John Zogby polled Americans on whether they'd like to become cyborgs. Some of the questions are about brain implants for health, others for information or "entertainment".
--If you could have the Internet wired directly into your brain, would you do so?
Yes: 13%
No: 82%
Not sure: 5%.
By comparison, around 10 percent of Americans have been prescribed antidepressants of some kind. I can imagine the idea of brain tinkering might be marketed in a similar way. Certainly, when you see actual research on microchip-neuron interfaces now, it's pitched as a way to directly influence pain networks, or rehabilitate lost tissue or nerve connections. In other words, medical utility.
Seems to me, that there's a lot of money people spend on expensive colleges that might be spent on technology instead, if it could enable the same opportunities. Microsoft Encarta destroyed the market for paper encyclopedias; Wikipedia killed the market for Encarta. Could a microchip kill the market for Harvard?
Anyway, you can count me in the 82 percent. It seems to me that Brain Internet has only one really practical use: the Matrix will use your brain to do character recognition. You know, like ReCaptcha.
Which pretty much makes the wetware brain a complicated way of gold farming.
