*NEWS*INCORPORATING COMPUTERS IN BODIES ?

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Date: Monday March 7, 2005 09:16:00 am
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  • Anonymous
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    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.

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