Sixth Sense - One Day It Will Be Internal.

PLEASE NOTE:  I've been evangelising the coming of this technology for several years now.  And here (http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090205/tc_afp/usitinternetresearchtedmit) it is.

Hang on, you're saying, these guys have produced a projector and smart stuff to overlay images on your surroundings.  That's not the same as your NanoNeuroNet[(c)2000-2020 teddlesruss] technology.

I direct your attention to the closing sentence.  I'm not the only one thinking implantable reality-augmentation.

The only difference is that they are still thinking "fiche'n'chips" with hardware manufactured and then surgically implanted - a technique that will not work unless you trust a robot, with its ability to mechanically make hundreds of thousands of connections, to go poking around in your brain and "plumbing in" the hardware.  Also, you'll be carrying discrete lumps of hardware inside your head, some of it may weigh a gramme or more.  That's the kind of thing that would turn into a lethal, brain-jellifying, missile in case of an accident at high speed, or in the worst scenario, if you walked head-on into a glass door.  Do you really want a few dozen quite massive bullets inside your body?

On the other hand, I'm thinking nanotechnology, a whole series of self-organising solutions that you inject and which arrange themselves along neurons and synapses, forming in effect a spidery scaffold that is distributed all through your body and weighs almost nothing compared to the existing nerve cells.

This technology would be less invasive, and has a few curious side effects.  In effect, your nervous system and brain become very hardy, as most "natural" deaths are due to neurological failures, nerves stop conducting, synapses misfire more and more.  Because you have this scaffold in place, neurological failure becomes much less of a problem.  You get to live longer.

The second side effect is something that's not immediately obvious.  But the speed of conduction is several orders of magnitude different between nerve cells (very slow) and metal or some metallic nanoparticle. In effect, your reflexes and motor skills will improve dramatically.  The only problem would be a feeling of disorientation until your brain learned to ignore the neural signals that would arrive a full couple of milliseconds AFTER the new NNN's signal had already arrived and been acted on.

So here's a technology I've envisioned for almost a decade now, and which is becoming more and more possible by each day's research being done around the world.  I won't even hesitate to say that several military projects are already at the "injecting NNN goo" stage, and would not be surprised to hear that at least some of the test had been successful.

Now I no longer wonder how long before they make an NNN, I wonder how long before someone figures out how to download one's NNN to a backup device...