George W. Bush Is Getting Brain-jacked. An extended discussion of the science policy of the Bush administration, the legacy of Vannevar Bush, and the internal cat-fight between politically appointed neo-luddites and scientists within the government.

In the past three years, the NBIC program has convened hundreds of researchers, entrepreneurs and policy wonks from academia, business, federal agencies and the military to brainstorm what will happen when petaflop chips running expert systems, back-engineered from the hippocampus, can be stuck into the brain as an internal modem using nanowires that are spit out by gene-tweaked extremophile bacteria. The NBIC's initial report stunned even the most optimistic techno-utopians with its predictions of rapid human enhancement, life extension and nano-neural interfaces in the coming decades. Turns out that when people on the cutting edge of the molecular, information and cognitive sciences begin to talk about merging their fields and applying them to extending the human body and brain, things get very transhumanist very fast—nanobots or no nanobots.