Nicolas Marchildon

L’éditorial de Tony Mobily dans le Free Software Magazine de mai 2005 à propos de la prochaine révolution/évolution de l’humanité après l’Internet a rallumé en moi la folie dont j’ai été atteint pendant les quelques mois où je n’ai cessé de m’informer sur le fonctionnement du cerveau - un réseau de neurones avec lesquelles les circuits électroniques discuteraient pour améliorer l’interface homme-machine.

The most important [revolution] in my opinion is a revolution in the interface between us and our computers, The way we interact with computers today is unintuitive, cumbersome, even pathetic, and it will need to change drastically in some way. I think keyboards and mice have long passed their due dates; voice interfaces simply don’t cut it - and I don’t think they would cut it even id they were 100% reliable. (How do you create a complex spreadsheet using just your voice?) A few years ago I was a great believer in VR (Virtual Reality: does anybody still remember it?), and I could have sworn that VR would be it, the future - I was wrong when I thought it back then, and I would be wrong is I said it now, at least considering its current incarnations.

I believe that the next revolution could be in the use of neural interfaces, which will allow us to interact with computers using our brains: no “middle man”, no meat involved. (Now, it’s time for our future reader to burst into laughter and start feeling sorry for me…). What would we “see”? How would we do anything in there? How would we create complex spreadsheet just using our brain? Would those “neural chips” be able to make us see, hear, touch, and move? I don’t know the answer to these questions.

This entry was posted on Mercredi, mai 11th, 2005 at 12:07 am and is filed under Cerveau, Logiciel Libre.