A few years ago, okay it was about fifteen years ago, I played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. The game was stunning. It was far too detailed and complex for my young self to fully comprehend and appreciate but I had fun building towns and units, terraforming land and progressing along the tech tree. I was reminded of the tech tree and one particular technology recently when I read an article about Henry Markram. He is a South African Neuroscientist who has embarked on a project closely akin to the fictional "Secrets of the human brain" tech from that old game. The audacious plan is to build a supercomputer to map and simulate the workings of every synapse and neuron in a human brain. The exact implications are debatable but their importance is not. Whether the computer provides an exact, infinitely tune-able model of the human mind to aid in the research of physiological and psychological disorders or it becomes a functioning self-aware consciousness is open for discussion. Either way something big is going to happen. And it is happening. Markram has secured 1.3 Billion Euro in funding for the E.U.
The reason this project caught my eye, apart from it's scope and promise, was the way it reminded me of the kind of science which seemed fitting to put in a science fiction game only a few(okay fifteen) years ago. I am a young man and I've already seen several technologies cross from science fiction to science fact. Mobile phones and the International Space Station are two off the top of my head. It seems we're approaching the point where futurism is impossible beyond ten years simply because there is no way to know where we'll be. It is hard enough to keep up with the present. It would be very embarrassing for a science fiction writer to dream up some fantastical device or technology only to be told by some fourteen year old that it's been on the app store for the last six months!
Another thought on this topic is my view that as the level and ubiquity of tech in our lives increases the scientific horizon for futurists is pushed further back. Although whatever our guess is we're likely to be wrong. In William Gibson's Neuromancer we visit a black market in software where cyber punks with USB slots in their heads sell bootleg floppy disks under the counter. Gibson couldn't have foreseen the Pirate Bay or the open-source community making such dealings obsolete. Likewise in Robert A Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land we see the Man From Mars getting so much fan mail he insulates the onion cellar with the unopened letters. Again there was no way for Heinlein to expect Email in his world of flying cars and lunar colonies. When I first saw Ghost in the Shell I couldn't get my head around it. The world was too alien to anything I had seen before for me to even consider the world Masamune Shirow was suggesting. The Sci-fi of Ghost in the shell showed a world of extreme physical augmentation and brain hacking. To read or steal someones thoughts electronically seemed absurd at the time. Today looking at Markram's work it seems far more believable. Although we haven't reached it yet, there's a day coming when reality will be beyond the imagination of early science fiction writers. Living on the moon and flying cars were easy. We had cars and we had the moon. Today we're just checking off the list of things they imagined. People in space, check. underwater ships, check. monkey butlers...Ahem. Anyway "Secrets of the human Brain" is next on the check list and after we've exhausted their list all bets are off.
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