At UC Berkeley, Professor Michel Maharbiz and colleagues are working on a project they call ‘Neural Dust’. Their neural dust would be particles that are less than 100 microns across. Thousands or tens of thousands or more could be sprinkled across the brain, and would then communicate wirelessly via ultrasonic sound waves. Those same ultrasonic vibrations would also provide power to the individual neural dust nodes. Reading their proposal and looking at the diagrams almost feels like reading an artifact from one of my books. Almost. Neural dust still isn’t small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier, so it would still involve an incision in the skull. And it’s still on the drawin board, not something that has been built. Still, it’s fascinating to see science moving in these directions. (Maharbiz developed the world’s first remote-controleld beetle, by the way – a flying insect whose nervous system could be controlled via electrical stimulations sent wirelessly.)

DARPA, the Defense Applied Research Programs Agency, is also highly interested in this area. In recent talks and calls for grant applications, they’ve painted a vision of neural interfaces small enough that they could injected via a syringe rather than via brain surgery; of combining multiple technologies to achieve high-fidelity communication with individual neurons; and most recently of their ‘cortical modem’ vision: an implant the size of two nickels, with a cost of just a few dollars, that would allow the beaming of high-quality video directly into a human brain.

All of that said, I’ll be surprised if, by 2040, we have brain computer interfaces anywhere near that the sophistication of Nexus. Research inside the body and brain moves slowly. The first rule of medicine is, quite appropriately, ‘do no harm’. And that means that experimentation is necessarily conservative. I expect tremdendous progress by 2040 – restoration of senses, of mobility, of function destroyed by stroke and brain damage; perhaps even significant augmentation. But I’ll be surprised (alas) if it’s as easy as drinking a vial of silvery liquid.

I’ll be similarly surprised if uploading a human mind is possible, or even close, by 2040. I elaborated on those reasons in the afterword to Crux.

In both areas, though: Progress is happening at an incredible pace. As well it should. We all live inside our brains, after all. Our minds are the seat of joy and sorrow, of peace and war, of innovation and stagnation. Unlocking the mysteries of the mind is one of the most exciting and most important endeavors I can imagine. I’m delighted to be a bystander. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Acknowledgements

Apex wouldn’t be the book it is without the help of more than sixty people who provided input along the way.