What if?

I like asking “What if?”

Life is getting digitized.Information is universally accessible. And our realities are getting redefined by it. The information superhighway consists of rapid global movement of weightless bits moving at the speed of light. In simple words, bits have taken over atoms. If atom is the tiniest unit of matter, bit is the smallest element of the digital information era.  For practical purposes, if a bit can be described as 1 or 0 – it just proves the power of the binary vocabulary which might look like 1,10,11,110,001,111,etc. And like this, imagine digitization of various types of information like audio & video in a similar reduction patterns of 1s and os. Intelligence lives in these patterns. And thus, digital always creates the potential for new things (platforms, content, possibilities) to originate and spread from a whole new combination of sources.

Now, given this reality – what if – in the near future we could communicate with the power of such intelligence (which would be available to every individual) just like the manner in which information is available today.

Two individuals will talk like this:

Mr.X: “Words are so powerful… they make or break you”

Miss.Y : “Very true. Just like poetry.”

Mr.X :  “Heard this? I attempted to concentrate / the total sun’s rays in / each poem as through a glass, / but such magnification / did not set the page afire”

Now, Miss.Y is clearly taken aback. She says, “I never knew that you were a big fan of Ginsberg”

Mr.X goes on to say that “Perhaps you have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear”.

Miss. Y cannot believe her senses as she utters “How did you know that Kant is my all time favorite?”

In reality, Mr.X hasn’t read Kant or Ginsberg. He never really liked literature or philosophy. His passion was mathematics. But Miss.Y hated mathematics. So Mr.X activated a program which basically consisted of an implant in his brain. When he activated the program with a certain command, a high-speed wireless chip that was connected to the world wide web streamed information at great speeds to his brain with the help of a built-in encyclopedia. It responded to the effort to remember by delving into these information sources and picking out what was being looked for. The processing of information took place at such a fast pace that Mr.X could not even tell what he was actually remembering and what the chip had retrieved. Nor did he care. Because he had got a chance to speak to the most beautiful woman he ever saw. And that was the thing that really mattered.

What if this is possible?

(inspired from:this)

~ by rb on November 24, 2010.