Imagine the tech geniuses decide that silicon simply won’t do as a substrate for intelligence, and that a truly intelligent system has to be biological. At first they intend to construct a huge living computer, but it never works the way they want, so they decide to tap into human brains.
In exchange for an almost livable monthly payment, people get an implant that hijacks a portion of their brain’s processing ability. This dispersed network is not only the most powerful computer ever built, but it has real-time updates on data from around the world.
Some people would read that and think, “interesting idea, you should write a book.” But a good book isn’t made from an interesting idea. It’s made from characters and conflict and its ability to tap into archetypal stories that resonate with our brains.
It’s still an interesting concept to ponder.
Reminds me of what I thought was going to turn out to be going on when I first saw the Matrix. When I asked myself “why would a bunch of machines bother to keep humans around rather than just shouting EX-TER-MIN-ATE and being done with it?”, I thought “maybe massively parallel processing?”
My theory was that it would turn out that even machines had questions they wanted answers to and were using human brainpower to try to solve the problem. Still prefer it to what transpired.
Yes, some really cool processing could be going on, especially if you could compare perceptions — e.g., people who are on crack see things this way, people with schizophrenia see things this way, etc.