>Crap. Sensation is nothing more than electrical signaling.

I'm gonna hafta agree with Gryph here.

Extremely rudimentary limbs that are controlled by the brain's output already exist -- I remember reading about a leg of that nature a good five years ago. Not to mention that monkey who moved an arm by remote control directly from taps on the brain. Feedback through the nervous system will be the next step, and it'll likely start out with fairly simple pressure sensors. In the Ghost in the Shell manga, Shirow Masamune described a fiber-optic skin that could be used to duplicate the senses handled by the human skin -- I don't know how much of it is truly viable, but it could easily work for pressure/contact at least. The main obstacle I can see is that our senses are analog, not digital, and any input system would have to have an extremely high resolution... but that's just a matter of engineering, not invention.

As for cybernetic eyes... I know that there's been work done on creating artificial eyes that interface with the brain directly, but the last I heard on it (which was a very long time ago, since I don't keep up with these technologies) was that the primary obstacle was simply figuring out how to encode the signals so that the brain could decode them. A modern CCD could produce a useful resolution, if not one that would get you a driver's license. And you'd have the possibility of being able to add on things like telephoto or alternate spectra as the technology advanced.

Speed systems... that's much trickier, as that would be a LOT of monkeying around with the nervous system, much moreso than anything else. I'd be reluctant to adopt that.

Datajacks will almost certainly not be two-way at first... it'll amount to something that replaces the keyboard and mouse to begin with, and when they deem feedback systems suitable for use in humans (which will probably interface through the same kinds of systems that will control cybernetic limbs and sensory organs -- thus, cyberspace), they'll be much changed.

Me, I'll take eyes and a datajack. Or, at least, implanted cybernetic contact lenses that'll let me modulate my visual spectrum (thus, 20/20 or better vision, and night vision), and a jack that'll let me plug into the a USB or IEEE-1394 port and control the computer that way.

El, on thinking about this, I'm going to have to disagree wholeheartedly on how jacking directly into a computer would affect you. The environment would be shaped to fit how humans interact with the world, a goal that GUI developers have been working on for about thirty years. Visual icons are easier to learn than text-based commands, and a full-immersion environment would be even easier to learn, and potentially much faster than even a command-line interface.

-- Sean --

http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
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