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Future of Job Search Episode 8: Brain.Net
May 1st, 2008
2100 To join the Brain Net, or not
At their age, Johnny and Maria were very much part of a rampagingly active younger generation. Their age group was not only affluent but the youngest human generation ever to form a majority of the global management demographic.
Never before had it happened that people under 30 were a majority in management. It was making a very big difference to how the planet was run, too.
The old story of having to wait 20 years for someone who’d been trained to come and solve the problems was long gone. Now, however, global issues were being handled on the spot, by the people doing the business and the science.
With the affluence and the global reach, however, Johnny and Maria’s generation were still very young, and part of the huge global entertainment and media audience.
They were bombarded with, as one critic said, An Expensive Waste Of Time A Second. Every new gimmick, particularly in technology, was fired at them.
Some of these things include some actually dangerous technology.
The big debate in 2100 is about technologies which affect the mind. Most controversial of all is the Brain Net.
The Brain Net is the Facebook or MySpace of 2100, but the user’s mind is literally plugged in to the net, accessing millions of things at the speed of the human brain. A small transceiver is fitted under the skin around the frontal lobes. Then it’s tuned to the net, the user just thinks of something, like doing a search with your head.
People pay for this service, of course, and you can join your friends and pretty much have a party in cyberspace with anyone. Just think of the number of websites, the number of people, and you’ll get the idea.
The first thing anyone noticed about Brain Net is that some people starved to death when they got so interested they simply forgot to log out. Brain Net was accused of being 2100’s equivalent of addictive drugs.
It was a difficult enough debate, with billions of people loving Brain Net and almost as many billions loathing it. Then someone discovered you could do actual business on it, securely. All you needed, inevitably, was a better, more secure transceiver, to practice thinking your passwords and security data, and it was more secure than normal encryption.
Which was great, except it also meant that for a while nobody could access anything if the transceivers fouled up a signal.
Hackers were out of business, but psychiatrists, ironically, had a brief burst of popularity as people tried to guess encryptions. Useless, of course, but anyone will look at a theoretical free lunch.
The big problem with Brain Net was the sheer intensity of the experiences. The human brain is the defining experience, and some people really are experience junkies. They did nothing else. They lost jobs because they couldn’t drag themselves off the net.
Now, a new product, a shared transceiver called MergeMind, where you and your partner could share experiences had been developed, and it was very hot among Johnny and Maria’s age group.
It was sold as The Ultimate Romance, Friends Forever… any schmaltzy thing you could think of, really, dreck a la nausea.
It did sell, though. Hundreds of millions of people bought the new transceivers.
MergeMind was cursed as a plague by many, particularly those trying to get in touch with people who’d floated off across the net. At one point a quarter of humanity, three billion people, were just not able to be contacted.
It was also cursed as the worst of the blind dates, introducing people to each other in a way that many of them would never forgive. That was actually painful, too. The emotion of anger, through a transceiver, not only hurt the person merged with the person feeling angry, but that person, too. Sharp little electric daggers pierced through the signals.
Johnny and Maria weren’t convinced by MergeMind, or Brain Net generally. They’d seen quite a few people looking very unhappy, others ecstatic, and a few quite lost. They’d also had a hard time finding their clients and contacts who were on Brain Net, which was getting more than a bit aggravating.
The normal thing to do, when annoyed with a Brain Netter, was to leave your message using an old style email, or other hardwired communication system, with them. It meant “Get off Brain Net”.
Now Johnny and Maria had a sort of ethical problem. They’d been invited on Brain Net by some relatively new friends. Both had said they weren’t in any great hurry to have the transceivers fitted, they were very busy, it was like a forest of excuses.
They were both curious, though, and were looking skeptically but with grudging interest at the promo materials for MergeMind.
It did look a bit too cutesy to be true, but as the promo said, you could control every move, and you could turn off the transceiver with a single thought.
(The designers had the sense to include a simple binary off switch with the transceivers, 0/1, which could be done in less than a quarter of a second, even subconsciously.)
The problem was that people didn’t. Everyone they knew who’d tried it would wander back in days later and say they either loved it or hated it.
As far as Johnny and Maria could figure out, it was like a new car, you just had to drive it somewhere. A few relationships had broken up with MergeMind, although a few had also started.
Their daughter made up their minds for them, when she asked what the MergeMind promo was. She asked, in her shaky year old voice, if she could do that…
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