|
Posthumanism |
I guess Homo erectus
Luddites would
also have whined about 'future concerns'...
|
| |
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.
|
|
 |
|
|
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.”
|
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. |
|
 |
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
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 disorder, others will be
first in line following Wired's first glossy ad touting a first "reliable"
mental augmentation device.
This points, I think, to the fundamental question of choice in a democracy.
No one should be forced to use neurotechnologies, but we shouldn't be
prohibiting their use either. The problem arises when we try to apply our
personal standards—even through the dubious valence of what constitutes
"public health"—to others' lifestyle choices.
At the CCLE I am working to make a future that will allow those who will
want to dissolve the boundaries of self—through the use of neural nets, or
sensorial transposition, etc.—do that, while also protecting those who find
that concept unsettling, or even repulsive, to have socially palatable lives
without unreasonable pressure to "conform" to something else. So, we're
working for both the freedom to use new neurotechnologies for benefit, and a
freedom from surreptitious or compelled uses of the same.
Could you give us a bit of an overview of the Centre for Cognitive Liberty
and what you do there?
As director of the CCLE, I'm involved with most every aspect of the vision
for the CCLE and for now, with a lot of the minutiae in daily operations of
the office. My own work is largely on neuroethics—considering what the
implications of cognitive technologies are or may be in the near-future,
then analyzing these for their impact on freedom of thought, and then
getting the word out about the possible consequences. To this end, I oversee
projects that help focus public attention on current trends in relation to
what we have defined as individual rights of mind—or what we at the CCLE are
calling neuropolicy.
Richard Glen Boire, the other director of the CCLE and an attorney, is
looking at how the new field of neurotheology—which uses brain imaging to
learn about spiritual states of mind—could reshape our understanding of
freedom of religion.
Our overarching goal is to advance sustainable policies that protect freedom
of thought. We work to promote both public awareness and the legal
recognition of cognitive liberty.
Because the CCLE is nonprofit and our work is funded largely by generous
individuals and a select number of granting institutions, it's important
that what we do on a daily basis have a practical import—we feel, from where
we are at, and where culture is at in general, that our efforts and
intellects are best put to use where the skin hits the pavement. That's why
our neuropolicy focuses on what we can see coming—and our vision may prove
to be short-sighted—first in the realm of neuropharmaceuticals that have a
direct link to our material body-brains, and then on those technologies that
try to capture the brain's electrical/magnetic activity in order to deduce
thoughts.
The CCLE is trying to foresee hot spots, and ensure that the US legal system
and a global public will be able to cope with the shifting parameters of a
right to freedom of thought. Freedom of thought—and of religion—is expressed
in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, article 8, and the right to privacy
is implied in the US Constitution. We see a need to expand the definition of
privacy to encompass the sphere of our inner choices—even if that choice is
to forgo their interiority!
So you want to create and protect individual rights to give up the
traditional sense of individuality as well as the freedom to give up the
traditional sense of "freedom of thought?"
Exactly. Without protecting freedom of thought in a budding
neurotechnological age as an individual's right to self-determine—the very
basis of so many of the freedoms we enjoy—we will see our liberty not only
eroded under poor management by governments, but we could see these freedoms
disappear entirely.
I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but when you think about the rapid
changes that our culture is undergoing in terms of technological capability
and the divergence in views about what reality is or "should" be, we have to
be careful to preserve the gains of our history as a free society, without
stifling our collective and individual potential.
An individual's right to self-determine his or her own conscious states is
therefore something that we see, in today's emerging conditions, as taking
on renewed constitutional importance.
We're saying that the values we have as a free society need to be
readdressed. It's not so much a radical existentialism, as an appeal to our
common democratic principles and our constitution—this is the framing for
our work in neuroethics. Freedom of thought is exactly what it sounds like,
it is the very heart of our individuality (or conformity) and it is the
foundation of a free society. Laurence Tribe, who is a well-known
constitutional attorney and legal scholar at Harvard, has written that "the
guarantee of free expression is inextricably linked to the protection and
preservation of open and unfettered mental activity." His point is that
without freedom of thought, you can't have freedom of speech. Nor can you
have freedom of religion, or privacy.
It's certainly an understatement to say that this is an exciting, important
area to be working in. You must have a lot of vision in order to keep going
at breaking such tough, new ground.
Yes. I'm interested in cognitive liberty not only as a right, but as a call
to action both personally, and collectively.
This is why for my part, I would like people to consider the wrinkles in the
neuroethics debates to better help us find common ground in effecting viable
neuropolicies in our democracy. What can we agree on, despite our differing
professional and personal points of view regarding trends in
psychopharmacology, computer-brain interfaces and related cognitive
neuroscience developments? I'm looking to improve pluralism in the sense of
a vibrant free society that embraces tolerance, creativity and choice to
maximize mental diversity.
Even though humanity is still plagued by age-old problems of greed, war and
hypocrisy (the essentialist-pessimists would say this is human nature), I'm
of the camp that thinks these might be growing pains, and that with greater
cognitive liberty in every sense, we might overcome not only our own, but
our species', small thinking.
Has the CCLE faced any particularly difficult opposition?
Obstacles to what we're doing are largely in the realm of education. I don't
get the feeling that most people consider the implications for a number of
current trends I've discussed in terms of their own freedoms. I mean, I
could count off the camps of "staunchly opposed" and "strongly in favour" of
things like cognitive enhancement, but that is ancillary to the larger
picture.
As Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute, and I mused at
a recent "Technosapiens" bioethics conference in Washington, DC, sponsored
by Christians, wouldn't it be great to get the transhumanists and the
Catholics to agree on something? Mutual tolerance in a changing world is
really a necessary goal—if nothing but that lesson is learned by today's
generations of young people poring over the daily headlines of death and
stupidity at work in the world, we will have become a better race.
I guess my belief is that the protection of cognitive liberty as a way of
negotiating culture and the role of humanity now and in the future is the
best place to start. That is to say, people need to decide, what is best for
themselves, in terms of participating or not, in the coming waves of change.
Just as our current nation can accommodate the Amish—who by the way, embrace
certain technologies if it will clearly benefit their society and not
diminish their values—as well as philosophical positions such as
transhumanism, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to let people pursue
their own pursuit of happiness.
Is there anything people can do to help or support the development of
neuroethics and neuropolicy?
Thank you for asking. The assistance that the CCLE most needs is valuable
feedback on what we are working for (some of your questions have given me
just that), collaboration with specialists who have expertise in
neuroscience, medicine and the law, and—most important of all—cold, hard
cash or digital stock-transferred contributions. Our general donation page
is at http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/gift.html
I should have mentioned funding as an obstacle to our effectiveness as well.
Needless to say, you can't run an operation on vision alone, and following
the post-dot.com slumps—on the West coast at least—our current donor pool
has certainly been affected. I've been doing the CCLE for two full years
now, and before that, worked in drug policy under the Alchemind Society.
It's pretty accurate to say that if we don't secure operational funds to
keep our work going by the end of January 2005, we're going to have to
renegotiate our roles and close down the office. I would really like to keep
going with the CCLE, particularly because I feel that we're only beginning
to hit on a number of important advances, socially, politically and legally.
I'm amazed by the number of calls and interest we get from the press, who
later go on to use our information in their articles; likewise with
university audiences and legal scholars.
So, if any of your readers are themselves in a position to help, or have
names of individuals who might be potentially interested in funding our
work, please do have them email me, wrye(at)cognitiveliberty.org
|
|
Nick Bostrom
(www.nickbostrom.com)
Cheesy or not, but I want to make the world a better place.
How? - Indirectly, by figuring out how our growing
technological powers can be turned to human good
and how the biggest risks can be reduced. I work on
some of the key philosophical, ethical, and strategic problems. I
also encourage others to help make progress
towards this goal.
Why? - By historical standards, things are now
happening fast, and it seems fairly probable that
molecular manufacturing
and
superintelligent machines will be developed in
this century. These prospects are both scary and
exciting. Possible outcomes range from
extinction to unimaginably wonderful lives - we could eventually
become ageless creatures with vastly improved
intellectual, emotional, and moral
capacities. Such capacities would enable us to have experiences that
are impossible with our current neurobiological
limitations. We could at last get rid of
involuntary suffering, aging, and disease and get the
opportunity to truly grow up and experience life as it should have
been all along. Human nature as we currently know
it is not an eternally fixed constant, but, I
believe, an early draft of a work-in-progress. In
addition to transformative technology, we need the wisdom and the good
will to use it well. Many deep and difficult issues need to be
addressed.
In an effort to encourage relevant research and
public debate, I co-founded a non-profit
organization, the
World Transhumanist Association, in 1998
(together with David Pearce). The WTA currently
has some 3,000 members, who come from all walks and are
forming formed local groups across the world. (It needs to become
much bigger!) There are also encouraging signs
that academia is beginning to cease to ignore what
is arguably biggest issue of our time. My research
interests are illustrated by the texts on this page. Beside
philosophy, I also have a background in physics, computational
neuroscience, mathematical logic, and artificial
intelligence. (I did three and a half full-time
programs simultaneously in my Swedish student days.) In earlier
phases of my life, I seriously dabbled in painting and poetry. I also did
stand-up comedy for a while on the vibrant London circuit.
On the bank
On the bank at the end
Of what was there before us
Gazing over to the other side
On what we can become
Veiled in the mist of naïve speculation
We are busy here preparing
Rafts to carry us across
Before the light goes out leaving us
In the eternal night of could-have-been
|
|
Engineering Better Citizens
Human enhancement doesn't guarantee better democracy, but
better democracy may require human enhancement
By James Hughes
9/1/2004 2:51 PM
For the past couple of months, leading up to the Olympics, our friend Andy
Miah has been appearing all over the place arguing for the legalization of
genetically enhanced athletics. In his new book, Genetically Modified
Athletes, he points out the absurd lengths to which sporting officials have
been forced to go to distinguish acceptable foods, supplements and high-tech
apparel from illegal "performance enhancers." As we saw in August as
Olympians were eliminated for failed drug tests, even when the likelihood of
detection is high the lure of performance enhancement is impossible to
resist. If we legalize "gene doping," at least for some competitions, then
we can better monitor athletes' use of dangerous mods, and athletes will
have access to genetic enhancements that protect them from injury and
improve their health.
Sadly, aside from the issue of doping, I am congenitally incapable of
mustering a flicker of interest in athletics of any kind--even Olympic beach
volleyball--as those circuits in my brain have always been monopolized by
politics. I can see why other people are more excited by sports than
politics. In politics the teams are unevenly matched and don't even have the
same number of players on each side. When there are rules, judges are often
unable to enforce them. Political outcomes are far more complicated than
winning or losing tournaments.
But politics actually has an impact on our, and other peoples', lives.
Surely the world would be a better place if people's heads were crammed with
at least as many statistics about the performance of Central Asian
politicians or the history of toxic waste regulations as they are with
batting averages and touchdowns.
Fortunately, this problem, as with so many others, can be fixed by human
enhancement. Even if self-governance is never as engaging as sports, my
expectation is that the enhanced humans we're becoming will find
self-education, political opinion formation and citizen engagement
increasingly effortless. Even if human enhancement doesn't guarantee better
democracy, better democracy may require human enhancement.
Getting Google-brained
At the recent TransVision conference, Swedish polymath Anders Sandberg
observed that his most desired enhancement would be to have access to Google
from inside his brain. (We were surprised this was not already the case.)
For me, it would be to have news.google.com on neural tap, constantly
queuing up relevant news clippings from the world's media and blogosphere.
