The road to becoming a robot.

Recently a bio-medical engineer by the name of Theodore Berger has made some astonishing progress in the field of brain implants. For decades he has focused his work on deciphering the human brain and specifically the part of the brain that triggers memories (the hippocampus). He is now at a point where he is able to trigger memories in the brain of a mouse or monkey. He does this by using a computer chip which mimics the signals a hippocampus uses to trigger a memory. For now this silicon chip is still on the outside of the body and no testing has been done yet on humans. Imagine though what it could mean if Berger manages to develop a model which you can plant in your brain that will help you to recall memories. Alzheimer patients will have less issues with forgetting the names of their beloved ones, to give one example.

If this would become reality, and this is a big if, it would be a pretty large step forward in biomedical technology. But let’s take it a step further, what if we could build chips that will allow us to start dreaming at command or which will be able to feed our brain all kinds of information in a matter of seconds? Once we have unlocked the code of the brain this process could be very fast. It will probably be the ethical side of it which will slow it down. And now that we are fantasizing anyway, what about the other way around? We can put machines in our minds, but can we put our minds into a machine? According to Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, this will also be possible in a matter of years. It all comes down to computing power for this particular challenge. It’s estimated that by 2045 we will be able to store our minds on a computer and therefore achieve (digital) immortality.

However, this means your mind will be stored on some sort of datacenter, or perhaps in a virtual reality somewhere, but you won’t actually be able to put your mind in a new body. Which is where Bergers findings and Kurzweils predictions come together. Kurzweil thinks that by 2090 all the biological parts of our body will be replaceable by manufactured body parts. Combine this with a mind you can store and download in a manufactured brain, and you have really achieved immortality.

The implications of these kinds of technologies on our society would be enormous and I’m interested to hear how you guys would feel about techniques as these.

Personally, I only need to find a way to keep myself alive until 2090.

 

Sources:

Cohen, J. (2013) Memory Impants, MIT Technology Review, http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/513681/memory-implants/

Woollaston, V (2013) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2344398/Google-futurist-claims-uploading-entire-MINDS-computers-2045-bodies-replaced-machines-90-years.html