The difference between this and the performance-enhancing drugs is the competition aspect. If people want to enhance their physical abilities just for the sake of moving a piano easier, then that should be fine.

See, for me the similarity between this idea and performance-enhancing drugs is that a polymath is something to marvel at, just like a long-distance runner or whatever. I love knowledge, but even more I love the challenge of learning, the achievement of it.

I know there would be so many advantages to being able to learn quickly and easily. I'm not denying that for a minute. Still, my first reaction is to ask where the challenge would go then. If there is no challenge, I'm not really so interested, I'm afraid.

Oh, and, even more, let me return to this comment:

For example, want to become a virtuoso concert pianist? Download and install that module in your brain–instead of spending 10 years of boring and repetitive practice.

Excuse me? I am a pianist -- not a concert pianist by any means, but a pianist. And if I'd just downloaded all that stuff into my brain, I would not be a pianist, not as I recognise the term. When I sit down to the piano, I'm working off layers and layers of, yes, repetitive practice, and enjoyable mucking around, and however many iterations of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata as a moody teenager (none of those were repetitive, because it's different every time you play it), building on the time when I finally got to the stage where you can play with the phrasing, and the time I finally crawled my way up to half-way capable sightreading through a combination of being able to sight-sing and being able to play by ear (oddly, these days, if I'm sight-singing a complicated passage, I find myself playing the piece on my knee -- kind of the reverse of the way it used to go!), and however many sessions of casual sit-down-and-play-something. Can downloading a module into your brain give you the kind of emotional connection that goes with the dedication required to learn a thing? Well, yes, it probably could, hypothetically -- but that's much too much like the Orgasmatron scenario for comfort. Let's all go live in the Matrix of downloaded experiences, shall we?

I think perhaps I'd rather be me with moderately capable, nothing-to-marvel-at piano skills than download the ability to play like a virtuoso. Of course, it's possible that if you gave me the opportunity I'd try it and like it, but I'm really not sure. The world you suggest has no shape, the boundaries are out of joint. Partly, I have to concede that that's because it's not real and not realised as an idea with any specificity. At any rate, perhaps you have a better understanding of where I'm coming from.

As for the brain chip idea, there is always the problem of retrieving the knowledge. You can't be thinking it all at once, so you have to do it a piece at a time... which means you need a search engine. From there it just gets more complicated...

Anyway, just having all the piano knowledge in the world isn't enough. You still have to practice. I used to be a fairly serious pianist in my youth, and I still remember some tunes as if they were my own phone number. However, I can't play the music very well anymore because my fingers are too weak. I get halfway through and my forearms start to seize up.

It's not just what you know; it's how you apply it that's the most important.

Brains don't work in stored-program fashion; their operations logic is all at the hardware level, as it were, and not abstracted away as with a computer. A CPU uses the same circuits for interpreting inputs from input devices, commanding outputs for output devices, and everything in between; it gets instructions for each set of activities from the memory devices that CPU is connected to. By comparison, a brain has separate sensory areas (input-device interpreting), motor areas (output-device commanding), and everything in between.

So you are right about the difficulty of downloading knowledge and skills into our brains; they are not as abstracted as computers are.

"We'd lose something profound by that — it would sort of be like taking drugs to improve your athletic performance, only worse."

What do you mean by "worse" - I've never had a problem with people taking preformance enhancers at all: if they want to sacrifice a few years of their lives for greater physical preformance right now, I say let them. And ditto for any neuro-enhancing durgs.

As a working academic, I read something to the tune of 10-15 books per week (granted I read rather quickly, though, and I skim or skip over irrelevant parts), in addition to several articles in scholarly journals. The idea that I haven't even scratched the surface of available knowledge can indeed be disconcerting. There are some topics [insert random physics subject here] about which I know virtually nothing.

However, the fact that such information is increasing and becoming more readily available provides a serious boost for my morale. Ebon mentioned that 375,000 books were published in 2004 in English alone, and there are hundreds of thousands more in other languages. It used to be that access to such information was limited to those who were within close proximity of a library (considering the library even had the book in question), but with the Internet one can absorb this information from the comfort of one's own home.

As a relevant yet still diverging comment, I once had a professor who said, "More books were published in 2003 in Spain alone than in the entire Muslim world since the 11th century" (regretfully, I don't have a link to back this up). Another look at how religion tends to discourage the circulation of knowledge.

It's hard to imagine this really happening

I was a kid in the late '40s to early '60s. The world we live in today was science fiction back then; about the only thing missing now is contact with aliens. Oh, and when the first moon landing happened in 1969 I, and many others, believed that by now there would be a permanent base on the moon and there would have been at least one manned mission to Mars.

Don't be surprised if, when you get to my current age (63), you look back at the '00s and think 'Wow, the world was so primitive then' :)

I agree the idea of brain augmentation is highly speculative. But some of the neural scanning that is being done today (including observing people's brains to tell what images they are looking at, or intercepting signals meant for the vocal chords to drive a speech synthesizer) were total science fiction even 10 years ago.

But what about virtualization? What if a circuit were to be installed surgically that was capable of emulating large sections of neural tissue? While hardwired physical neurons are not easily rearranged, simulated virtual neurons could be reconfigured dynamically to present whatever forms of information were desired in the moment. Obviously the actual data would be stored in some sort of biochip hybrid, with a possible wireless connection to the net. Not only would this allow speed learning, silent communication with anyone, anywhere, but it would potentially allow people to tap into other people's experiences.

Again, all very speculative and Matrix-like, but Kurzweil lays out an excellent case for how it would be accomplished, and solid documentation of his time table.

Lynet,

What would we lose? We'd have radical expansion of our capabilities, and then people could choose to focus on further advancement. It wouldn't be like drugs, the performance enhancement would be very real, permanent, subtle, and refined. We'd have the ability to learn from each other's mistakes instead of having to make them all ourselves.

What about learning? Imagine the studious routinely collecting Ph.D.s in 50 subjects. Imagine the average citizen with an IQ of 140 or better. How do you spin that as a bad thing? Want to get rid of religion and superstition? Create a society of geniuses. (Mensa members are far less religious than the general population).

It's hard to imagine this really happening, but who would have predicted the impact of Google in--say--1980.

Basically, if this does not happen, we have to accept the very sobering truth that Ebonmuse laid out--that we will only ever know the tiniest fraction of even human knowledge--which is itself a tiny fraction of all that could be known.

I'm not satisfied with a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction. I want more.

With brain augmentation, everyone should (theoretically) be able to have instant access to all human knowledge. For example, want to become a virtuoso concert pianist? Download and install that module in your brain–instead of spending 10 years of boring and repetitive practice.

We'd lose something profound by that -- it would sort of be like taking drugs to improve your athletic performance, only worse. I don't know if that will become possible, and if it does, I'm sure it would have great advantages, but would there be anything to replace the challenges and achievements that we would lose?