Not technology's pulse - technology's pace. It proceeds, as it's sometimes said, "most apace." I don't think there's a BPM that'll measure the kind of heartrate tech's exhibiting now...
And I know - I sound like an old guy yelling at - whatever. But bear with me. I've seen people on Youtube feeling frustrated because things they'd spent a few days recording editing and publishing a video about, had progressed so much that by the time the video went up it was already out of date.
"Oh ha ha!" I thought. "That's a bit rich, Youtuber. How can you say something like that?"
But they were right. Reviewers would get a 3D printer to review, spend several weeks putting it through its paces, produce a thoughtful review and put it up on Youtube - and the company had updated software version and fixed two hardware issues by that time.
More recently I saw an explainer-type channel presenter complain that what they'd posted about AI yesterday was already superseded by today's new AI app online. "M'kay boomer" the youtubers said ...
Anyway. They're right. I've recently written and scheduled a post, added to it twice before the publication date, and then right after it was published, had to schedule another post with even more new stuff relating to the original post. The post was about EV charging stations, and I mentioned the rapid pace that battery technology was taking from chemistry to chemistry to construction to manufacturing and two posts later I'll have to start another one and start with this new technology (which incidentally isn't the latest battery news any more either . . . )
This is the state of everything at the moment. Ray Kurzweil famously suggested The Singularity and many people wondered if Moore's Law would keep being more or less true, and I've been working on the basis that if you replace "the number of transistors per chips" in Moore's Law with "the amount of computing power per dollar of cost" then it still holds true. And The Singularity holds sort of true because the last decade in particular has seen prosthetics and "biohacks" start on a geometric rise to that point.
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| This is one of my favourite banner images I ever made. |
Fifteen years ago I read about someone building themselves a home-brewed prosthetic hand, now you can download the model files to print your own, build your own controller, and set it up. Or you can buy them ready-made customised to your needs. There were the parents that built portable filters so that their children didn't need to have dialysis as often, insulin pumps are now mainstream and the age of cyberpunk biohackers is here if you search for devices like implantable NFC chips to hold your bank card's functionality or open your doors or start your car or even just store some information for emergency services in case of accidents.
Two or three other companies are competing with NeuraLink and I've actually posted about Augments and neural nets and stuff, mostly though as fiction stories, but it's been a thing I've thought about for 20+ years so I'm sure hundreds of other people will have thought about the exact same things - and for all I know there are biotech and nanotech companies pursuing that very research right now. (I've found that I'm almost never the first to arrive at what I thought at the time was a unique and revolutionary idea, and literally hundreds of others were also thinking they had the same unique and revolutionary idea... And sometimes, I'd see the idea become a commercial reality as someone got more research and development done than I did. Because I never really went past the "Oh wow! A unique and revolutionary idea!" stage.)
No, there's no ulterior motive to this post
I'm just blown away by how fast things move. "Oh!" I think to myself, "Wouldn't it be great if we could put a direct connection into our nervous system?" and then a decade later "No Elon - not like that . . . Sheesh . . ." I mean, I'm still waiting for some nanotech company to develop the Nano-Augment products I predicted in my blog post sixteen years ago. (Yes, there is an ulterior motive - sixteen years ago. Me.)
What are they?
I thought to myself that we can't really expect to connect a person to the Internet via hard hardware (like panels of fine pointy metallic bits) attached to a small patch of brain for a very small number of inputs/outputs. There're a number of reasons I think that it'll never work, despite NeuraLink's little successes. And Elon you can try and change my mind but in this case you're just not enough of a visionary, sorry.
My basic premises for rejecting hard implants are that A) it'll damage the brain tissue it's implanted in, for sure. Take a hard tumble and the contacts'll drag and destroy a few cells.
B) Even though the currents may be in the range of picoamps, that will still cause electrolysis effects over time.
C) Materials themselves won't be up to the flexing required. Yes we have bendable screens now but how many have been tested to last 30 - 90 years of constant use? Hmmm.
D) Resolution: a thousand points of contact of which only between 100 and 400 could end up being unuseable only gives a small number of bits that can input/output commands.
So what's the solution?
Well - nanotechnology. And BIG thinking. And a lot more time. You see, nanotechnology can be rigid machines, or it could be liquids and suspended molecules . . .
And - a LOT of experimentation and trials before ever making the first treatment.
The basic idea is that we can make nanomaterials that can have pretty specific properties right now. What we need is to get good enough to give them extremely specific properties. They have to be made to adhere to particular types of human tissue, and then join together along it to form a conductive circuit.
So you make a mixture of these nanomachines and introduce them into a person, they form along all manner of nerve cells, in effect creating a parallel to the nervous system and connected to it. you now have "wiring" in the body that runs at a far faster speed than nerve cells, and which it's okay to connect to. And you have - in effect - the entire nervous system in analog that can be used for - whatever you want.
There are downsides to this. I thought this through at the time. If you have a second nervous system in your body that runs at around ten times faster than your original nerves, you'll suffer from a terrible "double vision" effect where the signals arrive, and then arrive again a second later. Unless it's possible to train oneself to ignore one set of signals, it would be nauseating and disorienting. But I assumed it wouldn't be insurmountable.
Then there's a second issue. You might sense a mosquito landing on your arm in a tenth of the time that it took you before the Augmentation, but you still couldn't get your muscles to react fast enough. THAT would drive you crazy, maybe. Maybe crazy enough to have a similar treatment done to increase your muscle speed.
Now when you sense that mozzie, you send the swat signal, your new muscles power on and -
break the bones of the arm you're swatting with. Followed by the mosquito, and the bones of your other arm that it was sitting on.
*sigh*
You need some titanium reinforcement for your bones, too.
And before you worry about how much weight you'll gain with all that nanotech inside you - it's nano. You have ten times more bacterial cells in your gut than there are somatic (body) cells in your body, yet they weigh only about a kilo. Any nanotechnology is similarly going to consist of numerous molecules but weigh only a kilo or two.
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| Okay okay - I took a bit of artistic license. |
The thing is - I'm expecting to read about it anytime now. THAT'S how fast I think technology is going.
It's a system that would allow a person to send every aspect of a learned behaviour (aka an 'engram') to an AI to teach it a particular task. Imagine someone who's been a truck driver most of their life, providing their experience to an AI. And also a rally driver. And so forth. Eventually you have an AI that can be trusted to drive you everywhere. And because the Augment is in all your nervous system, the driverless car AI will even be able to have "gut feelings" about traffic situations and act on them...
One downside of course is that you could be infected with a digital virus. In that 16 year old blog post I actually thought about that too. I'm just going to re-state that. Sixteen years ago I'd already thought of a way to make a superhman, and a way to defeat them. I'm not - I'm nowhere near being - the sharpest tool in the biotech / cyborg / cybernetic shed, but I could imagine this back then. I had (and still have) no laboratory for any such ventures, no formal education, and no money to do any research like that.
Imagine what a bunch of smarter people with a decent set of laboratories and funding could do . . .
I would sooo like to be able to get my posts seen farther and wider. And I'd so like to chat. There's a link in then graphic above that you can use to chat with me. (There are also links to donate and subscribe t the once-a-week newsletter . . .)
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