Head transplants and brain implants

Howdy folks,

How's everyone doing? Enjoying the small talk? Cool cool cool. 

I was thinking about head transplants this morning. Way back when I was an intern at TNW I wrote about Sergio Canavero, a scientist hellbent on being the first person to successfully perform one.

Canavero insisted he'd pull off the transplant in 2019. After that deadline passed, and he didn't, he reportedly moved to China to continue his work. It's unclear if there's a new target date set yet... and why are even indulging this crap? 

Even the brightest, most optimistic expert projections put the technology required to make it possible to re-fuse the spinal cord together after a total severance at least a decade away.

Canavero's been called a "quack" by more than one expert and it appears he's generally viewed as an outcast in the medical community. 

But what if Canavero were a tech mogul or the heir to a business empire? What if, when he started out, he'd had millions to spend on marketing and fundraising efforts, VCs on speed dial, and the social media acumen of Elon Musk?  

Neuralink's building an invasive brain computer interface for healthy people and Facebook's conducting AI-powered psychological experiments on billions of unwitting people at a time. 

If Canavero can figure out a way to incorporate NFTs, Dogecoin, the blockchain, or advanced machine learning into his pitch for choppin' n' swappin' noggins, he'll probably end up as the chief scientist and head chopper off-er for a company that makes chatbots or something. 

Anyhooo... here's 5 really scary things about the future of AI that The Terminator movies didn't prepare you for.