14 DAY TRIAL // There's something really ironic about 3D bioprinting of body parts, something that the scientific community seems all too willing to leave unmentioned: it's the perfect way to make all those amazing (or horrifying) stories about clones and robots come true.
Cloning has been the subject of science fiction for ages, and even fantasy fiction if you know where to look. However, no matter how blasé fictional characters were (or weren't) about the subject, real world has a rather dim view of it.
And it's not just because of the tendency of clones to die young, as shown by that unfortunate attempt to clone a sheep. It's because of the reason why the clones exist in-universe (as cattle off which to harvest organs, for example).
I don't really need to rehash all the moral dilemmas that surround the matter of cloning, the soul and everything else involving them. What I'm more interested in is the fact that it's becoming possible to pull it off like in Sci-Fi movies and books.
We'll be implanting 3D printed organs as early as 4 years from now
Sure, it will only be a liver, which is naturally less complex than other organs and also has the ability to regenerate over time, but that's just it: it is an organ we will be able to artificially produce through technology in as little as 4 years.
That's the time frame predicted for the start of human trials in case you were wondering. Since additive manufacturing technology can only improve in the meantime, we can safely assume that other organs won't be hard to create afterwards.
After that, you can be certain that the brain will be the main focus of a large chunk of the scientific community. Especially with 3D printing and bioprinting courses and degrees now being offered by universities.
Eventually, probably not many years down the line, reproducing the brain will be possible. Even scarier is that high-tech scanners will probably be capable of reproducing every neuron in a brain before neurologists actually figure out what each of them does.
That means that 3D bioprinting and scanning could reach the stage where we would be able to 3D print whole brains and, by extension, people while still lacking the understanding of how our nervous systems fundamentally work.
Kind of worrisome really, and you can be sure that some secret mad scientist or other will try to go Frankenstein on us whether we like it or not. Maybe they'll deliberately 3D print a brain and a makeshift body so that they can teach and “raise” it while studying the brain, to finally “understand” how our brain develops as we gain more awareness. Right, moving on.
How this can lead to robots with true AI
It wouldn't be hard really. Just replace the substances in neurons with something else and 3D print a “brain” out of synthetic but conductive materials and voila! Technological noggin.
Now, whether or not you're like me and believe in the existence of a metaphysical side to our self-awareness, there's enough evidence to suggest that the physical brain has sufficient storage capacity and performance to store a consciousness on its own. Or the facsimile of one.
What I'm getting at is that 3D scanning derived from something like MRI could be used to create robot “cortexes” whether or not we actually achieve the understanding of our brain functions by the time we pull that off.
I'm torn between staring in horror and gushing over the possibilities of the creative potential that can be derived from that.