From: Jay Dugger (duggerj1@charter.net)
Date: Sat Dec 28 2002 - 21:09:39 MST
On Sat, 2002-12-28 at 16:19, Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
> MJ asked:
>
> <<What will Organics evolve into after AI ? Hopefully hundreds of new
> species all able to "link" consciousness from time to time. Hopefully the
> AI's we create will enjoy the company and diversity of organics and not see
> us as vermin to be eradicated to purify the ecosystem.
> MJ >>
>
> I think it was Freeman Dyson, in Imagined World, who postulated the concept
> of radio telepathy, via nanoelectronics implanted in the human nervous
> system.
Perhaps, but the earliest reference I know comes from J.D. Bernal's
"The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the
Three Enemies of the Rational Soul," (1929!) which you can find here.
http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Bernal/
See the tenth paragraph of section 3., which begins:
A much more fundamental break is implicit in the means of his
development. If a method has been found of connecting a nerve ending in
a brain directly with an electrical reactor, then the way is open for
connecting it with a brain-cell of another person. Such a connection
being, of course, essentially electrical, could be effected just as well
through the ether as along wires. At first this would limit itself to
the more perfect and economic transference of thought which would be
necessary in the co-operative thinking of the future. But it cannot stop
here. Connections between two or more minds would tend to become a more
and more permanent condition until they functioned as a dual or multiple
organism. The minds would always preserve a certain individuality, the
network of cells inside a single brain being more dense than that
existing between brains, each brain being chiefly occupied with its
individual mental development and only communicating with the others for
some common purpose. Once the more or less permanent compound brain came
into existence two of the ineluctable limitations of present existence
would be surmounted
If you haven't the patience for reading the essay, you might try Olaf
Stapledon's fictionalization of it, "Last and First Men."
--
Jay Dugger : Til Eulenspiegel
http://www.vibepusher.com/~jdugger
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Sometimes the delete key is your best friend.
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