By
Google CEO Eric Schmidt greased the skids for an
Internet brain chip during a speech at the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland earlier today when he predicted the end of the world
wide web as an external concept.
Asked how he saw the
Internet developing in future years, Schmidt responded. “I will answer
very simply that the Internet will disappear.”
“There
will be so many IP addresses…so many devices, sensors, things that you
are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even
sense it,” he added. “It will be part of your presence all the time.
Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your
permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on
in the room.”
Schmidt,
who previously caused controversy amongst privacy advocates when he
stated, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe
you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” concluded his Davos
speech by envisaging “A highly personalized, highly interactive and
very, very interesting world.”
When Schmidt speaks of
sensors that will replace the Internet as a platform accessed only
through an external device, he is talking about implantable brain chips.
As we previously reported,
in December 2013, Google engineering director Scott Huffman predicted
that within five years web users would have microphones attached to
their ceilings and microchips embedded in their brains in order to
perform quicker internet searches.
This ubiquitous
world wide web would utilize microphones to instantly answer queries,
control other technological devices and make travel plans.
When
asked if such a system would be more vulnerable to government
surveillance, Huffman glibly responded that people should just trust
Google (a company that allowed the NSA to mine data from its cloud network “at will”) to safeguard their information.
“Google
believes it can ultimately fulfil people’s data needs by sending
results directly to microchips implanted into its user’s brains,” states
the London Independent report which features the interview with Huffman.
So when Eric Schmidt talks of the Internet “disappearing,” he really means that it will disappear inside your head.
While
transhumanists will see this as an exciting leap forward for the world
wide web, others will be understandably alarmed at the concept of a
giant transnational corporation with cosy NSA connections having
microchips embedded inside its customers’ brains.