Of course, news is not the same thing as information, much less education.
One of the concerns about the decline of the newspaper as a source of news
and the rise of narrowcasted cable television and partisan Websites has been
that citizens will be less exposed to in-depth analysis and contrasting
points of view. But that underestimates the shallowness and partisanship
that has always characterized most newspapers, and underestimates the
curiosity that the 21st century Web surfer has about diverse points of view.
Most citizens of democracies up to the present have been woefully
ill-informed, acting at the direction of their religious and political
elites. The real problem isn't with the narrowing of the modern e-citizen's
worldview, it is that e-citizens will drown in the growing flood of
information, in-depth and shallow, unable to parse it into opinions.
Transhumanist forebear FM-2030 wrote that transhumans want "instant
universal participation that will do away with the very institution of
government." Once a community is larger than 2,500 people or so, however,
the issues become so complex that we have had to delegate to elites. Staying
on top of even a fraction of the issues of modern governance requires
superhuman capacities and energies. Even a clearly posthuman intellect such
as Noam Chomsky doesn't write much outside of foreign policy and
linguistics.
Which is why we will need intelligent political agents--political shopping
bots--to surf all the information for us and make increasingly accurate
choices about which issues we should be interested in, which data sources
provide the best information and which organizations are actually
accomplishing something. Already, by answering a couple dozen questions in
an online survey at The Political Compass you can determine with high
accuracy your affinity for political ideologies of which you may never have
heard. Then there's a program called Constituty by computer scientist Jason
Tester that monitors users' Web surfing, asks them about their apparent
interests and values, tracks issues and the positions of candidates and
advises users on voting. Constituty can then also track how well candidates
fulfill campaign promises and reward them with additional support on users'
behalf.
Having software to pull together the facts and make coherent sense out of
our political choices would finally allow many people to begin making
choices in their own interests. For instance, a recent American Prospect
article by Larry Bartels (discussed by Louis Menand in The New Yorker)
points out that most Americans instinctively approve the repeal of
inheritance taxes even though they only apply to the top 1% to 2% of
estates. Even a majority of those Americans who think "the income gap
between the richest and the poorest Americans has increased in recent
decades" and that "the rich pay too little in taxes" want to repeal
inheritance taxes. Bartels calls this "unenlightened self-interest," and
political decision-support software would likely point us in a more rational
direction.
Unless, of course, the software is designed by Microsoft to automatically
discourage taxes and redistribution. As we've seen with growing concern
about partisan skullduggery hidden in voting software, these systems will
immediately fall under suspicion of having partisan biases and they will
have to be open source.
But even if our political agents are completely transparent, what would it
mean for democracy if all the heavy lifting in forming opinions and being
politically active was done without any conscious effort on our part?
Participatory e-agent democracy would still be an advance over the passivity
of representative democracy, which offers at best a couple binary decisions
every couple of years.
What we really want, however, is to run this software as a conscious
subroutine, as part of the civic engagement module for our genetically,
pharmaceutically and nanoneurally enhanced brains.
Democracy of supermen
If we can expand our conscious capacities for knowledge, attention,
deliberation and communication, then even a small proportion of our energies
may be enough to read opinion journals, monitor C-SPAN, participate in
online debates and vote on the UN referenda, while the rest of our brain
gets on with the more important things in our lives. More capable and
intelligent citizens will inevitably begin to demand more participatory
forms of democracy, delegating fewer tasks to imperfectly representative
elites, as John Stuart Mill suggested 200 years ago:
From this increase of intelligence, several effects may be confidently
anticipated...they will become even less willing than at present to be led
and governed, and directed into the way they should go, by the mere
authority and prestige of superiors...The theory of dependence and
protection will be more and more intolerable to them, and they will require
that their conduct and condition shall be essentially self-governed.
Gene tweaks for intelligence, nano-neurotechnology, and political
intelligent agents will not only make us more empowered for self-governance
but also more immune to the psychological manipulation being perfected by
pollsters, ad agencies and spin doctors. Voters' decisions are swayed by
irrelevancies such as a politician's height or attractiveness, the color of
the party's logo, clever catchphrases and negative ads, and meaningless
proxies for ideological commitment such as a politician's religion or
military record.
Researchers at the University Arizona in Tucson found that support for
charismatic leaders increases dramatically the more that people are
manipulated to think about death. "Reminders of death increase the need for
psychological security and therefore the appeal of leaders who emphasize the
greatness of the nation and a heroic victory over evil." This could
certainly explain the opposition of some politicians to life extension and
their enthusiasm for alarming states of emergency. The fine-tuned
manipulation of these unconscious responses is being explored in the
burgeoning field of political neuromarketing using PET scans and MRIs.
Hopefully, as transhumans, we will also have increasing awareness of and
control over these unconscious responses. The cure for
demagoguery will be a spam filter on our cerebellum.
And just as the literate, well-fed citizens of the 1960s insisted on forms
of democracy undreamt of by 18th century sharecroppers or Paleolithic
hunter-gatherers, the increasing health, intelligence, longevity, education
and leisure of the ordinary citizen will make them more capable of
recognizing the ways that an unequal society does not serve their interests,
and more able to understand the methods they need to pursue to achieve
empowerment.
As George Bernard Shaw said in the Revolutionist's Handbook "Democracy
cannot rise above the level of the human material of which its voters are
made...(Democracies will continue to be swayed by demagogues) unless we can
have a Democracy of Supermen; and the production of such a Democracy is the
only change that is now hopeful enough to nerve us to the effort that
Revolution demands."
Posthuman politics
At TransVision 2004, economist Robin Hanson proposed that many people
persist in untenable beliefs because of ignorance and self-deception. As a
consequence, in a posthuman future, as we get smarter and have increasing
access to and control over our minds, we will have more information and be
less able to sustain self-deception. Deliberations between completely
rational posthumans, according to Hanson, will much more quickly arrive at
consensus.
Hanson may be partly right. If people are happier, smarter, more prosperous
and less manipulable, I think there will be fewer intractable conflicts. We
will be less likely to pick fights to satisfy our need for sadism,
self-aggrandizement and revenge. Insofar as disagreements have possible
win-win solutions we will be more likely to find them.
But Hanson has a stereotypical economist's faith that all conflict can be
solved through utility-maximizing exchange, and a blindness to the
differences in worldviews and material interests that also lead to
conflicts, and thus the need for democratic deliberation and governance. In
a labor market the worker and the boss may quickly arrive at a wage rate.
Then the workers may organize, go on strike and elect a pro-labor government
to raise that wage. And their bosses may buy off the politicians and hire
union thugs to beat up the strikers. The result is not determined by
deliberation but the contest of citizen organization versus money. No matter
how smart we get there will still be zero-sum conflicts whose outcomes will
be determined by the unpredictable clashes of power and wealth.
In the future, the advantage will go to those with access to the latest
nano-neurotechnology and political intelligent agents. We can already see
the contours of the debates over more equal access to citizenship
enhancements today in arguments about campaign financing, media democracy,
voter registration and the digital divide. In order to ensure that human
enhancement technologies facilitate a more radical participatory democracy
and not a widening of the gaps between the haves and have-nots, we need to
ensure universal access to those technologies. We may not be able to oblige
all citizens to exercise their equal powers of self-government, but we can
assure that they all have access to them.
When people aren't interested in politics we say they aren't "political
animals." The hope, however, is that in the near future we may all be able
to stop being political animals, unreflectively pushing levers on the basis
of Pavlovian conditioning and then panting expectantly in hopes of a dog
biscuit from the elites who put us through our paces. Instead, we may
finally become cyborg citizens, smart and clearheaded enough to build a
democracy worthy of human beings, and whatever else we might become and
create.
James Hughes, PhD, teaches Health Policy at Trinity College in Hartford
Connecticut and serves as the Executive Director of the World Transhumanist
Association. Dr. Hughes also produces the weekly syndicated public affairs
talk show Changesurfer Radio and contributes to the democratic transhumanist
Cyborg Democracy blog. Dr. Hughes' book Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic
Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future will be
published by Westview Press in November. |
|
Considered science
fiction neural technology is opening doors
BY RONALD KOTULAK
Chicago Tribune
Tue, Aug. 03, 2004
Jesse Sullivan doesn't know exactly how his brain liberated
itself from his armless body and began doing things for him on its own. But
he has become a pioneer in a new field of medicine called neural
engineering, whose practitioners are proving that there is such a thing as
mind over matter.
Sullivan, a Tennessee power company worker who lost both arms in a
job-related accident, has been outfitted by Rehabilitation Institute of
Chicago researchers with a kind of bionic arm, which is controlled directly
by his thoughts. This extraordinary achievement - just one of several
breakthroughs nationally in linking mental activity with machines-signifies
an impending step of immense proportions: The human brain is poised to make
its biggest evolutionary leap since the appearance of early man eons ago.
The first direct brain-computer hookups have already been achieved in
paralyzed patients, with limited success. Building on that, Cyberkinetics, a
Massachusetts biotech company, has government approval to implant chips
containing 100 tiny electrodes into the brains of five quadriplegics this
year to see if their thoughts can operate computers. At least two other
research teams are planning similar brain-machine experiments in people.
"I think what we're going to find is that we can help people who are
disabled become super-able in a new sense," says Cyberkinetics chief
executive Timothy Surgenor. "These people may be able to do things we can't
do, like operate a computer faster or do very precise tasks. That's what
we're really trying to accomplish. We're not trying to make an incremental
change for these people. We're trying to do something that's a
breakthrough."
These experiments have ushered science into a new era, the age of the cyborg,
where the melding of brain and machine, long envisioned by the masters of
science fiction, is now possible. And the research is not just aimed at the
handicapped. Able-bodied people may also be able to greatly expand the
capacity of their minds.
"We're getting into sort of a scary field, in a way, that of cyborgs, where
relatively healthy people are going to control machines (with their
thoughts)," says Dr. Philip Kennedy, of Neural Signals Inc., in Atlanta. In
1998, Kennedy, a former Emory University neurologist, was the first
researcher to implant an electrode into the brain of a totally paralyzed
patient, who was then empowered to use his mind to slowly spell out words on
a computer.
"People are very bad at remembering lots of things and our calculation
ability is only fair," he says. "Simple arithmetic is all we can do in our
head without having to resort to a calculator. If you've got a tiny chip
that you can put in with lots of access points into the brain, then you can
enhance the normal memory and the normal ability to communicate."
If it works the way Kennedy and many other scientists now believe, the
two-way brain-machine interface could give people expanded memory banks and
super calculating power. Implanted computer chips, for example, could enable
people to quickly learn a foreign language and master other tough subjects.
"We do dream about that, of enhancing functionality, just like the Six
Million Dollar Man," says University of Chicago neuroscientist Nicholas
Hatsopoulos, who worked with Brown University's John Donoghue to show that
the Cyberkinetics chip enabled monkeys to move a computer cursor with their
brains. "It would actually improve your capabilities beyond what a normal
person could do. You could see better, hear better, move better and think
faster."
Are such things possible? Not now, but very likely soon.
"I have no doubt that that is the future of those technologies," says Arthur
Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.
"We'll see them for safety purposes, learning purposes and enhancement
purposes."
The technology raises disturbing questions: Who would have access to
electronic mind-enhancers? Would companies and other institutions coerce
employees to have chips implanted in their brains to gain a competitive
edge? Would chips be given to children? Would they be used to control the
behavior of sex offenders and others? Would it change our notion of what it
means to be human?
