The Spotless Mind

Anyone that is even casually following the field of neuroscience has got to be unsettled by the extraordinary developments that are going to shape our world. Check out this article in the New York Times about research that effectively blocks memories in animals (rats and horses, at least). No reason it won't work on humans. And, as the article points out, the research could go both ways, using the same chemical approach to dramatically improve memories.

Just ponder that for a minute. Had a traumatic experience? Forget it. Depressed about losing the big game. Forget it. Studying history? Then you can remember everything.

The moral and ethical ramifications are staggering. But more importantly, the very nature of what it means to be human, to have developed a history through a linear existence, is now in question.

A related field that will be rapidly emerging and commercially driven is virtual reality. As neuroscience capabilities improve over the next 25 years we will be able to replicate almost any emotion and any visceral experience virtually through brain stimulus. Want to go to China but don't have the time? No problem. Would like to date Brad Pitt without Angelina Jolie butting in? Right this way.

None of this is fantasy. Science fiction has missed the mark by undershooting the bow. The exponential rate of technological development is increasing. (Not simply the rate, but the exponential factor.) The world is going to start changing at a dizzying pace. My grandchildren will laugh at the primitive conditions we are living in today.

One final perspective from Ray Kurzweil's latest book, Transcend. In 1964 an IBM computer cost $11 million (today's dollars), was used by thousands of people and took up most of a building. Today, the computer in your cell phone is a million times smaller, a million times less expensive and a thousand times more powerful. That's a billion-fold increase in price performance. With the exponential rate of development increasing, we should see the same billion-fold increase in price performance in the next 25 years that we saw in the last 40.

Unless something big happens.