Live Forever with Human Enhancements?
Is it possible to live forever with human enhancements? Living forever (radical life extension) sounds like a boring proposition for some, and it could be, if you remained you. As it turns out, you won’t. Just as you are not the “you”, that you were as a one year old, or when you were 5, or 25 or 75. The emerging future will be full of much bigger differences then just life experiences, physical immaturity, and aging’s frailty that makes each individual think and act like a “new” person. Human enhancement will trend with “the law of accelerating returns” by adding new senses and improving our current senses with human genetic engineering. Our wish lists include: echolocation, an electrosensory system, and new genes crafted from a computer program that makes the sense of touch more subtle and boost our ability to see in the dark. Human enhancements such as an artificial gastrointestinal tract (GI tract) will allow humans to eat unlimitedly and not gain weight while giving our biological parts the appropriate nutrition and non-biological body parts energy.
Is it possible to live forever with human enhancements? Living forever with human enhancements such as advanced computer brain interface technology will give us access to people, companies, facts, and new sensory perspectives. Our brain computer interface will have secondary pathways, hardwired and wireless, to send messages to our brain, cybernetic limbs and bionic senses that will boost our abilities. Direct brain implants have already been used to give a limited sense of vision to a blind person. Over the last decade we have implanted an array of electrodes in the eye that delivers electrical impulses directly to neurons in the retina allowing the blind to “see” shadowy shapes and outlines. Our next attempts will include retinal implants that will receive wireless transmissions from a camera attached to glasses or light hitting an interface. Neuroprosthetics such as Cochlear implants already give hearing to the deaf. Ray Kurzweil’s current print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the K-NFB Mobile Reader, enhances the abilities of the blind and can even read small text that cannot be read by the sighted. Smart tissues, glucose, body motion, and our pulse will become the new sources of energy for our human enhancements.
The EPOC wireless neuro headset uses your brainwaves so that you can control computers, wheelchairs, drones, games, and brainwave visualization and to see how your brain is working as you experience and perform everything you do.
Tan Le of Emotiv demonstrating how the EPOC wireless neuro headset works.
These current technologies are helping to fix medical problems and now they are going beyond human capabilities. Action at a distance has been the fantasy of humans throughout the ages. Now that fantasy has become a reality. Computer brain interface experiments started out to enable people with spinal cord injuries and severe neural disorders such as locked in syndrome. In 2009 the first computer brain interface or brain wave games were sold commercially: Star Wars Force Trainer, MindFlex, and Emotive EPOC allowed anyone to turn a motor on and control the speed of the motor with their thoughts. Computer games have been developed by programmers using brainwave software; phone apps that allow you to call your friends just by thinking about them when you wear the wireless headset. Wheel chairs can be controlled using a headset that picks up facial features such as blinking and smiling. The cybernetic human has started its ascent in humanity’s self-directed evolution.
Recording memories with videos, discussions, pictures, and interactive avatars online are allowing Alzheimer’s patients to replay the day’s events, helping them to recall and maintain the memory of those events. These same recordings are being made so that amnesia patients can review their life that was, prior to the amnesia occurring. These digital memories will also be used when cryonics patients are revived helping to give them a better sense of identity. This digitized information will also be placed in virtual AIs and robots, creating an artificial memory cloning of sorts. Mind uploading can be researched further in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness publications and by visiting LifeNaut.com or CyBeRev.org
