"Artificially intelligent nano-machines will be injected into humans within 20 years to repair and enhance muscles, cells and bone," said John McNamara, Senior Inventor and Innovation Centre Technologist Lead at IBM - working from the UK.
He continued: "These will provide huge medical benefits, such as being able to repair damage to cells, muscles and bones – perhaps even augment them.
“Beyond this, utilising technology which is already being explored today, we see the creation of technology that can meld the biological with the technological, and so be able to enhance human cognitive capability directly, potentially offering greatly improved mental, as well as being able to utilise vast quantities of computing power to augment our own thought processes.
“Using this technology, embedded in ourselves and in our surroundings, we will begin to be able to control our environment with thought and gestures alone.”
Umm, control our environment through gestures alone, it is odd, IBM talks about melding technology with humans and then talks about turning the TV up via the flick of our wrist. That sounds like fun, but there is so much more to this.
Masayoshi Son, the man behind Soft Bank, the giant technology investor that bought ARM and is building a $100 billion war chest to invest in tech, claims that the Soft Bank money, in combination with ARM expertise, will create a computer with an IQ of 10,000, and to be here with three decades.
But will humans, via technology such as neural lace, which Elon Musk is working on, be able to combine with such technology, or will we simply use it, rely on it, and maybe become wholly reliant on it?
Will such tech turn us all into mini super men and women, enhanced by nano robots and prosthetics, to be physically superior, like the Ancient Greek gods, made real, while simultaneously making us all an order of magnitude more intelligent than Einstein, or will it turn us into some kind of sub-human, all our physical needs met by tech, removing the struggle from life that makes us who we are?
These are not questions to be asked by science fiction writers, to be explored by Ridley Scott, aided by Harrison Ford, these are questions for the House of Lords to ponder, for politicians, for the media and for you and me.
