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How close are we to achieving the transhumanism seen in ‘Years and Years’?

Watching Russell T Davies ’ Years and Years , you’d be forgiven for having a major crisis of conscience. On the one hand, if we’re to take the show’s fictional timeline literally, our seven-year-old self’s dreams have finally been realised: becoming part-cyborg will be possible by 2025. On the other, your adult, more tech-conscious self’s worst nightmares may have just materialised on your TV screen. Findings by a research group of scientists at Harvard and Surrey universities suggest we’re on track to living in the transhumanist world that Davies presents us with in the hugely popular series. The study, published last week in Nature , has seen scientists manufacture “nanoscale probes”, which are used to read intracellular electrical activities from neurons. Their ability to measure electrophysiology (the electric current that runs within cells) means these probes are a huge step towards understanding what Dr Yunlong Zhao of Surrey University called, in an interview with Science Daily recently, “the intersection between humans and machines”. From extras.Anqi Zhang, a PhD student in the Lieber Lab at Harvard who was part of the team, explains: “The ability to read electrical activities from neurons is the foundation of many brain-machine interface applications, such as brain activity mapping and neural prosthetics.” When asked how accurate she thinks Years and Years ’ transhumanism predictions are, she says the “area of brain-machine interfaces will see significant advancement in the next 10 to 15 years, so long as we can address the ongoing limitations of electrode-brain interfaces.”Fast-forward 10 years from today in the show and the government has paid for Bethany Lyons (Lydia West), one of the show’s principal characters, to get a brain implant that enables her to interact directly with the internet; fast-forward 15 and Edith Lyons (Jessica Hynes) has her mind and consciousness uploaded to the family’s futuristic version of an Amazon Alexa . By Davies’ estimation, transhumanism is well and truly established by 2034.Davies, who says he planned to write Years and Years some 20 years ago, told The Verge earlier this month that the most important thing about the series was grounding everything futuristic and technological in the family home, to make it more believable.