Institute For The Future

Technology and madness

One day last year, while walking in downtown Palo Alto, I saw someone on the sidewalk, walking in circles, gesticulating and yelling. Homeless person, I thought, my urban defense radar ticking up a notch. As I got a bit closer, I could tell my original impression was wrong. He had a Bluetooth headset linked to his cell phone, and was breaking up with his girlfriend.

It was only fitting. I've seen a couple homeless people talking to themselves, but holding one hand up to their ear, as if they were having conversations on their cell phone.

The great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said that sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. It turns out that sufficiently advanced personal electronics are indistinguishable from madness. We already have devices that generate voices in our heads. Of more limited popularity are devices that give us visions, by projecting images directly on the retina; but as the popularity of mobile computing grows, that may change.

Twenty years ago, if you were a psychiatrist and a patient told you that the government had implanted a chip to track her, all you had to do was write a prescription. Soon you'll have to ask who manufactured it, and what the reader's range is. If a patient says that the refrigerator is talking to him, you'll have to ask why it wasn't passing the messages to his cell phone, the way appliances are supposed to.

Madmen in every age have their distinctive psychoses, which often reflect the technology of the day. Today the process is reversing: technologies are starting to reflect symptoms of madness.

This isn't to say that there's something inherently crazy about such technologies, or that they're driving us insane. Visions have been signs of power rather than insanity in many cultures: the shaman or priestess has always commanded respect. All information technologies have something a little Promethean about them. Many ancient cultures believed that writing was invented by the gods, or that certain numbers had mystical as well as mathematical values. Today's information overload may be a version of the overwhelming feeling that medieval peasants felt in great cathedrals.

But there may be something to be learned from this dovetailing of technology and insanity. After all, psychoses bear some resemblance to normal behaviors: it's not crazy to want to avoid germs, but it is crazy to wash your hands obsessively. As information and communications technologies shrink, and jump from the desktop to bookbag to body, our relationship with them changes profoundly. A wearable computer won't just be a really small personal computer; it'll be used very differently, and experienced very differently.

Under such circumstances, the challenges of designing technologies to be useful without being intrusive, intimate but not intimidating, increase exponentially. This is one reason RFID tags scare some people who are nonplussed by surveillance cameras: the idea of having something implanted in packaging or clothes without their knowledge creeps them out more than being watched by security guards. Maybe the patient who complains about implants isn't quite so crazy after all.

[An earlier version of this article appeared in Red Herring Online.]