Ramez Naam Quotes

Eventually there are going to be chips in brains. Imagine if you could just buy knowledge and download it into your head instead of having to learn it. Like in 'The Matrix.' Imagine all the years saved!

The final frontier of the digital technology is integrating into your own brain.

We need to get used to seeing humans with antennas sticking out of their heads.

In my books the technology that I choose to talk about has to serve the themes. What that means is that I end up having to cut out a lot of cool technology that would be really fun to describe and play with, but which would just confuse everybody. So in 'Amped,' I focus on neural implants.

Elon Musk is talking about silicon nanoparticles pulsing through our veins to make us sort of semi-cyborg computers. But why not take a noninvasive approach? I've been working and trying to think and invent a way to do this for a number of years and finally happened upon it and left Facebook to do it.

Everything good and bad about technology would be magnified by implanting it deep in brains. Is the risk of brain-hacking outweighed by the societal benefits of faster, deeper communication, and the ability to augment our own intelligence?

We're not that far from being able to plant images, memories, and emotional states directly into the brain.

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.

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.

We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human body.

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.

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

I predict that technology will enable people to transmit their neuronal, actual feelings over the Internet.

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.

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

We treat human biology as our center point. Everyone already has a head-mounted display. It's your head!

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

As you go out to the 2040s, now the bulk of our thinking is out in the cloud. The biological portion of our brain didn't go away but the nonbiological portion will be much more powerful. And it will be uploaded automatically the way we back up everything now that's digital.

The Internet of things will augment your brain.

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.

Going a little further into the future, we'll start literally connecting to machines. Some of my colleagues at MIT here - some of them are working on a neural mesh that connects directly to your brain, and they've already done it with some disabled people and allowed them to move objects just by thinking.

Imagine something a million times more powerful than your smartphone that is the size of a brain cell interfacing with your biological neurons. That will be the complete symbiosis. That will be when we augment our brains at the level of the neuron.

I honestly believe that the next big leap in immersive technology will be very much like Brainstorm.

If I could make a device where people could just intuit everything you are thinking - a little cable you plug into, like, a USB port, I would make a billion dollars.