Michael Chorost

Michael Chorost is a technology theorist with an unusual perspective: his body is the future. In 2001 he went completely deaf and had a computer implanted in his head to let him hear again. This transformative experience inspired his first book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. He wrote about how mastering his new ear, a cochlear implant, enabled him to enhance his creative potential as a human being. The critics agreed; in 2006 Rebuilt won the PEN/USA Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Shortly afterward it was reprinted in paperback under the new title Rebuilt: My Journey Back to the Hearing World.

Dr. Chorost earned his B.A. at Brown University and studied computer programming, Renaissance drama, and cultural theory on the way to his Ph.D. at UT-Austin. He doesn't draw sharp lines between programming, science, writing, and art; to him, these are all profoundly creative human endeavors. This freewheeling approach infuses his second book,World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet. In this book he ups the ante, proposing that humanity can incorporate the computer into its collective soul in a way that enhances communities and creative work instead of diminishing them. As a freelance science writer he has written for Wired, The Washington Post, Technology Review, and The Scientist, among others. He wrote the screenplay for a TV special on brain implants titled The 22nd Century, which aired on PBS in January 2007. He sits on external advisory boards for neuroscience research at Northwestern and Brown. He has given over 85 talks at institutions such as Google, MIT, Stanford, Brown, the Brookings Institute, and the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Dr. Chorost was born in New Jersey and has lived in North Carolina, Texas, and California. In 2008 he moved to Washington D.C., where he now lives with his wife and their three cats Harper, Posy, and Elvis.

What he presents:

How will future technologies change the body? Implants and prosthetics are already changing the lives of people with disabilities; will they ever be useful for people without disabilities?
Is electronic communication alienating people from each other? How can people relate to each other more richly and productively in a technological age?
How do prosthetics and implants such as cochlear implants actually work? How are they integrated with the body? How do users adapt to such radical changes in the human sensorium?
What new technologies make it conceptually thinkable - not yet practicable, butthinkable- to create technologies that can know what a brain is perceiving, remembering, and feeling?
What philosophical and ethical frameworks are the most useful for thinking creatively about how society is changing in the 21stcentury?