Promising Brain Tech?

There’s a lot of really exciting developing technology out there. You can create beautiful, complex images by saying words, and the process may as well be magic: it looks like you’re casting a spell, and then things just happen.

Waving your hand in order to make a virtual reality scene disappear from your worldview is right around the corner. A voice just like anyone ever recorded can now be generated to read you bedtime stories.

These are all really exciting things, but I tend to get the most excited about technology that allows people to live longer, or to live better, healthier lives. There have been a lot of these innovations, too: surgery done with robotic arms, vaccines that save millions of lives developed with AI, and untold promise in the field of drug synthesis.

It’s hard to tell how much of this is hype, and how much is real promise.

In situations like these, I really value the perspective of someone who is subject to all of this hype, but cuts through it for the most perso…