Techlepathy
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Techlepathy is a neologism, referring to the communication of information directly from one mind to another (i.e. telepathy) with the assistance of technology.
Recent conjunctive advances in cybernetics, information technology, and cognitive neuroscience research indicate that such a technology is indeed a realistic, and possibly even an inevitable, future. Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading, England is one of the leading proponents of this view, and has based all of his recent cybernetics research around developing practical, safe devices for directly connecting human nervous systems together with computers and with each other. He believes that technologically enabled telepathy will become the sole or at least the primary form of human communication in the future. He believes that this will happen because of natural selection, much as other technologies have been adopted even by critics over time. Like home computer systems and even mobile telephones, which were once thought of as fantasy, and later as being impractical, both are now commonplace tools utilised daily by most individuals in developed countries. Similarly, Warwick and colleagues believe that even those who doubt the utility or practicality or even morality of such technologies will over time be drawn into using them as it becomes less and less economically and socially viable not to be able to communicate thoughts instantly, just as it has become much less economically viable for businesses not to be able to conduct instant transactions across computer networks, and less socially viable for individuals not to be able to send and receive information and speak to one another from any location.
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[edit] Postulated Developmental Stages
It has been speculated that techlepathy will come about in a number of different stages. The number of stages varies depending on the considerations made and which theories of the mind one assumes to be true when making such extrapolations, though usually the number of stages is between three and five.
- The first commonly speculated stage will likely be basic unidirectional verbal techlepathy, wherein one person is able to send sounds and words, without vocalising, directly into the auditory centres of another person's brain. Such techlepathy would likely be very much as a speech conversation between two or more people, only over long distances and without the need to produce any real sound. Such auditory telepathy would be superior to actual sound in a number of ways, as a skilled technician, engineer and perhaps musician could synthesize any variety of sounds of any intensity and duration without causing ear damage, significant discomfort, and with the additional benefit of achieving any auditory quality - thereby neutralising the negative effects of conversion between various musical storage media, and the inherent physical limitations of sound systems and acoustical engineering. Hypothetically, then, such a form of techlepathy could be a source of great enthusiasm for audiophiles and performance buffs.
- The second speculated stage might then be unidirectional nonverbal communications, in which a person is able to send pictures, ideas and whole thoughts directly into another person's mind, thereby bypassing for potentially the first time the bottleneck of complex mental linguistics. In this stage, communication might be as a conversation or perhaps even something less tangible to non-techlepathic humans involving two or more individuals showing each other images without describing them, or injecting thoughts without explaining them. This might be used to see through another person's eyes, or in education to teach complex concepts as a single whole rather than broken into parts. Individuals capable of this form of techlepathy would have a nearly indescribable advantage over non-techlepathic individuals, though such individuals would undoubtedly be quite able to accurately gauge and describe their advantages due to the fact that attempting to use language to describe this form of techlepathy is approximately equivalent to attempting to explain the range of benefits of language to speechless early humans.
- The third and final stage of techlepathy would involve multidirectional non-linguistic communication, in which two or more individual's minds shared data seamlessly on a subconscious level. In this stage, any number of people would be able to communicate purely subconsciously, and being connected to another person in this way would for all intents and purposes be very much like actually being the other person. Again, this form of techlepathy is at this point probably indescribable to all or nearly all humans, though it would suffice to say that a group of people connected in such a way would probably feel and likely behave as though each of their individual brains had been fused together, as the level of human consciousness does not likely extend "low" enough on the neurological scale of complexity for such a group of techlepathic people to distinguish themselves from one another. At this level of interconnectivity, the only way to distinguish, subjectively, one person from another person, would be if that person were aware of the behaviour of their own neural clusters. This form of techlepathy would probably only become feasible upon the development of mature nanotechnology, as other microtechnologies would be incapable of sufficient non-disruptive infiltration of neural tissue to attain the requisite informative resolution.
As stated above, the postulated future development of techlepathy technologies is divided into "stages" in different ways by different theorists.
[edit] Morality of Techlepathy
The morality of techlepathy is controversial. Proponents such as transhumanists often put forth the logically invalid argument (or dismissal) that most radically new technologies are controversial, yet very few technologies seem to actually be suppressed as a result of this controversy: techlepathy, they claim, will be no different. It may be noted, especially by critics, that nuclear technologies are widely restricted due to their controversial nature, and there are serious talks about the elimination of the field of nuclear weaponry altogether. Techlepathy, though not destructive in an overt way as nuclear technology is, may turn out to be destructive in a much more insidious and covert way - it may, as cited by critics and even supporters, lead to the alienation and marginalisation of late adopters and resistants. For example, Kevin Warwick, a proponent, speaking in the documentary "Building Gods"(video), admits that he cannot really imagine much of a positive future for resistants and late adopters, explaining it thus:
- "Just like we have cows now, so we'll have humans in the future. There'll be other creatures - other species, cyborgs, intelligent machines - that are the dominant life forms on earth. And, as a cyborg, if a human came to see me and it starts making silly noises, a bit like a cow does now, if a cow comes to me and says 'Moo'.... I'm not going to say, 'Yeah! That's a great idea, I'm gonna do what you tell me!', so it will be with a human. They'll come in and start making the silly noises that we call speech and human language and so on, and I'll hear these trivial noises, and I'm not going to do those silly things - why should I? This creature is absolutely stupid in comparison to me!"
