Essays

by Gregory Benford

  Haldeman: It effects the brain.

  Benford: ...and it effects the brain, right. Yes, it does. The ineffable lightness of being. And I thought of a stunt you could do: you assemble a coat and trousers made out of light pipes; they take the information coming from your back, pipe it around, computer process it and emit it in this direction. And vice versa in the other direction. You split the light pipe, half goes this way, the other half goes the other way. To someone on that side, you appear to be not there; instead they are looking at the building behind you; you have become invisible. Now if that's not alteration of the body, what is? Well, it's a kind of invisibility. Of course, you can try for a partial effect. Say, you only do it for a hole about this large. You walk down the streets; you seem to have a large hole blown through you. You look like a victim from a war that hasn't happened yet. Nice effects, you know, people are not going to forget seeing you today which is the part of the thrust of some clothes I've seen. You know, the insulting T-shirts. What's that supposed to do: it is supposed to make you remember that person. You won't necessarily like that person, but you'll remember that person.

  Well, there are all kinds of social ways of expressing the body. Then, I began to think about really sophisticated computers. In a couple of generations, people looking back may think of us as people who lived in a dumb world. Once you have augmented your customary moving self, you have made your clothes smart. Then they would be able to respond to what is smart, what is interactive, in the environment. I mean this building is a dumb building . You walk into the building and it doesn't respond to your presence at all. But many buildings in a sense should; for example if you walk into a bank, it would be handy for the bank to know whether you are armed, or whether you belong there at all or what you want to do there. Exit the receptionist. You walk into the building; the building tells you what you need to know about what's in the building and it interrogates you and so forth. But all parts of the landscape, all parts of the artificial world that we have created can in some sense be smart and interact with you. You walk into a hotel suite and say "I hate this color, turn everything in the room mauve, I hate this yellow," and BAM! it does that.

  This is like being Bill Gates. Bill Gates does have these big screens in the house that he is building which produce very high resolution pictures such as the Madonna or any old landscape that you want; you can have it show a real time image of waves breaking in Mawai, if you want. You are looking out of the window at a sea scape on the other side of the planet. Rooms, buildings can react to you in that way and they become smart in the sense that they become an interactive part of your environment. So the world divides, then, into smart and dumb. And your body has smart and dumb processes to the extent that there are these three spheres: there's a social world (clothes have social functions,) there's the physical world (we all have physical functions), and there is the digital world. The fact that these can all overlap simultaneously in some shared space means that the entire concept of your body has changed.

  Your concept of your body has already changed in ways that you really don't register anymore. Someone three thousand years ago would have found it very mysterious that we have things on our faces, in front of our eyes. Why? Or that we have odd pieces of metal stuck into our teeh; or my left shoulder, which I've stupidly broken twice, once playing softball and once surfing, is now made of metal. All of these things are augmentations, changes that we accept as natural. The next change, then, would probably be a smartening of the body. We would then have a division between smart and dumb interactions with the world. And the world would be divided between smart and dumb in the same way that human culture divides the world into artificial and natural. Chimpanzees almost certainly do not have the classification of cultural and natural, and certainly, they don't have it in the way that we have it. Soon enough, our division would be between smart and dumb ways in which the body reacts to the world. And that will be as profound a change as anything that I can think of. And we can't really even glimpse what that would necessarily imply. It is very hard to get outside of your cultural perception but if computerization keeps on going for a couple of more decades at its current rate, all these things will become readily possible and I don't think we can quite understand how big a movement it will make.

  Haldeman: Yes, it's interesting to talk along those lines. I am looking forward to a time in the very near future when the idea of the computer as a separate instrument is curiously quaint; when doors and tables and microphones have computers inside them and they just sense what you want and go ahead and do them. [Beeper phone beeps in audience] In fact, pockets would have little computers in them that would tell you that somebody is waiting for you. One thing about the modification of the body is to make the body smarter. Some thing that I haven't seen investigated in science fiction and I am going to patent it right now so that Greg can't write about it. Our intelligence is actually not limited to the brain but spread all through the nervous system. A person who plays a musical instrument does not figure out which way to move his fingers everytime he moves his fingers. In fact, you go much faster than you could possibly think. After a certain amount of practice, you not only can memorize a piece very fast but you can improvise faster than you can actually do any cognitive work.

  I find that fascinating and it's not something that is happening in your brain; it's happening somewhere between your spinal column and your fingers. What happens if you can actually modify that; what happens, if you can speed that up; what happens if you can actually do some time sharing between some part of your brain and that little autonomic stuff. I don't know, but it would be interesting, I think that we may see a revolution in the arts, for instance, to make a really conservative prediction: a kind of music so fast and so subtle that we couldn't even understand it now. But when everybody can do it, when everybody who cares can do it, that may become a dominant form of music.

