3 Comments

  1. Yes, this study is for mice currently, but imagine a future where we could in a sense expand our metal capabilities with such external brains.

    On the other hand, are we making slaves if we use brains that are not our own?

  2. All evidence points to yes at some point, scientific progress points to pretty far off, and policy points to never going to happen unless it changes.

    Most countries don’t allow scientists to clone humans, do we think they are going to allow scientists to have fully conscious brains lying in a vat to test on? That’s the plot of a horror movie not of a scientific discovery.

    Unless the ethics of people drastically change in the future, the only things which we might use to help those with brain damage is most likely going to be a mix of reparative regeneration of brain tissue (speculative, but some evidence points to it being possible, and perhaps not very far off, though it will probably come with massive caveats) and implants linked to the brain (there’s plenty of brain implants to help the paralysed move their prosthetic limbs, there are also implants that help people with Parkinson’s and depression, so this is in fact very much a thing right now, and is probably only going to develop even more in the future), and not melding together two separately conscious brains.

    In conclusion, yes, we will be able to help people with brain damage with new technology, because we are doing it right now. Parkinson’s is a condition that causes brain cells to weaken and eventually die, leading to impairment of motor function, and there are brain implants that help mitigate their symptoms. Given that technology exists right now to help with brain damage, it’s unlikely to believe that new technology won’t make improvements upon this established basis.

    However, given that scientists are bound by ethics, we are probably not going to see the particular type of technology in the video on humans very soon, if at all.

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