Page 43 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

nism in the form of pages on which information may be written or printed. If a text exists in the form of a digital file or files, which require a separate reading device or display mechanism, that device, separate from the text, is an essential, though sometimes interchangeable part of the digital book, as without a reading device the text cannot be read by humans. If the book exists in a human memory it should be usable by the memorizer but will require some kind of output or recitation to be useful by others. Whether at some future date humans, or humanoids, will be able to read digital files by direct input into their brain using a brain-computer interface, without an external reading device, remains, at least for the time being, a topic for sci- ence fiction. Research on a brain-computer interface (BCI), sometimes also called a direct neural interface or brain-machine interface, through which digital files could be directly input to the human brain, processed in the hu- man brain, and output digitally, began in the 1970s. It was featured in such science fiction or cyberpunk classics as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and the film The Matrix (1999).
Relative to humanoids, the issue was dramatized in the film Blade Runner (1982) in which the humanoid (replicant) received a personality, including memories such as books read, through digital data input. If and when peo- ple can read digital files without an external reading device, the digital files alone (what traditionally was called text), without a separate display mech- anism, may be viewed as books.
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