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from the Louis-Wu-would-like-a-word-with-you dept.
"What I think is so interesting is that the future is always flying cars," Leuthardt says, handing the resident his Sharpie and picking up a scalpel. "They captured the dystopian component: they talk about biology, the replicants. But they missed big chunks of the future. Where were the neural prosthetics?"
It's a topic that Leuthardt, a 44-year-old scientist and brain surgeon, has spent a lot of time imagining. In addition to his duties as a neurosurgeon at Washington University in St. Louis, he has published two novels and written an award-winning play aimed at "preparing society for the changes ahead." In his first novel, a techno-thriller called RedDevil 4, 90 percent of human beings have elected to get computer hardware implanted directly into their brains. This allows a seamless connection between people and computers, and a wide array of sensory experiences without leaving home. Leuthardt believes that in the next several decades such implants will be like plastic surgery or tattoos, undertaken with hardly a second thought.
The article reports Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are working on neural implants as well.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Zinho on Friday December 01 2017, @10:27PM (4 children)
I don't know what rock this guy has been living under; at 44 he should have lived through several, if not all of these:
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Neuromancer
* Shadowrun/Cyberpunk anything
* Ghost in the Shell
* The Matrix
* Psychohistorical Crisis [1]
* Robocop
* Deus Ex
I'm sure this crowd could list MANY others, but I may as well just link to the Tropes page [allthetropes.org] and be done with the list. Brain augmentation via computer implant as a Sci-Fi concept has been around for a long time, I don't know how he could have missed it. I hope it was just journalistic hyperbole, not actual ignorance on the part of a Sci-Fi novelist.
Good on him for having caught the vision anyhow, I wish him lots of success!
[1] novel by Donald Kingsbury, not sure how wide a following it has; it's one of my favorite books, though, so I'm listing it. Not sure what it says about me that my favorite Foundation novel isn't written by Azimov or authorized by his estate, but there you go.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Saturday December 02 2017, @12:49AM (2 children)
TRIGGERED! Fuuuuuuuuuk! That movie was painful....ah man why did you have to put that... that name at the top. I have to lie down now.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Saturday December 02 2017, @02:08AM
Movie?
Oh, right--there was a movie...
I remember thinking at the time that Keanu Reeves was well-cast as Johnny, who was as generally annoying in the story as Keanu was in his other roles at the time. I also remember the SFX not being up to properly rendering the story, especially the arena. Something something dolphins. That's all I remember of the film.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Sunday December 03 2017, @05:32AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1) by Rich26189 on Saturday December 02 2017, @03:51PM
"Origin" by Dan Brown, just finished it. Maybe not as cool as the movies cited.