While I was making the broccoli cheddar soup tonight, I decided to put on a YouTube video to listen to. The title of it is “How to Bend Reality to Your Will and Become Unstoppable.” I found it a couple days ago while my brain was being a lefty and wanting to talk computers, so what made me bookmark this video for later was the fact that the host of the show was interviewing someone who was a former hacker turned neuroscientist.

I was intrigued by the leap from computer hacker to brain hacker.

My soup didn’t take long to make tonight since I’m getting very quick with the recipe, so I didn’t get the whole video in. I ended up having to finish the video while I was doing dishes. Well, as usual, the title of the video really has little to do with the actual interview. Some cool things were discussed, but overall, nothing earth shattering. Until toward the end.

Then I started to get chills. The things people are doing right now to work on the human brain is not only amazing, but down-right terrifying. I thought it was pretty scary when I first heard about AI that will actually be able to write books for me just by inputting my current books. That freaks me out. I would stop writing before I let an artificial intelligence write a story for me. Writing is too much of who I am.

Painting on the other hand…

Kidding! I just always come back to the end game question of if we have all this technology serving our needs and don’t even have to do anything like create art anymore (shudder!), what are we going to do? Really! Too many people have issues finding themselves these days and are angry and frustrated at the world. If they can’t find a purpose that give their lives meaning now, what’s going to give our lives purpose in a future where we have no more survival struggles at all? Yes, this is barring any environmental calamities and assuming that everyone on the planet no longer faces starving or medical issues — we’re getting there and we may never have a perfect world that way. Though we could. And I like to dream of a Star Trek utopia rather than a Star Wars dystopia.

In the video, they were talking about life spans of 150+ years and how the mind might no longer be there while the body is functioning. To me, this is one terrible condition (the other being that the mind works while the body doesn’t). But the man being interviewed is currently working at learning how the mind decays so that they can prevent it, or even reverse it. Just amazing.

And terrifying. There are so many scary roads that can go down. I don’t even want to think of them.

At least not outside of a story.

And that has only been one of the things that made me want to go tell stories in this last week. So many stories, so little time.

Although, if I could now expect to write until I’m 150, yeah, I’d take that.

Happy adventuring!