Bryan Johnson could be called the 800 Million Dollar Man. With the near-billion he made from selling his online payment platform, Braintree, to PayPal in 2013, he has since formed a company to develop a memory-improving brain prosthesis and, more recently, has spent several million dollars annually on medical procedures to become 18 years old again, and maybe even live forever. He and his team of 30 doctors have nearly gamified the process with a laundry list of tests, exercises, procedures, and, of course, an algorithm. They call it Project Blueprint.
Johnson is just another in a long line of Soylent-drinking tech types hellbent on the "hack." Optimizing the human body by hacking its machinery is something he's been working on for more than a decade, as detailed in John H. Richardson's November 2017 piece, "Inside the Race to Hack the Human Brain." While he is now better known for swapping plasma with his teenage son and 70-year-old father, six years ago Johnson was trying to puzzle out the human brain with the goal of optimization. That project was a little quieter, though no less ambitious: The entrepreneur's ultimate aim was to "reprogram the operating system of the world." He planned to start by using an algorithm to encode neural signals related to memory and then feed that code back to the brain to trigger memories. In the article, the company he formed to do so, called Kernel, was conducting its first human test. At the time, we couldn't get enough of the concept of brain implants: Elon Musk's Neuralink was a mysterious new venture and Meta had just begun work on a brain-computer interface (a program it would cease funding just four years later). That same year, WIRED's Steven Levy declared that we are "entering the era of the brain-machine interface."
In Richardson's compelling though appropriately skeptical telling, Johnson's project hits a major snag that leaves the reader wondering where he might go next. Today, we know Kernel is not selling commercial implants to communicate with the brain, but rather sleek-looking helmets that measure and analyze it. Research on the human brain, with the help of AI, is exploding and the race to create brain interfaces is hotter than ever. Still, the massive market for commercial neural devices analysts predicted in 2017 has not yet materialized. Today, Johnson's heart, skin, and lung capacity, according to his doctors, are younger than they were at the article's writing. So in many ways, he traded one stalling vision for another. We are years away from knowing whether this one works. By that time, Johnson may have moved on to time travel.
It's challenging to take the word of a person who consumes 111 pills per day and speaks about humanity in terms such as "operating system" seriously. While we are years from broad-application neural implants, it's undeniable that his work is part of a booming industry that so far has restored speech to ALS patients and given mobility back to stroke survivors. Some even argue that despite their dystopian image, brain implants may allow us to compete with ever-maturing AI. I find myself feeling skeptical. To me, commercial implants for "optimizing" healthy brains are a concerning prospect, and one we are still likely decades away from seeing. I wonder whether it might go the way of VR glasses—exciting and innovative, but one step too close to cyborgs for comfort. And wouldn't hacking aging create a society in which the wealthy live years or decades longer than the working class, only furthering the hierarchy that Johnson's cohort claims to want to dismantle? How do you see it? Are the Bryan Johnsons of the world foolish or visionary? Or is it more complicated than that? Leave a comment below the article.
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Sam
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حبيبي ليس يعدله حبيب *** ولا لسواه في قلبي نصيب حبيب غاب عن بصري وسمعي *** ولكن في فؤادي ما يغيب يا حبيب ...
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