Plug and Play Humans: Is Your Cell Phone Getting Under Your Skin?

One common futurist trope I've run across more times than I can count is the idea that the current trend of ever-decreasing-in-size cellular phones will inevitably lead to people routinely electing to have the minuscule offspring of today's phones implanted in their heads.

Now, believe me, I am all for improving human-machine interfacing. One of my own pieces of "fantasy hardware" consists of a kind of heads-up display that would permit the projection of some sort of informational overlay across my field of vision, possibly via a pair of eyeglasses and...

[waves hands, sprinkles pixie dust]

...a system of sensors to detect the state of various bodily systems, in addition to providing navigational and other sorts of useful data.

The nearest imagining I've ever seen of this occurs in the science fiction novel This Alien Shore, by C.S. Friedman.

In that book, characters have internal computers called "wellseekers" that adjust their heart rate, blood pressure, and other variables so as to avoid unnecessary health-damaging effects due to stress and whatnot, in addition to providing reminders about the need to consume food or drink.

Additionally, they can put on headsets that interface with their internal "brainware" and this allows them to navigate the Outernet, which is the book's answer to our Internet, extended to interplanetary scale.

But fantasies aside, I am definitely not holding my breath waiting for "implantable cell phones", and frankly I don't see that idea as being one likely to grab much of a foothold in mainstream culture anytime soon.

I don't doubt that such a thing may become technologically feasible in the next few decades (perhaps dialing would be activated by tongue movements or something along those lines), but my guess would be that anyone who isn't a rather geeky body-modification enthusiast already would shy away from having to get surgery in order to access the latest and greatest phone technology.

Not that there's anything wrong with being a geeky body-modification enthusiast or anything, of course, it's just that that descriptor doesn't seem to apply to the majority of what would be the cell-phone market segment.

Plus, I really have to wonder what the heck people will do if their internal phone breaks or goes obsolete -- are they going to be willing to get more surgery every time they feel like upgrading? I would imagine probably not.

It's 2009 as of this writing and infection remains a risk of implanted medical devices; it's a different thing to accept such a risk when it's your life at stake than when you are simply considering doing something for aesthetic*, social, or curiosity's sake.

Honestly one thing that sometimes gets to me about certain realms of futurist discussion is the way bodies are so often reduced to the abstract, as if surgery is (or will soon be, even though there's no evidence of this) tantamount to snapping Lego blocks painlessly and easily in and out of a structure.

Heck, even relatively "trivial"-seeming operations like getting a small magnet embedded in one's finger entail certain physical realities. Journalist Quinn Norton is one of the few to have actually participated in this experiment; she writes in Wired magazine that:

The initial cut did hurt, but not unbearably. He sliced open my finger with a standard scalpel, inserted a tool to make a gap for the magnet, and tried to insert the magnet in one nonstop motion. The insertion didn't work, and he widened the cut and tried again. This time it worked, and he closed the cut with a single suture. The suture was the most painful step -- an indicator that the cold "anesthetic" had worn off. The process took less than 10 minutes. My finger was slightly swollen and sported a blue, knotted plastic thread.

Now, that doesn't sound totally horrible or anything, but there's still finger-slicing action, sutures, the whole bit. Later on Ms. Norton also ran into infection issues which led to more fun gouging from the family doctor in an attempt to remove the thing; then the implant disintegrated in her finger (though in an interesting twist, the bits of the magnet re-formed and she became able once again to pick up other magnets a few months later).

So while Norton's description of the sensation of having the implant when it was actually working as intended is seriously cool and tempting-sounding:

I would circle my finger with a strong magnet and feel the one in my finger spin. In time, bits of my laptop became familiar as tingles and buzzes. Every so often I would pass near something and get an unexpected vibration. Live phone pairs on the sides of houses sometimes startled me.

...clearly this sort of thing, let alone a vastly more complex and probably larger device, isn't about to take the mass market by storm anytime soon.

Again, I have no problem with people choosing to implant whatever the heck they want into their bodies, whether it be magnets or metal spikes or whatnot, but I would hardly figure implanted cell phones can be presumed inevitable based on current conditions and trends.

One of the reasons cell phones are becoming so ubiquitous is the very fact that the devices are getting so cheap to make, replace, and transfer. Putting surgery into the equation would almost certainly entail a totally different market model and one that would not permit the level of growth that has been observed so far.

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*Yes, a lot of people these days are getting plastic surgery, but it would be quite a stretch to presume that anyone willing to use a cell phone today would also be willing to get plastic surgery.