If you’ve read my first post on brain augmentation, you may have had a visceral reaction to the idea of slowly converting your brain into a machine. I don’t blame you, it is a hard to swallow idea. The clone idea to get a new body also repelled me. Growing a new liver and then implanting it into my existing body seems good, whereas growing an entire body from my DNA seems creepy. It’s not me, it’s another body laying there on the table. You are going to put my brain into that thing? I don’t think so. It will take time to adapt to such ideas, but we will.
Here is what will happen and why it will work. As research proceeds, we will create functional brain material with nano hardware. We will do this to repair brain damage, to give sight to the blind, to restore function where it has been lost or never existed. There will also be the early adopters who want to plug into the internet and to augment their brains with new functionality. Both groups will push for development and FDA permission (here in the USA). And at first it will be controversial with passionate people on both sides.
First we will develop add-on hardware for our biological brains. These are small hardware devices that lay in the folds on the surface of our brain and send non-organic tendrils down into the outermost layers of our brain. Those tendrils will establish connections to existing cells in the same way that ordinary brain cells make connections. This will be an interface between the hardware laying on the surface and our normal brain. The hardware will be implanted surgically at first, but will move to nano assembly in situ when that is practical and relatively safe. The 2020′s will be a hotbed of development for brain augmentation.
This add-on hardware will be socially accepted because it is like a prosthesis, eyeglasses, or hearing aid. But it will pave the way for more functionality and more conversion of biological cells to hardware cells. Augmented workers will be valuable in business. They will have photographic memory, instant mental access to databases anywhere in the world, mental access to their phone and computer which allows them to monitor and guide their own work applications remotely.
Society, or the more technical strata, will grow used to the idea of augmentation and that will produce great benefits. Then a few daring souls will allow the conversion from biological brain cells to hardware brain cells to proceed further. Greater and greater proportions of the brain will convert. Someone will allow total conversion and prove ( as far as it can be proven ) that they are the same person. Perhaps someone terminally ill will volunteer. It certainly is a possible road to immortality. And much more theoretically safe than freezing the brain and hoping someone can repair it someday.
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?