The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

Scanning Using Nanobots. Although these largely noninvasive means of scanning the brain from outside the skull are rapidly improving, the most powerful approach to capturing every salient neural detail will be to scan it from inside. By the 2020s nanobot technology will be viable, and brain scanning will be one of its prominent applications. As described earlier nanobots are robots that will be the size of human blood cells (seven to eight microns) or even smaller.44 Billions of them could travel through every brain capillary, scanning each relevant neural feature from up close. Using high-speed wireless communication, the nanobots would communicate with one another and with computers compiling the brain-scan database. (In other words, the nanobots and computers will all be on a wireless local area network.)