“I know Kung Fu.” The iconic moment in The Matrix when protagonist Neo downloads expert martial arts skills in seconds may not be as far-fetched as it seems. Experts in neuroscience predict that future breakthroughs in AI and nanotechnology will lead to the development of a “Human Brain/Cloud Interface” or B/CI that connects our brains to huge cloud computing networks or synthetic neocortices in the cloud.

This real-time connection between the brain and the cloud would include neural nanobots that monitor and control the neural connections, making it possible to connect to vast data networks and other humans simply by thinking about it. And knowledge could be acquired by downloading directly to the brain.

Writing in scientific journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, lead researcher of this international team of experts, Dr Nuno Martins, said such a B/CI system "mediated by neuralnanorobotics could empower individuals with instantaneous access to all cumulative human knowledge available in the cloud, while significantly improving human learning capacities and intelligence."

However, one significant challenge to this ‘braincloud’ or Internet of Brains is bandwidth: even the fastest supercomputers in the world right now couldn’t handle the kind of data transfer that would occur between individual neurons and the cloud.

[ https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.00112/fullOpens in new window ]