by Rebecca McCauley Rench

The Borg Queen in Star Trek is capable of understanding all of the Borg she is connected to implicitly and has acquired the cumulative knowledge of all assimilated alien races. Yet until assimilation, the Borg are incapable of understanding the motivations and emotions of those space farers they encounter. The holiday season spent with family and friends that you only see occasionally makes many of us feel like a Borg, incapable of communicating our thoughts with family and bewildered at the ideas our loved ones share. It can be difficult to communicate an issue with people speaking from a different reference point. We all want to understand the thoughts and feelings of loved ones, but actually putting oneself in their shoes can be an unachievable challenge. What if we could get assistance communicating with each other through neural technologies that helped us understand the concepts our loved ones are trying to share? Technologies could provide commentary or tell stories in a new way so that we can understand in a way relevant to our personal reference frame. Not only will these types of technologies help us communicate with those around us more effectively, learning becomes more effective as new concepts are explained in a way that fits our frame of mind.

The impacts do not stop with those able to verbally communicate either. The Borg could communicate through their neural network. What if we could apply those same principles to interacting with our children? New parents with their babies often discuss the difficulties in knowing what a baby wants and thinks before their child has had a chance to learn how to speak. Most parents would agree that the first 2 years of a child’s life is difficult and normally completed in a haze from lack of sleep. The benefits of such communication technologies in our child rearing are clear – what if communications between you and your child allowed you to understand why they were upset or what they didn’t like about particular foods and toys? Would child rearing become easier? Perhaps parents worry about the impact on the “natural” progression towards cognitive development. We will have to wait for the data to come in to see how these technologies affect us, but with data in hand, sign me up for a cyborg baby.