Incorporating computers into our bodies
One of the More
interesting speakers during my recent visit to the annual conference of the
World Future Society was Ian Pearson, futurologist at British Telecom. One of
the advances he sees in our near future is what he term’s “active skin”–computer
displays in human skin to make “a video tattoo” if we wish. But that would be
just the first step in attaching computers to human skin. As Pearson puts it in
a recent essay for BT:”Chip components are getting smaller. By the end of this
decade, it will be possible to build simple identifier, memory, and processing
chips, sensors, and short-range communication devices, all smaller than human
skin cells, which are about 10 microns across. We could print or blast these
chips in significant numbers into the upper layers of the skin … .
Semiconductor circuits can already be printed today using inkjet printers, so we
could imagine some of the circuits being painlessly printed onto our hands in a
corner shop… . Medical sensors could be implanted that could monitor our blood
chemistry 24-/7 and keep in touch with hospital computers via our phones. These
computers could remotely control drug dispensers and thus keep our condition
under constant check … . Cellphones, MP3 players, electronic diaries, and
other consumer electronics could be printed ointo our wrists, with full
keyboards. These could remain almost invisible until we touch them, when they
could light up … . The circuitry itself would be made of dispersed groups of
invisibly small devices, so we may show no more than a very slight colour change
in that area of skin before the device is switched on … . Having a TV printed
onto the back of our hands might be quite appealing. It will certainly make some
very interesting body-adornment possibilities. We could even see some real
Teletubbies!”
Pearson, who admits he’s a Bit more aggressive in his
forecast than most of his colleagues at BT, also predicts that we’ll have
conscious, artificially intelligent computers by 2015.