Are you ready for a brain chip? It’ll change your mind
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Smartphone ownership is nearly universal. It isn’t mandatory, of course, but you’d be seen as an eccentric if you didn’t have one.
Rejecting smartphones means you’re old-fashioned, possibly a bit of a crank. There are pros and cons to having a smartphone. As a society, we’ve decided that on the whole it’s much better to have one.
Of course, there’s an astronomical amount of money at stake. Imagine how much revenue depends, directly and indirectly, on the near-universal ownership of smartphones and tablets. There’s the demand for the hardware itself, for the raw materials to build that hardware and the infrastructure to assemble it, to improve it, to ship it around the world.
There’s demand for transmission lines, cell towers and data networks. There’s demand for the operating systems, for the middleware that operates the cameras and regulates the batteries, for the hundreds of thousands of apps you might want to download. There’s demand for the endless content that appears on those apps and for the advertising time and real estate on hundreds of millions of smartphone and tablet screens.
Beyond all that, there’s demand for the huge amounts of energy we need to make it all work. There is very little that is completely independent of these devices. So, yes, you can do without a smartphone.
But it isn’t easy. It won’t be long before there is a similar concerted effort to make brain-implanted chips seem normal. It is a matter of years, not decades.
These won’t be chip implants permitting paraplegics to regain their independence. These will be implants marketed to everyone, as smartphones are now. And if you decline to have a chip grafted onto your brain, you’ll be a backward, out-of-touch
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