The team points to existing developments in the areas of nanorobotics and neural interface technology which, they admit, is still only in its infancy. The end goal of such technology would be downloading information to the brain, enhancing not only human capabilities and intelligence, but could also “revolutionize democracy, enhance empathy, and ultimately unite culturally diverse groups into a truly global society.”

According to the team’s estimation, existing supercomputers already have the processing speed and power to handle the volume of data to support the Brain/Cloud Interface (B/CI), and they’re improving all the time. The technological bottleneck exists, for now at least, in the development of a brain interface.

That would be where breakthroughs in nanorobotics or, more specifically, neural nanorobotics would come in.

“These devices would navigate the human vasculature, cross the blood-brain barrier, and precisely autoposition themselves among, or even within brain cells,”says senior author and nanotechnology researcher Robert Freitas Jr from the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in California.

“They would then wirelessly transmit encoded information to and from a cloud-based supercomputer network for real-time brain-state monitoring and data extraction.”

The team also point to recent advances such as 2018’s BrainNet which allowed three human players to interact with each other and play a video game with only their thoughts. Though somewhat primitive in relation to their lofty predictions, the researchers feel that such advances could lead to “the future creation of ‘superbrains’ that can harness the thoughts and thinking power of any number of humans and machines in real-time.”

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