"How much can I do this and still be me?" Caplan asks. "Not every
intervention threatens our sense of who we are, but if you really started to
change your memory speed, or clearly started to be able to do things that
you weren't able to do before, like learn languages in a day, or had
infrared vision, you do start to get to questions about, `Is that still me?'
"My answer to that is, I'm not sure. But that won't stop people."
The National Science Foundation essentially concluded, in a 2002 report
called "Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance," that
"super people" are around the corner:
"At this unique moment in the history of technical achievement, improvement
of human performance becomes possible. Better understanding of the human
body and development of tools for direct human-machine interaction have
opened completely new opportunities."
Sullivan, 57, of Dayton, Tenn., entered this dazzling new world three years
ago when his arms were incinerated on the job as a lineman for a Tennessee
power company. He doesn't remember how it happened, but somehow he
accidently grabbed a high-tension wire carrying 7,400 volts of electricity.
His arms took the full fury of the charge.
When it came time to rebuild Sullivan, doctors first fitted him with a
standard plastic-and-metal prosthesis. But it moved clumsily and demanded
arduous shoulder gyrations.
That's the way things stood until last year, when Sullivan happened to be in
the right place at the right time. That was the RIC, where Dr. Todd Kuiken,
director of amputee services, was getting ready to test a 20-year-old dream,
an experimental myoelectric arm, a device intended to transmit instructions
from the brain via unused nerves to points outside the body. In short, Jesse
was to think the arm to move.
Sullivan had one important thing in his favor: The memory of his arms and
hands remained fresh in his mind, while the neural circuits that controlled
those parts were still powered up as they had been before the accident.
Would the impulses that commanded movement in his missing left arm leap from
his brain, travel down his functional but destination-less nerves to the
computerized artificial arm and bring it to life?
Sullivan remembers the moment well. It was a cold January day in Chicago,
but Sullivan's thoughts were on matters far from the frigid temperature
outside. A single mantra kept running through his mind as he concentrated on
getting plastic and metal to react solely to his will: "Think, Jesse,
think."
Then it happened. Something moved.
"That was probably one of the best feelings I'd had since I had my accident,
when they first put it on and told me to close my hand," Sullivan says.
"When I did, this thing closed. This grasper on the end of the arm closed
up."
Sullivan's robotic arm has given him a new sense of independence. He can do
things he couldn't just a year ago, like shave, put on socks, weed the
garden, water the yard, open small jars, use a pair of handicapped scissors
and throw a ball to his grandson. "It gave me part of my dignity back," he
says.
Sullivan doesn't have to think hard anymore about doing something; he simply
does it the way he always did. "I feel my hand when I want to pick something
up, then I just close my hand," he says. When he wants to grab a bottle of
water, for instance, the computerized arm moves forward, the elbow bends and
the mechanical hand grasps the bottle, bringing it to his lips, as his
natural arm once did.
It feels so natural, in fact, that Sullivan forgot himself earlier this
summer and yanked off the mechanical hand trying to start a lawn mower. The
arm had to be sent back to the Rehabilitation Institute for repairs.
For Kuiken it was vindication of an idea he got as a young graduate student
two decades ago, prompted by a line he came across in a scientific journal,
the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. It was a "what if" kind of article
where the authors speculated on things that might be possible someday. The
line that caught Kuiken's attention described the theoretical possibility of
transferring nerves to different muscles and then using signals from the
muscles to control an electronic prosthesis.
The far-out idea grew into an obsession with Kuiken. He would first
surgically move the nerves that once led to an arm and transplant them into
a chest muscle. Once they took root, sensors could be placed over the nerve
endings to amplify the electrical signals still coming from the brain. The
signals could then be plugged into a computer and used to control a
motorized arm.
It was a wild dream; no one had ever done it. Kuiken spent year after
frustrating year overcoming failures in experimental animals until he had a
model that could be tried on a human being. Facing Sullivan after the arm
was put on for the first time, Kuiken was anxious: "Oh my God," he thought
to himself, "what if it doesn't work?"
But as Sullivan's brow knit and his mental effort caused the artificial hand
to close, Kuiken at last breathed easier. "I was very relieved and excited,"
he recalls.
He was even more excited once Sullivan got used to the bionic arm: "Doc, now
I don't have to think about it," Sullivan told him. "I just do it."
As wonderful as the robotic arm is for Sullivan and the many others sure to
follow-another Rehabilitation Institute patient has since been hooked up to
an arm and a third was being fitted as this article went to press - it is
only the start of what is to come, as more is being demanded of the brain.
Researchers are learning how to harness brainpower to machines so that
paralyzed people can use thoughts to operate not only computers, but
wheelchairs, robots and other mechanical devices. The Department of Defense
funds much of the research in hopes of using thought control to fly
airplanes and maneuver combat robots in dangerous war zones.
And bolstered by new knowledge of how neural circuits reorganize themselves
from minute to minute to adapt to the outside world, scientists are
developing high-tech tools to prod the brains of stroke patients into
healing faster and more completely than ever before.
As scientists explore the brain-machine interface, they are wonder-struck at
the brain's ability to make room for new conditions-for instance,
considering a robotic arm as much a part of the body as a flesh and blood
one, and accepting an implanted computer chip as a natural extension of its
powers.
To be sure, the ubiquitous computer has already, in a sense, become an
appendage of the brain. Preschool children who have daily access to a
computer, according to a recent study by Xiaoming Li of Wayne State
University, perform significantly better on measures of school readiness and
cognitive development (perception, awareness, reasoning and judgment) than
those who don't.
"We are driven by several themes: The idea that the brain, even in the
adult, is modifiable-it's plastic, and has adaptive capacity," says Dr. W.
Zev Rymer, director of research at RIC, who is spearheading the nation's
leading effort to use the newest technology to help heal the brain. "We
didn't believe that for a long time. We had believed that after the first
few years of life, the capacity of your brain to change was severely
limited."
That old way of thinking also put limits on rehabilitation. When something
goes terribly wrong with a person's brain or spine - as it does for more
than a million Americans who suffer strokes, spinal cord injury or head
trauma - that person is usually given immediate supportive medical care, but
the brain, for the most part, is left on its own to get better.
Trying to turn that dismal picture around, Rymer is focusing 80 percent of
the RIC's research on ways to help the damaged brain or the injured spinal
cord. It has become the 150-bed institution's top priority, since the
majority of its patients have some type of neurologic injury.
"Our future lies in exploring the limits of ways to optimize recovery of
brain function, reorganization and plasticity," Rymer says. "The point of
all this is the plasticity idea: that we now have ways to modify the
reorganization of the brain in a constructive way."
One way the Rehabilitation Institute's scientists are trying to rearrange
the damaged brain is with electrical stimulation. Our brains work on
electricity. Neurons communicate with one another through electrical
impulses, and animal studies reveal that a small electrical charge can
stimulate the production of new connections between brain cells that helped
the injured animals recover.
Of the 750,000 Americans who suffer strokes each year, 300,000 are left with
serious deficits, such as weakness, paralysis or inability to speak. Most
recovery occurs within the first three months after a stroke, and the
deficits that remain after that are usually considered permanent.
Dr. Mark Huang, a RIC rehabilitation expert, is trying to break that
frustrating three-month barrier. In a recently completed phase one clinical
trial, five patients with paralyzed arms underwent surgery to have specially
designed electrodes made by a Seattle-based company, Northstar
Neurosciences, implanted near their motor cortex, the part of the brain that
controls nerves and muscles. The patients were well beyond the point of
optimal recovery, having had their strokes anywhere from four months to six
years earlier, yet they experienced significant recovery.
An ongoing phase two study is showing similar promise and a phase three
study involving many more patients at multiple centers across the country is
scheduled to start later this year. These three-phase studies are required
by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to show that a product is both safe
and efficacious.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers pinpoint an area of
the motor cortex that is likely to take control of commands to the arm from
neurons destroyed by the stroke. A surgeon makes a small opening in the
skull, placing an electrode over the site. The idea is to stimulate this
area electrically while a patient undergoes intensive physical
rehabilitation of his or her paralyzed arm.
The results, though preliminary, are stunning: Patients recovered an average
of 30 percent of lost function in their paralyzed arms. Five similar stroke
patients, who did not receive the implants but underwent the same intensive
rehabilitation, recovered only 10 percent of lost function.
"The main purpose of the device is to provide the stimulation that will
allow the brain to heal," Huang explains. "It basically means you're getting
the brain to retrain itself to do activities that it did before."
"We're taking people who basically plateaued neurologically, and providing
them with improvement. When you get a stroke you usually reach a certain
point and then you plateau. That's pretty much all you get back. These
people are not returning to normal, but they're getting some gains back."
Like Jesse Sullivan, Laurie Sears doesn't fully comprehend how her brain
changed to make her better, except that it had something to do with the
electrode under her skull. Her right arm had hung uselessly by her side ever
since her stroke six years ago.
Sears cheerfully describes how the wire from the electrode burrowed under
her skull and then threaded down under her skin to a small battery-powered
receiving disc in her left chest. A radio signal from the outside turns the
electrode on only during the intense rehabilitation sessions, which last for
six weeks. Sears says she never felt the electricity in her head. At the end
of the experiment, the wire and electrode were removed.
Sears had three goals in mind when she volunteered to participate in the
electrical brain stimulation experiment: to be able to hug loved ones with
both arms; to take up knitting again; and to use a spoon to eat soup.
She can now do all three-nowhere near as well as before her stroke, but with
a proficiency that represents a quantum leap over having no use at all.
"I'm not zooming through the bowl of soup," she laughs. "It's a very slow
process. But just to be able to do something like that made me very hopeful.
It's so very, very important that we have this kind of research. If we don't
have it, where's the hope? The hope also goes into reality. Would I do it
over? Yeah. I'd jump at the opportunity."
Judy Walsh, 59, of Elmwood Park, Ill., said thinking about having the brain
stimulator was "scary," and her children tried to talk her out of it. Now
she and her children are glad she went through with the procedure. She's
enjoyed a 40 percent recovery of function in her left arm, which had been
paralyzed by a stroke five years earlier.
"I definitely feel I have improved," Walsh says. "I can do more things with
it. Instead of just letting it hang there, I'm picking it up more and using
it more. I use my fork and knife at the dinner table. I didn't think I would
recover so much."
Walsh says she also noticed a big change in her mood: "My attitude is better
because I feel more confident. That's a big difference; you're more
self-confident."
Dr. Robert Levy, the Northwestern Memorial Hospital neurosurgeon who
implanted the stimulator in Sears, Walsh and other patients in the study,
says he's amazed at the early findings. "We have for the first time a
relatively innocuous procedure that appears to have the ability, at least in
part, to reverse a fixed neurological deficit. That is something that has
not been available to me as a clinician ever in the course of my 20-year
career."
While the preliminary results appear enticing, scientists still lack an
adequate explanation of how electrical stimulation works. "Obviously the
body has electricity, that's how we're powered," said Dr. Mark Huang,
rehabilitation expert. "For some reason the electrical stimulation is
helpful. We're not sure why it's helpful, but it seems to assist with this
neuroplasticity, more so than if we did just straight rehabilitation
therapy. This seems to be above and beyond that."
Electrical stimulation seems to affect other body structures beyond the
targeted limb. A few patients who lost some ability to talk after their
stroke experienced improved speech, even though the stimulation was intended
to help their paralyzed arm. Northstar Neurosciences officials intend to
expand testing to speech-impaired stroke patients and people incapacitated
by traumatic brain injury, especially those involved in motor vehicle
accidents.
Would electrical brain stimulation help normal people learn faster?
"There are many possibilities that have to be answered ethically," said Dr.
Mark Huang, a rehabilitation expert. "You can use this in any application
where you want to potentially enhance brain function. If you want to learn a
new language, potentially the stimulator might help. Would I recommend you
do it for that purpose? No. But down the road, who knows? Obviously the
sky's the limit and we're still in the infancy stage."
Elsewhere on the sprawling upper floors of the RIC, neuroscientists,
engineers, doctors and technicians bustle around strange new equipment-much
of it built for the first time-that is intended to get patients to do things
they never did before, and perhaps get them to heal better than ever before.
"Where we're heading with all this now is this knowledge that we can change
many aspects of brain function," Dr. W. Zev Rymer explains. "It gives us a
tool to look carefully at what it is we do when a therapist begins to work
together with a patient on promoting recovery. In rehabilitation, the idea
is that the robot could be a substitute for some lost or impaired function."
When Rymer uses the term "robot," he is not referring to the beeping,
self-propelled androids that the word usually conjures up, but to machines
that engage humans in motion. These machines have ramped up the work of
physical therapists, who have been manually moving the limbs of patients
with brain and spinal cord injury for a long time, hoping that some of it
would take, but not knowing how it helped and what was most effective.
"The framework within which they work has been very obscure," Rymer says.
"It was obscure then, and it remains obscure to this day. A lot of it is
just seat-of-the-pants clinical practice. They think that these things are
helpful, and there are some straightforward things that they do that
probably are helpful without invoking any elaborate theories of mechanism."
Rymer feels that robots may now provide the answer to what works and what
doesn't. RIC researchers use the robots to move paralyzed hands, arms and
legs, trying to teach the brain how to regain lost functions by rewiring
itself. And the robots do so tirelessly, putting patients through
brain-stimulating workouts that would exhaust a team of physical therapists.
One of the most cutting-edge robots is a virtual reality machine that takes
up most of a small room on the RIC's 14th floor. It's the only one of its
kind, and its job, if it works, is to coax the brain and body of stroke
patients back into cooperating. It does so, for example, by enabling a
patient to feel and manipulate an object that appears in space before him
but really isn't there. The purpose is to get the brain to retool itself to
move muscles that are still good but which have lost their linkup to command
central.
"The global idea-that the brain is modifiable with experience, and that by
retraining muscle activity you can produce physical changes in the brain-is
pivotal," said Dr. W. Zev Rymer, director of research at RIC.
That's what paraplegics using another machine called the Lokomat are
counting on. The $250,000 contrivance looks like the steel frame of a small
building. A harness holds patients so that their feet rest on a moving
floor. Computers operate motorized braces that force a patient's paralyzed
legs to go through walking motions while sensors pick up muscular activity.
Neurologists believe that there may be two roads to recovery in patients
with serious but partial spinal cord injuries that cause paralysis.
Physically moving paralyzed limbs may help retrain the brain to take
command, and it may also reawaken "mini-brains" in the spinal cord itself.
These mini-brains are clumps of neurons, called pattern generators, which
control routine leg movements, so that a person can walk without thinking
about it.
The potential benefits of the Lokomat rely on both avenues, since
experiments on paralyzed animals showed that putting them on a treadmill
could reactivate their pattern generators.
Patients so far tested on the Lokomat already had gone through standard
physical therapy with no improvement. They remained paralyzed from the waist
down but still experienced some feeling in their legs. "We and others showed
that their walking gait was improved with the Lokomat," Rymer says. "We are
now looking to intervene earlier after spinal cord injury to see if that
improves their ultimate performance." The research has also been expanded to
include stroke patients who have leg paralysis.
Martine Maenhout, 58, of Naperville, Ill., says her brain forgot how to walk
after a blood clot in her spinal cord paralyzed her from the waist down in
November 2002. Doctors said that at most, she had a 5 percent chance of ever
walking again.
"Then we heard about this robot program, the Lokomat," she says. "I started
to come here 10 months after I was paralyzed and still unable to walk.
Within six weeks, I walked."
Maenhout ambulates easily now with a walker and can walk short distances
with two canes. She expects to keep improving and to be able to go shopping
on her own by Christmas.
She isn't sure what happened in her brain to get her back on her feet, or
whether her spinal cord also helped. She suspects that the walking motion
that the Lokomat forced her legs to go through somehow put the memory of how
to walk back into her brain, like reprogramming a computer.
"At first it was very strange, almost like somebody else's legs were being
moved," she says. "I could feel my legs being moved, but I had absolutely no
control over them. They had to tell me everything, as if I had never walked.
Keep your feet up, lift your knees, everything. Within a couple of weeks I
could start moving my legs."
Other scientists are exploring new brain-machine boundaries.
Kennedy of Neural Signals in Atlanta was the first to show that the brain's
commands could be tapped to operate machinery outside the body. In 1998, he
implanted an electrode into the brain of 63-year-old Johnny Ray, who had
suffered a massive brain-stem stroke that left him totally paralyzed and
unable to speak. Yet his brain remained intact.
The extremely thin electrode is open at the end to allow brain cells to grow
axonal branches inside. Wired to a computer, the electrode picks up the
firing pattern of individual neurons-each of which can control complex
functions.
Watching a cursor on the computer screen, and listening to the crackle of
neurons firing, Ray quickly learned how to concentrate his thoughts. He
could control the firing of the neurons inside the electrode, increasing or
decreasing their speed of firing. Programmed to respond to the commands of
individual neurons, the computer obeyed his thoughts. Increasing the firing
action of one neuron moved the cursor from left to right, while decreasing
its firing rate made the cursor stop. Another neuron was taught to move the
cursor up and down, enabling Ray to spell out words at a rate of three
letters a minute.
His body was locked in, but his brain was now free to communicate with the
outside world. "See you later," Ray liked to say. "Nice talking with you."
Or, "I'm hungry."
"We would ask him questions about himself and his family and he'd spell (the
answers) out," Kennedy says. "He was very pleased. He was very sick all of
the time and in pain a lot of the time. But he always expressed to us that
he was very glad he could do it.
"To see him control the cursor with his brain was unbelievable. But then
there was the awe at what it meant, what it meant for others. I realized
that when we had Johnny controlling the cursor, we had crossed a threshold.
People who are locked in should be able to communicate easily, control their
environment, control their wheelchair, control just about everything."
Ray and five other paralyzed patients were terminally ill when they received
the experimental brain implants, and all have since died. With major
equipment upgrades, Kennedy is planning more implants in patients.
He will be collaborating with Duke University neurobiologist Andrew
Schwartz, who has succeeded in training monkeys to eat with a robotic arm
using only their brainpower to guide the arm's movements.
In Schwartz's experiment, an electrode with multiple contact points is
implanted in the animal's motor cortex-which controls its arms-and the
electrode is then connected to a computer, which controls the robot arm.
With the computer reading output from the motor cortex, both of the animal's
arms are strapped to its side. The animal is then presented with an orange
slice at the end of the robot arm, only inches from its mouth. The monkey's
urge to grab the orange with its real, immobilized arm causes a lot of motor
neurons to fire. At first the computer is programmed to move the orange
close enough for the monkey to eat it in response to the firing of any
neurons in the motor cortex. Then the task grows harder. The arm is moved
farther and farther away, forcing the monkey to fine-tune the firing of
neurons to control the motorized arm. While the computer records the
patterns of brain activity, the animal gradually learns that it doesn't have
to try to move one of its own arms to get the orange. It only has to think
about getting the orange. When the computer reads that thought pattern, it
moves the robot arm to the monkey's mouth.
"We call it closed-loop learning," Schwartz explains. "The animal changes
its neural output. We decode that and feed it to the robot. The robot moves
and the animal decides if the robot is moving in the right direction or
not."
Subconsciously, the monkey makes a connection between what it is thinking
and how that gets the robot arm to move in the desired direction. Schwartz
believes that a paralyzed patient with such electrode-mediated brain control
over a robot arm could feed himself, work an electric wheelchair and do many
other things.
A Duke University team, led by neurobiologist Miquel Nicolelis and
neurosurgeon Dr. Dennis Turner, was the first to get monkeys to move a robot
arm with their thoughts. With a 32-electrode array implanted in their
brains, the animals were initially taught to use a joystick with their hands
to move a cursor on a screen that controlled the mechanical arm. A computer
recorded the pattern of neuronal firing the animals used to maneuver the arm
in three dimensions.
Then an amazing thing happened. Power was cut off to the joystick, leaving
only the animal's thoughts funneled through the computer to control the arm.
At first the monkeys kept using the joystick. Gradually they noticed
something was different: The arm was not responding to the joystick as
before, yet the screen cursor, obeying the computer's readings of their
brain patterns, was moving. It didn't take long before they figured it out.
They stopped using the joystick, but kept moving the cursor with their
brains.
The first time it happened, Nicolelis and the other scientists fell silent,
staring at each other in disbelief. A momentous goal had been reached-the
brain was operating out of the box. The Duke team now believes its array is
ready to be tried in humans and is seeking FDA approval to implant the
electrodes into the brains of paralyzed patients.
How far can the brain go? Is the body in which it resides actually holding
back its full potential?
The University of Chicago's Hatsopoulos is trying to find out and thinks
there may be a way to get the brain to run a computer at warp speed. What if
a computer could be operated, not by using the brain to move a cursor
around, but by using complete thoughts to do many functions at once?
Hatsopoulos is implanting Cyberkinetics' Braingate, the 100-electrode chip,
into the premotor cortex of monkeys as well as into the motor cortex. He
found that the chip in the premotor cortex, which sits in front of the motor
cortex and is involved in the planning of movement, was able to predict what
the motor cortex was going to do before it did it.
Tapping directly into the premotor cortex would bypass the arm and hand,
which currently limit the speed at which a computer can be used.
Instead of having the motor cortex direct the muscles to go through all the
individual steps necessary to move a cursor from one position to another,
the premotor cortex would simply command that the whole function be done at
once. The computer, in a sense, would be reading a person's thoughts and
putting them into action.
"The idea would be for a general purpose brain-machine interface,"
Hatsopoulos says. "You have this different mode of operation where you say,
`I have a neural remote control. I want to change the channel but I don't
want to change the channel by moving the cursor to hit a button. I just want
to intentionally select this button.' That presumably is going to be a lot
faster than actually moving a cursor to the button. You just say to
yourself, `Activate that button.'"
Before brain-computer interfaces can become a reality for therapy or to
enhance mental abilities, a lot more research must be done. But the field is
moving fast and is energized as never before.
"Just by thinking, patients could control and choose objects," says
Northwestern Memorial Hospital's Robert Levy. "That's the first step in
enabling the brain to bypass the spinal cord and send signals directly to
some output function. That's breathtaking work. It's no longer a question of
if this stuff is going to replace much of what we do now. It's really how
soon it's going to be."
---
SIDEBAR
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Rehabilitation Institute of
Chicago, which began in 1954 as a small outpatient clinic and has become the
nation's top rehabilitation hospital, according to U. S. News & World
Report. RIC was the brainchild of a former chief of the Veteran's
Administration, Dr. Paul Magnuson, who envisioned opening up to private
citizens the kind of rehabilitative care received by returning World War II
and Korean War veterans. In 1963, Dr. Henry Betts, a young physician
specializing in rehabilitative medicine, was recruited from New York City
and became RIC's medical director, serving for two decades before becoming
chief executive officer and president.
In 1974, RIC built the nation's first freestanding rehabilitation center
that furthers a holistic treatment approach, teaming doctors, nurses,
therapists and spiritual counselors in pursuit of the institution's stated
goal, "to maximize the potential of each patient." Meanwhile the hospital
has raised huge sums of money to conduct cutting-edge research programs to
find ways to compensate for such problems as brain or spinal injury, stroke
and other disabling events and physical conditions that limit individual
independence.
"RIC has evolved into a clinical, educational and research institute of
great size and strength," says Betts, who is now chairman of the
Rehabilitation Institute Foundation. "We must work toward reaching more
people and the ultimate outcome of achieving prevention and cure."
Wayne M. Lerner, RIC's current president and CEO, says the institute,
through its emphasis on patient care, research and advocacy for the
disabled, has generated a "synergy that creates exceptional results for
patients and their families, attending physicians and support staff, and the
scientists, clinicians and engineers behind our research program-the largest
in the world."
RIC's anniversary year will culminate in a benefit dinner on Oct. 5 at the
Chicago Hilton and Towers. With the theme "Transforming Medicine,
Transforming Lives," the dinner will honor Mayor Richard M. Daley for
establishing the nation's first Task Force on Employment of People with
Disabilities. Appearing at the dinner will be noted Irish tenor Ronan Tynan,
himself a physician and double-amputee, who recently sang at Ronald Reagan's
funeral.
© 2004, Chicago Tribune. |
|
Evolution's next stage?
Transhumanists explore ways to overcome the physical and
psychological limitations of the body
Olivia Ward
TheStar.com
25 July 2004
Thousands of years ago a primitive man or woman, huddled in a squalid cave,
struck sparks from a stone and created fire. The result was so successful
that manipulating the environment to meet human needs became the norm,
turning night into day with artificial lighting, taming the inhospitable
effects of weather, and creating devices that reduced daily drudgery to mere
minutes of work.
But now, experts say, another scientific quantum leap has transported us
from the human to the transhuman era ? a time when humankind itself is being
manipulated and enhanced, leading to an unknown future where man, machine
and technology will merge with startling results.
"What's happening in the 21st century is a natural progression of the
invention of fire," says James Hughes, secretary of the World Transhumanist
Association. "Human tool use has always extended the capability of doing
what we weren't biologically intended to do. But now the possibilities are
infinite, and they're making some people feel scared."
Next month, Hughes, a bioethicist at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.,
will take part in an international conference at the University of Toronto,
titled ``TransVision 2004: Art and Life in the Posthuman Era.'' Sponsored by
the transhumanist association and the Texas-based Extropy Institute, the
four-day event opens Aug. 8.
For many people the very concept of transhumanism is vague, unsettling or
downright off-putting, suggestive of sci-fi films such as I, Robot, in which
a new generation of homicidal androids swarms Chicago in an anti-human
hatefest.
That, advocates say, is the very opposite of what transhumanism means:
rather than a potentially destructive force, it is "a nascent approach to
bioethics, futurism, art and culture whose adherents affirm the use of
technology to overcome the limitations of the human body."
And, they point out, "transhumanism as both a philosophical and cultural
phenomenon has experienced exponential growth worldwide in recent years."
Toronto author and academic Christopher Dewdney, in his book Last Flesh:
Life in the Transhuman Era, describes our time, for better or worse, as the
dawn of a radically new era for humankind: until now, life on earth has
experienced two major transformations, from the reproduction of the first
complex molecules that gave rise to human evolution, to the beginning of
human consciousness.
Now, he says, "we are on the verge of the next stage in life's evolution,
the stage where, by human agency, life takes control of itself and guides
its own destiny. Never before has human life been able to change itself, to
reach into its own genetic structure and rearrange its molecular basis: now
it can."
And, Dewdney adds, "the goal of transhumanism is to surpass our current
biological limitations, be it our lifespan or the capabilities of our
brain."
Although many people point to cloning, cybernetics and the new science of
extreme miniaturization called nanotechnology as the heralds of the
transhuman future, scientists are quick to point out that the future has
already arrived, and it began centuries ago.
"In the 1870s, hygiene improved immeasurably, when sterilization saved
thousands of lives," says Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. "That
was a century ago, and it was accepted as a tremendous advance. There was no
debate about whether it should have been discovered."
Improving on the mental and physical capacities of human beings has a
history that goes back to the earliest documented times.
By 3000 B.C., simple tools such as the wheel, the pulley, the wedge and the
plow allowed people to travel farther, carry more goods, grow larger crops
and build houses in ways the early cavemen could only dream of.
Writing, invented around the same time in Mesopotamia, allowed scholars to
pass on their theories, and the development of science followed quickly. The
discovery of the solar system in 5th century B.C. led to today's quest for
space travel. New weapons of war based on explosives, invented around 800
A.D. in China, led to improved ways of killing that allowed soldiers to
fight enemies beyond their own range and muscle-power, and paved the way for
large-scale conquests.
In the arts, increasingly sophisticated musical instruments transformed the
sounds of the human voice into symphonies and full-scale operas, while the
printing press from 15th-century Germany allowed once obscure music,
literature, religious and political texts to reach an international public.
Medical advances, from 18th-century invention of vaccination, to
sterilization, antiseptics, anaesthetics and antibiotics developed alongside
eyeglasses, hearing aids, false teeth, artificial limbs and joint
replacements. Blood transfusions, hormone therapy and organ transplants
altered the ingredients of the human body while extending its life.
By the 20th century, new discoveries were so fast and furious that one
revolutionary "age" followed another with mind-boggling speed: the
electronic age, the atomic age, the space age, the computer age and the
information age. All opened up immense possibilities for humans to extend
their physical and mental prowess, to build or destroy, even venturing into
other worlds.
At the same time, the cult of self-enhancement grew, with an explosion of
drugs and herbal preparations promising bigger muscles, better
co-ordination, healthier organs, more attractive face and figure, sharper
memory, uplifted mood and sexual potency into old age. Cosmetic surgery
followed cosmetics in the quest for physical perfection. By the dawn of the
21st century, an affluent 70-something could expect to live as vigorously
and youthfully as a 40-year-old two centuries earlier.
Until recently, most enhancement was done through external means. But in the
transhuman era, the very stuff of life is altered to create new varieties of
human beings who may, in the future, have little in common with the cavemen
and women of our dim beginnings.
Since the discovery of the structure of DNA, known as the double helix, half
a century ago, the mechanisms that lead to the creation of life have been
decoded and analyzed in minute detail. That has opened the way to genetic
manipulation that offers the possibility of vast changes in human life and
the way it is lived. While some fear the results, many others are eager to
join the revolution.
"Visionary scientists are blueprinting the impossible," says Dewdney, "and
their visions ? human immortality, nanotechnology, populating the universe ?
no longer have the stigma of quackery they once had."
What we're facing, says Hughes, is no less than a future as "radically
redesigned humans."
"A lot of our DNA is evolutionary baggage," he insists. "We don't need it
and it's doing us no good. Eventually we'll be able to streamline and
improve on it in radical ways that will make today's ordinary biological
reproduction difficult. In time redesigned people may no longer be able to
breed with ordinary humans. That will mean we've surpassed the classical
definition of a species: that it reproduces with others of the same
species."
University of Toronto engineering professor Steve Mann already embraces
mechanical merger. In his autobiographical book, Cyborg: Digital Destiny and
Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer, Mann recounts his
20-year experiment as a pioneer cyborg ? a person whose everyday life is
dependent on a mechanical or electronic device.
Mann, said to be the first person living in total and constant contact with
a computer, wears a plastic frame that contains a video camera eyepiece
which "mediates reality" by filtering out undesirable elements of everyday
life such as advertising, and gives him a 180-degree view of what is
happening around him.
"The wearable computer allows me to explore my humanity, alter my
consciousness, shift my perspectives so that I can choose ? any given time ?
to see the world in very different, often quite liberating ways," he writes.
For some people, turning oneself into a cyborg is still a leap too far. And,
says Hughes, more startling things are ahead: "The most radical challenge to
understanding future citizenship will be machine minds. We'll have to cope
with intelligence based on something other than the `organic wet-ware' of
our brains. "
While some transhumanists focus on extending the mind, others are determined
to extend life itself, even to the point of immortality.
"If we can extend life by 30 years, we'll have done more or less all we need
to do," says de Grey, who is a co-founder of the Cambridge-based Methuselah
Foundation. "People have been brainwashed to come to terms with the ghastly
inevitability of aging. It's just a matter of waking them up."
De Grey believes that aging is the result of seven processes that undermine
the human body and mind, and are ultimately curable. To produce an immortal
human, scientists would have to find a way for the body to manufacture more
new cells, delete old harmful cells, stop deadly mutations in the cell
nucleus and the energy-generating mitochondria, and clear out the waste
materials that gradually accumulate in the body over time.
De Grey's first step to longevity is building a better mouse, that is one
whose normal three-year lifespan can be extended to five years. And, he
says, the main stumbling block is not public qualms but lack of funds. For
every naysayer who worries about overpopulation, economic collapse and
dangerous inequality of the very poor and the indestructible rich if life
were dramatically extended, he argues, there are many others who would
support it if given the chance.
Some experts take a dimmer view. The posthuman future, says State University
of New York doctoral candidate Joshua Kunken, may be a brave new world in
the Orwellian sense. Genetic modification could open the way to new kinds of
terror attacks, and conflicts between the "normals" and the genetically
enhanced could lead to catastrophic wars. At the very least, competition in
sports, jobs and education would be fierce and bitter.
"Will the benefits of being more human than human outweigh the drawbacks of
living in a society that is not yet tolerant of people with substantial
differences?" Kunken asks in an article on the website Transhumanism.com.
But the arguments for human perfectibility, both pro and con, run very deep
in the human psyche. Since earliest times, humankind has flirted with a
godlike status that inspires both horror and envy. From the ancient Greek
legend of Icarus, who died for the folly of rising above the mortal world,
to the German classic story of Faust, who sold his soul to the devil in
return for paradise on earth, the perils and wonders of perfection are
embedded in our culture.
"The argument for the perfectibility of mankind rests on a logical fallacy,"
writes Margaret Atwood, in the New York Review of Books. "Thus man is by
definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would
perfect him are themselves, by their own definition imperfect. And imperfect
beings cannot make perfect decisions." |
| |
|
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
Nick Bostrom
Homepage: www.nickbostrom.com
© 2004. Preprint, The Journal of Medical Ethics, in press
Once upon a time, the planet was tyrannized by a giant dragon. The dragon
stood taller than the largest cathedral, and it was covered with
thick black scales. Its red eyes glowed with hate,
and from its terrible jaws flowed an incessant
stream of evil-smelling yellowish-green slime. It demanded from
humankind a blood-curdling tribute: to satisfy its enormous appetite,
ten thousand men and women had to be delivered
every evening at the onset of dark to the foot of
the mountain where the dragon-tyrant lived. Sometimes
the dragon would devour these unfortunate souls upon arrival;
sometimes again it would lock them up in the
mountain where they would wither away for months
or years before eventually being consumed.
The misery inflicted by the dragon-tyrant was incalculable. In addition to
the ten thousand who were gruesomely slaughtered each day, there were
the mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children,
and friends that were left behind to grieve the
loss of their departed loved ones.
Some people tried to fight the dragon, but whether they were brave or
foolish was difficult to say. Priests and magicians called down
curses, to no avail. Warriors, armed with roaring
courage and the best weapons the smiths could
produce, attacked it, but were incinerated by its fire before
coming close enough to strike. Chemists concocted toxic brews and
tricked the dragon into swallowing them, but the
only apparent effect was to further stimulate its
appetite. The dragon's claws, jaws, and fire were so
effective, its scaly armor so impregnable, and its whole nature so
robust, as to make it invincible to any human
assault.
Seeing that defeating the tyrant was impossible, humans had no choice but to
obey its commands and pay the grisly tribute. The fatalities selected
were always elders. Although senior people were as
vigorous and healthy as the young, and sometimes
wiser, the thinking was that they had at least already
enjoyed a few decades of life. The wealthy might gain a brief
reprieve by bribing the press gangs that came to
fetch them; but, by constitutional law, nobody,
not even the king himself, could put off their turn indefinitely.
Spiritual men sought to comfort those who were afraid of being eaten by the
dragon (which included almost everyone, although many denied it in
public) by promising another life after death, a
life that would be free from the dragon-scourge.
Other orators argued that the dragon has its place in the
natural order and a moral right to be fed. They said that it was part
of the very meaning of being human to end up in
the dragon's stomach. Others still maintained that
the dragon was good for the human species because it kept
the population size down. To what extent these arguments convinced
the worried souls is not known. Most people tried
to cope by not thinking about the grim end that
awaited them.
For many centuries this desperate state of affairs continued. Nobody kept
count any longer of the cumulative death toll, nor of the number of
tears shed by the bereft. Expectations had
gradually adjusted and the dragon-tyrant had
become a fact of life. In view of the evident futility of
resistance, attempts to kill the dragon had ceased. Instead, efforts
now focused on placating it. While the dragon
would occasionally raid the cities, it was found
that the punctual delivery to the mountain of its quota
of life reduced the frequency of these incursions.
Knowing that their turn to become dragon-fodder was always impending, people
began having children earlier and more often. It was not uncommon for
a girl to be pregnant by her sixteenth birthday.
Couples often spawned a dozen children. The human
population was thus kept from shrinking, and the dragon
was kept from going hungry.
Over the course of these centuries, the dragon, being well fed, slowly but
steadily grew bigger. It had become almost as large as the mountain
on which it lived. And its appetite had increased
proportionately. Ten thousand human bodies were no
longer enough to fill its belly. It now demanded eighty
thousand, to be delivered to the foot of the mountain every evening
at the onset of dark.
What occupied the king's mind more than the deaths and the dragon itself was
the logistics of collecting and transporting so many people to the
mountain every day. This was not an easy task.
To facilitate the process, the king had a railway track constructed: two
straight lines of glistening steel leading up to the dragon's abode.
Every twenty minutes, a train would arrive at the
mountain terminal crammed with people, and would
return empty. On moonlit nights, the passengers travelling
on this train, if there had been windows for them to stick their
heads out of, would have been able to see in front
of them the double silhouette of the dragon and
the mountain, and two glowing red eyes, like the beams from a
pair of giant lighthouses, pointing the way to annihilation.
Servants were employed by the king in large numbers to administer the
tribute. There were registrars who kept track of whose turn it was to
be sent. There were people-collectors who would be
dispatched in special carts to fetch the
designated people. Often travelling at breakneck speed, they
would rush their cargo either to a railway station or directly to the
mountain. There were clerks who administered the pensions paid to the
decimated families who were no longer able to support themselves.
There were comforters who would travel with the
doomed on their way to the dragon, trying to ease
their anguish with spirits and drugs.
There was, moreover, a cadre of dragonologists who studied how these
logistic processes could be made more efficient. Some dragonologists
also conducted studies of the dragon's physiology
and behavior, and collected samples its shed
scales, the slime that drooled from its jaws, its lost
teeth, and its excrements, which were specked with fragments of human
bone. All these items were painstakingly annotated
and archived. The more the beast was understood,
the more the general perception of its invincibility
was confirmed. Its black scales, in particular, were harder than any
material known to man, and there seemed no way to make as much as a
scratch in its armor.
To finance all these activities, the king levied heavy taxes on his people.
Dragon-related expenditures, already accounting for one seventh of
the economy, were growing even faster than the
dragon itself.
Humanity is a curious species. Every once in a while, somebody gets a good
idea. Others copy the idea, adding to it their own improvements. Over
time, many wondrous tools and systems are
developed. Some of these devices calculators,
thermometers, microscopes, and the glass vials that the
chemists use to boil and distil liquids serve to make it easier to
generate and try out new ideas, including ideas that expedite the
process of idea-generation.
Thus the great wheel of invention, which had turned at an almost
imperceptibly slow pace in the older ages, gradually began to
accelerate.
Sages predicted that a day would come when technology would enable humans to
fly and do many other astonishing things. One of the sages, who was
held in high esteem by some of the other sages but
whose eccentric manners had made him a social
outcast and recluse, went so far as to predict that technology
would eventually make it possible to build a contraption that could kill the
dragon-tyrant.
The king's scholars, however, dismissed these ideas. They said that humans
were far too heavy to fly and in any case lacked feathers. And as for
the impossible notion that the dragon-tyrant could
be killed, history books recounted hundreds of
attempts to do just that, not one of which had been
successful. "We all know that this man had some irresponsible ideas,"
a scholar of letters later wrote in his obituary
of the reclusive sage who had by then been sent
off to be devoured by the beast whose demise he had
foretold, "but his writings were quite entertaining and perhaps we
should be grateful to the dragon for making
possible the interesting genre of dragon-bashing
literature which reveals so much about the culture of angst!"
Meanwhile, the wheel of invention kept turning. Mere decades later, humans
did fly and accomplished many other astonishing things.
A few iconoclastic dragonologists began arguing for a new attack on the
dragon-tyrant. Killing the dragon would not be easy, they said, but
if some material could be invented that was harder
than the dragon's armor, and if this material
could be fashioned into some kind of projectile, then maybe
the feat would be possible. At first, the iconoclasts' ideas were
rejected by their dragonologist peers on grounds
that no known material was harder than dragon
scales. But after working on the problem for many years, one of
the iconoclasts succeeded in demonstrating that a dragon scale could
be pierced by an object made of a certain
composite material. Many dragonologists who had
previously been skeptical now joined the iconoclasts.
Engineers calculated that a huge projectile could be made of this
material and launched with sufficient force to
penetrate the dragon's armor. However, the
manufacture of the needed quantity of the composite material would be
expensive.
A group of several eminent engineers and dragonologists sent a petition to
the king asking for funding to build the anti-dragon projectile. At
time when the petition was sent, the king was
preoccupied with leading his army into war against
a tiger. The tiger had killed a farmer and subsequently
disappeared into the jungle. There was widespread fear in the
countryside that the tiger might come out and
strike again. The king had the jungle surrounded
and ordered his troops to begin slashing their way through it. At
the conclusion of the campaign, the king could announce that all 163
tigers in the jungle, including presumably the
murderous one, had been hunted down and killed.
During the tumult of the war, however, the petition had been
lost or forgotten.
The petitioners therefore sent another appeal. This time they received a
reply from one of the king's secretaries saying that the king would
consider their request after he was done reviewing
the annual dragon-administration budget. This
year's budget was the largest to date and included funding for
a new railway track to the mountain. A second track was deemed
necessary, as the original track could no longer
support the increasing traffic. (The tribute
demanded by the dragon-tyrant had increased to one hundred thousand
human beings, to be delivered to the foot of the mountain every
evening at the onset of dark.) When the budget was
finally approved, however, reports were coming
from a remote part of the country that a village was suffering
from a rattlesnake infestation. The king had to leave urgently to
mobilize his army and ride off to defeat this new
threat. The anti-dragonists' appeal was filed away
in a dusty cabinet in the castle basement.
The anti-dragonists met again to decide what was to be done. The debate was
animated and continued long into the night. It was almost daybreak
when they finally resolved to take the matter to
the people. Over the following weeks, they
traveled around the country, gave public lectures, and explained their
proposal to anyone who would listen. At first, people were skeptical. They
had been taught in school that the dragon-tyrant was invincible and
that the sacrifices it demanded had to be accepted
as a fact of life. Yet when they learnt about the
new composite material and about the designs for the
projectile, many became intrigued. In increasing numbers, citizens
flocked to the anti-dragonist lectures. Activists
started organizing public rallies in support of
the proposal.
When the king read about these meetings in the newspaper, he summoned his
advisors and asked them what they thought about it. They informed him
about
the petitions that had been sent but told him that the anti-dragonists were
troublemakers whose teachings were causing public unrest. It was much
better
for the social order, they said, that the people accepted the inevitability
of the dragon-tyrant tribute. The dragon-administration provided many
jobs that would be lost if the dragon was
slaughtered. There was no known social good coming
from the conquest of the dragon. In any case, the king's coffers
were currently nearly empty after the two military campaigns and the
funding set aside for the second railway line. The
king, who was at the time enjoying great
popularity for having vanquished the rattlesnake infestation,
listened to his advisors' arguments but worried that he might lose
some of his popular support if was seen to ignore
the anti-dragonist petition. He therefore decided
to hold an open hearing. Leading dragonologists, ministers
of the state, and interested members of the public were invited to
attend.
The meeting took place on the darkest day of the year, just before the
Christmas holidays, in the largest hall of the royal castle. The hall
was packed to the last seat and people were
crowding in the aisles. The mood was charged with
an earnest intensity normally reserved for pivotal wartime
sessions.
After the king had welcomed everyone, he gave the floor to the leading
scientist behind the anti-dragonist proposal, a woman with a serious,
almost stern expression on her face. She proceeded
to explain in clear language how the proposed
device would work and how the requisite amount of the composite
material could be manufactured. Given the requested amount of funding, it
should be possible to complete the work in fifteen to twenty years.
With an even greater amount of funding, it might
be possible to do it in as little as twelve years.
However, there could be no absolute guarantee that it would
work. The crowd followed her presentation intently.
Next to speak was the king's chief advisor for morality, a man with a
booming voice that easily filled the auditorium:
"Let us grant that this woman is correct about the science and that the
project is technologically possible, although I don't think that has
actually been proven. Now she desires that we get rid of the dragon.
Presumably, she thinks she's got the right not to be chewed up by the
dragon. How willful and presumptuous. The finitude of human life is a
blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not. Getting
rid of the dragon, which might seem like such a
convenient thing to do, would undermine our human
dignity. The preoccupation with killing the dragon will
deflect us from realizing more fully the aspirations to which our
lives naturally point, from living well rather
than merely staying alive. It is debasing, yes
debasing, for a person to want to continue his or her mediocre
life for as long as possible without worrying about some of the
higher questions about what life is to be used
for. But I tell you, the nature of the dragon is
to eat humans, and our own species-specified nature is truly
and nobly fulfilled only by getting eaten by it..."
The audience listened respectfully to this highly decorated speaker. The
phrases were so eloquent that it was hard to resist the feeling that
some deep thoughts must lurk behind them, although
nobody could quite grasp what they were. Surely,
words coming from such a distinguished appointee of the
king must have profound substance.
The speaker next in line was a spiritual sage who was widely respected for
his kindness and gentleness as well as for his devotion. As he strode
to the podium, a small boy yelled out from the
audience: "The dragon is bad!"
The boy's parents turned bright red and began hushing and scolding the
child. But the sage said, "Let the boy speak. He is probably wiser
than an old fool like me."
At first, the boy was too scared and confused to move. But when he saw the
genuinely friendly smile on the sage's face and the outreached hand,
he obediently took it and followed the sage up to
the podium. "Now, there's a brave little man,"
said the sage. "Are you afraid of the dragon?"
"I want my granny back," said the boy.
"Did the dragon take your granny away?"
"Yes," the boy said, tears welling up in his large frightened eyes. "Granny
promised that she would teach me how to bake gingerbread cookies for
Christmas. She said that we would make a little house out of
gingerbread and little gingerbread men that would
live in it. Then those people in white clothes
came and took Granny away to the dragon... The dragon is bad and it
eats people - I want my Granny back!"
At this point the child was crying so hard that the sage had to return him
to his parents.
There were several other speakers that evening, but the child's simple
testimony had punctured the rhetorical balloon that the king's
ministers had tried to inflate. The people were
backing the anti-dragonists, and by the end of the
evening even the king had come to recognize the reason and the
humanity of their cause. In his closing statement, he simply said:
"Let's do it!"
As the news spread, celebrations erupted in the streets. Those who had been
campaigning for the anti-dragonists toasted each other and drank to
the future of humanity.
The next morning, a billion people woke up and realized that their turn to
be sent to the dragon would come before the projectile would be
completed. A tipping point was reached. Whereas
before, active support for the anti-dragonist
cause had been limited to a small group of visionaries, it
now became the number one priority and concern on everybody's mind.
The abstract notion of "the general will" took on
an almost tangible intensity and concreteness.
Mass rallies raised money for the projectile project and
urged the king to increase the level of state support. The king
responded to these appeals. In his New Year
address, he announced that he would pass an extra
appropriations bill to support the project at a high level of funding;
additionally, he would sell off his summer castle and some of his
land and make a large personal donation. "I
believe that this nation should commit itself to
achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of freeing the
world from the ancient scourge of the dragon-tyrant."
Thus started a great technological race against time. The concept of an
anti-dragon projectile was simple, but to make it a reality required
solutions to a thousand smaller technical problems, each of which
required dozens of time-consuming steps and
missteps. Test-missiles were fired but fell dead
to the ground or flew off in the wrong direction. In one tragic
accident, a wayward missile landed on a hospital and killed several
hundred patients and staff. But there was now a
real seriousness of purpose, and the tests
continued even as the corpses were being dug out from the debris.
Despite almost unlimited funding and round-the-clock work by the
technicians, the king's deadline could not be met. The decade
concluded and the dragon was still alive and well.
But the effort was getting closer. A prototype
missile had been successfully test fired. Production of the core,
made of the expensive composite material, was on schedule for its
completion to coincide with the finishing of the
fully tested and debugged missile shell into which
it was to be loaded. The launch date was set to the
following year's New Year's Eve, exactly twelve years after the
project's official inauguration. The best-selling
Christmas gift that year was a calendar that
counted down the days to time zero, the proceeds going to the
projectile project.
The king had been undergone a personal transformation from his earlier
frivolous and thoughtless self. He now spent as much time as he could
in the laboratories and the manufacturing plants,
encouraging the workers and praising their toil.
Sometimes he would bring a sleeping bag and spend the
night on a noisy machine floor. He even studied and tried to
understand the technical aspects of their work.
Yet he confined himself to giving moral support
and refrained from meddling in technical and managerial matters.
Seven days before New Year, the woman who had made the case for the project
almost twelve years earlier, and was now its chief executive, came to
the
royal castle and requested an urgent audience with the king. When the king
got her note, he excused himself to the foreign dignitaries whom he
was reluctantly entertaining at the annual
Christmas dinner and hurried off to the private
room where the scientist was waiting. As always of late, she
looked pale and worn from her long working hours. This evening,
however, the king also thought he could detect a
ray of relief and satisfaction in her eyes.
She told him that the missile had been deployed, the core had been loaded,
everything had been triple-checked, they were ready to launch, and
would the
king give his final go-ahead. The king sank down in an armchair and closed
his eyes. He was thinking hard. By launching the projectile tonight,
one week early, seven hundred thousand people
would be saved. Yet if something went wrong, if it
missed its target and hit the mountain instead, it would
be a disaster. A new core would have to be constructed from scratch
and the project would be set back by some four
years. He sat there, silently, for almost an hour.
Just as the scientist had become convinced that he had
fallen asleep, he opened his eyes and said in a firm voice: "No. I
want you to go right back to the lab. I want you
to check and then re-check everything again." The
scientist could not help a sigh escaping her; but she
nodded and left.
The last day of the year was cold and overcast, but there was no wind, which
meant good launch conditions. The sun was setting. Technicians were
scuttling around making the final adjustments and giving everything
one last check. The king and his closest advisors
were observing from a platform close to the launch
pad. Further away, behind a fence, large numbers of the
public had assembled to witness the great event. A large clock was
showing the countdown: fifty minutes to go.
An advisor tapped the king on the shoulder and drew his attention to the
fence. There was some tumult. Somebody had apparently jumped the
fence and
was running towards the platform where the king sat. Security quickly caught
up with him. He was handcuffed and taken away. The king turned his
attention
back to the launch pad, and to the mountain in the background. In front of
it, he could see the dark slumped profile of the dragon. It was
eating.
Some twenty minutes later, the king was surprised to see the handcuffed man
reappearing a short distance from the platform. His nose was bleeding
and he
was accompanied by two security guards. The man appeared to be in frenzied
state. When he spotted the king, he began shouting at the top of his
lungs:
"The last train! The last train! Stop the last train!"
"Who is this young man?" said the king. "His face seems familiar, but I
cannot quite place him. What does he want? Let him come up."
The young man was a junior clerk in the ministry of transportation, and the
reason for his frenzy was that he had discovered that his father was
on the last train to the mountain. The king had
ordered the train traffic to continue, fearing
that any disruption might cause the dragon to stir and
leave the open field in front of the mountain where it now spent most
of its time. The young man begged the king to
issue a recall-order for the last train, which was
due to arrive at the mountain terminal five minutes before
time zero.
"I cannot do it," said the king, "I cannot take the risk."
"But the trains frequently run five minutes late. The dragon won't notice!
Please!"
The young man was kneeling before the king, imploring him to save his
father's life and the lives of the other thousand passengers onboard
that last train.
The king looked down at the pleading, bloodied face of the young man. But he
bit his lip, and shook his head. The young man continued to wail even
as the
guards carried him off the platform: "Please! Stop the last train! Please!"
The king stood silent and motionless, until, after while, the wailing
suddenly ceased. The king looked up and glanced over at the countdown
clock: five minutes remaining.
Four minutes. Three minutes. Two minutes.
The last technician left the launch pad.
30 seconds. 20 seconds. Ten, nine, eight...
As a ball of fire enveloped the launch pad and the missile shot out, the
spectators instinctively rose to the tips of their toes, and all eyes
fixated at the front end of the white flame from the rocket's
afterburners heading towards the distant mountain.
The masses, the king, the low and the high, the
young and the old, it was as if at this moment they shared a
single awareness, a single conscious experience: that white flame,
shooting into the dark, embodying the human
spirit, its fear and its hopes striking
at the heart of evil. The silhouette on the horizon tumbled, and
fell. Thousand voices of pure joy rose from
assembled masses, joined seconds later by a
deafening drawn-out thud from the collapsing monster as if the Earth
itself was drawing a sigh of relief. After centuries of oppression,
humanity at last was free from the cruel tyranny
of the dragon.
The joy cry resolved into a jubilant chant: "Long live the king! Long live
us all!" The king's advisors, like everybody that night, were as
happy as children; they embraced each other and
congratulated the king: "We did it! We did it!"
But the king answered in a broken voice: "Yes, we did it, we killed the
dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have
been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of
people wouldn't have had to die."
The king stepped off the platform and walked up to the young man in
handcuffs, who was sitting on the ground. There he fell down on his
knees. "Forgive me! Oh my God, please forgive me!"
The rain started falling, in large, heavy drops, turning the ground into
mud, drenching the king's purple robes, and dissolving the blood on
the young man's face. "I am so very sorry about
your father," said the king.
"It's not your fault," replied the young man. "Do you remember twelve years
ago in the castle? That crying little boy who wanted you to bring
back his grandmother that was me. I didn't
realize then that you couldn't possibly do what I
asked for. Today I wanted you to save my father. Yet it was
impossible to do that now, without jeopardizing the launch. But you
have saved my life, and my mother and my sister.
How can we ever thank you enough
for that?"
"Listen to the them," said the king, gesturing towards the crowds. "They are
cheering me for what happened tonight. But the hero is you. You cried
out. You rallied us against evil." The king
signaled a guard to come and unlock the handcuffs.
"Now, go to your mother and sister. You and your family shall
always be welcome at the court, and anything you wish for if it be
within my power shall be granted."
The young man left, and the royal entourage, huddling in the downpour,
accumulated around their monarch who was still kneeling in the mud.
Amongst the fancy couture, which was being
increasingly ruined by the rain, a bunch of
powdered faces expressed a superposition of joy, relief, and
discombobulation. So much had changed in the last hour: the right to
an open future had been regained, a primordial
fear had been abolished, and many a long-held
assumption had been overturned. Unsure now about what was required
of them in this unfamiliar situation, they stood there tentatively,
as if probing whether the ground would still hold,
exchanging glances, and waiting for some kind of
indication.
Finally, the king rose, wiping his hands on the sides of his pants.
"Your majesty, what do we do now?" ventured the most senior courtier.
"My dear friends," said the king, "we have come a long wayŠ yet our journey
has only just begun. Our species is young on this planet. Today we
are like children again. The future lies open
before us. We shall go into this future and try to
do better than we have done in the past. We have time now time
to get things right, time to grow up, time to learn from our
mistakes, time for the slow process of building a
better world, and time to get settled in it.
Tonight, let all the bells in the kingdom ring until midnight, in
remembrance of our dead forbears, and then after midnight let us
celebrate till the sun comes up. And in the coming
days I believe we have some reorganization to do!"
* * *
MORAL
Stories about aging have traditionally focused on the need for graceful
accommodation. The recommended solution to diminishing vigor and
impending death was resignation coupled with an
effort to achieve closure in practical affairs and
personal relationships. Given that nothing could be done to
prevent or retard aging, this focus made sense. Rather than fretting
about the inevitable, one could aim for peace of
mind.
Today we face a different situation. While we still lack effective and
acceptable means for slowing the aging process[1], we can identify
research directions that might lead to the
development of such means in the foreseeable
future. "Deathist" stories and ideologies, which council passive
acceptance, are no longer harmless sources of consolations. They are
reckless and dangerous barriers to urgently needed action.
Many distinguished technologists and scientists tell us that it will become
possible to retard, and eventually to halt and reverse, human
senescence.[2] At present, there is little
agreement about the time-scale or the specific
means, nor is there a consensus that the goal is even achievable in
principle. In relation to the fable (where aging is, of course,
represented by the dragon), we are therefore at a
stage somewhere between that at which the lone
sage predicted the dragon's eventual demise and that at which the
iconoclast dragonologists convinced their peers by demonstrating a
composite material that was harder than dragon
scales.
The general ethical argument in the fable is simple: There are obvious and
compelling moral reasons for the people in the fable to get rid of
the dragon. Our situation with regard to human
senescence is closely analogous and ethically
isomorphic to the situation of the people in the fable with
regard to the dragon. Therefore, we have compelling moral reasons to
get rid of human senescence.
The argument is not in favor or life-span extension per se. Adding extra
years of sickness and debility at the end of life would be pointless.
The argument is in favor of extending, as far as
possible, the human health-span. By slowing or
halting the aging process, the healthy human life
span would be extended. Individuals would be able to remain healthy,
vigorous, and productive at ages at which they would otherwise be
dead.
