“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” (3) Neuromancer by William Gibson begins, imagining a world where the virtual and the physical collide. Gibson creates the term cyberspace, calling it “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of people” and predicting a dystopian world where cyberspace is an engulfing reality (51). The main character Case and character Molly Millions develop a close relationship that provides them with a shared mission to steal the consciousness of other human beings, raising the question of what it means to be human in a world where consciousness is downloadable and can be stolen and experienced by others. After investigating the identity of Armitage and revealing that he has a former identity of a Willis Corto, Gibson explores the meaning of identity in a digitized age. Case is “hungover and confused” when he discovers this, and Case asks the computer to read printed materials to him, which he says leave gaps about Armitage’s past identity (79). The blurred lines of the physical body and virtual creation become blurred in the novel, revealing a prediction of a super technological world that allows for technology to be implanted inside of the brain and for the virtual world to be experienced with the senses. Case has internal organs that are technologically enhanced. Peter Rivera, a drug addict who is able to create holographics with implanted pieces of technology inside of his brain, leads Case and Molly to an being containing artificial intelligence called Wintermute. The artificial intelligence that exists in this novel raises questions about the extent of technological creations, and whether or not they will ultimately equalize themselves to the same level of reasoning, consciousness, and emotion that human beings contain. In the close of the book, Case spends the “bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver,” further showing Gibson’s notion of a world in which the human body and the machine are blurring together (260). In the intricacies of the plot line, Gibson is displaying a broader point: that a world that blurs the natural and virtual provides complex consequences.
With Neuromancer, Gibson spends time showing a world that is filled with artificial intelligence. 3Jane and Molly are talking in chapter 19, and 3Jane tells Molly that her father killed her mother because “she imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with AI’s, our corporate decisions made for us” (220). In Gibson’s futuristic world, artificial intelligence is a reality that is as smart as the human race, able to make decisions and make them for us. “Listen,” Case says, “that’s an AI, you know” (108)? Neuromancer explores the implications of a society heading in that direction, using the matrix as a prediction for a virtual world that allows users to become involved on a sensory level with a technologically created reality. Case feels things in the virtual world, predicting a reality that we currently live in. With the integration of the virtual experience into the physical experience, we may become involved with technology on a level that goes much deeper than simply experiencing or interacting with it. We are, like Case in the novel and like Gibson predicted, growing more involved with it. Just as Case “tried to scream” when he “jacked in” and found “nothing” but a “gray void” that contained “no cyberspace,” Gibson predicts a world in which humanity will try and scream in the absence of a virtual connection because of our dependence on it (225). Walking into a room in chapter four, Case sees booths that “lined a central hall” and were inhabited by “clientele” who were young, “few of them out of their teens” (55). Case notes that they “all seemed to have carbon sockets planted behind the left ear” (55). Gibson’s book goes to show this reality in society, that youth metaphorically have sockets in their heads, constantly plugging in to virtual outlets and constantly being plugged into by virtual mediums. Gibson blurs the lines between technology and humanity with Neuromancer, imagining a dystopia that is being realized in society today.
No comments:
Post a Comment