Implants, dammit!

I read Neuromancer as well as a ton of other Science Fiction at an impressionable age, and it … well … affected me. Especially Neuromancer. Holy crap. Talk about sticking your Swedish-boy-from-the-sticks unformed brain in a microwave.

So lately I’ve been starting to feel disenfranchised with the state of technology. Computers still crash. Can’t retrofit my car to pair with my Bluetooth-enabled cellphone so I can enjoy completely hands-free talking. My cellphone gets no reception at work. MP3s really don’t sound all that great on a good sound system. My inbox is full of spam. Digital cable movies look like crap due to the insanely high compression schemes my cable provider uses. Et cetera.

At this point you might be saying, “OK, so cry me a river, nerd boy. What’s the point?” which is a valid question. The point is, according to the sci-fi I read as a boy, we’d have all this Cool Stuff™ by now. Out of all the Cool Stuff™ that was bandied about back in the days of my impressionable youth, the one thing I really, really wanted, and find us, as a species, getting no closer to is implants. Dammit, I want a straight feed to my optical nerve! I want the current time shimmering in front of my vision when I think about it. I want to see caller ID. I want my computer display to hover in front of my eyes. I want to be able to jack a chip and know how to talk Spanish.

Is it so damn much to ask?

It almost seems like what happened is that Science figured out how to implant things into women’s chests to make them bigger. Then Science figured out how to build the perfect technology to disseminate pictures of women with large chests (i.e., the Internet) and then all the scientists on the project took a break to chill out with some donuts and a fast Internet connection to reap the rewards of all their hard work.

These scientists need to get back to work.