How do you experience the world? Through your senses. Your senses are your interface, your inputs. From there your brain produces understanding and response. But in a world that is increasingly connected, quantitatively and qualitatively, via computer and Internet, are our five senses enough? Our sphere of potential control has exploded. But control requires i/o. In a world where inputs are local this is not an issue, your senses work fine. However, when the inputs are remote what do you do? Instant messaging is a remote sensor. It senses input (presence) and delivers it to you over a network. Once received, your brain then knows what to do with it and can consider an output. But this is a rudimentary example. Think of your world, not locally, but globally. What does it include? How much is out of your reach right now. All of it, except what is directly around you...OR to which you are remotely connected somehow. That is what's new. Think about the information that you could connect to if you could but extend your senses. Maybe you could invent new ones to boot. Here's an example. You're in a traffic jam on the highway. The other side is flying along. You want to know if you should exit right away and try an alternate route but not if the jam you're in is short. But how can you tell? The radio says nothing. You know of no online service that could tell you. The answer is the drivers in the other lanes. They just drove past the line of traffic you're in and could easily tell you if it was a long one. But how do you reach them? How do you leverage other people's senses?! Think of the collective power of that. Certainly work is being done with cell phones and SMS. But it is still peer-to-peer. There are other opportunities to leverage sensors that are not human but "machine", placed by either you and/or others. The point is you start to utilize and consume virtual "senses". Does that mean you can expand YOU? If you embed these remote sensory organs into your perception, your hyper-perception, does that create a virtual octopus out of you? If you start to think/imagine that you can get answers to remote sensory questions, the way you perceive, control and respond to your world changes radically.
