2010, I sat down with a man who had a computer wired into the median nerve of his left arm and asked him if it was worth the risk.

Kevin Warwick did not hedge: You have to take risks to be part of the future, he told me.

Back then it sounded reckless. Warwick had already done what nobody else would do to their own body: a neurosurgical implant linking his nervous system directly to a machine, the first ultrasonic sense ever added to a human being, and the first purely electronic signal sent from one person’s nervous system to another. The other person was his wife, Irena.

Nearly sixteen years later, there is a billion-dollar #BrainComputerInterface industry circling the same territory, complete with funding rounds, FDA trials, and product launches. Warwick got there first, in a lab at Reading, with a surgeon and a spouse willing to go under the knife with him. That is what being the first #Cyborg actually cost.

He also put a question to Ray Kurzweil that has never really been answered: why hasn’t Ray experimented with implant technology yet? Talking about merging with machines is cheap. Getting cut open is not.

We spent an hour on human and artificial intelligence, robotics, God, the beginning of the universe, and the #Singularity. The part that has aged the strangest is not the hardware. It is his line about who gets to shape the future and who just stands there watching it arrive.

I am not going to tell you whether he was right. Listen and decide for yourself.

Full interview here: [ https://snglrty.co/4fuuibl](https://snglrty.co/4fuuibl)

Want to hear Kevin Warwick’s thoughts on the singularity, artificial intelligence, robotics, cyborgs and religion? Check out this singularity podcast.