Skip to main content

The World's First Billion Dollar Brain



How much might the highest bidder pay for Steve Jobs' intact brain in a jar? I could see a die-hard collector and history fan dropping 10 or 20 million $ for bragging rights. Maybe more.

But what if that buyer could count on extracting information from the brain? As science continues to better our understanding of functions like memory, intelligence and cognition, and improves brain-scanning and simulation, we're rapidly developing the ability to identify where and how information resides in brains. Researchers have already  distinguished between different recalled memories in brains. So how many more years will pass before mankind can read meaningful portions of the well-preserved brain of a deceased person? 5 years? 10? 20? 50? 100?  

The answer may well be 10-20 years, but even if it's 100 - that could seriously affect the price a person or an organization is willing to pay for a brain. The prospect of retro-active brain reading will surely push up the going rate for preserved brains.

So maybe that raises the top bid for Steve's brain to $50 million, especially considering the advances being made in fields like chemo-preservation, which is turning out to be a powerful alternative to freezing. For an in depth overview check out Ken Hayworth of the Brain Preservation Foundation discuss this at length - begins at 3 mins 30 seconds.


Keeping in mind accelerating developments in computer processing, scanning, information theory and brain sciences, how much might a government or group betting on the prospect of retro-active brain reading in the future be willing to pay for the brain of a key scientist, intelligence operative, general, politician, inventor or enemy? The going rate will of course be influenced by available budget and the certainty of the purchasers, but both of those will only rise as we move forward in time. There will most likely be more capital available. There will most likely be greater certainty that brains can be read. 

How much would a company be willing to pay for Steve Jobs' brain (which was not preserved, btw)? How much would the U.S. pay for the intact frozen brain of China's leading cyber strategist? How much would Obama's or Gates' chemo-preserved brain be worth to the Chinese govt? 

The only thing I'm really sure of is that the informational value and going $ rate for ALL brains will rise steadily over time as accelerating change, systems quantification and the emerging superfluid economy conspire to allow us to read brains better and make information more useful and transferable - just as the value of rain forests goes up as we figure out the previously discounted or externalized value of the ecosystem and species therein.

Perhaps we'll get to a billion dollar brain purchase by 2030 or 2040. Perhaps the average going rate for a brain will be $1 billion (inflation adjusted) by 2060. Perhaps some foresighted risk-takers are already stock-piling brains. Perhaps there are companies or nations that have already put "brain recovery" clauses in key asset's contracts. 

It may seem crazy to contemplate. But such an exercise is much less whacked than it would've seemed just 5 or 10 years ago. 

The main point: it's worth thinking about - maybe someone will retro-actively read your brain one day.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Annotating the Physical World - How Much Augmented Reality Cake Will Layar Take?

Imagine pointing your iphone at different locations around you to reveal geographically pertinent annotations and/or other media that people have deposited there. Now there's an app for that. In futurist circles, this basic world-as-web scenario has been discussed for years (I even worked on one such forecasting project ), if not decades. The simplest version of the concept has always been an application that intuitively and instantly blends real-time first-person physical world experience with the valuable data contained Wikipedia, Yelp or other websites, allowing you to instantly access stats about restaurants, concert venues, parks, car dealerships, schools, businesses, etc, that you encounter in your view. Such an app could, for example, provide information about a certain shrub in your yard, allowing quick access to species data, historical photos and related ads from the local lawncare services. Now, thanks to the convergence of smart phones and real-time geo-sensing, a

Building Human-Level A.I. Will Require Billions of People

The Great AI hunger appears poised to quickly replace and then exceed the income flows it has been eliminating. If we follow the money, we can confidently expect millions, then billions of machine-learning support roles to emerge in the very near-term, majorly limiting if not reversing widespread technological unemployment. Human-directed  machine learning  has  emerged  as the  dominant  process  for the creation of  Weak AI  such as language translation, computer vision, search, drug discovery and logistics management. I ncreasingly, it appears  Strong AI , aka  AGI  or "human-level" AI, will be achieved by bootstrapping machine learning at scale, which will require billions of  humans  in-the-loop .  How does human-in the-loop machine learning work? The process of training a neural net to do something useful, say the ability to confidently determine whether a photo has been taken indoors or outside, requires feeding it input content, in this case thousands of diff

Donald Trump, Entertainer-in-Chief

The days of the  presidential  presidency are behind us.   JFK was the  first TV President . He and his successors exuded a distinctly  presidential vibe as they communicated confidently to the masses, primarily through color video, usually behind a podium or in high-power settings, on a monthly or sometimes weekly basis. Donald Trump is the first Web & Reality TV President.  He spent a decade as host and producer of the hit show  The Apprentice  and exudes a distinctly colloquial vibe across cable and the web. Trump prefers titanic business settings like board rooms and communicates to the masses at a daily or even hourly rate, even after the election. Twitter is his pulpit. Trump is a seasoned, self-aware, master content producer AND actor.  In sports, the equivalent is a player/coach, a Peyton Manning or LeBron.  He's calculatedly sloppy and unpredictable, which appears to boost his authenticity and watchability. Most importantly, he's relentless. Trump's m