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Lessons To Be Downloaded Into Brains Of Schoolchildren
Information will be directly downloaded into the brains of schoolchildren. Sounds a little like a tabloid headline, but it apparently quotes Chris Parry, new chief executive of the Independent Schools Council, Britain's top private school organisation.
Younger sf fans will doubtless be thinking about the Matrix when Parry remarks
"It's a very short route from wireless technology to actually getting the electrical connections in your brain to absorb that knowledge."
(Neo accepts a hot download)
I'm thinking that it's actually not a "very short route." But I can't wait do be able to do this, so I'm game if he is. Unfortunately, Parry's estimate on when this will happen - thirty years from now - may not be much help to me.
Fans who are just a bit older will be thinking of using microsofts, those nifty "knowledge-on-a-chip" devices from Neuromancer.
Fans who are even older than that recall such old-school technologies as the toposcope from Cities in Flight:
They conducted you to your couch and helped you to fit over your head a bright metal helmet which had inside it what seemed to be hundreds of tiny, extremely sharp points which bit into your scalp just enought to make you nervous, but without enough pressure to break the skin.
(Read more about James Blish's toposcope)
Via Daily Mail; thanks, Moira!
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/3/2008)
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