Ramez Naam Quotes

We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it.

As computer intelligence gets better, what will be possible when we interface our brains with computers? It might sound scary, but early evidence suggests otherwise: interfacing brains with machines can be helpful in treating traumatic brain injury, repairing spinal cord damage, and countless other applications.

Eventually, brain implants will become as common as heart implants. I have no doubt about that.

By the time we get to the 2040s, we'll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that's singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter.

Neurotechnology may benefit from questioning what kinds of low-information-content signals we can read and write before we try to upload and download consciousness.

Ask not what the brain can do for the computer. Ask what the computer can do for the brain.

Wouldn't you like to have an augmented memory chip that you could plug into your head so you don't have to look everything up and remember everything?

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

Who should have spent their money on a brain implant?

Implanting a microchip inside the brain to augment its mental powers has long been a science fiction trope.

With brain hacking experiments, I've hacked into Morgan Freeman's brain. He was the most famous and the most nerve wracking because I got really awestruck when I met him, and the moment I was introduced to him, he challenged me there and then to hack his brain.

Mark Zuckerberg talks about telepathy, and Elon Musk has invested in trying to create a brain-machine interface.

The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.

What I'm really interested in is this idea of a 'brain co-processor' - a device that can record from, and deliver information to, so many points in the brain, with a computational infrastructure in between - a computer that can process the information and compute exactly what needs to be restored.

Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we'll augment our intelligence.

In the future, the Internet might become a 'brain net' where we send memories, feelings and sensations.

Electrodes aren't the only things we may someday start implanting in our brains. Consider what you could do with a chip in your head that linked directly to the Internet: Within milliseconds, you could retrieve just about any piece of information.

I never stopped dreaming of how to create a wearable to communicate with our thoughts, how to do this at consumer electronics pricing.

We have always dovetailed our cognition to our tools, but when our tools start dovetailing back, where do I end and where does the tool begin? It is going to be a really Twilight Zonish situation. It is definitely interesting. Once Google is in a blood cell sized device in our brain, do we become part Google? There are certainly interesting things to think about and provocative questions, but I don't think those provocative questions are going to do anything to slow down the onset of these technologies arriving and becoming even more pervasive.

The primary implication is that we're going to combine our intelligence with computers. We're going to make ourselves smarter. By the 2030s, they will literally go inside our bodies and inside our brains.

The main message of 'Smarter Than You Think' is an attempt to look at the productively new and interesting ways that we have begun to learn about the world, to think about what we found, and to mull it over and argue about it with other people as we use technology.

When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence.

We basically created a computational unit out of two brains.

Technology is an interesting subject, people thinking: how much good, and how much bad, does it inherently carry?