The Rise of the Electrophorus

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Author(s): Katina Michael (University of Wollongong, Australia)and M.G. Michael (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Copyright: 2009
Pages: 63
Source title: Innovative Automatic Identification and Location-Based Services: From Bar Codes to Chip Implants
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Katina Michael (University of Wollongong, Australia)and M.G. Michael (University of Wollongong, Australia)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-795-9.ch014

Keywords: Computer Science & IT / Information Science Reference / Mobile and Wireless Computing / Sensor Technologies

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Abstract

When Jacques Ellul (1964, p. 432) predicted the use of “electronic banks” in his book, The Technological Society, he was not referring to the computerization of financial institutions or the use of Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs). Rather it was in the context of the possibility of the dawn of a new entity- the coupling of man and machine. Ellul was predicting that one day knowledge would be accumulated in electronic banks and “transmitted directly to the human nervous system by means of coded electronic messages… [w]hat is needed will pass directly from the machine to the brain without going through consciousness…” As unbelievable as this man-machine complex may have sounded at the time, forty years on visionaries are still predicting that such scenarios will be possible by the turn of the twentysecond century. A large proportion of these visionaries are cyberneticists. Cybernetics is the study of nervous system controls in the brain as a basis for developing communications and controls in sociotechnical systems.

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