Michael Chorost is the author of Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, which focused on the changes in his life after he received a cochlear implant, and World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Q: You have
written, "My two implants make me irreversibly computational, a living
example of the integration of humans and computers." How closely do you
think humans and computers are already connected, and how much more connected
do you think they can become?
A: That is
from my first book, Rebuilt. Right now they’re connected in the sense that we
spend all our lives around computers. Most people I know never get more than
five feet away from their iPhone, ever.
I’ve gone rather further than that in
actually having chips surgically installed in my head that send data directly
to my auditory nerve. A surgeon inserted sixteen electrodes into my inner ear
that fire my auditory nerves. There’s a gadget I wear on my ear that takes in
sound, digitizes it, and sends it by radio to an implanted chip in my skull.
The chip figures out how to parcel the binary data to my sixteen electrodes,
and I get an experience that is sort of like hearing.
People have
seen this as a harbinger of the day where everyone has implants that enhance
their brains or senses. But I think it’s important to make a distinction
between prosthetic implants and enhancement implants.
Prosthetic implants are what I have. I need
them because I’m deaf. They required surgery, which is always risky, but for me
the risk-to-reward ratio was very high: low risk, very high reward.
Enhancement
implants are a different story. No one knows what the rewards would be, and the
risks would not be zero. One thing I learned from getting a cochlear implant is
how complex and unpredictable the body is, and that makes me wary of bold
predictions. I’m not saying it won’t
happen, I’m just saying that it’s very far off.
Having said
that, in my second book, World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity,
Computers, and the Internet, I took on the role of technofuturist. I wrote
about implants that could, in theory, someday, allow the sense-impressions and
feelings of one person to be transmitted directly to the brain of another
person, or even more profoundly, to groups of other people. A kind of
collective awareness, or telepathy.
The point was that the real future of
implanted devices isn’t going to be to enhance our existing abilities, but to
let us do new things entirely. That’s always been the deal with technology: it
creates new ways of doing things. Telephones, email, and Facebook don’t really
let us do the old ways better. They open up entirely new ways of communicating.
I see that pattern continuing someday with implanted technologies, once the
risk-to-reward ratio becomes favorable.
Q: Part of World Wide Mind deals with how you met your wife. What do you see
as a good balance between being connected to technology and having links to
other people? How can someone find the balance that's right for them?
A: There
must have been fifty books published in the last few years about how addictive
Internet technologies have become, with people worrying that they are
distorting and harming human relationships. It’s easy to be afraid of harms we
already know about, while not seeing the benefits that we presently can’t yet
imagine.
In World Wide Mind I tried to offer a visionary but also more balanced
view of the future. The “telepathy” I talk about in World Wide Mind could be
like what we have now, only a hundred times more compelling and addictive. What
do we do about that?
In the book I interwove the technology with a story of
teaching myself to connect better with people face-to-face. I wrote about going
to workshops in Northern California where people would do exercises like
looking into each other’s eyes and listening without interrupting. Very basic
stuff. However, these are skills usually aren’t taught. We just assume people
are good at them, where in fact often they aren’t.
In the book, I juxtaposed
the high-tech, low-touch future of a World Wide Mind with the high-touch,
low-tech present of the workshops: I thought it was a heady, provocative
combination.
I argued that we need to develop transformative new technologies
and teach ourselves the skills of compassion, listening, and being present in
one’s body. To get a future worth living in, you have to do both. There isn’t
any shortcut. You just have do the hard work of being human.
Q: How has the cochlear implant changed your life, and would you recommend them to other
people in your situation?
A: If
cochlear implants didn’t exist I would have had to try to learn sign language
and join the signing deaf community. Nothing against it, but it’s a completely
different world, with its own language and cultural life.
I wanted to stay in
the hearing world I’d grown up in, so cochlear implants were the obvious
choice. They’ve given me back the partial hearing they used to have – I
actually hear better with them than I did with hearing aids.
Before, I could
hear a clock ticking maybe five feet away.
Now, it’s twenty or thirty feet.
It feels like my arms are five times longer than they used to be.
Everything sounded very weird, of course. When the implant was first turned on,
“What did you have for breakfast?” sounded to me like “Zzzzzz szz szvizzz ur
brfzzzzzz.” Teapots sounded like
foghorns instead of whistles. My own
voice sounded either squeakier or hollower, depending on what software I was
using. Paper made bell-like sounds when
I rattled it. I’ve adapted to it, but
it’s still strange.
I would
recommend them to two groups of people: (a) adults who have had hearing for
most of their lives, and (b) children. I would not recommend them to adults who
have never used a spoken language, because in that case the brain doesn’t know
how to hear, and it’s usually too late to start. Implants rarely enable such
users to become skilled in hearing a spoken language.
Cochlear implants are not
for everyone, and it’s up to the medical team and the patient to make a
well-informed decision. In my case the choice was an obvious yes, because I’d
used hearing aids since 3½, had grown up as an oral deaf person, and was
skilled with spoken language.
Q: How much
time in a typical day do you spend on the computer or other devices?
A: Too much.
Q: What are
you working on now?
A: I’d love
to write a book on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and I’m
writing a book proposal for it now. Whether my agent will be able to sell it to
a publisher, that’s anyone’s guess.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Michael Chorost is on Twitter @MikeChorost
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