William Gibson - Distrust That Particular Flavor

Actually, the return of those humanoid robots has disappointed me. I’d thought that everyone had gotten it: that you don’t need to go anthropocentric in order to get work done. That in fact you get far less work done, far less bang for your buck, if you do. My idea of an efficient robot today would be an American Predator drone with Hellfire missiles, or one of the fly-sized equivalents allegedly on Pentagon CAD-CAM screens, if not already in the field. Though actually those are both cyborgs, or borg-aspects, as they are capable both of autonomous actions and actions via telepresent control. When the human operator uplinks, operator and Predator constitute a cyborg. A friend of mine wrote a short story, a decade ago, in which the protagonists were Soviet equivalents of Predator drones, but literal cyborgs: small fighter aircraft controlled by brain-in-bottle onboard pilots, with very little left in the way of bodies. But why, today, bother building those? (Unless of course to provide the thrill of piloting to someone who might otherwise not experience it, which would be a worthy goal in my view.) But for purely military purposes, without that live meat on board, aircraft are capable of executing maneuvers at speeds that would kill a human being. The next generation of U.S. fighter aircraft, for this and other tactical reasons, will almost certainly be physically unmanned.

Martian jet lag. That’s what you get when you operate one of those little Radio Shack wagon/probes from a comfortable seat back at an airbase in California. Literally. Those operators were the first humans to experience Martian jet lag. In my sense of things, we should know their names: first humans on the Red Planet. Robbed of recognition by that same old school of human literalism.

This is the sort of thing that science fiction, traditionally, is neither good at predicting, nor, should we predict it, at describing.

Vannevar Bush, whom I mentioned earlier, was not a science-fiction writer. In World War II he was chief scientific adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, and director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, where he supervised the work that led to the creation of the atomic bomb. He more or less invented the military-industrial complex, as we call it today. In 1945, he published an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled, “As We May Think.” In this article he imagined a system he called the “memex,” short for “memory extender.” If there was a more eerily prescient piece of prose, fiction or otherwise, written in the first half the twentieth century, I don’t know it.

This article is remembered most often, today, for having first envisioned what we call the principle of “hyperlinking,” a means of connecting disparate but conceptually involved units of data. But I’ve never read it that way, myself. I think Vannevar Bush envisioned the cyborg, in the sense I’ve been suggesting we most valuably use that word.

One remarkable thing about this is that he seemed to have no particular idea that electronics would have anything to do with it. He begins by imagining an engineer, a technocrat figure, equipped with a “walnut-sized” (his phrase) camera, which is strapped to the center of his forehead, its shutter operated by a handheld remote. The technocrat’s glasses are engraved with crosshairs. If he can see it, he can photograph it.

Bush imagines this as a sort of pre-Polaroid microfilm device, “dry photography” he calls it, and he imagines his technocrat snapping away at project sites, blueprints, documents, as he works.

He then imagines the memex itself, a desk (oak, he actually suggests, reminding me of my television set in 1952) with frosted glass screens inset in its top, on which the user can call up those images previously snapped with that forehead-walnut. Also in the desk are all of the user’s papers, business records, etc., all stored as instantly retrievable microfiche, plus the contents of whole specialized libraries.

At this point, Bush introduces the idea which earns him his place in conventional histories of computing: the idea of somehow marking “trails” through the data, a way of navigating, of being able to backtrack. The hyperlink idea.

But what I see, when I look at Bush’s engineer, with his Polaroid walnut and his frosted-glass, oak-framed desktop, is the cyborg. In both senses. A creature of Augmented rather than Virtual Reality. He is…. us! As close to the reality of being us, today, as anyone in 1945 (or perhaps in 1965, for that matter) ever managed to get! Bush didn’t have the technology to put beneath the desktop, so he made do with what he knew, but he’s describing the personal computer. He’s describing, with an accuracy of prediction that still gives me goose bumps, how these devices will be used. How the user’s memory will be augmented, and connected to whole Borgesian libraries, searchable and waiting. Google! The memex, awaiting the engineer’s search-string!

But in our future, awaiting the interconnectedness of desktops. Awaiting the Net. Bush didn’t see that, that we’d link memexes, and create libraries in common. Steam Engine Time: He couldn’t go there, though he got closer than anyone else, in his day, to getting it.

There’s my cybernetic organism: the Internet. If you accept that “physical” isn’t only the things we can touch, it’s the largest man-made object on the planet, or will be, soon: It’s outstripping the telephone system, or ingesting it, as I speak. And we who participate in it are physically a part of it. The Borg we are becoming.

So for me the sci-fi cyborg, the meat/metal hybrid, is already another of those symbols, somewhat in the way that Dr. Satan’s robots had their origin, as symbols, in a Czech satirist’s view of alienated labor. The real deal is that which we already participate in daily, meld with, grow into.

The big news in biology this week was the announcement that we’ve stopped evolving, in the biological sense. I’ll buy that. Technology has stopped us, and technology will take us on, into a new evolution, one Mr. Bush never dreamed of, and neither, I’m sure, have I.

Interface evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least conscious effort to, survives, prospers. This is true for interface hardware as well, so that the cranial jacks and brain inserts and bolts in the neck, all the transitional sci-fi hardware of the sci-fi cyborg, already looks slightly quaint.

The real cyborg, the global organism, is so splendidly invasive that these things already seem medieval. They fascinate, much as torture instruments do, or reveal erotic possibilities to the adventurous, or beckon as stages or canvases for the artist, but I doubt that very many of us will ever go there. The real-deal cyborg will be deeper and more subtle and exist increasingly at the particle level, in a humanity where unaugmented reality will eventually be a hypothetical construct, something we can only try, with great difficulty, to imagine — as we might try, today, to imagine a world without electronic media.

This was for a series of evening lectures at the University of British Columbia. I decided to assume that the audience wouldn’t necessarily be familiar with my fiction, and to try to explain, without announcing it, what I think my work tries to convey about technology.

That’s the sort of thing journalists like to ask, and which I usually assume is impossible to answer, with any honesty or thoroughness. Sometimes it’s good to have an excuse to be patient with oneself, and see where things go.