Dr Karl

There's an article in the New Scientist two weeks ago about a man who's paralysed from the nipples down, and yet they've managed to do some wiring into his spinal cord above that level, so not only can he feel things with his own hands, he can pick the difference between a really hard ball...

and a foam ball with 60% accuracy, which is pretty crappy, but it's getting better.

And also he can pick up things and he can also feel what another person who is wired up is feeling and move their muscles for them, but very crudely.

And with regard to moving your own muscles, the reason that you can't just go to the back of a car and lift it up is to protect you from tearing your muscles off your bones.

And there are circuits in your system to stop you from doing that.

And every now and then there's an emergency and suddenly your niece, nephew, child, parent or refugee gets trapped under a car and without thinking you go there and you lift off the back of the car by yourself.

And often you get away with it.

And so it is possible to override those safety protections.

Nobody's done it because when you override it, you run the risk of ripping your muscles off your bone in a really bad way.

And so that's how you could jump higher.

So we are heading down this pathway of integrating.

At the moment, we're going down a pathway where it's mostly electronics being integrated into biological flesh.

Now, we've managed to get things called organoids.

An organoid is where you get a bunch of cells, stem cells of a particular organ, like, for example, the brain, and you put them in a dish and you can train them to beat you at the game called, this is a very unsophisticated game, pong.

Can you just describe pong for the audience?

So this bunch of brain cells can beat you every time in pong.

So when we get to the stage of, for example, making AI from organoids or having the things implanted in you, especially integrated organoids, or we change the DNA, there's many things that we can do.

But the thing is to have the wisdom to do good things, not bad things.

Welcome.

No, but I can have a few guesses.