The benefits of brain chips will be vastly beyond what external devices offer today. We will be able to take “photos” of anything we see with our eyes, just by thinking. Ditto video—in 3-D. We will be able to send messages to friends by thinking them, and to hear their replies played in our minds. We’ll have conversations with friends remotely, hearing their voices and ours without actually having to speak. We’ll be able to talk to anyone in any language. We’ll be able to remember an infinite amount of information, to retrieve any fact by asking our brain chips. We’ll be able to pay for things without carrying a wallet or a phone. We’ll be able to hear music piped directly into our brains. To watch movies. To take part in movies. To be totally entertained in new virtual worlds.
We’ll even be able to go to sleep quickly, whenever we want. And we’ll be able to get counseling instantly if we ever have suicidal thoughts.
We’ll be able to get advertising pumped directly into our brains, to have images hover before our eyes that we can’t turn off—except for those opting for the premium subscription. Our memories will be organized for us by artificial intelligence under policies crafted by experts who will have society’s best interests at heart. We won’t have access to information that might be, say, Russian propaganda. If we have criminal ideas, or perhaps just countercultural notions, they will be referred to the proper authorities before it’s too late.
In other words, it will be every dystopian sci-fi drama rolled into one.
How helpless would we be if tomorrow the internet were suddenly and permanently turned off? Think how much of our lives, memories and relationships is already stored and remembered for us online. We don’t know our best friend’s phone number. We don’t even know how to spell. We don’t need to.
But transhumanism—transcending human “limitations” through technology—becomes dangerous when a human, deprived of that technology, would be not only inconvenienced but unrecognizable.
Imagine a world in which not only our friends’ phone numbers but all our experiences with them, and even their names and their faces, are remembered for us and stored remotely on servers somewhere—available for us at any time. Until they’re not. What would be left of a generation of humans who had never had to use their own memory or do any of their own reasoning until, one day, all the chips were turned off? Would there be any human left, or only an empty shell?
It doesn’t take an atomic bomb to destroy humanity. There are other ways. If you don’t get a brain chip, you’ll have a hard time competing or even living in the modern world. You won’t be able to retain endless information, to pick up new skills instantly, to communicate with anyone anywhere. You’ll be out of date. You’ll be an obsolete human. You might be the last human. So maybe you’d better get the brain chip after all. Remember, it’s optional.
Mr. Gelernter is manager of RG Niederhoffer Digital and an expert in artificial intelligence and machine learning.