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Max Hodak - The vanishing computer

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Back in the 1980s, we imagined that the future would be big arrays of screens enmeshed with dense bundles of wires; that technology would take over the world. In reality, as technology has taken over the world it has become increasingly invisible. The beautiful aspiration is not to be surrounded by machines, but for technology to disappear into nature. Looking at a laptop, physically it is dominated by a screen, a keyboard and a trackpad. Modern science is already pretty comfortable extracting keyboard and mouse information directly from the brain; many groups have done it in many species. It is slow, finicky and requires bulky implants today, but I am confident that it will become fast, wireless, and miniaturized very soon. Similarly, multiple groups have already shown the ability to inject visual information into the brain. The science here is admittedly less developed than that of decoding motor activity, but it is a much higher dimensional problem and we have been limited by tools,

Back in the 1980s, we imagined that the future would be big arrays of screens enmeshed with dense bundles of wires; that technology would take over the world. In reality, as technology has taken over the world it has become increasingly invisible. The beautiful aspiration is not to be surrounded by machines, but for technology to disappear into nature. Looking at a laptop, physically it is dominated by a screen, a keyboard and a trackpad. Modern science is already pretty comfortable extracting keyboard and mouse information directly from the brain; many groups have done it in many species.…

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