In the movie “The Matrix“, the leader Morpheus brings the chosen one – ‘Neo’ on his ship. They are on a mission and Neo needs to be trained to fight for this mission.
As part of the training program, one of the team members injects a niddle wire or a ‘head-plug’ in the back of Neo’s head through a hole implanted on his head and connects his brain with a computer system. One of the team members loads a fight training program to his brain through his computer.
Once the program is loaded successfully in a minute to his brain, they wakes him up.
“I know Kung Fu“, says Neo after waking up!!!
Whoa… Isn’t it amazing?? They’ve loaded a Kung Fu program into his brain and he knew Kung Fu just in a minute. What a super cool technology!!!
Well, this technology existed in the movie though. However, do not get upset. The same technology is being researched by the scientists in the Neuroscience branch under Neurotechnology.
So, what’s the Neural Lace? To explain Neural Lace in a non-jargonic way, I have given the example of The Matrix movie above where Neural Lace is nothing but the head plug or the niddle wire injected in Neo’s head in order to connect to his brain with a computer.
The term Neural Lace was coined in the Science Fiction Novel series in early 80’s. The fiction version of the definition says that, Neural Lace is a tiny little mesh with a niddle implanted in human brain to act as an interface to communicate with a computer. And gradually this mesh will be part of the human body itself.
However, the future versions of Neural Lace technology can be different altogether. It can be a head plug, a computer chip or just the hair-wires. Who knows! However, one thing is for sure in my opinion is that this technology is soon going to exist in real and ultimately will make us the Cyborgs.
Elon Musk (man behind PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors) has already started working on this techology. He recently has co-founded a company named Neuralink for developing the Neural Lace or the implantable Brain Computer Interface (BCI) for humans.
In his opinion, we are already half Cyborgs as our virtual identity is already existed in computer world online in forms of social media, emails etc. Our virtual identity will still exist online even if we die! Well, that’s an interesting view by Elon Musk!
Talking further about the Neural Lace technology, the BCI – Brain Computer Interface can work both the way around. Just like you download and upload data from/to the Internet, the same way we will be able to download our brain data to computer and load new data to brain from computer or the Internet. It can also be possible that your whole brain data can be implanted to an artifical human body once you die. Could this be a breakthough technology to make humans immortal?? We’ll see in the future!!!
However, this technology seems as alarming as it seems amazing. There can be huge threat to human race if this wouldn’t be monitered with extreme care by some authorities. Ultimately, you are opening the doors to your brain to read and write the data. And it will be easy, at least in the early stages, for the bad people to implant malicious data to your brain in your brain language. And even to erase your precious data from your brain.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has been advancing rapidly these day. The AI can now learn to create AI programs itself. What if a situation comes when an AI program decides to override the human brains connected on a global computer network or the Internet?? This situation can cause some heavy existantial threats to human race!!!
The key to avoid such situation is to keep moitoring the advancement process and use it for the good of human race!
What do you think? Let me know your views.
I hope you have enjoyed my first post. More are coming up. Stay tuned! Thanks.