Ray, of Light wrote:

This:

The world's first brain prosthesis - an artificial hippocampus - is about to be tested in California. Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this silicon chip implant will perform the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing.

With the demise of communism and Seinfeld, there are few things left to terrify me, and this is one of them. People are talking about entire brains in silicon, and what that might mean, etc. etc., but that reality is decades away, at least. Even if or when, semiconductors of such density are devilishly expensive to produce, and vigorously wasteful in their use of energy.

No, it's another prospect that keeps me up at night. We can grow organs -- skin, at least -- in vats, today. We can synthesize most any hormone. We have an infrastructure that makes communication lightweight and inexpensive. We have the brain's I/O characteristics sussed, though the high-level protocol remains a (partial, unravelling) mystery.

Now, imagine that someone grows a brain. He figures a way to simulate sensory input, Matrix-style, and gives the brain a faux-life based on, say, trading stocks. Or engineering, or telemarketing. He gives it limited access to the outside, and gets it generating income, and then he grows a thousand more. That man now has 1001 minds in his employ and a payroll of 300 calories per day, per head. Each has studied its trade since birth, and will never sue or strike or leave to compete with him.

Or, maybe it will begin as therapy for quads, freed from their vestigal bodies and attached to a box that lets them run and fuck again. It won't be long before someone -- I'm looking at you, Japan -- makes the leap voluntarily, because it's more fun or less expensive or more polite than existing as an "able".

Either way, the result is a mass of "people" that consume next to nothing and compete with dominating efficiency. If agriculture is economic gunpowder, at-cost brains are the fucking atom bomb. There will be wars fought over this. I'm not sure who I want to win.

Ray!