Asked why a company building retinal implants would look at oncology, Hodak reframes the entire body as life support. The brain is the one organ that cannot be transplanted even in principle; the heart, liver and lungs are, in his phrase, support characters. The joke is the argument.
…scale of like hundreds of thousands of patients in the U.S. and Europe. So, for the current version of Freema, it's probably hundreds of thousands of patients. And then the next version, which is going into animal studies now, will be in humans hopefully next year, should expand that to millions.
You said something that surprised me as an intermediate point between vision and fully understanding consciousness. How does oncology or other, like, how do other indications fit into the picture in terms of what you might work on?
…the biology is so difficult, I mean, you've got this like alien nanotechnology that is around us that we are like completely surrounding us that we are completely dependent on that we understand still very poorly. Instead of needing to solve that, are there ways where we can accomplish the same fundamental goals, you know, like using a toolbox that humanity is much more advanced in? And so, I'm going to be ultimately fairly disappointed if I'm murdered by my pancreas. And that I think that's that's the worldview. It's that the thing that matters is the brain. The brain is the computer that gives us this. You could not, we talk about being a brain in a vat or having like these upload thought experiments, but you already that's what the skull is. Like the brain is connected to the environment through a small number of wires, the cranial and spinal nerves. The…
For people who are interested in working at or investing in science, if you are successful, you know, what will be the change the human experience 20 years from now, besides you not worrying about your pancreas as much?
Yeah, I mean, that's it. Like, that's the, there's the, there's a sense, like a fragility that we all live, like there's this jeopardy that we all live under as part of the human condition. And I think that if we're successful, what will happen is that sense of jeopardy will fade. Like we will be…
Being able to preserve yourself and being able to adapt yourself. Swappable parts and substrate
