This blog will deal with the function, limits, and likely avenues to improvement of the human brain, and on occasion some of the moral, social and political issues surrounding these.
The initial posts will likely be of more interest to a general audience, but as my understanding of neurology, artificial intelligence, and interfaces improves, the writing will necessarily become more technical. Fortunately or not as it seems to the reader, this may take me a while.
In any case I will make my best effort to distinguish speculation from established fact, and to avoid undue excitement over the appearance of every promising experimental result. Improvements to the brain will be found, and in number, and some of them will substantially extend our powers of thought and action; but we cannot say when they will first appear nor when they will be perfected, nor how long most will wait before adopting them, nor how long it will take us to use them to best advantage.
That getting there will require hundreds of real advances built on tens of thousands of false starts inspired by millions of speculations suggested by billions of useful data points culled from quadrillions of measurements…this is far easier to predict, and it gives a sense of how much patience and hard work must go into what I believe will be the most important project in history: allowing Homo sapiens to live up to its name.