  We may be able to augment our eye sight so that the visual arts become..oh, I don't know...we could use up a lot more of the spectrum. Not a LOT more, we can't see radiowaves without having eyes this big, and you don't want to look at something that's in gamma rays for too long, it might hurt the other parts of the spectrum. But our visual acuity could increase by an order of magnitude and we could actually increase the visual spectrum by an octave or two and have things that are tremendously complex and moving paintings that you and I would just see as a piece of blank canvas, or a monochrome. I am fascinated by the stuff that we saw over at the wearable computers, a lot of the things that were interesting were just concept clothing; that is, nobody has figured out how to wire them yet, but the one that I really liked is the one that I read about in science fiction story a couple of years ago about a reporter who goes to cover a war and she's wearing everything she needs, she's got a camera in her hand and she's modemed fairly well. She speaks into her jaw and a computer a thousand miles away writes up her stories and projects them onto a little a screen in front of one eye so that she can edit it, and there was a gal wearing one of those things on a pedestal at the Media Lab show and it was functional. She had a little camera, not a great camera but a little camera on her palm and like a three by four inch screen in front of her eyes that showed what she was looking at. She had her left hand wired with five contacts where she could type by tapping different combinations of fingers into a little computer output that was onto one breast. I could use on outfit like that!

  After the first hundred thousand dollar one comes then comes the ten thousand dollar one and then finally it reaches Radio Shack. If you want to really spend money, you can get one that nobody can tell you are wearing. It's all heads up and its lens is built into your nail. We'll see that really soon because as a culture we are addicted to the preservation of information about our activities. This way, you can get real time the whole boring vacation, nail your relatives and say alright this is going to take about twenty hours. Yeah ó this world does need editors; it already needs editors and think how horrible it
is going to be in the next century.

  Question: You mentioned before smart clothing that changes while you walk, while you're moving around the room. You meet somebody from across the room and your sweeter changes to match theirs and flashes. What does that change in the nature of communication?

  Benford: Yes, sexual signaling is very important in clothes. Of course, the most important sexual signaling is when you take them off. Yeah, there's certainly going to be stuff like that. Remember fifteen years ago when they had clothes that would change color because at places with direct contact with the body they would warm up Those didn't catch on, because of course, it was a random signal. With a smart system, you can interrogate somebody else's system and you can skip the cocktail chat and get right down to the heavy breathing stuff, but the mind boggles. That's one thing that could happen, but you would assume that all people were smart unless, of course, they were wearing dumb clothing. That's yet another hierarchical thing that would start to separate us out in a way.

  Haldeman: What happens when a dumb person wears smart clothing?

  Benford: They just don't say much I guess.

  Haldeman: They'll say you're new in town.

  Benford: Well, smart, of course, means just capable of interacting and interrogating about all kinds of stuff. Suppose you walk into a room and all you have to do is look at somebody and a couple of key touches here and there and you could instantly download his entire web site. So you walk towards a person and you can read his website and you go up to the guy and you know something about him, a lot maybe. You could go off and have a drink, look at the skyline and read the whole website, read his last essay in the New York Times Refuse of Books and come back and argue with him about it. The possibilities are endless here. Of course, a lot of reading, I know.

  Haldeman: Well, we'll be able to read much faster in the future.

  Benford: Oh yes, that's the one thing that hasn't improved. We have all kinds of technology to make us disseminate words faster but nothing, except for the electric light, to make us read faster.

  Haldeman: You've never taken that Evelyn Wood speed reading thing?

  Benford: No, never had the time.

  Haldeman: Too much to read.

  Question: Both of your stories dealt with reinterpreting the senses, altering sensory information and subjectively changing reality. What kinds of effects do you see this technology having on people and on society?

  Haldeman: Well, in one corner I can see profound changes in recreation, things like synesthesia ó rearranging the input of the senses into something pleasing or strange or even horrifying and strange but therefore entertaining. In terms of actually coping with the real world, the external reality I see an amplification of the senses which would allow a normal person do more subtle work; I mean the obvious things like nanoengineering and so forth. We are already doing things that literally couldn't have been described fifty years ago, couldn't have been thought of. The idea of operating on a nucleus of a cell by moving things around is incredible. It's everyday now, but when I was born nobody was even thinking about it. I got a little calculator, a little computer cost me three hundred bucks and I can write on it in script and it comes out printed as a word processed document.

