MIT develops synapses that exceed a million times those of the human brain

How will man change? Will he become even more manipulable, like a machine? The discovery by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that it can shock humans

A discovery that has the potential to disrupt the world we know: at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston they have developed a type of artificial analog synapse that exceeds a million times those of the brain. These synapses work by mimicking the connections between human nerve cells but are exponentially more powerful.

If our lives have radically changed with the advent of smartphones, imagine the potential of this new discovery. It will be like moving from a society based on the transport of humans and things with animals to one that uses teleportation to move. Maybe soon you will be able to fly, read minds and control devices from a distance with the power of the mind. We will do it as we drink a glass of water today. All thanks to the grafts of these new technologies in our minds. With a chip in his brain, the man of the future will be bionic. The integration of machines and biology is the way of the future. In fact, one of the most expanding technological sectors today deals with brain implants that integrate human intelligence and artificial intelligence. With the risk, however, that from the outside someone enters our mind and manages it.

There are many dystopian examples in literature and cinema that explain the consequences. In the future, replacing humanity with machines or controllable beings will be more than a movie. But who does not remember “The Manchurian Candidate” by Jonathan Demme, in which the protagonists discover that they have a microchip implanted in the body and someone from the outside controls them in every significant movement.

The applications of the new discovery in learning, industry, medicine, artificial intelligence and robotics are already being evaluated which can replace humans in work and common activities. Progress in this area is impressive.

The synapses used by MIT are made of phosphosilicate glass, as we said, much more powerful than that of a human being.

These new technologies are also interesting on the resource front: allow a significant reduction of energy used with the same computing power. Energy consumption today is more and more of a problem. If we consider that data centers, financial markets, blockchain technologies and large technological structures consume abnormal quantities of electricity, this innovation could radically optimize their consumption.

But it will take at least a couple of years to see its practical use in daily life. Meanwhile, society should grow awareness of the potential and dangers inherent in the new discovery, with public debates also to circumscribe its activity.

It has been done with ethics committees, intellectuals and expert scientists who after years have delimited the use of atomic energy or the possibility of recreating human life in the laboratory, it should also be done with this new incredible invention. If it is not done in this field too, it will be like the advent of the atomic bomb in everyday life, with masses of consumers who will graft technologies into the brain to experience the thrill of new existences but without understanding the risks.

In societies like ours then, always under the political yoke of collective fears and emergency crises, as we have also seen with Covid and with energy today, it will not be difficult for those with a lot of money to create beings and contexts that are even more highly manipulable than the current ones. Even without the synapses that exceed a million times those of the human brain we have seen during Covid how common sense and reasoning can do nothing against the god of money and people are prey to states and large economic groups. Innovations go at a different speed than laws regulate their application in society. But society is made up of people, not machines.

In a global financial capitalism without roots with the territories, with bureaucratic structures that determine the time of life (the State, the military apparatuses, etc …), the system of knowledge and science that is increasingly complex but not very transparent and even less controllable and with the manipulation of new technologies, the risk is the very end of the human being as we have known it for thousands of years.

A revolution, like all very radical changes, can have the potential for tremendous improvement for life or cause limitless devastation.