It's the Monday morning following the opening weekend of the movie Blade Runner 2049, and Eric C. Leuthardt is standing in the center of a floodlit operating room clad in scrubs and a mask, hunched over an unconscious patient.
"I thought he was human, but I wasn't sure," Leuthardt says to the surgical resident standing next to him, as he draws a line on the area of the patient's shaved scalp where he intends to make his initial incisions for brain surgery. "Did you think he was a replicant?"
"I definitely thought he was a replicant," the resident responds, using the movie's term for the eerily realistic-looking bioengineered androids.
"What I think is so interesting is that the future is always flying cars," Leuthardt says, handing the resident his Sharpie and picking up a scalpel. "They captured the dystopian component: they talk about biology, the replicants. But they missed big chunks of the future. Where were the neural prosthetics?"
It's a topic that Leuthardt, a 44-year-old scientist and brain surgeon, has spent a lot of time imagining. In addition to his duties as a neurosurgeon at Washington University in St. Louis, he has published two novels and written an award-winning play aimed at "preparing society for the changes ahead." In his first novel, a techno-thriller called RedDevil 4, 90 percent of human beings have elected to get computer hardware implanted directly into their brains. This allows a seamless connection between people and computers, and a wide array of sensory experiences without leaving home. Leuthardt believes that in the next several decades such implants will be like plastic surgery or tattoos, undertaken with hardly a second thought.
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https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609232/the-surgeon-who-wants-to-connect-you-to-the-internet-with-a-brain-implant/?
