On Boing Boing, neurobiologist David J. Linden pushes back on futurist Ray Kurzweil’s vision of nanobots being introduced into our brains in the near term, making it possible for us to communicate with external hardware and extend our memory and intellect almost infinitely. An excerpt:

“Don’t get me wrong. I do believe that the fundamental and long-standing mysteries of the brain will ultimately be solved. I don’t hold with those pessimists who claim that we can never understand our minds by using our brains. I also share Kurzweil’s belief that technological advancement will be central to unlocking the enduring mysteries of brain function. But while I see an exponential trajectory in the amount of neurobiological data collected to date, the ploddingly linear increase in our understanding of neural function means that an idea like mind-uploading to machines being usefully deployed by the 2020s or even the 2030s seems overly optimistic.” (Thanks Browser.)

Kurzweil’s take:

“Still not within the nervous system, you got 20 years, 25 years, these nanobots, these blood cell size devices will be going in our bodies keeping us healthy from inside. We’ll have some go inside our brains to the capillaries not invasively, there would be interacting with our biological neurons so it’ll extends our memory, our decision making faculties, put our brains on the internet and they also enable us to enter virtual reality environment from within the nervous system.

So, for on to go in the virtual reality environment, the nanobots will shut down the signals coming from I realize in my real skin and create the signals that will be appropriate for the virtual environment and that will feel like I’m in that environment and I’ll have a virtual body and those environment could be the same body I have in real reality, it could be a different body, a couple could become each other, experience relationship from the others perspective, teacher could design a student to become Ben Franklin in the virtual constitutional congress not just dress up as him but become that character and this virtual environments would be like websites, you’ll have millions to choose from and some will be recreations are beautiful earthly environments like the Taj Mahal or the Mediterranean Beach.”