Michael Anissimov wrote this great article on Transhumanism. If you're not familiar with the concept, it is that the technology all around us is our next evolutionary step. Today, we think of computers and technologies as things around us, but they'll soon be part of us, and then replace us, much as we replaced cave men. We're building our own grandchildren.

Mr. Anissimov makes the observation that

Politicians and laypeople everywhere are beginning to get the picture - it matters less what you say than what technology you have at your disposal. This is why presidential speeches are peppered with mentions of the importance of alternative energy and the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Good technology improves the lives of millions and bad technology has the potential to murder millions. Social ideas are merely a footnote.

Cheri Robertson recently received surgery that allowed her to see, even though previously she was blind. The procedure, performed at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, is the first to reverse blindness in patients without eyes. A camera on the tip of Robertson's glasses sends signals to a computer that's strapped around her waist. The computer then stimulates electrodes in the brain through a cord that attaches to the head.

Link

European scientists have developed a brain implant capable of receiving signals from more than 16,000 mammalian brain cells , and sending messages back to several hundred cells. (Learn more about Brain-Computer Interfaces in my previous post.)

This is a dramatic improvement over the previous state-of-the-art BrainGate technology which allowed some one hundred neural connections.

In addition to the number of connections allowed, the new technology is more "embedded", in that transistors and other components are inside the implant itself, and changes were made to the neurons themselves. This compared to BrainGate, which is really just a tiny set of probes, with all the processing done in a back-end computer.

If you haven't heard of brain-computer interfaces before, this Wikipedia article is a good place to start. The concept is connecting human brains to computers. So, you could think about something and effectively google it and know the answer. This sort of technology isn't as crazy as you might think. Recently,
Matt Nagle, a quadraplegic paralyzed from the neck down was implanted with probes into his brain through which he was able to manipulate simple things by thinking about them, such as working a remote control, reading email and opening and closing a prosthetic hand. Deafness has been cured in some 80,000 people today through cochlear implants, where audio signals are processed and fed directly into the auditory nerve.

So, today there are already real-world means of getting output from a human brain into a computer, and getting output from a computer back into the brain. Now, it's just a matter of increasing the bandwidth.