My new story for Vice Motherboard on how in the near future we will edit our realities to suit our tastes and desires:
“In a sense, all four pillars of the mind-uploading roadmap—mapping the brain’s structure and function, creating the software and hardware to emulate it—are now areas of active research. If we take Koene’s optimistic view, within a decade, we may have the technological capacity to fully map and emulate a very simple brain—say, that of a Drosophila fruit fly, which contains roughly 100 thousand neurons. ”
Brain activity recorded by electrocorticography electrodes (blue circles). Spoken words are then decoded from neural activity patterns in the blue/yellow areas. (credit: CSL/KIT)
If there was a drug that meant you never had to sleep again, would you take it? Would those who didn’t need to sleep have special advantages over those who did? All that and a side of zombies, in this week’s episode of Meanwhile in the Future.
In the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks, futuristic post-humans install devices on their brains called a “neural lace.” A mesh that grows with your brain, it’s essentially a wireless brain-computer interface. But it’s also a way to program your neurons to release certain chemicals with a thought. And now, there’s a neural lace prototype in real life.
Mesh electronics being injected through sub-100 micrometer inner diameter glass needle into aqueous solution (credit: Lieber Research Group, Harvard University)
Microtransponder’s vagus nerve stimulator uses precisely-timed jolts to help stroke victims relearn movements more quickly
My latest article for Vice Motherboard. It’s about consciousness and a so-called ‘Turing Test’ that superintelligence might one day use on humans:
