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Posthumanism |
I guess Homo erectus
Luddites would
also have whined about 'future concerns'...
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Here's something to chew
on:
There exists a concern that advances in biotechnology will come at a
terrible price - the loss of authentic happiness, the loss of what makes
life meaningful ie. struggle, suffering frailty, finitude, and death.
Yet
this thinking does not appear to square up with what we have already
experienced in the wake of biomedical progress. Do those who use glasses,
insulin injections, wheelchairs, inhalers, oxygen tanks, hearing aids, or
prosthetic limbs feel inauthentic or overcome by a loss of meaning in their
lives?
If I use a calculator, a computer, or the Internet to solve a
problem, do I feel that I have been cheated out of a more authentic
experience enjoyed by my grandparents, who used pen and paper calculation,
visited a library, or mastered the multiplication table?
There is little
evidence for the dour view that we can only be happy when we have earned our
happiness.
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Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford
University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody
else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of
the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his
weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the
Sims.
August 14, 2007
New York Times
By JOHN TIERNEY
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable
assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we
are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most
humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions
created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid.
But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made
of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.
You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat
to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by
using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future
of Humanity Institute at Oxford.
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer
with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that
advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their
evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people
with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power,
that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it
doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5
million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and
if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or
entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be
vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether
they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience
would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual
ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain
that he or she was living in a virtual world.
The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of
simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses,
as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the
technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before
reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to
run the simulations.
“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like
stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they
wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have
better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they
would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact
that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more
likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and
it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance
we’re living in a computer simulation.”
My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better
than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to
produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything
like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life,
SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a
chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as
Cleopatra or Napoleon.
It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer
geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological
question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason
there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of
Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.
A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your
first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s
real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever
posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your
feelings are any less real.
David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says
Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply
a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching
now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if
it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood,
plastic or clay.
You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world —
and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow
on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you
think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for
being a good person.
Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason
University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory
that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation.
(For more on survival strategies in a computer simulation, go to
www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she
might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a
virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of
intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you
finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer,
let’s call him or her (or it).
Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her
creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough
to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they
themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime
Designer?
If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going
on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re
still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably
tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out
the situation.
It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer
upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to
continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world
started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants
apiece.
If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a
computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on
earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world,
but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper,
but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.
It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue
Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game
Over.”
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Life 2.0
The new science of synthetic biology is poised between hype
and hope.
But its time will soon come
The Economist print edition
31 August 2006IN 1965 few people outside Silicon Valley had heard
of Gordon Moore. For that matter, no one at all had heard of Silicon Valley.
The name did not exist and the orchards of Santa Clara county still brought
forth apples, not Macintoshes. But Mr Moore could already discern the
outlines. For 1965 was the year when he published the paper that gave birth
to his famous “law” that the power of computers, as measured by the number
of transistors that could be fitted on a silicon chip, would double every 18
months or so.
Four decades later, equally few people have heard of Rob Carlson. Dr Carlson
is a researcher at the University of Washington, and some graphs of the
growing efficiency of DNA synthesis that he drew a few years ago look
suspiciously like the biological equivalent of Moore's law. By the end of
the decade their practical upshot will, if they continue to hold true, be
the power to synthesise a string of DNA the size of a human genome in a day. |
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At the moment, what passes for genetic engineering is mere pottering. It
means moving genes one at a time from species to species so that bacteria
can produce human proteins that are useful as drugs, and crops can produce
bacterial proteins that are useful as insecticides. True engineering would
involve more radical redesigns. But the Carlson curve (Dr Carlson disavows
the name, but that may not stop it from sticking) is making that possible.
In the short run such engineering means assembling genes from different
organisms to create new metabolic pathways or even new organisms. In the
long run it might involve re-writing the genetic code altogether, to create
things that are beyond the range of existing biology. These are enterprises
far more worthy of the name of genetic engineering than today's tinkering.
But since that name is taken, the field's pioneers have had to come up with
a new one. They have dubbed their fledgling discipline “synthetic biology”.
Truly intelligent design
One of synthetic biology's most radical spirits is Drew Endy. Dr Endy, who
works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to the subject from
engineering, not biology. As an engineer, he can recognise a kludge when he
sees one. And life, in his opinion, is a kludge.
No intelligent designer would have put the genomes of living organisms
together in the way that evolution has. Some parts overlap, meaning that
they cannot change jobs independently of one another. Others have lost their
function but have not been removed, so they simply clutter things up. And
there is no sense of organisation or hierarchy. That is because, unlike an
engineer, evolution cannot go back to the drawing board, it can merely play
with what already exists. Biologists, who seek merely to understand how life
works, accept this. Engineers such as Dr Endy, who wish to change the way it
works, do not. They want to start again.
So Dr Endy has developed an idea invented by Tom Knight, one of his
colleagues at MIT. Dr Knight calls the idea “BioBricks”. His inspiration was
a children's toy called Lego. What makes Lego successful is that any part
can attach to any other via a universal connector. A BioBrick is a strand of
DNA that has universal connectors at each end. BioBricks can thus be linked
together to form higher-level components and also joined into the DNA of a
cell so that they can control its activity.
Dr Endy likes BioBricks because they promise the synthetic biologist the
standardised set of parts that has been one of the advantages enjoyed by the
electronic engineers behind Moore's law. If an engineer wants a particular
component for a job, he can go to a catalogue, find a widget with the right
parameters and order it from a supplier. He does not have to design it
himself. He does not even have to know how it works. Dr Endy thinks
BioBricks can put biologists in the same position.
The DNA of a BioBrick contains a combination of genes that acts as a
standardised component. When translated into protein in a cell, it makes
that cell do something—and that something is often more than just “make more
of protein X”. In particular, Dr Endy is interested in switches and control
systems that regulate other genes. Such switches are the basis of
electronics and he hopes they may one day become the basis of an
industrialised synthetic biology.
At the moment, BioBricks, like Lego, are still a toy. They have been used
for proof-of-principle studies such as taking photographs with films made of
modified bacteria, but not yet for serious applications. But there are a lot
of them around—many in the public domain at MIT's Registry of Standard
Biological Parts. Such “open wetware” is one reason for the emergence of
biohacking (see article).
Whether BioBricks will come to dominate the field remains to be seen. One
difficulty they face is the cussed tendency of biological things to evolve.
An electronic component, once designed, can be turned out reliably in a
factory. BioBricks are bred, rather than made, and that introduces scope for
error. Meanwhile, other researchers are content to work with things that
more closely resemble natural components, although they still assemble them
in unconventional ways.
A new synthesis
One of the leading proponents of this method is Jay Keasling, of the
University of California, Berkeley, who also believes that synthetic biology
will ultimately need standard, well-characterised parts if it is to thrive.
But he is trying to get there via a practical project, rather than by
generating lots of components and waiting for others to think of what to do
with them.
Dr Keasling's project is to do biologically what no chemist has yet managed
to accomplish—to synthesise an antimalarial drug called artemisinin cheaply.
At the moment, artemisinin is a herbal remedy. It is extracted from
Artemisia annua, a type of wormwood, and the best source is in China. Making
artemisinin by standard chemistry requires so many steps that it is
impractical. So Dr Keasling persuaded the Gates Foundation to back his idea
for doing the job using synthetic biology.
For this, he has built a metabolic pathway in yeast cells that synthesises a
chemical called artemisinic acid which chemists can easily convert into
artemisinin. Some of the genes to do this have come from Artemisia, but
others have been created from other sources.
Dr Keasling's project is not the only one to lay down artificial metabolic
pathways. One goal of synthetic biology is to make what is known as
cellulosic ethanol. At the moment, ethanol—whether for wine, beer or fuel—is
made by fermenting sugar or starch. But even in crops such as sugar cane and
maize, which have been bred for their high yields, a lot of the plant is
wasted. Although yeast cannot digest cellulose or lignin, the molecules that
form a plant's skeleton, some bacteria and other species of fungi are able
to do the job. Identifying the genes for the enzymes that do this, modifying
them and assembling them into new pathways would produce systems that could
digest the whole plant and turn it into ethanol. Nancy Ho, of Purdue
University, in Indiana, has already worked out a way to enable yeast cells
to ferment the sugars produced by breaking down cellulose—which natural
yeast cannot do.
This is important stuff. Cellulosic ethanol is the great hope of many
environmentalists since its carbon, unlike that in fossil fuels, comes from
the atmosphere and thus cannot make a net contribution to global warming
when it returns there.
The ultimate proof of the success of synthetic biology, though, would be not
merely an artificial metabolic pathway, but an artificial organism. That is
the goal of Craig Venter. Dr Venter, the man who first sequenced the entire
genome of a living creature (a bacterium) and then went on to run a
private-enterprise rival to the publicly funded Human Genome Project, has
re-invented himself again. This time he is synthesising genomes, rather than
analysing them. Three years ago he made the first viable synthetic virus
from off-the-shelf chemicals. (It is a parasite of bacteria, not humans.)
Now he has a bacterial genome in his sights.
To make the task easier, Dr Venter is first creating what he and Hamilton
Smith, his collaborator at the Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, call
the minimal genome. This is a stripped-down bacterial genome that contains
the smallest set of genes consistent with life in the cushy environment of a
laboratory. Such a genome would have several advantages for synthetic
biologists. First, being small, it would be easier to make. Second, it would
not survive in the big, bad world outside the laboratory, should it chance
to escape. Third, it would not dissipate its biochemical effort on
non-essential tasks. That means it could be used as a platform on which to
bolt commercially useful pathways.
According to Dr Venter, the raw materials for those pathways are abundant.
As he observes, half the mass of living organisms on the planet is made of
bacteria and these bacteria are divided into zillions of species with
countless unidentified genes. For the past couple of years he has been
sampling the oceans and collecting bacterial genes. He has identified about
6m.
Among them are, for example, 20,000 genes for hydrogen-metabolising
proteins. That is of particular interest, since Dr Venter sees synthetic
biology as a source of new energy-generating technologies—and he has the
backing of America's Department of Energy to prove the point. He has also
found numerous genes for versions of rhodopsin. In vertebrates this protein
is found in retinal cells, where it transduces the energy of light into a
nerve signal to the brain. What it is doing in so many bacteria is not
known, though one possibility is signalling how deep they are in the ocean
as a consequence of how dark it is. Whatever the cause, the energy
conversion that rhodopsin brings about is also of interest.
It's life, Jim, but not as we know it
Dr Venter reckons he will be able to synthesise a working bacterial genome
from scratch within two years. More complex genomes, of the sort that make
plants, animals and fungi, will take longer. But they, he thinks, should be
possible within a decade. Even this definitive erasure of the distinction
between the living and non-living worlds is not, however, the most radical
idea in synthetic biology. Some people want to go beyond the toolkit that
evolution has provided and create biological systems that work with a
chemistry that is not found in natural living things.
Biology's operating system relies on two sorts of molecule: nucleic acids
and amino acids. Nucleic acids (DNA and its cousin, RNA) act as information
stores. The information they store is how to assemble amino acids into
proteins, which are chains of linked amino acids. Proteins then go on to do
the work of sustaining life. They manufacture other sorts of biological
molecules, such as fats and sugars. They process energy. They provide
structural support for cells.
One of the recurrent principles of evolution is “if it ain't broke, don't
fix it”. That is why the kludges Dr Endy is trying to eliminate have endured
across the millennia. Once the nucleic acid-amino acid operating system came
into existence it could never be “fixed” into anything else by evolution,
because the immediate consequences would have been so serious. But that does
not mean it cannot be changed by an intelligent designer, and a number of
such people are looking into how this might be done.
One obvious improvement would be to increase the number of amino acids that
can be assembled into proteins. At the moment only 20 are used routinely in
biology, but chemists can make thousands of others. Proteins containing
those “non-biological” amino acids would have novel properties, and some of
those properties might be useful. That, at least, is the thinking behind the
attempt by Lei Wang, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, to
extend the amino-acid parts set. Dr Wang's starting point is the redundancy
of the genetic code used by nucleic acids. This code is spelled out in the
genetic “letters” A, C, G and T, which correspond to chemical sub-units of
nucleic acids. The letters are grouped into three-letter “words” known as
codons, meaning that there are 64 of them. All but three of the codons
correspond to particular amino acids, and the order of the codons in the
nucleic acid corresponds to the order of the amino acids in the protein. The
remaining three are signals that the protein is complete.
But, with more codons than amino acids, many amino acids have more than one
codon to describe them. There is also a superfluity of stop signals. Dr Wang
has managed to reassign one of the stop codons in E. coli, the bacterial
workhorse of geneticists, to recognise an unnatural amino acid. This can now
be incorporated into proteins made by the bacterium.
Peter Carr of MIT and Farren Isaacs of Harvard Medical School have an even
more ambitious plan. They intend to recode E. coli completely, eliminating
the redundant codons. They have settled on one codon for each natural amino
acid and one for the stop signal and plan to go through the bacterium's
entire genome replacing alternative codons with their chosen ones. The idea
is that the cleaned up bacterium will be more efficient. That remains to be
seen; natural selection has been working on E. coli for a long time, so
whether two intelligent designers can do a better job is questionable. But
if their new bacterium is at least viable, it will have 43 codons that can
be re-assigned to other tasks.
The debate evolves
Where all this will lead is anybody's guess. But synthetic biologists
themselves are aware of the risks. The most obvious is that somebody,
whether a malicious biohacker or a political terrorist, will do something
deliberately nasty. The other risk is that something will escape
accidentally.
No technology is risk free, but synthetic biology has the twist that its
mistakes can breed. Today the risks are not great. As David Baltimore, the
president of the California Institute of Technology, observes, “nature is a
very tough critic”. Any organism modified in a laboratory is unlikely to
make it in the outside world in competition with creatures toughened up by
natural selection. Nevertheless, as knowledge increases, so will the risk
that something truly nasty might be unleashed.
To avoid that and the opposite problem of hasty legislation to curb their
activities, researchers are trying to get their retaliations in first by
promoting public debate. Their historical model is the Asilomar conference
of 1975, when the first biotechnologists met to agree on self-denying
ordinances that went a long way towards establishing their credentials as
responsible and trustworthy people. Despite initial fears, biotechnology has
not, up to now, caused any serious problems.
A recent meeting of biosynthesists in Berkeley issued a discussion document;
the Sloan Foundation has paid for a report, coming out soon, on the risks
and social implications of synthetic biology. So far, perhaps surprisingly,
the wider public has shown little interest. Perhaps it should.
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The next big bang: Man meets machine
In science-fiction fantasies, the melding of organic matter
and digital technology usually takes human form, from Steve Austin's
six-million-dollar bionics to the replicants running amok in "Blade Runner"
to the Terminator.
By Staff, TheDeal.com
May 29 2006
Yet research on multiple fronts in digital technology, biotechnology and
nanotechnology may, over the next half century, alter the way we think about
computers and information, and our relationship to them. With these changes,
bionic body parts won't seem so far-fetched as we increasingly develop ways
to integrate high-tech materials into our mortal flesh.
And the reverse is true as well. Researchers are now looking to biological
materials such as bacteria, viruses, proteins and DNA to replace mechanical
parts in computers. And as the age of genetic engineering matures,
scientists are already borrowing techniques from software developers to
build libraries of genetic information.
All of these overlapping strands of scientific inquiry are known
colloquially as "BANG," which stands for bits, atoms, neurons and genes.
"All these things are converging because biology, nanotech and organic
chemistry are running together," says Mark Bunger, an analyst with Lux
Research. "The boundaries are really getting sketchy."
Some of the advances are in the earliest phases of research and won't
produce actual products for years, if at all. But some of these concepts
have quietly been with us for years. Sixty thousand people worldwide, for
example, have cochlear implants, surgically implanted devices that do
electronically what the ear can no longer do naturally--transform vibrations
into signals the brain interprets as sound. Prosthetic limbs are
increasing in sophistication. And now, tech applications are making their
way into other parts of the human body.
Mind control
One of the best examples from this new world where man meets machine, and
biology and digital technology come together with stunning results, occurred
in an unassuming young man from the suburbs south of Boston.
Matthew Nagle was a normal American guy who played football in high school
and loved his local teams. A few years after graduation, he was looking into
a job with the U.S. Postal Service--until a July night in 2001 when he was
knifed in the neck during a fight at the beach. The blow severed his spinal
cord and left him paralyzed from the neck down.
Young, optimistic and otherwise healthy, Nagle at age 24 volunteered to be a
human guinea pig--the first recipient of an implant developed at Brown
University. Nagle spent a year connected to the BrainGate system, with a
chip the size of a lentil resting on a part of his brain that controls motor
functions. The chip, 16 millimeters square with 100 gold spikes on it, was
sensitive enough to pick up Matt's brain activity when he thought about
movement.
The chip was connected to a cable that emerged from the top of Matt's skull
and into a contraption that resembled devices from "The Matrix" movies. In
those films, Keanu Reeves is hooked up to a computer from a box in the back
of his neck, which downloads intelligence into him. ("Whoa," he says upon
waking. "I know kung fu.") Nagle's connection went the other way; the
implant uploaded brain signals into a software program that, with some
tweaking, learned to interpret what they meant.
Here's how it works: When the patient's neurons fire, electrodes pick up the
electrical activity; when the neurons are firing well, they generate
electrical "spikes." The software reads these spikes as "movement
intention."
Elizabeth Razee, a spokeswoman for Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems,
which ran the BrainGate trial, describes the process. "When you want to move
your arm up and to the left, for example, the neurons on your motor cortex
actually fire in a specific sequence. The computer software reads that
intention and translates it into cursor action on the screen 'up and to the
left.'"
Nagle quickly learned how to control an on-screen cursor and other visual
interfaces, such as a "Pong" paddle, with his mind. The footage is surreal.
Nagle sits immobile in his wheelchair, speaking with the aid of a ventilator
and playing "Pong" or "Tetris" or changing channels on a TV.
Nagle's year with the BrainGate ended last fall, and the implant has now
been removed, but Cyberkinetics provided archive video and interviews with
Nagle. "It's kind of a trip to think that my brain signals were controlling
a mouse," he says. "Who knows, in two or three years, they might put it back
in. I'd do it all over again. It did a lot of good."
Lou Gehrig's disease
Cyberkinetics now has another spinal cord patient using BrainGate, but
unlike Nagle the new patient has chosen to remain anonymous. The company
says the next step is to test the system with patients suffering from
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease,
named after the New York Yankee who retired in 1939 after his diagnosis and
died two years later.
ALS patients slowly get "locked" into their own bodies. They remain
cognitive, but their muscle and motor functions are cruelly stripped away,
including the ability to communicate with the outside world, leaving only
their hearing and vision intact. Many die because they can no longer
breathe.
Researchers in Boston are recruiting patients for the BrainGate ALS trials,
but with the leap in complexity from spinal cord injury, or SCI, to ALS,
success is far from assured. "ALS patients often come to me and say, 'I've
learned about (BrainGate), why aren't we doing this?'" says the ALS
Association's science director, Lucie Bruijn. "You have to appreciate that
with SCI. There's an injury in one area, (but) then there's not much
progression. ALS is diffuse. It affects motor neurons throughout the body,
and it's progressive."
One ALS specialist who advised on the design of the upcoming BrainGate trial
says applying the technology to fight ALS is much more of a leap into the
unknown. Primate studies that may give guidance aren't possible with ALS,
says Dr. Merit Cudkowicz of Partners HealthCare System. "They can model
spinal cord injury in monkeys, but no one will develop primate models for
ALS. It's such a horrible disease. There's no shortcut to going straight to
people."
Hundreds of researchers around the world are working on various aspects of
this brain-computer interface, including noninvasive systems such as caps
full of electrodes that pick up brain activity through the skull. Prominent
participating institutions include Duke University's Nicolelis Lab, the
state of New York's Wadsworth Center in Albany and the Cleveland Clinic. In
Europe, the Graz University of Technology in Austria has a brain-computer
interface lab. In Japan, where ALS patients are living longer and
progressing more deeply into the "locked in" phase, corporations such as
Hitachi have joined forces with university researchers.
Biocomputing
Less miraculous than helping paralyzed people use mind control, but just as
far-reaching, is the future of computers themselves. Various research
disciplines, each in itself a vast and complex area of knowledge, are
looking ahead to a day when we reach the physical limitations of current
computers and their components: silicon chips, metal batteries, cathode-ray
monitors.
Some of these limitations come from the materials themselves. Silicon and
other semiconductors begin to lose key properties, such as temperature
control, as components shrink. But other constraints are a function of the
interface between humans and computers. Anyone who has suffered from carpal
tunnel syndrome or dry, aching eyes from reading computer monitors too long
knows there's room for improvement on the interface front.
To delve deeply into the biological inroads researchers are making into each
layer of the computing "stack" would fill textbooks. But to provide an
overview of advances in each layer, we'll follow the example of analyst Mark
Bunger, who co-authored a report last year for Forrester Research called
"Biochemical Computing."
First, what could replace the semiconductor? Several labs are working on the
inherent computational power of our natural world. The basic building blocks
of life--DNA, enzymes, proteins--process instructions to carry out
incredibly complex biological tasks. With our nascent ability to manipulate
these molecular structures, could we effectively exploit them to carry out
these operations ourselves?
"Like the carefully orchestrated molecular processes that occur within
living cells, biomolecular computation can in principle occur autonomously,
without the need for any external intervention during the computation,"
writes Erik Winfree, a professor at the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena, Calif. "Being able to design and understand such systems is our
ultimate goal."
In addition to Winfree, work by Drew Endy at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and others has led to an open-source biotech project called
BioBricks. The idea: to build a library of biological components that can be
used to create synthetic organisms.
For-profit companies are starting to tap into this idea, too. Craig Venter,
the scientist who raced the U.S. government to crack the human genome, has a
new company that aims to re-create basic genetic components from bacteria
and other sources. It's akin to the way software programmers have access to
sophisticated libraries of code and tools when they build applications for a
specific operating system.
Memory and storage
As recent headlines about Google and the National Security Agency
underscore, the need to store and sort data for all kinds of purposes is
growing at a 40 percent annual compound rate, according to Forrester. As
cameras become ever more ubiquitous--built into phones, monitoring street
corners or orbiting the globe--a flood of still and video images will join
the data mix.
At some point, the magnetic storage media of disk and tape will be tapped
out. Some of the most far-out bioinformatic research is taking place in the
field of DNA storage. DNA, of course, is the ultimate storage device. Each
cell in your body has a complete copy, which stores 3 billion base pairs.
Instead of strings of zeroes and ones, DNA stores information in strands
of adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine. That's 6GB of storage per cell.
And people have a hundred trillion cells in their body, which makes
living things the world's most redundant storage devices.
DNA is also inert, so unlike a hard drive, bits of it can stick around for
years. Just ask a forensic scientist investigating a long-cold crime scene.
Storing our home videos in DNA, however, will take quite a bit of genetic
engineering, so don't hold your breath. But at least two laboratories are
working on the problem: the biocomputation project at the U.S. Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the same folks who first cooked
up the Internet; and the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory.
Robo-grunts
Today the frontier of the brain-computer interface is being pushed as a
remedy for paralysis, but the military also is interested in the technology
for use in able-bodied soldiers who will be able to control machines
remotely.
The Air Force, for example, has long been interested in what it calls
"alternative control technology" to allow its pilots to fly planes
hands-free. DARPA is running or funding several projects, including work at
Duke's Nicolelis Lab similar to the Cyberkinetics' BrainGate, on that theme,
and to develop exoskeletons to enhance battlefield performance.
Whether drastic procedures such as invasive brain implants ever reach beyond
the military into the mass market is anyone's guess. But don't underestimate
the determination of otherwise healthy people to augment their bodies in all
manner of once-unbelievable ways. Indeed, with the ubiquity of personal
devices on the streets these days, it's surprising no one's tried to have
his cell phone or iPod directly implanted under the skin. That would do away
once and for all with fumbling about in your bag or the fear of leaving
those devices behind.
Implants or not, the way we interact with computers is in dire need of a
rethink, as the digital elite might say. Our keyboards and mice make our
hands hurt, our monitors give us headaches and double vision, our desk
chairs reinforce our bad posture. On the whole, the organic constituents of
our bodies and the inert materials of our computers continue to remain more
adversarial than complementary. It's too soon to say when this will change,
but we can be sure that change it will.
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A ‘Singular’ Man, Ray Kurzweil Aims for
Human Omnipotence
Drake Bennett
THE BOSTON GLOBE
Tuesday, September 27, 2005.
Kurzweil Technologies takes up two floors of a low office building in
Wellesley Hills, near where the Charles River crosses and then recrosses
Route 128. In the reception area are a vintage Thomas Edison dictation
machine and a large flat-screen monitor on which a computer program draws
angular, cartoon-like portraits. Across from the entrance sits an alarmingly
lifelike man made of wax, bearded and brandishing a pipe as if in
conversation.
Ray Kurzweil ’70, the company’s founder, is an inventor, and has been one
for as long as he can remember. “When I was 7 or 8 my inventions actually
began to work,” Kurzweil told me recently in his large, cluttered office.
“I’d build these robotic devices, like a theater that would move scenery and
props and characters in and out of view by elaborate mechanical linkages.”
He was still a high school student when, in 1964, he created a computer that
composed music in the style of Chopin, Mozart, and other great composers. In
the early 1970s he invented the first flatbed scanner and the first
practical character-recognition software, paving the way for everything from
digital photography and graphic design to online newspaper archiving.
Combining those two technologies with a text-to-speech synthesizer (another
of his inventions), he made the Kurzweil Reading Machine. He sold the very
first one to Stevie Wonder — for whom he then developed the first music
synthesizer able to fool professional musicians into thinking they were
listening to real instruments. In 1987 his company Kurzweil Applied
Intelligence was the first to market large-vocabulary speech-recognition
software.
By any measure, Kurzweil has had an exceptional career. Now, however, he has
a new project: to be a god. And not just because he thinks he can live
forever. Within decades, he predicts, he will be billions of times more
intelligent than he is today, able to read minds, assume different forms,
and reshape his physical environment at will. So will everyone. Today’s
human beings, mere quintessences of dust, will be as outmoded as Homo
Erectus.
All this, Kurzweil believes, will come about through something called The
Singularity. Popularized more than a decade ago by the mathematician,
computer scientist, and science fiction novelist Vernor Vinge, who borrowed
the term from mathematics and astrophysics, it refers to the future point at
which technological change, propelled by the explosive growth of artificial
intelligence, will accelerate past the point of current human comprehension.
In Vinge’s prevision, once artificial intelligence surpasses human
intelligence there will be no turning back, as ever more intelligent
computers create ever more superintelligent offspring.
Among the programmers, scientists, and philosophers concerned with the
larger contours of technological evolution, the term quickly caught on. The
Singularity became an axis around which debates on technology, human nature,
genetic enhancement, and the future of consciousness all turned. Figures
like Marvin Minsky and Hans Moravec, the artificial intelligence pioneers,
and K. Eric Drexler, the father of nanotechnology, took it up.
Today Ray Kurzweil is the most radical and most visible prophet of The
Singularity. In talks, public debates, articles, postings on his website,
and in a series of increasingly provocative books — The Age of Intelligent
Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human
Intelligence (1999), Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
(2005) — he has done more than any other thinker to make the case for both
the desirability and the imminence of The Singularity. According to Doug
Lenat, a leading expert on artificial intelligence, “Ray is one of the few
people who can step back and see the big picture for what it means for our
species and for the planet.”
This week Kurzweil has a new book out, with the self-consciously millennial
title The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking). It is
the most detailed brief he has yet written for the nearness of the
unimaginably strange future, and it arrives with approving blurbs from
Minsky and Bill Gates (“Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting
the future of artificial intelligence,” writes the Microsoft founder.) At a
time when political debates over the ethics of stem cell research, genetic
modification, cloning and even nanotechnology are growing at once more
fervent and more complicated, Kurzweil offers a vision of technology as
destiny, of transformative change that has slipped the bonds of politics,
culture, and — for many — credulity.
That his predictions make moot most of the cultural norms and physical
limits of today’s world is, he believes, only a testament to the power of
the forces he describes. To his many critics, however, Kurzweil is simply
spinning fairy tales, preaching transcendence but propagating ignorance.
Opposing the linear
Arrayed around Kurzweil’s office and in the hallways outside are a few of
his inventions. When I asked, he readily showed them off. He had an old
Kurzweil Reading Machine flatly declaim the opening of the Gettysburg
Address. He played the first few measures of a Beethoven piano sonata on an
early-model Kurzweil synthesizer, stumbled, started over, stumbled again,
then switched to Gershwin. He arranged a demonstration of a pocket reading
machine for the blind that he plans to roll out in January. He told me about
FatKat, his artificial-intelligence investment program: Over the past two
years, he claims, it has brought in stock market returns of 80 to 100
percent.
Kurzweil is compact and trim, with full cheeks, a small smile, and a
knot-like nose drooping toward a broad chin. The tone of his voice, deep and
deliberate, is somewhat at odds with his eyes, which narrow and furiously
blink as he talks. He is 57 years old, nearly the age at which his father
died of a heart attack. According to a battery of controversial tests
administered by Terry Grossman, the anti-aging expert who co-wrote Fantastic
Voyage, Kurzweil has not aged appreciably in the past 17 years.
Every day, Kurzweil takes hundreds of nutritional supplement pills, and once
a week he takes several others intravenously. He is, as he puts it,
“reprogramming my biochemistry” and claims in so doing to have conquered his
Type 2 diabetes. More importantly, he insists, he is stretching his natural
lifespan until either genetic therapies, microscopic “nanobots”
(hypothetical robots on the scale of single atoms and molecules that
Kurzweil believes will be able, among many other things, to take over some
of the vital functions of the human body), or simply the ability to download
one’s mind onto a computer make immortality a reality.
What links all of Kurzweil’s creations is the concept of pattern
recognition: recreating the human ability to distinguish signal from noise.
As he sees it, the predictions he’s making are simply pattern recognition
applied to history.
The pattern he sees is a simple one: He calls it the law of accelerating
returns. To explain, Kurzweil uses the example of Moore’s Law, the storied
1965 prediction by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that the power of computer
chips would double roughly every two years. In 1972 there were 2500
transistors in an Intel chip, in 1974, 4500, and by 2004 there were 592
million.
For Kurzweil, however, the explosive power of exponential growth goes far
beyond transistors: Human technological advancement, the billions of years
of terrestrial evolution, the entire history of the universe, all, he
argues, follow the law of accelerating returns. He has put a team of
researchers to work gathering technological, economic, historical, and
paleontological data. All of it, he claims, graphs neatly onto an
exponential plot, starting out slowly, then nosing sharply upward through
the “knee of the curve” into higher order and greater complexity, arcing
toward infinity.
“Ultimately,” he promises in The Singularity Is Near, “the entire universe
will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the
universe. We will determine our own fate rather than have it determined by
the current ‘dumb,’ simple machinelike forces that rule celestial
mechanics.” How he is not sure, but he trusts his math.
At such moments, Kurzweil’s predictions have the ring of eschatology, of
half-cocked end-times rapture. For him, though, it’s surreal to hear people
talk about the size of the Social Security shortfall in 2042 — by then, he
believes, advances in nanotechnology will allow us to ward off disease and
senescence and to manufacture all the goods we want for a pittance. By then,
in other words, aging and poverty may hardly exist and people may not retire
or even work in a way that’s recognizable to us.
For Kurzweil, stubbornly linear habits of mind explain why, for example, so
few neuroscientists share his conviction that we will soon be able to
reverse-engineer the brain. “A lot of scientists,” he told me, “Nobel
Prize-winners included, take a linear perspective. They just intuitively do
the mental experiment of what will it take to achieve certain goals at
today’s rate of progress, with today’s tools.” Kurzweil points to the
skepticism that greeted his forecast, in 1990, that in as few as nine years
a computer would beat the world chess champion. He was too conservative, as
it turned out: Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997.
|
In Search of the Sixth Sense
In this expanded interview transcript, inventor Ray Kurzweil
discusses birth, death, and the potential offered by non-biological thinking
processes.
By: Lucas Conley
March 2005
Fast Company: First off, without death, CEOs will never give up their jobs.
There won’t be any succession plans.
Ray Kurzweil: I don’t think we need to kill people off to provide
opportunity for new leadership and creativity. The marketplace of ideas and
technologies is going to expand -- it has been for years. Look at the
computer industry. 60 years ago it was a handful of research projects, and
now it’s a trillion-dollar industry.
FC: But biotech? Who’s to say how quickly it will advance?
Kurzweil: A lot of people say you can’t really tell the future, and there
are certain things that are hard to predict. What will Google’s stock be
three years from now? That’s hard to predict. But if you ask me what it will
cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2010 or the cost to move a megabyte
of data wirelessly in 2015, those things turn out to be remarkably
predictable.
FC: To the point that we can program our own biology?
Kurzweil: Information technology is affecting almost every field. We’re now
understanding biology as information processing; we’re learning to
understand the processes underlying these biological pathways. Whereas drug
discovery used to be literally that, discovering drugs, which is to say
finding something that happened to work. Now we’re entering an area where we
actually understand the exact sequence of biological events. We can
intervene very precisely by blocking one key enzyme, one key step.
FC: Alright, before we go any further, tell me about your new book.
Kurzweil: It’s an urgent message to my baby boomer peers, 99% of whom are
oblivious to this perspective. People have a very conventional sense of the
cycle of life. They just don’t have a sense that they could master the
biology that’s controlling their progression towards disease and aging.
We’re well along in understanding and reverse engineering the dozen or so
biological processes that describe aging. It’s not too late for baby boomers
to reverse those processes. We have the tools right now to slow down aging
sufficiently so that most of us can remain in good shape until we do have
the tools. My view is that I’m reprogramming my biochemistry the way I’d
reprogram my computers. I’m measuring 60 different levels on a regular
basis. It’s definitely working; I would have heart disease otherwise.
The common wisdom is that health is 80% genetics and 20% lifestyle. And
that’s true if you take the conventional watered-down approach. If you’re
aggressive, you can overcome, well, I wouldn’t say anything -- but almost
anything.
FC: Would you want to be immortal if the opportunity presented itself?
Kurzweil: Well, I think the opportunity is presenting itself. Our mortality
is something that should be in our hands; it’s something I want in my hands.
Science and technology are accelerating. I believe we’ll demonstrate a mouse
that doesn’t age within approximately a decade. And within a decade of that
we’ll translate that into human therapies.
FC: Birth and death are nice bookends. How will removing them change our
philosophy of life?
Kurzweil: It’s already changing. There are lots of people in their 60s who
look sexy, who are intellectually vital, who continue to contribute. We’re
in an era where people’s contributions are primarily intellectual. Later in
life, people have accumulated experience and wisdom, so they’re very much in
a position to contribute to society. Our perception of someone 65 earlier in
the century was very different. Life expectancy was 37 in 1800. It was 55 in
1900. Now it’s pushing 80. We continually push that back and I think it’s
going to change very quickly as we get more powerful tools.
We can talk poetically about how aging is natural, but the reality is if you
visit an old-age home you see people who’ve lost their loved ones and have
lost their faculties. It’s really a tragic situation and it’s not something
I desire. I want to keep my faculties.
FC: What about the costs?How is society going to support the cost of all
these people?
Kurzweil: We’ll be creating a great deal of wealth. Not just in dollars, but
also in what a dollar can buy. We have 50% deflation in information
technology; you can buy the same digital camera today for half the price it
was 12 months ago. Same specs. Go out to 2020, what you can buy in terms of
information for a dollar will be quite vast. With nanotechnology we’ll be
turning information into a wide range of products -- including food -- with
very inexpensive materials.
FC: When will people choose to stop aging?
Kurzweil: The killer app for nanotechnology is nanobots. Some will be in the
environment, cleaning up, providing energy. Some will be involved in
automated manufacturing. Some will be in our bodies, keeping us healthy from
the inside. Destroying pathogens, getting rid of toxins, killing cancer
cells. It will be routine.
FC: Nanofood?
Kurzweil: Making sure our bloodstream has all the nutrients it needs
regardless of what we eat. We’ll ultimately disconnect the sensual and
social pleasures of eating from the biochemical task of keeping an optimum
set of nutrients in our bloodstream.
We’ve already separated the biological purpose of sex from the social and
sensual aspects of it. We’ll discover the opportunity to express ourselves
in different ways. We’ll have the opportunity to be different people. It’s
one of the features of virtual reality. I demonstrated this with
contemporary technology at TED 2001. I went on stage. I was wearing sensors
under my clothing. Computers picked up on my movement, and on a big 12-foot
screen in real time it created a pretty life-like animation of a young
woman, Ramona. And my voice was transformed to a woman’s voice. It looked
like Ramona was giving the demonstration. I sang "White Rabbit". Then my
14-year-old daughter got up, and her body was transformed to Richard Saul
Wurman. Warner Bros. heard about this and Al Pacino winds up doing exactly
what I did in Samone. We have technologies today that do that to a limited
extent. Makeup. Fashion. I actually found it to be a profound experience.
Once we put on the sensors and got all the equipment going, I was doing this
and looking at myself in the cyber mirror. Instead of seeing what I usually
see in the mirror I saw myself as someone else. It was a liberating
experience. And we do have these other personalities in ourselves that we’d
like to express. Couples could turn themselves into the other and get some
sense of what it’s like to be someone else. A lot of the misunderstanding in
the world is that we don’t see ourselves in other people’s shoes. Personal
relationships. Education. A student could actually be Ben Franklin in a
virtual constitutional conference instead of just dressing up. A lot of
psychological exploration. Certainly entertainment and games. I think we’ll
realize that we like expressing ourselves in different ways. We do that to a
limited extent. We dress up differently. We put on a tuxedo for one event or
blue jeans for another event. We’re changing our appearance a little bit.
But we’ll be able to go beyond clothing and fashion and hairstyle and
makeup.
FC: Will people begin to develop distributed intelligence?
Kurzweil: One of the ways in which our biological intelligence is limited is
that we have only limited ways of hooking up our intelligence to others. We
have some ways. We have the Internet, language, books, magazines. We have
been able to pool human intelligence across individuals. Now that we have
computers and the Internet to gather our knowledge and allow us to search
through our knowledge, our ability to do intellectual achievements has
grown. But we still can’t hook up the resources of one brain to another.
Computers can do that. You can take a network of 10,000 computers and they
can create one supercomputer and very quickly share knowledge and data and
have all the different processes working on the same problem. Then they can
be made separate again.
That’s one of the profound benefits of non-biological intelligence, that it
can pool its intelligence. I call that falling in love. Human beings, we can
kind of merge our thinking with another person. We call that falling in
love. But our ability to do that is subtle and fleeting and not something we
can control very easily, whereas machines can do that very easily. My view
is we will develop a non-biological component of our thinking as we begin to
introduce non-biological processes into our brains. We’re in the very early
stages of that today. There are people walking around in New York who are
cyborgs. They have computers in their brains. For example, the FDA-approved
implant for Parkinson’s disease. These are people whose portion of the brain
was destroyed by this disease. They have this implant. The implant actually
does what those biological neurons used to do. The neurons that are nearby
are getting signals from the electronic device just as they used to get
signals from the biological neurons that were working. And they’re perfectly
happy to get the signals from the electronic device. This hybrid of
biological and non-biological components works perfectly well. And in fact
the latest generation of this particular implant allows downloadable
software from outside the patient. So you can actually download a software
upgrade from your neural implant from outside. This is a very early stage --
and it requires surgery -- but ultimately we’ll be sending nanobots, which
will have computational resources and communication. We’ll send billions of
them through the capillaries of the brain. They’ll be able to communicate
wirelessly, non-invasively with our biological neurons. If you go out to
2030, say, and talk to a person of biological origin, they’re going to have
a lot of non-biological processes running in their brain. As you interact
with them, you’ll be interacting with someone who’s a hybrid of
non-biological and biological intelligence. We know that biological
intelligence is pretty fixed in its architecture. Today, we have
approximately 10^26 calculations per second in the humans species. 50 years
from now, the power of our biological thinking will still be 10^26 power.
It’s not going to grow. Non-biological intelligence basically doubles every
year. The crossover point will be in 2020s. You get to the 2030s and 2040s,
the non-biological portion of our thinking is going to be millions of times
more powerful than the biological portion. So if you talk to a person of
biological origin, the fast majority of their interacting is going to be
non-biological.
FC: You say "a person of biological origin" almost as if to imply that there
might be people of non-biological origin?
Kurzweil: If the biological portion is becoming fairly insignificant, some
people won’t necessarily have one. And we’ll have AI operating at human
levels. My position is that by 2029 computers will pass the Turing test,
which is to say they’ll be indistinguishable from biological intelligence.
But its not going to be a clear distinction, because there’s going to be
biological people with non-biological processes running in their brain,
there’s going to be non-biological computers that act human because they’re
based on the reverse engineering of the human brain. Even that in my view is
derivative of human intelligence. It’s the expression of the human
civilization. These are not intelligent machines coming from outer space,
invading the planet. It’s emerging from within our human civilization.
Civilization is already a biological / non-biological hybrid. We do
fantastic things that would be impossible without our technology. It’s the
technological portion that’s exploding exponentially. We’ll have human-like
intelligences that don’t have a biological substrate.
FC: How would distributed technology be manifested? Teams upload and
download information with each other?
Kurzweil: We have very efficient ways of sharing information between our
personal computers now. Our personal computers are outside our bodies and
brains, but just barely. I talked to a woman recently who said her son’s
personal computer may as well be inside his brain because it’s an extension
of him, and he carries it everywhere he goes. When she comes in the room,
she’s just another window because he’s got six windows open on his screen
and she’s standing there in the doorway, which is another window. And he’s
timesharing between her and the other windows. By early in the next decade
we won’t be carrying around these physical objects. Images will be written
directly onto our retinas from our eyeglasses or contact lenses and the
electronics will be woven into our clothing. We’ll have very high-speed
wireless connection at all times. And then it will make its way inside our
bodies and brains. It will be a very gradual, incremental process. The way
we share information now very fluidly between our personal computers will
obviously also happen when these computer processes are running inside our
brains. It will be very fluid.
FC: So when will we start seeing something like this?
Kurzweil: But it's affected already. I have people around the country, and
it's only a subtle difference between working in our office and people who
aren’t. It used to be a big challenge. It wasn’t that long ago. A little
over a decade there was no Web. You know what year the first reference to
the phrase "World Wide Web" appeared in the New York Times? 1993. Even early
adopters didn’t get involved in email until 1994, 1995. I’ve been in
business for a few decades. In the early 1990s it was very hard to have
someone working with you who wasn’t in your office. Now that’s very routine
and we have very powerful ways to share all kinds of knowledge. And when we
have really ubiquitous high-quality audio-visual virtual reality, which I
think is coming soon, that will be another major step in the ability to work
together no matter where you are. And once we have these processes running
inside our bodies and brains, which is a couple decades, that will be
another major step in the ability to work together and the intimacy of that.
FC: We have five senses for uploading information to the brain. What you’re
talking about would introduce a sixth, where knowledge set aside in a
storage device can interface with our brain. We’ll have to make the two
processes at the same biological pace.
Kurzweil: You’re bringing up an important issue, which is the speed of the
process: biological vs. non-biological. Of course, this analogy comes up a
lot when you talk about little companies merging with big companies and the
big company has these big gearboxes with big gears that move very slowly and
the little company has these small quickly moving gears. Sometimes those
gears strip when they try to merge. So it's an analogy in terms of large and
small organizations integrating. We have a similar issue when we try to
marry biological and non-biological thinking, which ultimately will be a lot
faster. Our biological thinking takes place at chemical switching speeds,
which are a few hundred feet per second. And that’s the speed with which the
chemical gradient moves along the axon. They take place at these very slow
speeds and the reset time is about five milliseconds. In a typical dentrite
that’s about 200 transactions per second. These are very slow speeds.
Electronics are about a million times faster. The speed of light is a
million times faster than the chemical switching speed of our brains. So
there is a mismatch. Ultimately we’re going to -- we’re in the process of
reverse engineering our thinking. I have a new book called the Singularity
of Near, when humans transcend biology, which will be coming out this fall.
And I concentrate a lot on the process of reverse engineering the brain,
which will be the source of understanding the software of human
intelligence. Once we reverse engineer that, we’ll be able to take those
methods -- we’ll be able to expand our AI toolkit to include the methods the
human brain uses. But then we’ll be able to apply them to computer
substrates that run a million times faster than biological thinking. When we
have non-biological thinking processes working inside our own brains, they
will work a lot faster.
FC: How would that work? The human brain is like a bottleneck. You’ve got a
fundamental biological problem -- to remember something or make a connection
that requires these biological processes is a hardware issue. Are we going
to supercede our biological hardware?
Kurzweil: We will have non-biological processes. I don’t even understand now
when I remember something where that memory comes from. I try to think of
some actress’s name, and I’ll think of it or maybe I won’t be able to think
of it, but if I do think of it, I’m not entirely sure. I’m not conscious of
how I did that. So, one could imagine one’s memory working a lot better than
it does, and a lot of it being non-biological.
FC: But to actually fundamentally change the biology of the brain?
Kurzweil: We get into profound issues of consciousness. I do think our sense
of consciousness will start to encompass these non-biological processes. We
already have a lot awareness of what we’re doing with our computers and we
have a lot of lack of awareness of what goes on inside our own brains. There
isn’t a perfect correlation of what goes on in our bodies and brains and
what we’re aware of. So as we expand the processes that go on in our bodies
and brains with non-biological ones that extend its capability, I think
those will also be in the province of our conscious awareness.
FC: Mind blowing.
Kurzweil: Certainly mind expanding.
FC: You’re also working on a product to predict changes in the stock market.
Kurzweil: The company is called Fat Kat. Financial Accelerating Transactions
from Kurzweil Adapted Technologies. I founded it about five years ago. We
have a blue-ribbon group of investors. Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of
Sun Microsystems. He and John Doerr run Kleiner Perkins. He is our lead
investor. Mike Brown is another lead investor -- he’s on our board. He was
chief financial officer of Microsoft for many years, and chairman of Nasdaq.
And we have a number of other prominent high-tech people backing us. And the
concept is applying my field, pattern recognition, to the stock market,
particularly to short-term movements of stocks. And if you look at a
particular stock it looks like an electric cardiogram. It constantly goes up
and down. These little movements look random, and there’s certainly a very
large random component to the movement, but its not entirely unpredictable
because companies have relationships with one another. They own each other.
They’re in supply chains with each other. They’re in industries with each
other. There’s all kinds of influences. If you see certain movements in
certain stocks, that’s putting out all kinds of ripple patterns and it
ultimately will reflect itself in other movements in other securities. In
fact the speed with which those reverberations or implications occur is
speeding up with the more rapid dissemination of information. We look at
data from 10-15 years ago, and we can see similar patterns today. But the
patterns 15 years ago were moving much more slowly. Right now, there’s an
announcement, and 30 minutes later it's old news because it's been all over
the Internet. Whereas, 15 years ago, it would take days for the information
to move around. So we actually see very similar patterns. They just move
more quickly.
FC: That implies that at the core of this is information distribution.
Kurzweil: Certainly. Information affects people’s decision making and that
affects people’s purchasing of securities. And we also see the effect of
increasing interest in so-called quant investing. Quant stands for
quantitative. The idea of investing using computers is called quant
investing. So we can see some simple methods that worked five years ago that
don’t work today because of the improved efficiency of the market. The
arbitrage from the simpler methods has been rung out of the system. So we
have our sophisticated pattern recognition model -- we don’t program it a
priori with our preconceived ideas of how the market should work. It’s very
much data driven, and it's building its models based on what it sees. But it
has the ability to build sophisticated models of how financial data
interacts with each other.
FC: I assume there are massive amounts of inputs.
Kurzweil: Anything that’s quantifiable. Certainly all of the tick data of
market transactions, but also a lot of company fundamental data and economic
data. Analyst opinions -- things we can quantify. It builds models, and the
result is that it makes predictions. It’s constantly updating what
securities will do in different time periods, ranging from hours to weeks.
And the objective is not to be able to predict these things perfectly, but
to predict them better than chance. And it turns out we can definitely
predict these movements substantially better than chance. That puts us in
the position of being the house in a casino. The odds are slightly in the
casino’s favor. On any two or three rolls of the die, the casino may make or
lose money, but over 50,000 bets, it reliably makes money because the odds
are in its favor. Of course, the challenge for the casino business model is
that the transactions are not free. It has to pay for the casino and the
people that operate it. It’s what’s called trading friction; they have to
make enough on each transaction to pay for the process. So we have the same
issue. But the odds are in our favor because we can make predictions
substantially better than chance. Our system places lots of bets. Each bet
is fairly small relative to the size of the fund. Some transactions win;
some lose. But more win than lose so the system makes money and it makes
enough money to overcome trading friction. There’s different forms of
trading friction: The actual transaction costs, the fees, slippage -- you go
to buy a stock that’s supposed to be $50.30 and you end up paying $50.32
cents. That’s slippage. Recoil: if you try to make a really big transaction
you’ll actually move the market. But our system works, we’ve been trading
with real cash for 2.5 years. We make 80-90% annual gains. We plan to launch
this year a hedge fund using our technique.
FC: What’s a very idealized idea of where this will be in five years?
Kurzweil: Our model is Renessaince. They make 45% a year and they manage $5
billion. They do it year after year. Last year they made $2.25 on $5 billion
and they keep some of that as a fee and return the rest of those profits to
the fund investors. Similar technology. That’s our model of success.
FC: Can it learn?
Kurzweil: Oh, it’s constantly learning.
FC: Your future will no doubt change or shock the system, society, business
changes.
Kurzweil: These are gradual changes which are already underway. It’s not
like nothing is going to happen and we’re suddenly going to wake up in 2025
to a different world. We get there a step at a time, and it's already
started. We can already see the business models changing. It's not just one
change. It's not just a case of a CEO who presides over a company that
operates the same way year after year. Already companies need to reinvent
themselves in order to succeed. There’s a shock when an industry resists
changing its business model. The recording industry resisted changing its
business model; they tried to keep the same business model that was around
when my father was a kid. Selling an album with maybe only one or two songs
that someone wants for a pretty expensive price. The bottom line is that
industries have to change the structure of their business models. Very often
it’s a new set of organizations that adopt a business model that’s
consistent with disruptive change that displaces the old ones. But people
aren’t necessarily going to keep the same jobs or careers for their whole
life -- especially when we change the concept of the human life cycle.
FC: Do you think there will be a point where people can turn themselves on
and off?
Kurzweil: Well, we will be able to separate the software of our lives from
the hardware of our lives. That’s another advantage of non-biological
intelligence. If you change computers, the viability of your software files
isn’t lost. You can copy them over. They outlive the hardware. They don’t
necessarily live forever though. If you walk away from some software files
for a while and nobody cares about them and you come back, you may find it
almost impossible to revive them. Try coming back now to some software that
existed on some PDP-One eight-inch disk drive. You’d have to find all kinds
of layers of hardware and software to revive that information. In fact,
that’s a very serious issue with standards and software formats constantly
changing. Software actually does require constant maintenance to remain
alive. The basic message is software remains viable if somebody cares about
it. And there’s an analogy in our own lives even today: if you don’t care
about your own life, then you’re likely to not maintain your physical body
very well. But yes, we’ll ultimately be able to separate the hardware and
software of our lives. Right now, they’re deeply embedded with one another.
When our hardware crashes, the software goes with it. And there is actually
information in our brains. It is literally information. I’ve estimated it in
thousands of trillions of bytes, reflecting our skills, our knowledge, our
memories, our personality. You can argue about those estimates, but there is
a certain amount of information there. And right now, when someone dies,
that information is lost. In my view, death is a tragedy. It’s a tragic loss
of all of that precious knowledge of experience and personality. And
ultimately we’ll be able to separate the hardware from the software. But, as
I pointed out, it doesn’t necessarily mean the software lives forever --
it’s just no longer dependent on one hardware substrate. It will only live
as long as someone wants it to.
