In the same way that you either bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water, Singularitarians want to bring the computer inside of humans or put humans inside computers. They’d ideally prefer both options. 

The idea of digitizing brain function seems impossibly far off in the future to me, but one idea if it does someday become reality is that we could capture the wetware in our heads, make copies of it, and upload it into a video-game-ish scenario or a synthetic bodysuit of sorts.

Yes, far-flung stuff, and none of us will live to see it, though Nell Watson of Singularity U believes it could be possible this century. From Marie Boran at the Irish Times:

Nell Watson’s job is to think about the future and she says: “I often wonder if, since we could be digitized from the inside out – not in the next 10 years but sometime in this century – we could create a kind of digital heaven or playground where our minds will be uploaded and we could live with our friends and family away from the perils of the physical world.

“It wouldn’t really matter if our bodies suddenly stopped functioning, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. What really matters is that we could still live on.”

In other words you could simply upload to a new, perhaps synthetic, body.

As a futurist with Singularity University (SU), a Silicon Valley-based corporation that is part university, part business incubator, Watson, in her own words, is “someone who looks at the world today and projects into the future; who tries to figure out what current trends mean in terms of the future of technology, society and how these two things intermingle”.

She talks about existing technologies that are already changing our bodies and our minds: “There are experiments using DNA origami. It’s a new technique that came out a few years ago and uses the natural folding abilities of DNA to create little Lego blocks out of DNA on a tiny, tiny scale. You can create logic gates – the basic components of computers – out of these things.

“These are being used experimentally today to create nanobots that can go inside the bloodstream and destroy leukaemia cells, and in trials they have already cured two people of leukaemia. It is not science fiction: it is fact.”•