We will all become mighty morphing cyborgs capable of reconfiguring ourselves by the minute – of renting extended nervous tissue and organ capacity and of redeploying our extensions in space as our needs change and as our resources allow. Think of yourself on some evening in the not-so-distant future, when wearable, fitted, and implanted electronic organs connected by bodynets are as commonplace as cotton; your intimate infrastructure connects you seamlessly to a planetful of bits, and you have software in your underwear. It’s eleven o’clock, Smarty Pants; do you know where your network extensions are tonight? … metaphysicians will be tempted to reformulate the mind/body problem as the mind/network problem.
Predictor: Mitchell, William J.
Prediction, in context:In his 1994 book “City of Bits,” MIT computer scientist William J. Mitchell writes: ”We will all become mighty morphing cyborgs capable of reconfiguring ourselves by the minute – of renting extended nervous tissue and organ capacity and of redeploying our extensions in space as our needs change and as our resources allow. Think of yourself on some evening in the not-so-distant future, when wearable, fitted, and implanted electronic organs connected by bodynets are as commonplace as cotton; your intimate infrastructure connects you seamlessly to a planetful of bits, and you have software in your underwear. It’s eleven o’clock, Smarty Pants; do you know where your network extensions are tonight? For cyborgs, then, the border between interiority and exteriority is destabilized. Distinctions between self and other are open to reconstruction. Difference becomes provisional. And perhaps, as the boundaries of the body and the limits of the nervous system become less definite, metaphysicians will be tempted to reformulate the mind/body problem as the mind/network problem. Some may want to argue that the seat of the cyborg soul – the postmodern pineal gland – is no longer to be sought just on the wet side of the carbon/silicon divide.”
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