Elon Musk's smartphone implants: anticipated in 1967

[jtbell]

TL;DR

Elon Musk is working on implants that communicate with smartphones. Did he get the idea from a 1967 movie?

Life imitates art?

Elon Musk is making implants to link the brain with a smartphone (CNN)

This made me think of the movie "The President's Analyst" (1967), in which a global communications conglomerate, The Phone Company (TPC), plots to take over the world by injecting microsocopic Cerebrum Communicators into people:



IIRC, just before this scene, James Coburn (the president's analyst) was abducted by TPC, which used a helicopter to carry away the phone booth in which he was trying to make a call for help.

 

[Klystron]

While I enjoyed the James Coburn movie, and his character in sequels (?), the Musk article reminds me more of Michael Crighton's brilliant novel "The Terminal Man" and subsequent movie staring George Segal as the reluctant implant recipient. Crighton practically made a career after medicine of warning about the dangers of advanced technology on human society, but Terminal Man strikes a chord.

 

[anorlunda]

Aren't we 80% of the way there already? How much practical difference is there between an implant and a phone that we carry with us all the time?

 

[Klystron]

And modern neurosurgeons routinely implant electrodes in and connect devices to patients.

 

[OCR]

Terminal Man strikes a chord.

Yes indeed. . .

How much practical difference is there between an implant and a phone that we carry with us all the time?

"Connected"

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