>...and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen<p>> Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075.<p>No way.<p>Disseroth is on a fast-trak to win a solo(!) Nobel for opto-genetics and Clarity, sure, but we are at <i>least</i> a century away from a wet-ware interface, if they are possible at all. The BRAIN initiative was effectively a failure (many reasons here) and the Connectome projects are essentially coming up with 'brains be different, yo'. Hell, we just discovered that the immune system is in the brain at all, like 3 years ago. We have not idea how many astrocytes and glia are in your brain (50% or 90%?) or how they are regulating synapses (maybe they are the primary regulators). What the hell are vestigial cilia even doing in the brain anyways? The list continues for miles of .pdfs.<p>Repair of neurons would be a necessary step for wet-ware, and still we have a damnable time trying to get people to dump ice-water on their heads as their father is dying. We are <i>decades</i> away from a cursory understanding of a wet-ware interface that won't just glia-up in a year or put you on drugs for life and at a 10,000x risk for strokes. We know electrodes don't work in the brain and the drug cocktails don't either.<p>Opto-genetics is a <i>great</i> discovery (use light, not electrodes) for interfacing, but the damn Abbe' diffraction limit (a huge physics limitation) screws you. ~125,000 um^2 of light at the focus versus a 25 um^2 neuron's soma. Maybe, yeah, for peripheral nerves where you can 'multiplex' along the length of a long fiber bundle, you can get away with a wet-ware interface. But cortical? Not gonna happen. You can use STED techniques, but you'll cook the brain to get the resolution down first. Opto is good only for applications where you aren't limited by Abbe', that's not the cortical areas.<p>> We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants<p>Maaaybe. However, what is a 'family' then? Your kids may not look or 'be' anything like you. All the families that will have done so will essentially have adopted a child, as far as the genes go. Plus, that kid will be 'whicked smahrt' if I'm reading this correctly. Not a lot of people do that even today, for many reasons. How will the kids think of their 'dumber' parents? Will they be 'parents' to them, or more like the cat, but with an inheritance? I think the initial forays are key here, and those forays will not be happening in 1st world countries, but much more 'familial' based ones like Korea and China. Places where the distortion of the family will be even more 'cutting' to the societal fabric.