Do you know who you are? If so, do you direct your own actions? These are two questions that we ask ourselves when someone asks us about our identities. In the west, individualism is valued. We like to think that we have agency in our own actions. We like to think that our identities are not affected by the world.

Do you know who you are? If so, do you direct your own actions? These are two questions that we ask ourselves when someone asks us about our identities. In the west, individualism is valued. We like to think that we have agency in our own actions. We like to think that our identities are not affected by the world.

There is a chip implanted in my hand. Two years ago, a tattooed man backstage at a Berlin tech show used a syringe to insert the chip. The process was no more painful than having my ear pierced, and just as quick. The chip was the size of a grain of rice and gave me a new way to control my phone, but if I'm honest, I underwent the procedure purely for journalistic reasons. Yes, I'll do just about anything for a story.

The internet is overflowing with tips on how to hack your health. From increasing cognitive function by drinking butter-spiked coffee to tracking sleep, stress, and activity levels with increasingly sophisticated fitness wearables, ours is a culture obsessed with optimizing performance. Combining this ethos with recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, it's practically inevitable that the next frontier in achieving superhuman status lies in the rapidly developing field of brain augmentation. Artificial intelligence has already proven its value in making software more intuitive and user-friendly. From voice-activated personal assistants like Alexa and Siri to smarter app authentication through facial recognition technology, we have reached the point where people are starting to trust that the machines are here to improve our lives.

You probably clicked on this article because the idea of using brain implants to allow artificial intelligence (AI) to read your brain sounds futuristic and fascinating. It is fascinating, but it's not as futuristic as you might think. Before we start talking about brain implants and how to augment the human brain using AI, we need to put some context around human intelligence and why we might want to tinker with it. We floated the idea before that gene editing techniques could allow us to promote genetic intelligence by performing gene editing at the germline. As controversial as it might be, some solid scientific research shows that genetics does play a role in intelligence.

You probably clicked on this article because the idea of using brain implants to allow artificial intelligence (AI) to read your brain sounds futuristic and fascinating. It is fascinating, but it's not as futuristic as you might think. Before we start talking about brain implants and how to augment the human brain using AI, we need to put some context around human intelligence and why we might want to tinker with it. We floated the idea before that gene editing techniques could allow us to promote genetic intelligence by performing gene editing at the germline. As controversial as it might be, some solid scientific research shows that genetics does play a role in intelligence.