Think or Thwim

World Wide Mind

This is one of the scariest/coolest things I’ve seen in a while (and I’ve been reading Ray Kurzweil, so that’s saying a lot).

It’s a PBS show written by Michael Chorost, author of Rebuilt. Chorost calls himself a cyborg, part man, part machine. He’s deaf, and the machine part is a cochlear implant to replace his lost hearing. This show is actually the pilot for a new show called 22nd Century. It’s competing with two other shows to become a new series.

The world wide mind means human brains directly interconnected into one large neural net using wireless implants. The resulting organism is the next phase of human evolution, similar to single cell organisms evolving into multi-cell animals. E.O. Wilson describes ant colonies in a similar way. Each ant is a cell in the larger organism of the colony. The colony exhibits intelligence that the ants do not posses individually.

From Chorost’s website:

When I first read of this idea in Kevin Warwick’s book I, Cyborg, I thought it was completely insane - not least because Warwick provides no technical basis at all on which to consider it even remotely achievable. It’s not a very good book, and I went out of my way to criticize it in my own book. But Ramez Naam’s book More Than Human discusses it much more lucidly, and it convinced me that the idea was at least thinkable. So when PBS came calling, I decided to use that as a personal opportunity to talk to Smart Folks about this idea and write a show exploring it. The producer liked the idea, and off we went.

Naam and Chorost both appear in the show. About watching himself on TV, Chorost says “My voice sounds exactly the same to me coming out of the TV as it does in life, since there’s no bone-conduction component to my hearing anymore; I only hear my own voice after it gets piped through the implant.”

You can also watch the whole thing uninterrupted at the 22nd Century website.