Will the fictional character of Motoko Kusanagi, created by Masamune Shirow in his 1990's manga, come to be real thanks to scientists like Kevin Warwick? For those who don't know the manga (and derivated series and movies) Ghost in the Shell, the story belongs the cyberpunk genre and features a world where, according to the introduction itself, the digital networks have spum around the planet and connect people together. Motoko Kusanagi is a full cyborg, leading the "section 9", a special and highly secret police force dealing with international cybercriminality and depending directly from the government. She can connect herself directly to the Internet and can contact her pals without having to use email, phones or any other traditional communicating device, simply contacting their brain through their prosthetic boosting device. She of course has a body that displays superhuman physical powers (strength, agility, and resistance). What animates her is her "ghost", a term defining what serves as a sort of digital soul to cyborgs of this fictional universe, in which you can actually "dive" using computer interfaces. However, this poses her many problem, not least that of her identity, the reality of her existence. And her super-boosted body simply doesn't belong to her, but to the government, meaning that if she wants to resign from her job, she won't be left with much but a few organic neurone, the only remnants of her past "humanity".

To return to Kevin Warwick, one can safely say that, with his two microships embedded in his nervous systems, is far from competing with Kusanagi. However, the analogy is interesting, because he addresses some issues in his presentation that are also raised by the Ghost in the Shell series, although not under such a positive and enthusiastic light. Warwick's ultimate dream is to get rid of all means of communication, which he sees more as hindrance to "true" communication, considered here as actually a "communion" in which ideas flow freely between people, without loosing any of their original essence. Basically, he would like brains to be directly linked to each others, so that people would able to convey the depth of their experiences with their environment to each other without needs to translation and risk of loosing "data". As scientific and technological development in this field are still in their very early infancy, the British "cyborg" has started with a single microships in his arm, serving as a neuro-digital interface between his brain and the Internet. This way, his brain can send signals to a neckless worn by his wife about her husband's mood. She can therefore know at distance whether he is in a calm state or getting excited, although if she wants to know why, will still have to rely on the phone or email. With this success of this first experience, he succeeded in convincing his wife (who must love him really a lot) to actually also get a similar neuro-digital device implented on one of her nerve in her arm, allowing her to send signals as she moves her hand to her husband's brain. This represents the first step in his ideal of brain-to-brain communication.

However, even at this stage, his and his wife's brains need a systems of interface to mediate between them, made of the two microships in the left arms of the couple and the Internet to transmit the signal. Since there is mediation, one can say that the neuro-digital implant plays the role of a mean of communication in the same way as the voice, the phone or the email. Indeed, it has to convert electronic signals into electro-chemicals signals that will carry the stimulus from the implants to the couple's brains and back. Of course, one can argue that these are only the first steps on a long winding path that will inevitably bring us to a new horizon of human communion. But this concerns a far-enough future to consider it still science-fiction, in the same way as the representation of the near-future offered by the Ghost in the Shell series. If the members of the Section 9 can communicate in a much more elaborated way than Professor Warwick and his wife through their implants, it is interesting enough to observe that the futuristic vision of Masamune Shirow doesn't offer a model of communion that stimulates Warwick's experiment. In short, they still need neuro-digital implants or prothesis and the Internet to mediate between their brains. The closest to Warwick's ideal is offered by Mamoru Oshii's first movie loosely based on the original manga story by Masamune Series. In the last scenes, Kusanagi is offered to fuse with another being, a commercial spying program that became aware of its own existence as thinking entity while it roamed through the Internet and therefore, ran away from those who wrote it. Devoid of any gendering type, "it" proposes her a sort of digital "mating", through which both of them would disappear, generating a new digital being, capable of thinking, free from physical constraints, with no other barriers than the limits of human thought. But in this vision of communion, individuals die in order to give rise to new beings, following the organic generation of life diversity through the fusing of DNA's from different organisms, who die to make the space for the next generation. However, even then, there is no true communion, in which brains-to-brains communication would actually equate more to a super-brain thinking.

Ghost in the Shell is only one fiction (but one of the most famous) among thousands of series (comics, TV animation, animated movies, OAV, video games, online games) produced by Japanese popular culture since the end of World War II. Manga authors and the whole entertainment industry that orbits around them have been pushing the questioning of the issue of man-machine relations, prosthesis and synthetic extension or boosting of the human body and brain, further than most other popular cultures. One reason lies in the importance technological development has taken for the economic and social reconstruction of Japan. But the two are now so tightly entwined that robots created by engineers look like characters like Osamu Tezuka's Tetsuan Atomu (Astroboy). I believe that it would be interesting to confront the Japanese experience and thinking about cyborgs, cybernetics and robotics with the recent scientifico-technological developments in the West, especially by people like Kevin Warwick.