Implanting a microchip inside the brain to augment its mental powers has long been a science fiction trope. Now, the brain computer interface is suddenly the hot new thing in tech. This spring, Elon Musk started a new company, Neuralink, to do it. Facebook, at its F8 developer’s conference, showed a video of an ALS patient typing with her brain. But earlier to the game was Bryan Johnson, an entrepreneur who in 2013 made a bundle by selling his company, Braintree, to Paypal for $800 million. Last year, he used $100 million of that to start Kernel, a company that is exploring how to build and implant chips into the skulls of those with some form of neurological disease and dysfunction, to reprogram their neural networks to restore some of their lost abilities.

Steven Levy is Editor in Chief at Backchannel. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

But helping to restore a damaged brain is only an entry point for Kernel. Johnson, a 39-year-old from Utah, is looking forward—with almost unseemly enthusiasm—to the day that healthy people can get neural augmentation. He has emerged as one of the most eloquent evangelists of reinventing the human brain. Needless to say, this effort raises lots of questions—the very questions I raised to him in a conversation recently. (It’s been edited for clarity and brevity.) Will his answers make you sign up for a brain computer interface? (Warning: it’s kind of invasive, but Johnson hopes that we might figure out how to do it without major noggin demolition.) Read it and make your own decision—albeit with your obsolete, unmodified brain.

Steven Levy: Why do you want to put in a chip in the brain?

Bryan Johnson: The next frontier of human aspiration is inside our brains. We currently understand the world through our sensory mechanisms, and we will find thousands or millions of Everests as we unlock our brains.

We’ve run out of Everests, and now we have to make them up?

I look at the current set of things that I could potentially do, and I would like more options.

These are things you would like to do but you feel constrained because your brain isn’t powerful enough?

Yes, I feel incredibly constrained in my current configuration. In my ability to process information, to remember it, to consume it, to think about it. Even my imagination—in my ability to contemplate things I’m unfamiliar with. I can only imagine things I’m familiar with.

Couldn’t some of these concerns be addressed by humans working in concert with machine intelligence, without having to change our own brains?

Let me ask you this: What does the human race look like in 50 years or 100 years from now? What does it mean to be a human?

I don’t know the answer. Maybe my brain’s too small.

Humans currently reign supreme on planet Earth, because we are the most powerful form of intelligence. So therefore, we decide who we eat, who we have as pets, who we allow to go extinct, who is saved, who is neutered, who can reproduce. We are currently developing a new form of intelligence in the form of AI that is increasingly capable, whether it’s conscious or not. For humans to be relevant in a matter of decades there is no choice other than to unlock our brains and intervene in our cognitive evolution. If you try to imagine a world where we are happy 30, 40, 50 years from now, there is no version of that future where we have not been able to figure out how to read and write our neural code.

Right now, we haven’t figured that out. What makes you feel that, even within a few decades, we will gain the understanding to do this?

What did we know prior to trying to sequence the genome? What did we know prior to trying to go on the moon?

Probably more than we know now about the brain.