Wed 27 Dec 2006
To return to nanotechnology, I want to explore how we will augment our own minds using nanotechnology. At this time, crude experiments using surgery are able to implant sensors onto the surface of a human brain and extract signals to control the cursor of a computer. We would like to go further and connect additional memory, add functionality and enable a visual and auditory connection to the Internet. How else would we do that without using nanotechnology?
If your spine is damaged at the neck, and you are confined to a bed for the rest of your life, then brain surgery is a risky, but important, thing to do. For the rest of us, it goes too far mearly to get a better internet connection.
Nanotechnology will allow us to add hardware to our brains without the expense and danger of brain surgery. Of course we will still be taking a risk – perhaps a large one in the early years of augmentation.
One suggestion I’ve heard but don’t remember who said it, is to slowly replace brain cells one by one with a chunk of hardware much smaller than the original brain cell. The hardware would simulate all the functions of a brain neuron. If we can come up with a safe replacement module that runs off the chemical energy in the blood and has a predicted lifetime greater than 20 years then it will be time to start the conversion. Take a pill each day to supply the hardware to your body and let the nanorobots install them over a six month period, one brain cell at a time. Six months later, you would never know any thing had changed yet you would be running on a hardware platform with amazing capability.
It could run a million times faster than your old biological brain. It would have room for a thousand times more memory. And it would be your own brain. Not a computer in the sense of the thing on your desk, but an exact copy of the structure and personality that existed before the conversion. And it would have an operating system that would allow you to control the speed of processing. Jump it from the biological 100 millisecond response time to something like 50 nanoseconds. That is 20 million times faster.
What that means is that for a short period ( limited, most likely, by the power dissipation limits of your blood and skull) you could slow the world down by a factor of 20 million. Your perceptions speed up but ordinary physics will limit how fast your body can move so, to you, the world slows down as your brain speeds up. But think about what you could do in an emergency. You would have time to think, to plan for hours during the first tenth of a second. And you could slow your brain down in small steps to ramp the world activity back up to a rate where you can interact with the world and accomplish a goal.
Since the hardware brain cells are smaller than the organic version, there’s a lot of room left over. That allows the nanorobots to install additional cells that can be added as needed for new memory, new skills, new interfaces – like that wireless internet. Also, it allows backup units to replace a failing unit with little or no impact on the overall memory or awareness.
The hardware is almost indestructible compared to the organic brain. Say an augmented person is involved in an accident and dies. The body may be a total loss, but the brain could be in perfect condition. An organic brain dies about three minutes after the heart stops. These hardware brains only turn off until they get a new power supply. All memories are intact. The brain is removed from the dead body. An organic body is regrown without a brain and the hardware brain is installed in the clone. It boots up as soon as the blood supply brings a new supply of energy. The person wakes up and learns to use the slightly different body.
In fact when hardware brains are common, the idea of life extension is a sure thing. Trade in your old body and get a new version that looks just like your old one but comes with all the latest mods. Things like intelligent immune systems, diamond reinforced bones, skin art ala a chameleon or cuttlefish, sensors that did not come with the original, and the list goes on.
One main issue is that a lot of people will see this as a distortion of what is human. And will not want to associate with the “cybogs” who will be seen as evil. It is good that you can have a fully hardware based brain that is installed in a perfectly human body. Who can tell without an X-ray?