My latest Scientific American article “Optocapacitance Shines New Light on the Brain” explores an exciting new technology, tentatively named optocapacitance. While I’ve been excited about its better-known cousin, optogenetics, for years, I think this has greater potential for therapeutic application and augmentation uses in living human beings. Treatment of macular […]
With the arrival of the 2012 Olympic Games, we find ourselves focused on the extremes of human performance. For seventeen days, the world’s finest athletes will compete at the limits of strength, speed and endurance. Many observers have speculated that for a number of these competitions, we may well be […]
If you could improve your body, would you do it? It seems a simple enough question with a simple enough answer. But what if that improvement meant incorporating a mechanical device into your body? Suddenly the question isn’t so simple, is it? And if that integration required the prior removal […]
BBC News is running a series on human enhancement this month. For it, I was asked my thoughts regarding the feasibility of augmentation in the context of a famous 1970s television show. “Is the Six-Million-Dollar Man Possible?” asks whether the bionic capabilities of the Steve Austin character could be achieved […]
Often when people think about intelligence and the future, they have visions of monolithic supercomputers, Terminator scenarios and Skynet. But there’s an entirely different path to future intelligence. Intelligence augmentation (IA, not to be confused with AI) involves supplementing our own brain’s abilities using a range of different technologies. While […]