An Exploration of Human Potential Part 2: Enter the Matrix?

Brain-machine interfaces are much closer to reality than anyone wants to give them credit for - it isn't an exploration of potential to talk about mind controlled robotic limbs or body parts, because we are already there.  It may not be pervasive in the market due to the backlash of the status quo to resist change, but we have brain interface devices that can control new limbs. The real revolution will be outside the physical space, and in the digital one.

2.  We will all be jacked in to a digital space shorter than you may think.  The modern brain interface devices are getting less and less intrusive by the year, by leaps and bounds, while simultaneously becoming more accurate and being able to interpret more and more complex electric signals given off by the various lobes of gray matter occupying the space between ones ears.  The brain is not inherently hard.  It runs off electricity and each node is effectively a processor with a few megahertz of performance.  The system has some inherent inefficiencies because memories are stored in a neuron that specialized for that purpose, but could have been specialized for something else, like processing.  It is a massively parallel machine with crappy device compatibility.

We definitely get over compatibility problems.  I see too many videos all the time of insanely smart people tearing apart cabling to make frakencable that connects a usb line into a 3.5mm audio jack, or some other bizarre mix that should never work but by genius and luck does.  There are examples of reading a cats memories as images, and we have brain controlled robotic limbs already.  The ability to emulate and interpret the electrical signaling of the body is rapidly becoming a reality all around us.

So what are the implications?  Once we are able to "jack-in" to cyberspace, such that through software we are given false signaling to make us perceive and interact with alternate realities, I would imagine many would never leave.  They could create anything they wanted - change their own personal dream land to whatever they wanted.  In a later part I will talk about replacing the various fleshy parts that won't be as necessary, but I wouldn't be surprised if many people just forfeit their mortal forms and exist solely in cyberspace as errant AI.  It is definitely a step beyond just faking sensory information and interpreting it, but it isn't an impossible problem, especially post-singularity when computational power to emulate keeps getting larger.

You can't emulate the whole brain with electricity though.  A large part of what makes living things less predictable and more errant in their patterns is the presence of hormones to influence cell behavior.  And chemical interactions can be much more volatile than the flow of electrons, which I think explains a lot of the more unexplainable aspects of cognition.  No idea how you emulate those, unless the AIs are just subjugated to randomized behavior alteration.  We do have very good ways to measure randomness - atomic oscillation, crystal harmonics, etc. 

I would love to go on a rant how we still lack any evidence for randomness being a "thing" - almost anything random today is just something we can't accurately predict yet.  Things that were once considered random, from the weather to migration routes to rock formation, have been proven aspects of nature and components of the physiological interactions of the universe.  I am almost certain the rest of the universal randomness factors are explainable in similar ways, albeit of magnitudes more complexity.

So people get virtual, real, cyberspace, that we can connect into directly through the brain stem, and emulate anything (electronic, at least) that we want.  I figure our 3d printers could manufacture the molecules that compose our hormones that influence our more errant behavior, so you could maybe even emulate those on a life brain.  You don't even need the hormones per-se for the digitized mind - they are just randomly generated situational behavior alterations.  Hopefully, a simple base here leads to emergent behavior, because otherwise we are all very boring and predictable in the end.  But if we get emergent behavior out of boring stateful AI of today, I remain optimistic.