Tomorrow Elephant

Karl Schroeder (whose excellent Lady of Mazes I’m just in the process of reading) discusses the philosophical implications of Columbia University’s scary Big Brother brain-computer interface. The system, which I blogged about earlier, talks directly to the subconscious image-processing parts of the brain. According to Schroeder, this suggests that computer applications talking to the deep layers of the mind are the future:

What this suggests to me is that consciousness has a specific role in cognition; hitherto our computing apps have jammed everything into that one box, because we haven’t had good interfaces to the unconscious parts of the brain. So, many of our applications are very slow and cumbersome, squeezed through an inappropriate part of the cognitive system as they are.

Future computing applications will present to consciousness those problems and summaries that it is optimized for. Other tasks—like sorting through massive sets of visual images—will be offloaded onto those cognitive modules that can do the job faster than consciousness.

I’ve got some ideas related to his know-thyself app, more on which later…