in it that more or less all came true. And people called them predictions but they really

weren’t predictions. They were extrapolations. The reason I talked for two hours is not because

I was Fidel Castro and I was giving a rally. It’s because I had 15 years of research

stored up and was about to open the media lab and it was real easy to talk about what

we were gonna do and some of it even seemed old hat even though in retrospect people thought,

oh, this is amazingly predictive. 30 years later, they say make a prediction as if I

had made predictions the first time which I hadn’t. So this year I actually did make

a prediction and it is in the prediction category in the sense that it’s not an extrapolation

of work I’ve been doing for 15 years. But it’s part of work that some of my colleagues

have started at the media lab which is really looking at the brain. Not just mapping the

brain but how do you interact with the brain pretty directly. And almost everybody who’s

done that has done it from the outside, you know, with sticking pins and needles or, you

know, EEG or MEG or other ways. And the key to my prediction is the best way to interact

with the brain is from the inside, from the bloodstream.

Because if you inject tiny robots into the bloodstream they can get very close to all

the cells and nerves and things in your brain, really close. So if you want to input information

or read information, you do it through the bloodstream. So by extension – and this

is, you know, why it’s a prediction because it’s by extension, you could in theory load

Shakespeare into your bloodstream and as the little robots get to the various parts of

the brain they deposit little pieces of Shakespeare or little pieces of French if you want to

learn how to speak French. So in theory you can ingest information and that was my prediction.

I won’t be around to see whether it’s true but, you know, like many of these predictions

it doesn’t have to be true as long as it gets people thinking. And there are people

thinking about this and looking at it quite seriously. And I think it’s an area in sort

of synthetic biology and sort of the interface between biology and silicon that is really

what the future’s about. The digital world today is like plastics were 25 years ago.

It’s an important field but kind of over. Digital world is like plastics and the biotech

world is the next phase.