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Articles Visionary pushing the boundaries Never say never: Peter Cochrane's love affair with technology began when he was sick as a child. Now he refuses to accept that it has limits. DAVID WILSON in London His best-known project is an attempt to create a computer that can be implanted inside the head to boost brainpower. Mr Cochrane has scant time for articles, papers and books on why technology will never achieve some given breakthrough. "Sooner or later, almost all of these authors are proven wrong," he said. He uses the example of H.G. Wells, who wrote: "I must confess that my imagination . . . refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea." Such pessimism now looks ridiculous, but many prophets go too far the other way. In a 1966 edition of Vogue, Arthur C. Clarke gushed that houses in 2001 would be able to fly, migrating south in winter. Some of Mr Cochrane's prophecies also look questionable. Can we really expect the ultimate demise of travel? "Telepresence technology will do almost all we need," he explains, "and the cost of travel will kill the planet if we do not create some new energy sources - 0.25 tonne of aviation spirit per passenger to fly from Britain to China is unsustainable." However convincing you find that, it is worth noting that many predictions made by Mr Cochrane and his team - such as "machines will play a better game of chess than us" - have come true. You can see why Douglas Adams, the author of the cult sci-fi novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, calls Mr Cochrane "one of our most far-sighted visionaries". As well as foretelling the future, Mr Cochrane sets out to invent it. His ambitious Soulcatcher project hinges on developing a computer that can be implanted in the brain to complement human memory and computational skills, increasing intelligence. To date, the most dramatic and beneficial result has been the embedding of micro-transmitters into the brains of paraplegics, giving some the ability to communicate directly with a computer by thinking. Not bad for a man with his own disability - progressive deafness - who was born in a house without electricity or hot running water at the end of World War II. Mr Cochrane "fell in love" with technology when, during his childhood, he was confined to a sick-bed and built Morse signal lamps and buzzers with batteries, pipe-cleaners and matchboxes. After leaving school, he joined BT as a trainee technician, then began to get "really fired up by the possibilities open to mankind". He would work a full day as a lineman and then go to "school" - Essex University - every night to study telecommunications and engineering. He became "totally immersed in the process of learning and understanding". Mr Cochrane won a succession of academic prizes and rose through BT's ranks. He turned his versatile mind to an array of disciplines, including artificial life, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. He went on to work as a UN technical adviser and has lectured at Oxford, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in many parts of the mainland. "The Chinese people are so very English," he said. "Great sense of humour, fiercely competitive businessmen and innovators - but held back by history!" Mr Cochrane's can-do, seize-the-day attitude can grow wearing. The man even skateboards. But what strengthens his reputation is his ability to communicate with Marshall McLuhan-style immediacy. He once described that force of chaos, entropy, as a "celestial ratchet". He cites his key contribution to date as "the realisation of self-organising systems and networks that can overpower and cope with chaos". They are in operation at BT every day, he says, adding: "We replaced 1.6 million lines of code with less than 1,000." This is a momentous advance because, as he points out, most established telecoms networks are phenomenally complex, requiring vast numbers of people devoted to writing and structuring software and systems. He contrasts the old networks with organisms such as ants. While they have intricate, robust social structures, each ant is founded on remarkably few lines of software and "an unbelievably simple computer" enhanced by a sensory system our machines still lack. "Sexual reproduction creates better software than we do!" Mr Cochrane says. But of course, he argues, this is changing: expect machines endowed with full awareness by 2030. |