Prior to becoming a futurist , Ramez Naam was a well well-thought-of and successful software developer and professional technologist . He was involved in the evolution of such merchandise as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook . His futurity in the software manufacture sure looked bright .
But it was during this sentence that he determine to switch gears and focalise his efforts on next studies , lead to his highly acclaimed book , More Than Human : Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement . Naam now devotes his time to lecturing and writing on these report , include his upcoming non - fiction account book , The Infinite Resource : The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet , and his much - forestall debut science fiction novel , Nexus .
We recently catch up with Naam at the recently concludedWorldFuture 2012 Conferencewhere he told us why he made the transposition from successful technologist to the world of futurism .
Back in 2003 I was give a conversation with a friend of mine who had fancy The Matrix , as had I , and he begin talking about how within ten years we would have implant that would help us to jack into our brains and allow us to transfer our thoughts and have alternating realism experiences and so on . And knowing a little bit about scientific discipline at the sentence — and not a whole lot — I said , no mode , that is totally crazy — the brain is fabulously complex and it is not viable that this could bechance anytime in the near future . I felt that it would take as much as a century for us to get to that sort of understanding of the human brain .
A few twenty-four hour period later I was reading an egress of Science and it had an article about a research team from Duke that had choose a rat and wired up detector in its brainpower to so that it could control a robot arm which could deliver water . They first had it such that the rat could bid a lever to get water , and it would do so . The sensor in its brain would heed to the portion of its motor cortex , and the researchers could secernate when it was moving its paw to hit the lever to get water .
Once they thought they had it down , and that they cognise the pattern , they just left the computer software in control . The researcher disenable the storey , so that the rat would progress to for it — but it did n’t actually do anything . But the nerve cell in the rat ’s wit were still firing against these probe , resulting in the rescue of water .
After a while , the rat figured this out and stopped moving its paws on the lever and would just ride there in place , just think about it , and water supply would just pour down into its mouth by the power of its thought alone .
So when I saw this paper I was suddenly persuaded that I was wrong and that brainpower - computer interfaces were really a world and that led to me writing More than Human and officially go in into the world of futurism .
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