Thu 28 Dec 2006
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.