FC: What fields and industries will become less important in this future?
Kurzweil: We’ve already seen a migration away from jobs that involve
extending our bodies. At the beginning of the 20th century, 30% of the
population worked on farms and 30% worked in factories. Those figures are
now down to 3% each. So we’ve seen a profound shift there already.
Increasingly, professions involve expanding the reach of our minds and
creating knowledge. Knowledge in very broad forms, whether the knowledge is
music or art or culture or writing or science or technology. Increasingly
that’s where our work efforts will be directed. I think people should go
with their passion. If they really have a passion for art, we’ve seen a
great empowering of the arts through technology. There’s a tremendous need
for creating graphics and so on. I know artists that could hardly make a
living who are now in tremendous demand as Web designers. It does pay to
learn skills to be able to express ones passion in the vernacular and
technology of the times. I do have exposure to a variety of fields, and it’s
remarkable to me how technically sophisticated every field is becoming, from
library science to music to art to certainly science and technology. I do
think that we need to have more kids in America pursue science and
technology careers. In Asia they seem to understand that. I have some graphs
that show the number of science and engineering graduates in the U.S. is
actually going down slightly. 60,000 10 years ago to about 55,000 today.
Whereas in China, for example, it was only a fraction of our level 10 years
ago, and they’re now up to about 300,000 engineers and scientists a year. We
see similar progressions in India, Japan, and Korea. So those societies seem
to understand that the cutting edge of future economic viability is science
and technology and they’re preparing their kids for that. The
counter-argument to that is that even our kids who are not becoming
scientists and engineers are nonetheless actually becoming very
sophisticated to technology. So you talk to a musician and he’s actually
extremely knowledgeable about computers. That’s true with almost every
field.
We see one trend towards increasing specialization, whereas, take my field
of pattern recognition: It's so diverse and there’s so many different areas
it’s hard to keep up with even a small portion of it. On the other hand
increasingly important work needs to be interdisciplinary -- to draw upon
many different fields together. For example, the work I did in speech
recognition, we had many different fields: linguists, speech scientists,
signal processing engineers, mathematicians, complexity theorists, computer
scientists. We had all these different fields working together so we need to
be able to build bridges between these different disciplines.
FC: Is that an argument for specialization -- because you need to advance
knowledge -- or an argument for the person or program that brings that
knowledge together, assimilating it.
Kurzweil: Increasingly that’s in the entrepreneurial field, where to
actually achieve something of value, you have to be able to combine
different fields. Search engines had to marry library science with databases
and intelligent search algorithms and so you’ve got mathematicians and
linguists working together. Increasingly true of any important practical
project.
FC: What would you like to be doing in 100 years?
Kurzweil: I do have a goal of being a successful 25-year-old female rock
singer.
FC: How long have you had this goal?
Kurzweil: Awhile. I did a decent job at TED 2001. You can see the results.
FC: Was it a pre-existing goal?
Kurzweil: Yeah, I particularly like female singers. I realized it would be
fun to be one. Of course, I always wanted to be with one, but to be one was
also kind of cool. And I actually do hope to return to that goal. It’s got
nothing to do with gender confusion. It has to do with the discovery that we
do have different people inside us that we’d like to be. I really enjoy
innovating; I get captivated with ideas. I remember at age 5 -- it wasn’t an
idle fantasy, I was absolutely convinced I would be an inventor. As I grew a
little older, 8, 9, I had all these different invention projects. I read the
Tom Swift novels where the whole message was no matter what problem you got
into there was some idea -- and you could find it -- that would overcome
these seemingly overwhelming problems. And I continue to have lots of ideas.
I do end up committing to some of them and when I commit to a project I
really do see it through -- it may take awhile. But I’ve got a lot of other
ideas I’d like to pursue. So I do see myself 10 year from now, 30 years from
now, 100 years from now continuing to be immersed in the world of ideas and
trying to make ideas real. It takes a lot of work and commitment and
passion, but it is my passion. What’s exciting for an inventor is to
actually see ideas come into the world and affect people’s lives. I call it
the link between dry formulas on a blackboard and impacting people’s lives.
That’s not the only way to be; a theoretical scientist is excited just by
the idea. But what turns an inventor on is to actually have the idea get out
into the world and impact people. So when people send me albums they
wouldn’t have been able to create without the type of synthesis that we
pioneered or I get letters from blind students who use our reading
technology in education, that’s thrilling. It shows the power of ideas. So I
see myself continuing in that path.
FC: You’re almost the anti-specialist. You’re envisioning an existence where
you’re capable of integrating different fields.
Kurzweil: That’s true, but I’m also very committed to my main interest,
mathematics and pattern recognition. I’m impressed with the power of
mathematics to impact the world. You can have a set of mathematical formulas
that can actually make predictions in the stock market or understand human
speech or understand patterns in biological processes and overcome health
problems. And at the core of that is mathematics and pattern recognition. I
do think that most of our intelligence is based on pattern recognition.
Human thinking is actually not very good at logical and analytical thinking.
We are very good at recognizing patterns.
FC: Storage formats: Is there a solution?
Kurzweil: I’ve actually thought about that. I think it’s a fundamental
philosophical issue. I don’t think there is a solution. Other than the
insight that information will survive if we care about it. I have files that
I have nursed along through different formats that are still alive because I
care about them and I manage them. I also have some old files that I
probably won’t be able to retrieve because I haven’t kept them up to date.
To the extent that information will encompass more and more of our lives,
ultimately our whole personality and intelligence can be seen and recorded
as information this becomes a very important insight. Our whole survival
will continue if we care about ourselves. I don’t see a technological
solution. I’ve been looking for one because I actually want to create a
database of all my files. I have hundreds of boxes of paper records. My
father was similar; he has all of his letters and college papers and Ph.D.
theses. I have 50 boxes of my father’s papers. And I want to scan it all in.
But then, if I scan it all in and have this big database, what format can I
possibly put this in that it would still be viable in 50 years from now? And
there is no such format.
Copyright © 2004 Gruner + Jahr USA Publishing.
|
Cozying Up with
Deep Blue
"Advanced Chess" pitting computer-human teams against each
other shows how humans can avoid obsolescence through symbiotic
relationships with technology
By George Dvorsky
Betterhumans Staff
3/2/2005
Several weeks ago, while bored on a commuter train, I decided to pull out my
Palm Pilot and play a game of chess. Seeing as I had no one to play against,
I decided to try my hand against the computer. I was quite confident that
I'd have little difficultly keeping up—it's hardly Deep Blue, after all.
I arbitrarily picked an average difficultly level and proceeded to get my
ass kicked in frighteningly short order. Somewhat discouraged, I then tried
at the easiest level. Once again, I suffered an embarrassing thrashing.
With my dignity soiled, I vowed to improve my chess skills. I wasn't going
to let some puny Palm Pilot beat me at chess. I dusted off an old chess
manual and practiced some standard openings and strategies. I can now
proudly say that I can beat my handheld at level 5. My goal is to beat it at
level 8, maximum difficulty.
Playing a computer at chess can be rather humbling. As you're waiting for it
to make its move, watching the "thinking" progress bar move from left to
right, it's daunting to consider how many moves it's evaluating. I'm happy
if I can think three to four moves ahead. The computer can contemplate
thousands every second.
I'm sure Garry Kasparov felt the same way back in 1996 when pitted against
Deep Blue. Now that computer could crunch the numbers. Written in C and
running under the AIX operating system, Deep Blue was a massively parallel,
30-node, RS/6000, SP-based computer system enhanced with 480 special purpose
VLSI chess processors. Odds are those stats are meaningless to you, but this
one shouldn't be: This mother could crunch 100,000,000 positions per second.
100,000,000 positions per second!
It's a wonder that Kasparov could play against it at all. Of course, there's
more to chess than just raw computation. It's a game of subtlety, nuance and
sophisticated psychology and strategy—elements that are far beyond the
capabilities of even the most powerful computers. In fact, prior to
Kasparov's defeat, some chess experts maintained that computers would never
be capable of defeating grandmasters. But thanks to Deep Blue and its
successors, we all know that this is in fact possible.
Kasparov's loss was indeed a deep shock to the chess world. It was a
significant milestone in the history of chess, not just because a reigning
world champion finally lost against a computer, but because of the
ramifications to the game itself. Did Kasparov's loss signify the beginning
of the end for meaningful human interaction in professional chess? Would
future tournaments see humans as mere spectators to machines?
More broadly, did Deep Blue's intrusion into a previously sanctified human
realm represent the beginning of a larger trend? If computers could now
defeat even our grandmasters, what else might they be capable of? Indeed,
the steady onslaught of Moore's Law and breakthroughs in parallel processing
has some fearing the rise of AI and the subsequent delegation of human
minds. Are Homo sapiens poised for obsolescence and even replacement?
Well, if Kasparov has his way, the answer is no—and not because he feels
that humans can continue to compete with computers. Rather, Kasparov
believes the future of chess can be advanced through the cooperation of
computers with humans. Consequently, Kasparov's idea of Advanced Chess,
where human-machine teams compete against other human-machine teams, offers
an effective framework for how humanity as a whole should manage its ongoing
relationship with its advancing technologies. To avoid replacement, we need
to establish a symbiosis with our technologies and create something greater
than the sum of its parts.
Computer chess vs. human chess
In all fairness to Kasparov and other expert chess players, computers still
aren't able to consistently defeat their human counterparts. After losing to
Deep Blue in the first game, Kasparov rebounded by winning three games and
drawing two, defeating it by a final score of four to two. Kasparov lost the
1997 rematch, but managed a draw against its successor, X3D Fritz in 2003.
Similarly, grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik tied Deep Fritz in an eight-game
tournament a year earlier. As it currently stands, the tables are quite even
in terms of what the best computers can do against the best players.
But what's interesting is not so much the parity; it's that humans and
machines play chess so differently yet still come up even. Computers and
humans have unique weaknesses that are clearly offset by their strengths.
It's generally acknowledged that computers are superior calculators, while
humans are better at long-range planning. Computers cannot be
psychologically intimidated (something Kasparov does very well against his
human opponents), nor are they capable of suffering from fatigue or other
physical problems (during the 1984 World Championships, for example, Anatoly
Karpov lost 22 pounds and was hospitalized several times as he battled
Kasparov in a protracted tournament that saw them play well over 30 games).
