Perpetually connected: Are wearable computers and bio-implants ...

In today?s connected world, you?d be hard pressed to find a population (disregarding technophobes and lost tribes) who actively shun activities that are digitally mediated. Unfortunately for those who do align themselves with Luddism, advances in mobile computing (and digital tech in general) appear to be exponential. Technologically-enhanced areas of information are all around us, from our PCs to smart gadgets made pocket-portable.

In the digital sci-fi series ?H+?, wireless implants are regularly injected into a population who seem comfortable with the idea of invasively combining biology and technology.? The characters of H+ willingly insert the equivalent of our current mobile device tech into their bodies, transforming them into mobile connected entities. Although this may seem like a nightmare scenario to some, many techno-evangelists would welcome the chance to dispense with manual gadgets totally and embrace a connection method where humans become perpetually, and irrevocably, connected.

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I?ve written a couple of science fiction stories where the main characters are connected to larger data networks via various kinds of implants. Ask for directions and an overlay will appear in your vision; need an answer to a question and an electronic voice will whisper the answer in your mind. Your ID will be in you, not on you, and constantly monitored by security scanners (police states will love this; privacy watchdogs will not). Soldiers have reinforced skeletons and the ability to accelerate their minds and bodies so that everything around them appears to slow down, enhancing their ability to fight enemies.

One of the stories I wrote with this sort of technology in it is called ?One Term.? The other is called ?Spindles.? If you like far future space opera stories, check them out and let me know what you think.

I do think this is where we, as a species, are headed, though ?augmented humans? will certainly not be the norm. These kinds of enhancements will come first to the ultra-wealthy because of expense, but even after the technology becomes more mainstream there will always be holdouts who reject any kind of modification to a baseline human. Most of these will probably come from misguided religious objections to ?tampering? with ?God?s work,? or some other such nonsense, but some will have valid moral concerns, and others may simply never want to be that connected.

Source: http://www.davidforbes.net/archives/4140

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