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PARTISAN REVIEW
There are dozens of ideas like this, which will come to fruition in the
years ahead.
A comment on ethics: there are a lot of controversies raised by cer–
tain biological technologies, although I don't think these actually are
going to slow them down. In my mind, the arguments are really just
stones in a stream. Progress flows around them. The most controversial
technology, stem cell research, is continuing, but the controversy has
actual ly accelerated ideas to convert one type of cell into another with–
out having to use an egg cell, which is actually a more practical
approach, because we don't have that many egg cells. I mean, what's the
difference between a skin cell and a heart cell and a neuron? They all
have the entire genetic code. There are certain protein signaling factors
that tell the cell it's a skin cell and tell which of the genes to express.
We're at the beginning of this process, but we're starting to learn how
to manipulate those protein signaling factors. And there were some
recent experiments that successfully converted one type of cell to
another without using an egg cell. So progress continues, but there is
controversy about biological manipulation, because some people feel
we're embarking on sacred ground and that our biology is part of our
sacred definition as humans.
Interestingly, there's no controversy when it comes to merging our
biological bodies and brains with non biological technology. Just two
weeks ago the FDA approved a neurological implant for Parkinson's
Disease, which actually alleviates the symptoms of that disease. It's an
implant that performs the same functions as the corpus of cells that are
destroyed by that disease and communicates with the other biological
neurons. It's inserted into a Parkinson's patient and significantly sup–
presses the symptoms. There are also cochlear implants. My friend went
profoundly deaf fifteen years ago, got a cochlear implant, and I can now
talk to him on the phone. He's getting it upgraded this year to a new
version that has a thousand points of auditory frequency discrimination,
so he'll be able to hear music again. He's been complaining that he's had
the same tunes running in his head for fifteen years. As I mentioned,
there have been four conferences with dozens of ideas to put mechani–
cal electronic devices inside our blood stream . We have devices that go
through our gastrointestinal system, inside our brains, etc. So
T
do see
that as another major trend: we're going to be merging with our tech–
nology.
Right now a thousand dollars of computation is about equal to a
mouse brain . By
2020
it wi ll be equa l to twenty million bil li on calcula–
tions per second, which is a relatively high estimate of the human brain.
