Books in 2125

Okay, I know it's a little off-topic for the group, but I'll risk it.

The group announcement started me thinking about reading even further in the future. It seems feasible that they'll eventually be a time where you can either "load" an entire book into your brain in seconds or into a device that your brain can directly access. This would could give you verbatim access to a book on any question asked, while still not having actually "read" the book in a linear fashion. There might become a split between "loading" a book and "reading" a book.

I can see various transcendent technologies, where physical books, ereaders and even screens go away but books are still read. For example, I think it's likely we'll eventually all walk around with heads-up displays embedded in our glasses, our retinas, or even applied directly to our optical perception.

In such a world we could "read" by commanding our computers to project text on a piece of paper we're holding, a wall, the face of someone really boring, or on all reality. But I think we'll still "read" it—experience it by moving its words through our consciousness.

I don't think we'll "load" books. I doubt we'll have technology to do it in 100 or even 1,000 years. But if we did, such a machine would be so revolutionary that, before we think to load the newest chick lit—direct from the author?—we'll have killed each other, or decided to enjoy an orgasm for the rest of eternity while our robots do the dishes. More importantly I doubt "loading" books will take over because it isn't fun. Sure, I'm glad I'm walking around with 3-4 Nabokov books in my head deeply—the consequence of repeated reading. But the fun was in the reading, not the having-read. Utilitarian reading, by contrast, may be "loaded," but I suspect it will be better to load lectures about the surgery you're about to do, or fake memories of performing it, not a book about it.

Anyway, if you have the ability to deeply change consciousness, I wouldn't want the ability to load Milton, skipping the part where the words flow through my consciousness, but to let the words flow through me as if I were a better reader—to read Milton as if I were Harold Bloom, or whatever. That is, maybe in the future we'll pick our books and our readers...

Non-fiction will be loaded, and will be in the form of specific knowledge, not limited to the format books are constrained to today.

Fiction will adapt depending on tech possibilities at the time and will split into "exact experience transmission", which will be somewhat like a movie/interactive game delivered to your brain, i.e. you see it exactly as intended by the author, and a "suggestive experience" which will only nudge your brain/imagination into filling in a pre-existing sketch, which is more in line with today's books. The latter will be less popular, probably.

Note, this doesn't mean we'll get "words" in our mind which we'll "read". It's possible that a direct interface to a brain may supersede language, which can be limiting, especially to those who don't have a good handle on language or don't even speak it.

If you'd asked Milton, or even Doctor Johnson, what they thought the dominant literary form of the 19th and 20th centuries would be, you can be pretty sure that it wouldn't have been the novel they suggested. Global catastrophes permitting, people will still be reading Dickens and Jane Austen - and probably a few 20th century authors too - in 2125, just as they will be reading Milton and Chaucer, but there's a good chance that the novel will be as much an historical curiosity as the epic poem. Literary forms evolve in line with the means of production and distribution available: maybe the 22nd century forms will be lyric poems and ultra-short stories. Or maybe literature itself, in the sense of the aesthetic use of static text, will be overtaken by other media, or by some sort of dynamic text - all we can be sure of is that things will change.

2> Right, that was basically my point. There is a fundamental "readness" to a book that we wouldn't attain even if we had a instant "loading" of its contents, I think. Reading is an journey, not a destination. The actual vehicle could be any number of things, as you point out (retinal display, audiobooks that play inside our heads, etc.)

But I don't think it's that far-fetched to think we might have this capability in 100 years. 100 years ago we barely even had cars or telephones, and heroin was available OTC as a cure-all.

My thinking is that we won't have a way to load knowledge into our organic brain, but by that time we'll at least have started extending our brain with technology that can be accessed via thought. What we'll consider our "minds" will actually start transcending just our biological components. Shoot, we're already starting down that path with the artificial hippocampus. And we've learned a great deal in the past decade about how memory works on a biological basis. Far more than we'd managed to learn in the centuries before that. I think it's a matter of time.

I think it's also within the realm of possibility that we eventually WILL be able to directly record memories to the organic part of our brains as well. But we'll be pretty far along by that time.

or decided to enjoy an orgasm for the rest of eternity

You know we already have that, right? Well, for the rest of your life. Yet somehow the majority of humanity manage to avoid that pitfall. I think most people actually want to get more out of life than simply a pleasure sensation.

We have come a long way. I am sure that many people are excited about it. I'm not. But I am not the future generation, so it hardly matters what I think. I'll be the minority. After reading this piece about video games:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3485918.stm
What comes next is left only up to someones imagination, the intelligence and technology is there waiting.

#5 If you think in the future it will be possible to be able to directly record memories to the organic part of the brain what's to stop people from trying to erase all of their bad memories like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by Michel Gondry and the film version with Jim Carrey & Kate Winslet or Total Recall by Paul Verhoeven with Sharon Stone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film version. They'd be able to implant false memories in people's minds and could be used by the Military as a form of mind control or brain washing and make do thiings they want them to do with out having the memory of having done it in the first place.

Or be able to go to places like the Yul Brynner movies West World by Michael Crichton and the sequel, Future World. They'd control what memories they wanted people to have and make them believe they actually wnet on their Dream Exotic Vacation of a lifetime,
climbed Mt.Everest, had fantastic lovers, lived in the Amazon's Troical Rainforest, etc. They'd use the technology to manipulate people's minds and memories.

Beatles1964

7> Actually, we've already made a lot of "progress" on the wiping out of bad memories right now. You don't actually wipe the memory so much as emotionally detach it. It makes the memory more like something you saw on TV, just featuring you. Radiolab did a great episode including it:

http://www.radiolab.org/2007/jun/07/

The second segment is actually about adding memories.

I'm more afraid of when they eventually develop the perfect non-lethal weapon. Then you have instant crowd pacification without the worry of blood in the streets. Of course, memory modification would be a handy thing to have if you have that as well...

Technology will eventually surpass the body's ability to sustain its use. Moving faster than walking speed causes motion sickness, flying causes blood clots, cell phones cause cancer, stationary bicycles tear up your knees and if permanent orgasms were OTC you'd die from either convulsion/cardiac arrest or dehydration. Although there are worse ways to go.

I also don't think the novel, the long story, will ever disappear. Stories were among the first things preserved by writing (after how many cows you had and what the Glorious Leader wanted you to do). What's always struck me as odd is that for centuries, in the West at least, the novel was looked down on as a low literary form. That may have more to do with what books made it through the middle ages and the monastic traditions in institutions of higher learning. I would imagine that during those years the storyteller was in high demand.

I think if we were to slip back into a dark age, and frankly the likelihood of that increased dramatically after WWII, novels would be one of the most widely available literary forms unless it were banished by some form of orthodoxy. And cultural declines usually are associated with the rise of orthodoxy so maybe novels are as likely to get the axe as they did before. Mox nix, I'm going to get one of those orgasm pills.

Technology will eventually surpass the body's ability to sustain its use. Moving faster than walking speed causes motion sickness, flying causes blood clots, cell phones cause cancer, stationary bicycles tear up your knees

I think it's more likely our lifespan will be shortened by stressing out about problems which are completely overblown. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is already happening.

>9 SomeGuyInVirginia:
...you missed: working with flint tools gives you silicosis.