Computers are also immune to making silly mistakes (Kramnik lost game five
against Fritz after making a severe blunder).
Humans, on the other hand, can plan, bluff and, most importantly, adapt.
Kasparov, in all his encounters with computers, tends to finish more
strongly than he begins. Even in my own clashes against my Palm Pilot, I
have noticed that my computer opponent gets quite messed-up when I open with
the Queen's Gambit. Consequently, that's now my standard opening against it.
The Palm, on the other hand, cannot learn from my mistakes, and has no idea
that I fare very poorly in end game scenarios.
Computers are also quite poor at recognizing when something is irrelevant.
During its first match against Kasparov, for example, Deep Blue eliminated
an inconsequential pawn at a critical point in the game. It's thought that
Deep Blue sensed no threat from Kasparov at the time and that the move
wouldn't detract from the attack it was developing at the other side of the
board. It was merely being mindlessly methodical by claiming the material.
Assistive devices
In consideration of these differences and unique strengths, it's safe to say
that the best chess playing entity in existence today is neither a computer
nor a human, but rather a computer and a human working together. As Albert
Einstein once remarked, "Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid;
humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are
powerful beyond imagination."
Indeed, computers have changed the face of chess—not just because they have
proven to be formidable opponents, but because they can also act as potent
assistive devices. Grandmasters now use them extensively for planning and
practice. Exhaustive hash tables have been generated by computers that map
virtually all end game scenarios involving up to five pieces. Scenario
analysis is now possible at an unprecedented scale, including backward
analysis (starting from a position with a large edge and moving back to a
starting position) to find new branches worth analyzing, and multi-variation
analysis mode to examine alternate tries worthy of analysis.
Simply put, not using computers to assist in chess play would be as silly as
not using calculators to help us do math. Further, when looked at as
prostheses, computers clearly expand human capacities, helping us take our
activities and disciplines to the next level. They enable us to partake in
endeavors that were previously cognitively impossible.
Recognizing this, Kasparov proposed a new form of competition during the
late 90s. Inspired by his matches against computers, Kasparov felt that
humans and computers should cooperate instead of contending with each other.
Called "Advanced Chess," the new style of play would see human players
team-up with a computer and compete against another man-machine unit.
Kasparov got the ball rolling by organizing a six-game Advanced Chess match
against Veselin Topalov in June of 1998, with Kasparov using Fritz 5 and
Topalov using ChessBase 7.0. The match ended in a three-three draw. Kasparov
commented afterward, "My prediction seems to be true that in Advanced Chess
it's all over once someone gets a won position. This experiment was exciting
and helped spectators understand what's going on. It was quite enjoyable and
will take a very big and prestigious place in the history of chess."
Since this initial match, Advanced Chess tournaments have been scheduled
annually in Leon, Spain. Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand, the winner of three
titles, is currently considered the world's best Advance Chess player. After
losing to Kramnik in 2002, Anand commented, "I think in general people tend
to overestimate the importance of the computer in the competitions. You can
do a lot of things with the computer but you still have to play good
chess...I don't really feel that the computer alone can change the objective
true to the position."
Expanding on Anand's point, advocates of Advanced Chess argue that the
strength of a player does not come from any of the components of the
human-computer team, but rather from the symbiosis of the two. The
combination of man and machine results in a "player" that is endowed with
the computer's extreme power and accuracy and the human's creativity and
sagacity.
Ultimately, the combined skills of knowledgeable humans and computer chess
engines can produce a result stronger than either alone. Advanced Chess has
resulted in heights never before seen in chess. It has produced blunder-free
games with the beauty and quality of both perfect tactical play and highly
meaningful strategic plans, and it has offered chess aficionados remarkable
insight into the thought processes of strong human chess players and strong
chess computers.
Cooperation and merger, not obsolescence
With the rise in prominence of computers in the chess world, Kasparov
refused to throw up his hands in despair and declare the end of human
involvement in the game. Instead, he devised a new activity that would
combine the best of what the digital world had to offer with that of the
biological. The result was something greater than the sum of its individual
parts.
The rest of society should learn from this example. Naturally, people are
growing increasingly wary of supercomputers and the potential for AI; it's
understandable that people fear a future in which humans are replaced by
machines. But as the example of Advanced Chess shows, that's not necessarily
what's going to happen. The development of AI and other information
technologies will continue to advance based on how we choose to adapt to
them and how they adapt to us. Further, human control over where and how
advanced technologies develop will have a significant impact on the kinds of
collaborative and symbiotic systems that emerge.
Thanks to human ingenuity, our disciplines, activities and goals will
continue to change and evolve, taking the human experience to unprecedented
places as we become capable of things never before possible.
Like beating my Palm Pilot at level 6.
------------------------------------
Quote:
"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are
incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond
imagination" -
Albert Einstein
|
|
More Than Human
This fall, the editors of a leading public policy magazine,
Foreign Policy, asked eight prominent intellectuals to identify the single
idea they felt was currently posing the greatest threat to humanity. Most of
the suggestions were merely old demons: various economic myths, the idea
that you can fight "a war on evil," Americaphobia and so on. Only Francis
Fukuyama, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, came up with a
new candidate: transhumanism.
By Fred Hapgood
CIO (US)
12/27/04
Transhumanism might be described as the technology of advanced individual
enhancement. While it includes physical modifications (diamondoid teeth,
self-styling hair, autocleaning ears, nanotube bones, lipid metabolizers,
polymer muscles), most of the interest in the technology focuses on the
integration of brains and computers — especially brains and networks. Sample
transhumanist apps could include cell phone implants (which would allow
virtual telepathy), memory backups and augmenters, thought recorders, reflex
accelerators, collaborative consciousness (whiteboarding in the brain), and
a very long list of thought-controlled actuators. Ultimately, the technology
could extend to the uploading and downloading of entire minds in and out of
host bodies, providing a self-consciousness that, theoretically, would have
no definitive nor necessary end. That is, immortality, of a sort.
While some of these abilities are clearly quite far off, others are already
attracting researchers, and none are known (at the moment at least) to be
impossible to achieve. Fukuyama obviously felt the technology was close
enough at hand to write a book about it, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences
of the Biotechnology Revolution, the thrust of which is that society should
give the whole idea a miss. His main concern was that transhumanism would
place an impossible burden on the idea of equal rights, since it would
multiply the number of ways of being human well past our powers of
tolerance. (If we have all this trouble with something simple like skin
color, just wait until some people have wings, augmented memory and reflex
accelerators.)
Ignorance Is No Option
Still, it's not clear that boycotting neurotech will be a realistic option.
When the people around you — competitors, colleagues, partners — can run
Google searches in their brains during conversations; or read documents
upside down on a desk 30 feet away; or remember exactly who said what, when
and where; or coordinate meeting tactics telepathically; or work forever
without sleep; or control every device on a production line with thought
alone, your only probable alternative is to join them or retire. No
corporation could ignore the competitive potential of a neurotech-enhanced
workforce for long.
Right now, the only people thinking about transhumanism are futurists,
ethicists (such as Fukuyama) and researchers. However, if and when we do
advance into this technology, several management issues will also need
attention.
Consider, for instance, the case of upgrade management.
From a purely capitalist point of view, one virtue of transhumanism is that
it incorporates both body and mind into the continuous upgrade cycle that
characterizes contemporary consumption patterns. Once a given modification —
such as a cortical display — is successfully invented, newer and better ones
will crop up on the market every year, boasting lower power requirements,
higher resolution, hyperspectral sensitivity, longer mean time between
failures, richer recording, sharing and backup features, and so on. Multiply
by all the devices embraced by the transhumanist agenda, and it's clear that
every year even the most financially secure users will be forced to winnow a
small number of choices from an enormous range of possibilities.
Another concern could be digital rights management.
When brains can interact with hard disks, remembering will become the
equivalent of copying. Presumably, intellectual property producers will
react with the usual mix of policies, some generous, some not. Some
producers will want you to pay every time you remember something; others
will allow you to keep content in consciousness for as long as you like but
levy an extra charge for moving it into long-term memory; still others will
want to erase their content entirely as rights expire, essentially inducing
a contractually limited form of amnesia. While any one of these
illustrations might be wrong in detail, there will almost certainly be a
whole range of intellectual property issues and complications that will need
to be managed.
In other words, it looks as though the transhumanist era is going to be a
Golden Age for CIOs and their skill sets. Even in the case of problems for
which CIOs do not have immediate solutions, they will probably be the right
people to think about the answers. Take, for example, the extremely vexing
problem of neurosecurity.
A brain running on a network will obviously be an extremely attractive
target for everyone from outright criminals to bored hackers to spammers.
Why worry about actually earning a promotion when you can just write a worm
that will configure your superior's brain so that the very thought of you
triggers his or her pleasure centers? Why bother with phishing when you can
direct your victims to transfer their assets straight to your bank account?
Why tolerate the presence of infidels when they can be converted to the one
true faith with the push of a button?
Who Do You Trust? Not You
Peter Cassidy, secretary-general of The Anti-Phishing Working Group, is one
of the few analysts thinking about neurosecurity. He says that a key problem
is that the brain appears to consider itself a trusted environment. When
brain region A gets a file request from region B, it typically hands over
the data automatically, without asking for ID or imposing more than the most
minimal plausibility check. It is true that with age and experience our
brains do gradually build up a short blacklist of forbidden instructions,
often involving particular commands originating from the hypothalamus or
adrenal glands (for example, "bet the house on red," or "pick a fight with
that bunch of sailors"), but in general, learning is slow and the results
patchy. Such laxity will be inadequate in an age when brainjacking has
become a perfectly plausible form of sabotage.
Cassidy points out that one of the core problems in neurosecurity is
defining trusted agents. All security depends on the concept of two trusted
parties (a trusted identity and a computer) and a trust applicant. The
neurosecurity conundrum is that it mixes all these identities in the same
brain. It forces you to face the questions of when, whether and how to trust
yourself. Still, CIOs (and CSOs) are familiar with the essence of even this
issue, which is much like analyzing the problem of defending an enterprise
against an employee who has gone bad.
One possible approach to neurosecurity might be to implant a public-key
infrastructure in our brains so that every neural region can sign and
authenticate requests and replies from any other region. A second might be
maintaining a master list of approved mental activities and blocking any
mental operations not on that list. (Concerns about whether the list itself
was corrupted might be addressed by refreshing the list constantly from
implanted and presumably unhackable ROM chips.) It might also be necessary
to outsource significant portions of our neural processing to highly secure
computing sites. In theory, such measures might improve on the neurosecurity
system imposed on us by evolution, making us less vulnerable to catchy tunes
and empty political slogans.
