Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film Ghost in the Shell is excellent, technically groundbreaking, and hugely culturally important. Were an electronic implant developed that could vastly improve your memory and intelligence, would you be tempted? Such technologies may be on the horizon, and science fiction imaginings such as Ghost in the Shell suggest that their power to fundamentally change the human condition should not be underestimated.How Mamoru Oshii ruined the Ghost in the Shell franchise

The fusion of such systems with the human brain is not possible with today’s technology – but it is imaginable in the decades to come. In terms of artificial intelligence, the work in my lab at Sheffield Robotics explores the possibility of building robot analogues of human memory for events and experiences. For example, an Emotiv connected to a computer can control a videogame by the power of the wearer’s thoughts alone. Devices like the Emotiv are simple wearable EEG-based devices that can detect some of the signature electrical signals emitted by our brains, and are sufficiently intelligent to interpret those signals and turn them into useful output.

The possibility of voluntarily networking our minds is also here. Directed by Rupert Sanders, the new film is visually stunning and the storyline lovingly recreates some of the best scenes from the original anime.

Nevertheless there was also a spiritual side to Shirow’s narrative: that the cyborg condition might be the next step in our evolution, and that the widening of perspective and the merging of individuality from a networking of minds could be a path to enlightenment.īorrowing heavily from Ghost in the Shell’s re-telling by director Mamoru Oshii in his classic 1995 animated film version, the newly arrived Hollywood cinematic interpretation stars Scarlett Johansson as Major, a cyborg working for Section 9, a government-run security organisation charged with fighting corruption and terrorism. In a world where knowledge is power, these brain-computer interfaces would create new tools for government surveillance and control, and new kinds of crime such as “mind-jacking” – the remote control of another’s thoughts and actions. Shirow’s stories also pinpointed some of the dangers of this giant technological leap.

Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow