WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

  Every year, edge.org posts a new question to a group of diverse group of thinkers - scientists, artists, philosophers etc.  In exchange for getting to plug their books, they contribute paragraphs and essays relating their take on the answer to the question posed.

Previous questions were:
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?


This year's question is: WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

Here are a few quick highlights:

GREGORY PAUL (Independent Researcher; Author, Dinosaurs of the Air) talks about giving our brains an upgrade:

The human brain and the mind it generates have not undergone a major upgrade since the Pleistocene. And they violate the basic safety rule of information processing — that it is necessary to back up the data. Something more sophisticated and redundant is required. With computing power doubling every year or two cheap personal computers should match the raw processing power of the human brain in a couple of decades, and then leave it in the dust.

If so, it should be possible to use alternative, technological means to produce conscious thought. Efforts are already underway to replace damaged brain parts such as the hippocampus with hypercomputer implants. If and when the initial medical imperative is met, elective implants will undoubtedly be used to upgrade normal brain operations. As the fast evolving devices improve they will begin to outperform the original brain, it will make less and less sense to continue to do one's thinking in the old biological clunker, and formerly human minds will become entirely artificial as they move into ultra sophisticated, dispersed robot systems.

Personally I would love a more accurate memory system, one with complete recall, or shall I say Total Recall. I think if we were to then add on some wireless networking capabilities to our brain, we would really step things up.  If you like this idea... here's another article on intelligence enhancement: NICK BOSTROM (Philosopher, University of Oxford; Editor, Human Enhancement) on SUPERINTELLIGENCE.


In another response, MARC D. HAUSER (Psychologist and Biologist, Harvard University: Author, Moral Minds) talks about imagining the impossible he describes a field of study called:

theoretical
morphology, a discipline that aims to map out the space of possible morphologies
and in so doing, reveal not only why some parts of this space were never
explored, but also why they never could be explored.

I love this kind of brain challenge... Try to think of something that is impossible.  Maybe with our new enhanced brains we'll be able to actually pull that one off.

There's many more thought provoking articles in the complete book/web post so go check them out!