New Security Horizons
Lance James, CSO of Secure Science Corp., a security services company, is
writing a book (working title: Eye Own You) on the security aspects of
neuronetworking. In it, he observes that engineering research on this topic
is going to be harder than conventional security research, which of course
has not completely cleared its own agenda. Conventional networking allows
researchers to launch experimental attacks on simulated networks that are
indistinguishable from the real thing. Simulated minds are nowhere on the
horizon, which means that neurosecurity engineers are going to have to work
on real brains. This is likely to be awkward, as volunteers will be few. And
the fact that neurotech will almost certainly be wireless (The Matrix
notwithstanding, people are not going to walk around with open brain
sockets) will just add to the security headaches.
However, James continues, the news is not all bad. A large fraction of
today's computer network security problems can be attributed to the
uniformity of our hardware and software. Hackers do their damage by learning
how to exploit these "monocultures." If every user built and programmed his
computer himself, security would be dramatically easier. Brains are not only
self-programming but self-organizing, which almost certainly means that
every adult brain is radically different from every other. In the terms of
the trade, James says, "Brains might share the same kernel, though even that
is a guess, but they probably run different services and have different
programming calls." This diversity might be a problem for neurotech vendors
hoping for the economies of mass production, but it gives CIOs and CSOs lots
of room to breathe.
Second, all these problems are not going to be dropped in our lap at once.
The first neurocomputational products will probably be thought-controlled
actuators. Though such devices might show up in quite a range of
environments — embracing apps from wheelchairs to body extenders to computer
games to controlling industrial machinery — they can be made relatively safe
by keeping the data traffic one-way, pushing control signals out through the
electrodes while shunting feedback through the physical senses, which are
relatively secure. The machinery itself might have a network connection (and
therefore be subject to attack), but not the brains of its operators.
Security issues will become more pressing when the second generation of
neurotech products arrives: cortical implants allowing sensors and data
stores to "print" directly to consciousness. (Much of the research under way
today on such implants can be characterized as figuring out how to write a
consciousness driver — such as a driver for a printer or a graphic card —
only for awareness.)
Fortunately, the first generation of these devices will probably be
electronic eyes that return sight to the blind, a function that does not
require Internet connectivity. From there, however, it is just a step
(conceptually, although the engineering itself is another question) to a
device that accepts any feed at all, from infrared cameras to television
programming. Once at that point, the demand for some sort of connectivity
will become intense. Who wouldn't want to be able to read their e-mail (or
watch The Sopranos) while pretending to listen to a boring presentation?
CIOs have been urging users to take security seriously for decades, to not
use "PASSWORD" for their passwords, to be careful where they find their
wireless access points and to use firewalls. By and large, they have been
studiously ignored. Perhaps the advent of neuronetworking will encourage
people finally to take these cautionary procedures seriously.
But probably not.
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Cognitive Freedom Fighter
With brain implants and memory erasure becoming reality, Wrye Sententia is
bringing constitutional rights into your head
Shannon Foskett, Betterhumans Staff
11/23/2004
Free thinking: "We're working for both the freedom to use new
neurotechnologies for benefit, and a freedom from surreptitious or compelled
uses of the same," says neuropolicy advocate Wrye Sententia
"I can imagine the tabloid ads for personal injury lawyers specializing in
things like 'faulty cerebral implants' and 'accidents' involving memory
erasure," says Wrye Sententia, cofounder of the Davis, California-based
Centre for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics (CCLE). "As bizarre as it may sound,
if we do not work to ensure that our democratic, constitutional rights can
weather the transition to tomorrow, we may find ourselves unprotected in a
world where we have no recourse for complaint."
Following the hit films Paycheck (2003) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004),
the specter of corporate memory control has reappeared in the popular
imaginary. We know the dream factory has pulled much here from fiction, but
how much do these stories draw from fact?
I had the chance to speak with Sententia about the explosive developments in
the fields of neurotechnology and cognitive liberty—and the even more
fascinating legal problems they raise.
Here are some excerpts from our conversation:
In an interview with New Scientist, CCLE cofounder Richard Glen Boire made
the spooky intimation that cognitive liberty is poised to be one of the
major civil rights issues of the century. What is this new concept, exactly?
Cognitive liberty is the right of an individual to liberty, autonomy and
privacy over his or her own intellect, and is situated at the core of what
it means to be a free person. This principle is what gave rise to some of
our most well-established and cherished democratic rights.
Cognitive liberty presupposes at least these three principles: cognitive
privacy (what and how you think should be private unless you choose to share
it); cognitive autonomy (self-determination over one's own cognition is
central to free will); and cognitive choice (the capabilities of the human
mind should not be limited).
If we stop and think about what freedom of thought means to us, it's really
about personal autonomy—in the sense that I can direct my life, not
necessarily that I am outside of a web of social relations—and privacy. Not
necessarily because I don't want to share my thoughts, but because I want to
retain authority over when, where, how and with certain caveats, I may do
so. Most people believe—and to a large extent, this has been the case—that
we do have freedom of thought.
Until recently, freedom of thought has been a kind of commonsense
assumption, a birthright in a functioning democracy which allows us to more
or less pick and choose our own ideology and guide our life according to our
own experience, beliefs and influences. Yet as some of the plausible
outgrowths of today's neurotechnologies take hold in society at large, we
will face a qualitatively different kind of freedom. It is going to be
important that we know and anticipate valid concerns over the use of
neurotechnologies.
The thought that someday I might need a lawyer to protect my individual
"rights of mind" is rather incredible, to say nothing of the horror I feel
at the thought of "mental violation," if one can conceive of it as such.
You hit on it. Both a disgust at a potentially invasive abuse of your
private thoughts, and at the prospect of lawyers encroaching on yet another
area to litigate our lives.
Are we merely expanding the definition of personal privacy, or are there
new, empirical developments that give us cause to believe that our freedom
of thought is or might at some point be endangered?
Today, new drugs and other technologies are being developed for augmenting,
monitoring and manipulating mental processes. The very definitions of
medicine and mental health are evolving as a result of the explosion in
neurotechnologies and neuropharmaceuticals.
Things like fMRIs, that grew out of MRI technology; "noninvasive" brain
scanning techniques; "brain fingerprinting" as a tool for law enforcement;
applications such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation; preventative "mental
health"; enhancement pharmaceuticals; "neuromarketing" are all examples that
are getting more attention these days in relation to higher cognitive
functions.
Another example that the CCLE is tracking is the proposed use of hypersonic
sound to project noise, music or voices directly inside your head.
Hypersonic sound is a "silent" sonic device that could be used, for
instance, as yet another way to get our attention. You might walk by a soda
machine on a hot day, and hear the refreshing sound of ice shifting in a
glass.
There's also the whole emerging field of nanotechnology and nanomedicine as
explored by Robert Freitas that will have implications for how we interact
with consciousness, the brain-mind, the body-brain, etc.
We can also anticipate a day when so-called germ line or genetic engineering
biotechnologies of the future will potentially impact the selective
reshaping or enhancing of cognitive abilities, and consequently these
distant possibilities raise the same polarized issues regarding personhood
and human "essence."
Most people have heard of Prozac or Paxil, but how much time will it be
before some of these more dramatic applications become household names?
To my knowledge, even though a number of nascent applications of brain
imaging and brain scanning technologies currently exist, most are in the
experimental or research stage, and certainly are not yet being used
unwittingly on private citizens.
The hard technical feasibility of gauging or influencing a person's thoughts
is still in its infancy. Most of the equipment used to glean information
from our brain's patterns has only been around for a couple decades.
Likewise, while EEG technology has improved, and the invention of LED "noninvasive"
brain scanning techniques are underway, the applications are still largely
in the research phases and the scientific viability of some of these methods
are still hotly disputed.
I'm not sure how likely the neural net possibility will be; the scientists,
computer engineers and neurologists are better judges of that than I. I
honestly think that we're not even close to uploading our consciousness to
computers—whatever that would entail and if ever we would want to.
Nonetheless, the applications are already being touted.
Neuropharmaceuticals are an area where changes in culture and deficiencies
in the law are already apparent and are already influencing how we, as a
society, think about drug chemistry and the brain. Today's spectrum of
antidepressants that work on the dopamine and norapinephrine
neurotransmitters make people feel better by readjusting the chemical
activity, or say, serotonin levels in the brain.
Even though some take a prohibitionary position in regards to "human
enhancement"—like the President's Council on Bioethics who issued their
Beyond Therapy report on this topic about a year ago—it's likely that, even
if the US bans a generalized, nonprescription use of future drugs to improve
attention, mood and even memory, these drugs will go on a "black market" in
the same way Ritalin has become a subverted drug in high schools and even
junior high.
Suffice it to say that neurotechnologies are already here, and more are
coming—and we have more examples up on our Website (http://www.cognitiveliberty.org).
Just to take a closer look at what may or may not be already obvious, what
do these technologies give us to worry about? Aren't they being developed in
the aim of improving general mental health and functioning for everyone?
Quite simply, individuals and collective freedom are threatened when these
technologies are applied or regulated without clear guiding principles.
Because our laws currently, as I understand them, only protect people from
unreasonable or hurtful decibels, in other words, from loud noise, what
happens when you are subjected to silent sound? If your thoughts can be
subject to unwanted scrutiny, what rights do you have to keep others'
probing at bay? How do physicians distinguish between medical and
"enhancement" applications? Should they? What about insurance coverage? What
does "treating the well" mean?
These are just a few of the neuroethical questions doctors are facing, and
that society will also increasingly face, and the sort of issues among many
that my colleagues and I grapple with on a daily basis.
But to date, only a small handful of neuroscientists are concerned about
issues like mind-reading or merged consciousness as real possibilities, and
most—if they think about this at all—are concerned with neuroethics in
relation to experimental subjects in a lab.
Neuroethics, obviously, deals with the responsibilities behind the creation
and use of applications such as fMRIs.
Neuroethics is a relatively new field concerned with the benefits and
dangers of modern research on the brain, and by extension, with the social,
legal and ethical implications of treating or manipulating consciousness.
It's important for us to think about what is at issue in the use or
application of neurotechnologies.
Some people are more apt to embrace new experiences and new technologies
while others are less inclined to experiment. As with biotechnology
developments, the shift from strictly therapeutic uses of neurotechnologies,
including drugs, will (and indeed already is) move from deficit to
enhancement applications. Some will use neurotechnologies only if they
absolutely have to, in order to compensate for a | |