Sparks Brain Preservation

Revival is something I'm sure we all think about a lot. Constantly thinking about it has real utility. Building up a large set of reasonable scenarios gives us a more accurate view of the future than the rest of humanity which is not constantly thinking about revival. Having some sort of big picture framework of what the future might look like gives us a place to hang all those scenarios in an organized manner.

My big framework used to involve two milestones: mature tissue engineering and then mature nanotechnology. I always figured about 70 years for each of those two eras. But AI has caused me to reconsider that framework and add some complexity. I think it has affected how everyone views the future. I think we will still hit my two previously envisioned milestones, but I think I have found a better way to organize my future scenarios. I think it would be more useful to organize by robot size. That would divide the future up into three eras: the era of robots, followed by microbots, and then finally nanobots.

We nearly have robots. Engineering is hard, but let's say they are generally available and plentiful in about 20 years. That would include self driving cars and household assistants. The number of robots could clearly grow into the billions. It could change society in many fundamental ways. Lots of people write about this and I have no special insight. Robots would help us more on the preservation side of things than on revival. A huge part of having robots could be not just having autonomous robots, but also having teleoperated robots. I am constantly frustrated that I cannot jump into a robot avatar in L.A. and walk around the building to get things done. I currently actually have to hire random people to go to that building to get things done. I've gotten very good at using TaskRabbit, but that process is so slow and inefficient. I would much rather jump into an avatar. It's so useful in fact, that I think avatars could hit the market a few years before autonomous robots. I think they could be very popular. My time is precious. Even around the Salem campus, I would rather tell a robot to walk over to a different building. Once it was in position, I would jump into it to talk to someone or point at something. I currently do this all day long without avatars and it's exhausting.

Robots could also help tremendously with rapid response in brain preservation. I think most normal people in the general population would want to tell their robots to stand there all night long watching them while they sleep. The robots could observe heart rate and respiration. They could help manage airways by nudging the sleepers to turn whenever they slip into a heavy snore or apnea. They could be there to scratch backs, fetch water, take out the dog, massage a charley horse, or whatever. It would be the end of unobserved sudden deaths because nobody would be alone. Those who were near death could get extra constant attention. Robots could clearly also take care of the elderly. They could bathe them, feed them, and move them around. Nursing homes would look very different. Our rapid response could leverage that. We could be more aware and more directly involved as someone is dying. Robotics and teleoperation could allow immediate response when each person dies.

Robots could also help us perform our brain preservation procedures. They could reliably perform the surgical procedures and they could also perform the brain removal. Humans currently do a pretty good job of this, but I don't think we yet appreciate how inefficient it is to train and use humans. Each human needs to be individually trained and then must individually maintain proficiency. A robot could be trained once, and that single training could be used repeatedly across multiple physical instances. Maintaining proficiency could also be approached entirely differently in robots. Yes, it could be a while, but it's coming. We could take advantage of it sooner with less regulatory overhead than in medicine. Fully trained robots could always be immediately available, no matter where they were needed. Procedures could be higher quality and more reliable, and they could also get more complex.

I'll estimate 40 years between robots and microbots. Mature microbots would be about the size of a grain of sand and would scurry around on little legs. In Avatar 2, we got to see some smallish crab-shaped construction bots. Imagine those getting smaller. Mature microbots would be almost too small to see, but still visible. They could be everywhere. They could be found scattered on or even coating the interior walls of houses, integrated into clothing, etc. They could accumulate into temporary structures like tables or room partitions. They could fetch physical objects that are needed from hidden storage. They could act as pixels for wall screens as well as for general lighting. Microbots could be in your gut, in your peritoneum, in your bloodstream, in your outer ears, in your hair, and temporarily in your mouth. Microbots could allow for gradually improving brain-computer interfaces by positioning themselves in blood vessels of the brain and on the surface of the brain. Each person could have millions, if not billions of microbots, at their disposal. And of course the transition would be gradual in the sense that there would be many intermediate versions between full size robots and mature microbots. But microbots would not be nanobots. Assuming a grain of sand as the size of the smallest microbots, they would still be 20x wider than cells, or 8000x larger in volume than cells. They would be 60x wider than capillaries, so they would be restricted to larger blood vessels and they would cause an embolism if they broke loose. Their arms wouldn't be small enough to do many of the things we associate with nanobots. Microbots certainly wouldn't be able to go inside of cells to do repairs or be able to tunnel through tissue other than as part of a surgical procedure. They would act upon various surfaces of the body rather than within tissues.

Scenarios with microbots are hard for us to imagine. Sci-Fi usually skips over microbots and jumps straight from robots to nanobots, but that's clearly wrong. We must have the intermediate era of microbots and it will be glorious. Even with exponential improvement, it's likely to go on for decades before we ever get close to nanobots. It's a huge step from microbots down to nanobots, so we must include microbots in our future likely scenarios.

I think it's worth spending time thinking about how some very dexterous and smart microbots might allow revival. The current bottlenecks that are stopping us from scanning an entire human brain with electron microscopy are AI and microrobotics. We already have the basic scanning technology, but we lack the advanced AI needed to reassemble all the images and trace all the neurons. We also lack the microrobotics that we need to divide the large blocks of tissue into very small samples. The scenario that I'm imagining to solve this is to use a purpose built device that looks something like a 3-D printer working in reverse. The brain would be embedded in some sort of supportive substance so that it wouldn't distort under its own weight and would then be placed in the device. The scanning head would move in a 2-D plane in an organized manner, much like a 3-D printer. As it went, the microrobotic arms on the head would remove small blocks of tissue. We already have the technology to scan a 1mm x 1mm sample on a multi-beam SEM, so each cube that the head removed could be 1mm in size -- slightly bigger than a grain of sand. This would result in 1.3M cubes. It would have some sort of system for organizing the 1.3M cubes. Each cube would then need to imaged and serially milled 33k times with microrobotics. That would result in 43 billion images that would need to be taken. Prior to imaging with the electron microscope, some additional analysis might need to be performed on each layer to look for certain chemical signatures. This all seems doable and it doesn't require nanobots. So my new prediction for when revival could happen has been moved up to about 60 years from now, or maybe 70 years to become widely available. I'll probably survive for about 40 more years, getting me tantalizingly close to revival.