Anticipate the moment at which all your personal electronic devices – headphone audio player, cellular telephone, pager, dictaphone, camcorder, personal digital assistant (PDA), electronic stylus, radiomodem, calculator, Loran positioning system, smart spectacles, VCR remote, data glove, electronic jogging shoes that count your steps and flash warning signals at oncoming cars, medical monitoring system, pacemaker … and anything else that you might habitually wear or occasionally carry – can seamlessly be linked in a wireless bodynet that allows them to function as an integrated system and connects them to the worldwide digital network … you will have acquired a collection of interchangeable, snap-in organs connected by exonerves … your nervous system will plug into the worldwide digital net. You will have become a modular, reconfigurable, infinitely extensible cyborg.
Predictor: Mitchell, William J.
Prediction, in context:In his 1994 book “City of Bits,” MIT computer scientist William J. Mitchell writes: ”Anticipate the moment at which all your personal electronic devices – headphone audio player, cellular telephone, pager, dictaphone, camcorder, personal digital assistant (PDA), electronic stylus, radiomodem, calculator, Loran positioning system, smart spectacles, VCR remote, data glove, electronic jogging shoes that count your steps and flash warning signals at oncoming cars, medical monitoring system, pacemaker (if you are so unfortunate), and anything else that you might habitually wear or occasionally carry – can seamlessly be linked in a wireless bodynet that allows them to function as an integrated system and connects them to the worldwide digital network. You will be able to use your PDA to program your VCR, listen to pager messages through your Walkman, display coordinates from the Loran on your smart spectacles, download physiological data from an electronic exercise machine into your PDA, and transmit the output from your camcorder to remote locations via your wireless modem. As you jog in a strange city, you might record your route on your PDA, then have your Walkman give you directions back to your hotel. You get the idea. By this point in the evolution of miniature electronic products, you will have acquired a collection of interchangeable, snap-in organs connected by exonerves. Where these electronic organs interface to your sensory receptors and your muscles, there will be continuous bit-spits across the carbon/silicon gap. And where they bridge to the external digital world, your nervous system will plug into the worldwide digital net. You will have become a modular, reconfigurable, infinitely extensible cyborg.”
Biography:William J. Mitchell was a professor and dean of architecture at MIT and the author of the predictive book “City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn” (1994). He also taught at Harvard, Yale, Carnegie-Mellon and Cambridge Universities. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Internet Appliances
Name of publication: City of Bits
Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 3: Cyborg Citizens
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/index.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney