Would you get ”plugged” if implants allowed you to learn anything you wanted?

No,thanks.
I would then have nothing to have meltdowns over!
I like to do things the hard way

I suppose if this was a common thing then you would be stupid not to do it as you would be at a great disadvantage in life compared to everyone else.

If it was an ability that only I possessed and kept secret, then all the more reason because then I can impress people with my vast knowledge of everything.

no.

Nope. I could learn the language on my own in a few months and already know how to fix cars. Besides, if it’s a rental it ain’t my job to fix them. I’d never, EVER, go to China or Italy, anyway, so the chip would be of no use.

Of course I would. There is no question.

Yes.

While “skillsofts” come in handy, most of the fiction I have read about them (especially Shadowrun) points out a rather severe limitation to such things. That is that you don’t actually learn the skill, you just run it from the chip. Worse, the chips will override any “natural” skill you have, even if your skill is better than the chip’s.

For some skills this isn’t a big issue, but for language skills, it is immediately obvious to native speakers that you are running from a chip, and this can be taken as a sign of disrespect; people will tolerate mispronunciation and bad grammar if they feel that you respect their culture enough to learn their language the hard way.

I don’t see such a thing being possible. We may get the hardware and neural interfaces right, but the programming will not… cannot ever be done right. So I would say no.

Sure, I love to know things!

@12Oaks I could learn the language on my own in a few months and already know how to fix cars. Besides, if it’s a rental it ain’t my job to fix them. I’d never, EVER, go to China or Italy, anyway, so the chip would be of no use. Yeah, the car company would send out another car but what if you were stuck in a not so desirable areas? You would not have to wait hours for what might be a pretty minor fix or you would know how to make a temporary repair good enough to get to the villa and not stuck out on the high way or up in the hills. And you can fix more than just cars, you are home a head wave is coming you’re A/C goes out you can pay a fee download the info to a chip, plug it in and know how to fix your own A/C. And you would not be limited to any nation as most major languages would be accessible.

@jerv I don’t see such a thing being possible. We may get the hardware and neural interfaces right, but the programming will not… cannot ever be done right. So I would say no. It may not be anywhere near something anyone could do today but in the next 60 years or more who can tell. Look at all that was done in the last 40 years? Just to date my self I have seen it go from vinyl to 8 tracks to cassettes, to CDs now only to be whisked aside by MP3s. Gone from 8mm, to Super 8, to VHS, and now digital. In just 60 years or so we have gained a lot in trauma care, what injuries today’s soldier live through they would have died from in the Korean War and the injuries are much worse.

@marinelife What would you see as the biggest pluses for doing so? How would it make your quality of life better?

If it was safe? Hell yeah, the advantages are pretty obvious and, if such a technique would be in common use, also outnumbering the disadvantages.

@Hypocrisy_Central There are things that rely on technology and human intelligence and there are other things that rely on common sense and human wisdom. The things you mention rely on the former whereas the qualms I have rely on the latter.

Also, the things you mention were more evolutionary than revolutionary. We have known how to reproduce sound since the days of wax cylinders, and video isn’t exactly new either. We have known about computers and digital storage for quite a while as well. It was only a matter of time before they merged. However, what do we know about the workings of the human brain? We don’t understand anything but the most basics, let alone enough to do detailed work on it or emulation of it.

We may get close enough to teach textbook skills (like car repair), and that may be good enough for many people, but I don’t see us actually getting to the point where we can do that with true knowledge. Some things rely more on intuition and insight, and you can’t program those.

I may be wrong, but it’s what I think.

@jerv Well ultimately, intuition and insight boil down to chemical reactions and electrical signals in the brain. If we reproduce those, then what would be the difference?

@chocolatechip That is a mighty big “if”; big enough that I can’t even wrap my head around the possibility that we can ever get that down when we can’t even write a decent, bug-free OS for comparatively simple binary electrical computer. I mean, if we can’t manage that then what makes you think that we can handle something a few orders of magnitude more complex?

@jerv Yeah, it’s a big if. The entire question is a big if, and I don’t see why you need to limit your answer with arbitrary rules :P

I mean, if we can’t manage that then what makes you think that we can handle something a few orders of magnitude more complex?

That’s like saying to a baby, “if you can’t manage to walk now, how are you ever going to be able to become a great dancer?”. You can’t achieve something without first being in a state of being unable to achieve it. Otherwise it would not be any sort of achievement.

@chocolatechip Actually, I liken it more to, “If you don’t have any legs then how are you going to win the Ironman Triathlon?” As I keep saying, I see us able to do the textbook-type stuff, but I have serious doubts about humanity being able to properly program the subtle stuff.

Look at how screwed up our laws are; we have a lot of experience writing laws and with how many special cases there are that require special clauses, and yet there are always people falling through the cracks, getting punished or exonerated on technicalities, etcetera. The law and programming are very similar in that both are about rules. The difference is that programs tend to be more literal and leave less room for interpretation. So if we have fucked a simpler, less exact thing up for thousands of years and seem to be gtting wrose at it every day, what makes you think that you can convince me that we will somehow someday get our act together enough to reverse that tendency?

It’s not about my lack of faith in technology, it’s that I lack faith in humanity.

Safety first ! But if that base is well covered I’d say yes because I like knowing stuff and am a curious person. Especially if one gets also a sense of the time-passing unfolding of the learning process along with a heap of facts yes. Not only is that fun it seems to be part of the way we process learned information in a sequence of updates to prior knowledge. Need the previous hook in place on which to hang the next datum.