An interesting story today about a scientist who implanted a microchip in his hand, which he then deliberately infected with a computer virus. He uses the chip to open doors and activate his mobile phone (weirdly, as his biological hand might seem the best tool to do that) but has now shown that his infected chip could – and did – pass on the virus to these other devices, and was capable of infecting other embedded chips – if other nerds had chosen to implant them.

In fact, this is perhaps more serious than we might think. It is happening more slowly than science fiction of the 50s might have envisioned, but we are becoming more and more cyborg. A device as simple as a hearing aid is a technological ‘plug-in’ to enhance our human abilities, and with an aging population who are going to live longer, more and more of us will be hooked up with pace-makers, artificial limbs and other sophisticated bio-digital devices.

The beauty of the complex evolved biological systems that we have become is that when we are attacked by viruses, our bodies can draw on rich and diverse resources to do battle with them. The problem with devices is that they cannot evolve in the same way. When they break, they do not heal, and one only need look at the land fills of the West to see the huge problem with gadget redundancy that we have.

Thus if we increasingly give over life-support (artificial hearts for example) to digital technologies we are becoming gadgets, and thus risk our own redundancy at the hands of computer viruses. The question that this story presents is thus not ‘how can we do better battle against computer viruses’ but ‘is our quality – not just length – of life going to be improved by embedding more technology into our beings.’

I blogged a short series about Jaron Lanier’s thesis ‘You Are Not A Gadget‘ here, and my fear is that the more machine-like we make ourselves, the more like machines we will treat one another, and the more of us will end up consigned to skips and rubbish dumps as broken people.

In the previous post I blogged about a fascinating book review in The Believer in which the reviewer was given just the text – no author, no past publications list, no endorsements and no well-designed cover. The text had to literally speak for itself, and, as someone who is about to be published again, I know I have conflicted opinions about this.

I think this has something to say to us about ‘bible-believing’ belief too. On Monday I had lunch with a colleague and fell to talking about a programme on the previous night which had looked at creation. My colleague (a warm atheist) was telling me about two friends who both believed that the Genesis creation narrative was literally true.

My thought was this: it was not that they had read Genesis and decided on the basis of the evidence that it was literally true, rather they simply couldn’t countenance the prospect of it not being literally true, as the problems of interpretation that this would precipitate would be too big. ‘It’s a matter of faith,’ one would repeatedly say. ‘I know it seems crazy, but I just have to believe it.’

In other words, for many ‘bible-believing’ Christians the irony is this: their belief that the bible is all literally true means that it has to be gagged. Why? Because if it were actually allowed to speak, it would cause too many problems.

If we were to simply read the text, without the ‘binding’ of the stern voices that tell us we can’t doubt, without the hard covers that brow-beat us with concerns that we are back-sliders if we don’t believe it all, we might find – as the reviewer did with their text – that when the word is allowed to speak, we can be renewed.