We’d fantasized about it for decades. Now in 2051, the ability to interact with technology using only our consciousness—no keyboard, no mouse, not even a finger necessary—is finally here. I typed what you are reading at this very moment using only my thoughts.
You’d think this would make things easier.
But I still regularly pause mind blank as I search for expression. Or rather, it’s more accurate to say “as I search for a thought in the first place.”
The Chip is only a transmitter, after all. They say Elon’s testing the Next Chip on some poor gibbons now. He was able to work out some special “conservation agreement” with China where he has full rein to use Hainan black-crested gibbons (Nomascus hainanus), as test subjects so long as their population growth is net positive. Using a dialed-in IVF strategy, he’s been able to do that no problem. So the gibbon beta testers never run out. It’s reported that the Next Chip will be a more direct upgrade to our brain’s capacity, but we’ll see. A new VERIFAIID.™ video of gibbons bleeding from their ears is dropping every other day.
Why gibbons? No one really knows. There are rumors that Elon is trying to somehow commune with the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, for some unknown purpose, perhaps even to consult his wisdom in the development of a new banana fueled Mars rover despite us still not having been to Mars yet.
For now, though, we’ve got The Chip, the top-line augmentation developed exclusively by Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries.
Naturally, human consciousness tapped directly into the latest LLMs has made IQ a dicey metric for determining an individual’s intellectual capacity. The old Self-Determination Act of 2031, ghost-written by Peter Theil and signed by President J.D. Vance, expressly enshrined the natural right of all Americans to access any future brain augmentations approved by the Department of Health and Human Services under a new regulatory framework. Under the SDA, neither the government nor any employer can discriminate on the basis of augmentation status. And, thanks to instantaneous cognitive integration with LLMs, even those with IQs well to the left of the bell curve are now able to operate with relative efficacy.
The Bill only made it to President Vance’s desk after a years long bargaining process between the Democrats, Republicans, and Elon’s (then upstart) American Party. Once the smoke cleared, the final deal—nicknamed “The Ultimate Bargain”—laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Acts of 1964/68 AND the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 to be repealed in exchange for
the SDA including provisions providing government subsidized augmentations to anyone “in need,” with the definition of “in need” to be adjusted as necessary by HHS;
a graduated universal basic income; and
the elimination of the income tax to be fully replaced by a federal sales tax system and tariffs.
We take this all for granted today, but boy this was some serious monkey business at the time. In retrospect, it would probably beggar belief that this would even be possible. But that’s easily remedied once one has a Chip installed and can consult the database in pure stream of consciousness. You understand.
Sure, at first The Chip was only available to early-onset Alzheimer patients (with those under 200% of the poverty line being eligible for their Chip to be provisioned directly by the Federal Government). Their memories would be backed up on a drive from which they would be able to instantaneously consult using The Chip as if none of their brain had ever atrophied.
People had some qualms about implanted memories, the inhumanity of reconstructed identity, yada yada yada, but for most of the families who got to enjoy the company of their loved ones beyond a 15 minute time loop, The Chip was seen as a miracle. They just didn’t think about the gray of the matter. Besides, it was better than putting them in hospice care to slowly die on a morphine drip, right?
But of course, The Chip soon began to be mass produced for the American consumer market. For those who could afford the $50,000 implantation procedure and lifetime lease payment of $3000 per month could have access to all the known information in the world as if they were their own memory of what they had for breakfast that morning. To anyone paying attention, this was an inevitable development.
Soon, though, the disparities heightened by the access of the privileged classes to seemingly limitless knowledge caused quite the stir, and HHS adopted new regulations that provided a tiered subsidy framework for the rest of us. For the poorest Americans, The Chip would be available totally free, albeit only in a version that strictly limited access to any and all materials deemed unproductive. The 80 IQ Tyrones of America could now operate at a passable productivity made possible by an approximate 15 point boost. That was the working theory, at least.
As we know (and it’s still whispered today that President Vance predicted in private repeatedly), in practice things were bit messier than that.
Somehow something slipped through the cracks of the moderated Chips.
The occasional stray thought here and there would ping a pirated pdf version of a book written by a random and long forgotten pseudonymous writer by the curious name of ‘ringleader’ from the Wailing ‘20s. This ringleader joker stopped posting anything online in the midst of the fierce debates surrounding the SDA of 2031.
To this day, his true identity is unknown, less because of the fella’s paranoid but well-intentioned OPSEC, and more because he was really just a nobody that liked it that way. All the same, some people still speculate that this nobody’s ringleader was a pivotal figure in the shadows of the SDA’s development. But people also speculate that The Chip doesn’t actually do anything and that its supposed benefits are really from the 6G network tapping into humanity’s biological frequencies.
No matter the finer details, ringleader’s book The Aping American can definitively be shown as a proximate cause of the Great Chip Chimp Out of 2045. My Chip blocks me from typing any further information on the reasons this little monkey book led to such upheaval—I simply cannot afford the unrestricted lease plan at today’s prices. And while the pdf has now been eradicated from all digital existence on the world wide web, now that Mossad has bought the rights to the book it’s become available for purchase again for the first time on Amazon.
They says its unabridged. An artifact. Now that the Chip has been finetuned so that another Chip Chimp Out can’t reoccur—Never Again—the powers that be think it charitable to give the people a glimpse of the America that led to where we are today.
If you Chip lease plan provides for personal literacy, then I highly suggest you buy this little curio and enjoy a quaint glimpse into a dumber time.
Available HERE courtesy of Jeff Bezo’s head in a bell jar.
And remember, Chip responsibly.