  When I was in graduate school, they put that about a hundred years in the future...and voice recognition and computers was something they said: "Well forget about it; that's science fiction." Hell, I can buy a little program that costs 25 bucks that does voice recognition on my machine. Doesn't do it perfectly, but it does it. We are living in this strange world because these wonders become everyday overnight and there are new wonders that come speeding around the corner all the time. And perhaps guys like us who are a little longer in the tooth than you guys are more actively impressed when these things happen. But I suppose that every now and then it might occur to you that you are living in a strange and rapidly changing world.

  Benford: What's hot in the moment and everybody can see it coming is going to be more interesting media technologies. Lots of graphics and interactive this, that and the other. I think these new media are going to amplify our views of the world enormously so that it's worth talking about new media in science fiction and seeing how far we can push it. That's what the story I read was basically saying. Stock brokers now sit in front of a screen and type out stuff and look at stock to place but what it would be like if you went to work and it was more like you were playing tennis but you are still doing the same operation. You were actually bodily engrossed in the activity. You were not just using your hands and your eyes but you are using your whole sensorium. It's the expansion of the human sensorium that I think will give us a radically transformed world for some people anyway in the next century because I don't see any real end in sight yet and the horizons we are looking at are pretty far off. You mustn't think of people eighty years from now having just bigger screens or better keyboards to type on. It can't be like that at all. The keyboard's going to go away. The keyboard itself is a only hundred years old and why would we want to stick with that?

  Reimagining the Body

  Jenkins: Last time, James Patrick Kelly read a story in which people rather casually decided to neuter themselves, to get rid of their genitals. In much contemporary science fiction, there is a lot of a play with bodily modification. It strikes me though when I read Joe's stories, which often include descriptions of wounds and mutilation, there seems to be a real attachment to the body and a sense of loss when the body gets altered. That seems to be a reality that's often lost when science fiction writers imagine future societies in which we casually toss aside pieces of bodily flesh in order to change who we are. And I am wondering what resistance the body poses to some of the visions of technology that are cropping up in recent science fiction.

  Haldeman: Well, we are learning a lot about the immune system and along with that we are going to learn more about radically transforming the internal organs of the body. I myself don't look forward to that sort of future but it's coming. I was signing books the other day and this really beautiful woman about twenty , twenty-one came up and she had more metal in her mouth and on her face than I have in my bicycle. She had all these little bolts in her tongue and lips and everything. She was beautiful but it was a kind of horrible beauty. And what I saw was not the future. What I saw was a fad that didn't have much longer to go, because she had obviously taken it as far as she could. God knows what else she had, I didn't try to visualize that. "I have a pierced pancreas, right through. It's the only one in all of Cambridge." God, doesn't it hurt? I suspect that the first thing we'll do, once we have solved the organ of harvesting organs out of animals like pigs, is to replace our own aging organs. That's going to be real fast; that's like raising a pig for a pork chop; give me a break. And I think that process will go from experimental to routine in no time at all because it will be a method of routine life extension and it will go from very expensive to moderately expensive to covered by group insurance plans real fast. And I suspect that you and I will probably live long enough to have a little piggish heart beating around or something like that. Maybe little piggy hair on my bald head.

  When it comes to radical changes I wonder about the people who write these stories. I love James Patrick Kelly's story, Mister Boy. That's one of my favorite science fiction stories. People take the strangest forms, like this guy has turned himself into eternal boy. He's like nine- or ten-year old; he's getting older but he's looking like a nine or ten years old boy. His mother is looking like the Statue of Liberty and I guess she's about 25 feet tall and his best friend looks like stegosaurus or something. I wonder about this. I had my body really badly modified by a machine-gun and rockets and rifle grenades. I have had so much surgery, I have so many pieces of metal in my body and I have seen my insides; that's something that most of the people who write about these things have not had the pleasure of seeing. I've seen other people I knew blown to pieces and lying rotting in the sun and that's not something that makes me loo
king forward to cutting a part of one's body and rearranging it into something that looks like a Mattel toy. But if it were done painlessly and if it were something that would make you popular and get you the girls or boys, they'd do it.

  Benford: Yes, I have the same reservations. In fact I instantly thought of John Varley who is a very interesting and rather strange guy and he wrote stories in the seventies and early eighties in which people change sex back and forth and it is all easy and cosmetic. Those stories really bother me because one thing we really do know about our sense of sexuality and our sense of self is that a lot of is hard wired in, from early experience. And if you just go down and change the genitals and reform the body and stuff, you are not going to affect this big driver up here and that driver is not going to be driving the right equipment. And it is not just going to be so simple that you, bang, become a woman and you see what it is to be a woman and the next week you are going back to being a man; it's just not going to be that easy. It's the mental equivalent of the TV dinner. Looks easy, but it's not satisfying. And I wonder about that brand of science fiction, because I just don't believe it.