Our Cyborgian Future?

Borg Drone Seven of Nine

Star Trek: Voyager

Police of the future?

(Image from Wikipedia)

After reading yesterday's quasi-paean to how technology is revolutionizing scholarship -- and transforming all of us musty old scholars into musty old cyborgian scholars along the way -- a fellow-traveller in this cyborgian process, Herr Richter, who maintains his own, extraordinary blog, The Burrow of Bucephalus, attempted to post a comment:

I was trying to post a reply on your blog, but it wasn't working, so I closed the page and tried again, it still didn't work, so I tried again, then all of a sudden there were 3 replies. The ironic thing is the first post was singing the praises of technology and how it will revolutionize scholarship, etc, and I'm pretty sure it got lost, but who knows, maybe it will pop up too eventually.

That is ironic. Maybe it will pop up 'eventually' -- as Herr Richter hopefully suggests -- but I've been waiting several years now for some of my missives into cyberspace to reach their designated mark.

I wonder what happens to them ... do they just continue forever whizzing about hypercyberspace at hypercyberdrive speeds?

Even if Herr Richter's comment never achieves its aim and is lost to us forever, you can still read some of his thoughts on high-tech-assisted scholarship and our coming cyborgian selves in his most recent blog post: Technology: friend of foe? Meta cliché titles: blessing or curse?

Hmmm ... "friend of foe"? Is that a typo or an insight? How about "blessing of curse," too? Or maybe "curse of blessing"? Anyway, the "of" would fit Herr Richter's more dystopian fears:

[I]t's only a matter of time before we'll be putting computer chips in our heads .... With technology applied to us, we could remember every experience and moment of our lives, use our eyes as microscope or telescope, hear things happening miles away, have access to an encyclopedia of information in our head .... [W]e'll have pin-point accuracy and coordination...

Dystopian? But this sounds too good to be true. Herr Richter worries that it is:

The police of the future will have all these features, as well as the power to read thoughts.

That doesn't sound good, does it? Dystopian indeed. On the other hand, would the police really be able to deal with all of the thought-generated data? The growing mountain of information might be too big for them to handle.

We might be growing too big for them to handle...