Imagine a future technology that would provide instant access to the world’s knowledge and artificial intelligence, simply by thinking about a specific topic or question. Communications, education, work, and the world as we know it would be transformed.
Writing in Frontiers in Neuroscience, an international collaboration led by researchers at UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, AI, and computation will lead this century to the development of a “Human Brain/Cloud Interface” (B/CI), that connects neurons and synapses in the brain to vast cloud-computing networks in real time.
Nanobots on the brain
The B/CI concept was initially proposed by futurist-author-inventor Ray Kurzweil, who suggested that neural nanorobots — brainchild of Robert Freitas, Jr., senior author of the research — could be used to connect the neocortex of the human brain to a “synthetic neocortex” in the cloud. Our wrinkled neocortex is the newest, smartest, ‘conscious’ part of the brain.
Freitas’ proposed neural nanorobots would provide direct, real-time monitoring and control of signals to and from brain cells.
“These devices would navigate […]
The thing I find interesting about such ideas is that they always talk about an “improvement in democracy” when, in fact, they always end up being used to decrease democracy. If these nanobots can be used to make outside information available to the brain, the opposite is also true. What you are thinking will be open to anyone outside.