In an interview last year with Motherboard’s Derek Mead, professor Kevin Warwick described an experiment in which he and a team of scientists created a very simple, two-dimensional, living brain of about 100,000 neurons and connected it to robots (a human brain, by contrast, approaches 100 billion).

It’s just a matter of time, he suggests, before scientists can build one in 3-D that’s much bigger. He also thinks most of us will one day be cyborgs to some extent. For these and other reasons, futurists like Ray Kurzweil believe that immortality is only about 40 years away. […]