Dr. Eddie Chang

In some cases, you know, there's people doing this kind of work non-invasively as well that don't require surgery.

The specific question that you were asking about is an area that we call augmentation.

So can you build a device that essentially enhances someone's ability beyond supernormal, super memory?

super communication speeds beyond speech, for example, superior precision athletic abilities?

I think that these are very serious kind of questions to be asking now because, as you mentioned, the pathway so far is really to focus on these medical applications.

I personally don't think that we've thought enough, actually, about what these kind of scenarios are going to look like.

And I don't think we've thought through all the ethical implications of what this means for augmentation in particular.

There's part of this that is not new at all.

Humans throughout history

have been doing things to augment our function.

Coffee, nicotine, all kinds of medications that cross over from medical to consumer, that is everywhere.

So the pursuit of augmentation or performance or enhancement

is really not a new thing.

The questions really, as they relate to neurotechnologies, for example, have to do with the invasive nature, for example, if these technologies require surgery, for example, to do something that is not for a medical application.

Again, there, that is not exactly new territory either.

People do that routinely for cosmetic kind of procedures for physical appearance, not necessarily cognitive.

So I do think that provided the technology continues to emerge the way that it does, that it's going to be around the corner.

And it probably is not going to be in ways that are super obvious.

I don't think it's going to be like, can we easily memorize every fact in the world?

But in forms that are going to be much more incremental and maybe more subtle, in many ways, we already have that now.