thoughtcrumbs

Self-healing plastics in Wired this month. So, if you drop your cell phone, mini pores in the material release a goo that fills and solidifies in the wound, much as skin does. Which do you think will come first: we turn machines into humans, or humans into machines (a la Joy or Kurzweil, or even just the wearables community)? More and more we see biological standards being applied to concepts (i.e. memes) or inanimate objects (like artificial neural networks, genetic programming). As biology and digital terms merge in the common lexicon, it seems that this human/computer synthesis is becoming publically accepted. Part of it is that we just like finding cool analogies for technical concepts (like, oh, daemons, zombie processes, divide and conquer, viruses, bugs), but it also seems to signal an acceptance of the integration of humans and computers. PDAs are socially de rigueur, and with the push to make them smaller and lighter, would the public really turn down a technology that could make your PDA display on your retina? Not that I'm against this (how's that for riding the fence?), but it's just something to think hard about.