Chethana Janith, Jadetimes Staff
C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter covering science and geopolitics.
The instant access to information at the speed of thought could multiply humanity’s intelligence a millionfold.
In the 1999 sci-fi cult classic, The Matrix, characters literally plug their heads into a universal supercomputer and download information that shapes their brains. For example, Neo, the hero of the story, undergoes a ten-hour “training” while lying back, eyes closed, a thick cable protruding from the base of his head. At the end, he opens his eyes and says, “I know kung fu.” If you’ve watched the movie, you know how thorough his knowledge is.
While that vision of pushing novel information directly into your brain is clearly fantasy, American computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil thinks we’ll only have to wait until 2045 for some version of a brain-boosting artificial interface. It may not give you overnight martial arts skills, but it could hook your brain up to the ultimate internet - unlocking the ability to summon answers to your questions in an instant, or even immersing yourself in a virtual reality beyond our wildest dreams.
Let’s be clear: this tech is not built for entertainment. Kurzweil says there’s a major advantage to building up our brains with nanotechnology: “One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.”
Eventually, we could all become so interconnected that humanity could form a sort of superbrain, some researchers believe. It would be a true equalizer, no matter your social or economic background. In other words, we could all finally understand each other.
What will it take to make such bold predictions come true?
Scientists who have been pondering how to enhance the human brain’s capacity think nanotechnology will be the vehicle for this revolution in the mind. Specifically, a Brain-Cloud Interface (B-CI) could enhance cognition, change the way we educate ourselves, and connect humans in a way we’ve never experienced before. It would also link our brains’ building blocks to immense cloud computing networks, all in real time.
Researchers envision nanobots inhabiting the brain, constantly monitoring and processing data flow from a cloud-based supercomputer. To pull it off, each nanobot would be impossibly tiny: about one one-hundredth the width of a single human hair.
In 2019, an international team of scientists outlined how a Brain-Cloud Interface would enable humans to access the vast amount of data on the internet, which is currently around 147 zettabytes of data. They published their results in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
Five years later, the paper’s lead author, Nuno R. B. Martins, Ph.D, thinks the pursuit of a Brain-Cloud Interface is more promising than ever due to the pace of technology development. His research in neuroscience, nanotechnology and human longevity has led him to the conclusion that a B-CI is possible, even though it may sound absurd right now.
Martins and the research team have a vision of embedding a nanobot inside each brain cell. The average human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons. There may be three times as many glial cells as neurons. They provide chemical and physical support, including holding the neurons in place. Synapses, the points where neurons communicate by transmitting rapid electrical impulses, number about 7,000 per neuron.
Hundreds of billions of incredibly tiny nanobots would be specialized for the three different kinds of brain cells: “endoneurobots” inside neurons, “synaptobots” in close proximity to synapses, and “gliabots” within the glial cells.
The researchers explore a number of procedures to deploy the nanobots, including via intravenous injection into the bloodstream, transdermal injection, or straight up the nose to help get past the blood-brain barrier, which normally regulates our brain chemistry and protects our brains from harmful substances. The nanobots would swim through the blood-brain barrier, enter brain cells, and position themselves at precise locations within the brain. External magnetic fields might help direct the nanobots to the correct brain regions. Once in place, the nanobots might use flexible nanosensors for each of the synapses to directly monitor and interact with processed and stored information. The bots might also use a high-speed nanofiber-optic network to receive and transmit data between the brain and the cloud. Real-time reprogramming might provide the nanobots with regular software updates, according to the paper.
Eventually, a Brain-Cloud Interface could allow humanity to use the ever-expanding scale of the information cloud to merge into a “global superbrain,” according to the Frontiers paper, making today’s online social networks look like preschool for how to connect online. Essentially, a superbrain would forge unconnected networks of human brains and AI into a mass of collective thoughts. This would actually bring people into greater harmony with the rest of humanity. “This shared cognition could revolutionize democracy, enhance empathy and ultimately unite culturally diverse groups into a truly global society,” Martins said in a 2019 press release.
However, to achieve a fully functional and comprehensive human Brain-Cloud Interface, we need a way to access the human body in a non-invasive, harmless way, and it must allow a robust amount of information transfer, according to the paper.
If nothing else, pursuing brain monitoring via nanobots could help solve some problems of aging, like the synapse loss and resulting cognitive decline of Alzheimer’s disease. Kurzweil thinks nanobots might someday be able to repair organs, a practical next step to ensuring human longevity.
To be sure, there are some downsides apparent in this vision of futuristic superintelligence.
For example, privacy and security risks have always been an issue when connecting online. If we were to achieve the ultimate information connection, the related technology would have to be sophisticated enough to protect each individual. Some people may get little to no access to the technology, depending on how it’s rolled out in society.
Other ethical dilemmas include the health risks and regulatory challenges of nanobots in the body. How would we deploy them? Would the blood-brain barrier pose an insurmountable challenge? How would the data exchange between our cells and the nanobots actually work? Many practical hurdles lie before us, the researchers note in their paper.
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