In addition to this general moral, there are a number of more specific
lessons:
(1) A recurrent tragedy became a fact of life, a statistic. In the fable,
people's expectations adapted to the existence of the dragon, to the
extent that many became unable to perceive its
badness. Aging, too, has become a mere "fact of
life" despite being the principal cause of an unfathomable
amount of human suffering and death.
(2) A static view of technology. People reasoned that it would never become
possible to kill the dragon because all attempts had failed in the
past. They failed to take into account accelerated
technological progress. Is a similar mistake
leading us to underestimate the chances of a cure for aging?
(3) Administration became its own purpose. One seventh of the economy went
to dragon-administration (which is also the fraction of its GDP that
the U.S. spends on healthcare). Damage-limitation
became such an exclusive focus that it made people
neglect the underlying cause. Instead of a massive
publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire
health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases.
(4) The social good became detached from the good for people. The king's
advisors worried about the possible social problems that could be
caused by
the anti-dragonists. They said that no known social good would come from the
demise of the dragon. But ultimately, social orders exist for the
benefit of people, and it is generally good for
people if their lives are saved.
(5) The lack of a sense of proportion. A tiger killed a farmer. A rhumba of
rattlesnakes plagued a village. The king got rid of the tiger and the
rattlesnakes, and thereby did his people a service. Yet he was at
fault, because his priorities were wrong.
(6) Fine phrases and hollow rhetoric. The king's morality advisor spoke
eloquently about human dignity and our species-specified nature, in
phrases lifted, mostly verbatim, from the
advisor's contemporary equivalents.[3] Yet the
rhetoric was smoke screen that hid rather than revealed moral reality.
The boy's inarticulate but honest testimony, by contrast, points to
the central fact of the case: the dragon is bad;
it destroys people. This is also the basic truth
about human senescence.
(7) Failure to appreciate the urgency. Until very late in the story, nobody
fully realized what was at stake. Only as the king was staring into
the bloodied face of the young pleading man does
the extent of the tragedy sink in. Searching for a
cure for aging is not just a nice thing that we should
perhaps one day get around to. It is an urgent, screaming moral
imperative. The sooner we start a focused research
program, the sooner we will get results. It
matters if we get the cure in 25 years rather than in 24 years:
a population greater than that of Canada would die as a result. In
this matter, time equals life, at a rate of
approximately 70 lives per minute. With the meter
ticking at such a furious rate, we need to stop faffing
about.
(8) "And in the coming days I believe we have some reorganization to do!"
The king and his people will face some major challenges when they
recover
from their celebration. Their society has been so conditioned and deformed
by the presence of the dragon that a frightening void now exists.
They will have to work creatively, on both an
individual and a societal level, to develop
conditions that will keep lives flourishingly dynamic and meaningful
beyond the accustomed three-score-years-and-ten. Luckily, the human
spirit is good at adapting. Another issue that
they may eventually confront is overpopulation.
Maybe people will have to learn to have children later and
less frequently. Maybe they can find ways to sustain a larger
population by using more efficient technology.
Maybe they will one day develop spaceships and
begin to colonize the cosmos. We can leave, for now, the long-lived
fable people to grapple with these new challenges, while we try to
make some progress in our own adventure.[4]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Calorie restriction (a diet low in calories but high in nutrients)
extends maximal lifespan and delays the onset of age-related
illnesses in all species that have been tested.
Preliminary results from an ongoing study on
rhesus and squirrel monkeys show similar effects. It seems quite likely
that calorie restriction would work for our species too. Few humans,
however, would be willing to put themselves through a lifelong
hunger-diet. Some researchers are searching for
calorie-restriction mimetics compounds that
elicit the desirable effects of lowered caloric intake without us
having to go hungry. (See e.g. Lane, M. et al. (1999) "Nutritional
modulation of aging in nonhuman primates," J. Nutr. Health & Aging,
3(2): 69-76.)
[2] A recent straw poll at the 10th Congress of the International
Association of Biomedical Gerontology revealed that the majority of
the participants thought it either probable or
"not improbable" that comprehensive functional
rejuvenation of middle-aged mice would be possible
within 10-20 years (de Grey, A. (2004), "Report of open discussion on the
future of life extension research," (Annals NY Acad. Sci., 1019, in
press)). See also e.g. de Grey, A., B. Ames, et
al. (2002) "Time to talk SENS: critiquing the
immutability of human aging," Increasing Healthy Life Span:
Conventional Measures and Slowing the Innate Aging Process: Ninth
Congress of the International Association of
Biomedical Gerontology, ed. D. Harman (Annals NY
Acad. Sci. 959: 452-462); and Freitas Jr., R. A., Nanomedicine,
Vol. 1 (Landes Bioscience: Georgetown, TX, 1999).
[3] See, e.g. Kass, L. (2003) "Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls:
Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Perfection," The
New Atlantis, 1.
[4] I'm grateful to many people for comments on earlier drafts,
including especially Heather Bradshaw, Roger
Crisp, Aubrey de Grey, Katrien Devolder, Joel
Garreau, John Harris, Andrea Landfried, Toby Ord, Susan Rogers, Julian
Savulescu, Ian Watson, and Kip Werking.
|
|
In Defense of Posthuman Dignity
NICK BOSTROM
Oxford University, Faculty of Philosophy, 10 Merton Street, Oxford, OX1 4JJ,
United Kingdom.
Web:
www.nickbostrom.com (2003)
ABSTRACT. This paper distinguishes two common fears about the posthuman and
argues for the importance of a concept of dignity that is inclusive
enough to also apply to many possible posthuman
beings. Recognizing the possibility of posthuman
dignity undercuts an important objection against human
enhancement and removes a distortive double standard from our field of moral
vision.
Transhumanists vs. bioconservatives
Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually
over the past two decades, and can be viewed as an outgrowth of
secular humanism and the Enlightenment. It holds
that current human nature is improvable through
the use of applied science and other rational methods,
which may make it possible to increase human health-span, extend our
intellectual and physical capacities, and give us increased control
over our own mental states and moods.[1]
Technologies of concern include not only current
ones, like genetic engineering and information technology, but also
anticipated future developments such as fully immersive virtual
reality, machine-phase nanotechnology, and
artificial intelligence.
Transhumanists promote the view that human enhancement technologies should
be made widely available, and that individuals should have broad
discretion
over which of these technologies to apply to themselves (morphological
freedom), and that parents should normally get to decide which
reproductive technologies to use when having
children (reproductive freedom).[2] Transhumanists
believe that, while there are hazards that need to be
identified and avoided, human enhancement technologies will offer
enormous potential for deeply valuable and humanly
beneficial uses. Ultimately, it is possible that
such enhancements may make us, or our descendants,
"posthuman", beings who may have indefinite health-spans, much greater
intellectual faculties than any current human being - and perhaps
entirely new sensibilities or modalities - as well
as the ability to control their own emotions. The
wisest approach vis-à-vis these prospects, argue
transhumanists, is to embrace technological progress, while strongly
defending human rights and individual choice, and taking action
specifically against concrete threats, such as
military or terrorist abuse of bioweapons, and
against unwanted environmental or social side-effects.
In opposition to this transhumanist view stands a bioconservative camp that
argues against the use of technology to modify human nature.
Prominent bioconservative writers include Leon
Kass, Francis Fukuyama, George Annas, Wesley
Smith, Jeremy Rifkin, and Bill McKibben. One of the central concerns
of the bioconservatives is that human enhancement technologies might
be "dehumanizing". The worry, which has been
variously expressed, is that these technologies
might undermine our human dignity or inadvertently erode
something that is deeply valuable about being human but that is
difficult to put into words or to factor into a
cost-benefit analysis. In some cases (e.g. Leon
Kass) the unease seems to derive from religious or
crypto-religious sentiments whereas for others (e.g. Francis Fukuyama) it
stems from secular grounds. The best approach, these bioconservatives
argue, is to implement global bans on swathes of
promising human enhancement technologies to
forestall a slide down a slippery slope towards an
ultimately debased posthuman state.
While any brief description necessarily skirts significant nuances that
differentiate writers within the two camps, I believe the above
characterization nevertheless highlights a
principal fault lines in one of the great debates
of our times: how we should look at the future of
humankind and whether we should attempt to use technology to make ourselves
"more than human". This paper will distinguish two common fears about
the posthuman and argue that they are partly
unfounded and that, to the extent that they
correspond to real risks, there are better responses than trying
to implement broad bans on technology. I will make some remarks on
the concept of dignity, which bioconservatives
believe to be imperiled by coming human
enhancement technologies, and suggest that we need to recognize that
not only humans in their current form, but posthumans too could have
dignity.
Two fears about the posthuman
The prospect of posthumanity is feared for at least two reasons. One is that
the state of being posthuman might in itself be degrading, so that by
becoming posthuman we might be harming ourselves. Another is that
posthumans might pose a threat to "ordinary"
humans. (I shall set aside a third possible
reason, that the development of posthumans might offend some
supernatural being.)
The most prominent bioethicist to focus on the first fear is Leon Kass:
-- Most of the given bestowals of nature have their given species-specified
natures: they are each and all of a given sort. Cockroaches and
humans are equally bestowed but differently
natured. To turn a man into a cockroach‹as we
don't need Kafka to show us‹would be dehumanizing. To try to turn a man
into more than a man might be so as well. We need more than generalized
appreciation for nature's gifts. We need a particular regard and
respect for the special gift that is our own given
nature[3] --
Transhumanists counter that nature's gifts are sometimes poisoned and should
not always be accepted. Cancer, malaria, dementia, aging, starvation,
unnecessary suffering, cognitive shortcomings are all among the
presents that we wisely refuse. Our own
species-specified natures are a rich source of
much of the thoroughly unrespectable and unacceptable susceptibility
for disease, murder, rape, genocide, cheating, torture, racism. The
horrors of nature in general and of our own nature
in particular are so well documented[4] that it is
astonishing that somebody as distinguished as Leon
Kass should still in this day and age be tempted to rely on the natural as a
guide to what is desirable or normatively right. We should be
grateful that our ancestors were not swept away by
the Kassian sentiment, or we would still be
picking lice off each other's backs. Rather than deferring to the
natural order, transhumanists maintain that we can legitimately
reform ourselves and our natures in accordance
with humane values and personal aspirations.
If one rejects nature as a general criterion of the good, as most thoughtful
people nowadays do, one can of course still acknowledge that
particular ways
of modifying human nature would be debasing. Not all change is progress. Not
even all well-intended technological intervention in human nature
would be
on balance beneficial. Kass goes far beyond these truisms however when he
declares that utter dehumanization lies in store for us as the
inevitable result of our obtaining technical
mastery over our own nature:
-- the final technical conquest of his own nature would almost certainly
leave mankind utterly enfeebled. This form of mastery would be
identical with utter dehumanization. Read Huxley's
Brave New World, read C. S. Lewis's Abolition of
Man, read Nietzsche's account of the last man, and then read
the newspapers. Homogenization, mediocrity, pacification,
drug-induced contentment, debasement of taste,
souls without loves and longings - these are the
inevitable results of making the essence of human nature the last
project of technical mastery. In his moment of triumph, Promethean
man will become a contented cow.[5] --
The fictional inhabitants of Brave New World, to pick the best-known of
Kass's examples, are admittedly short on dignity (in at least one
sense of the word). But the claim that this is the
inevitable consequence of our obtaining
technological mastery over human nature is exceedingly pessimistic
- and unsupported - if understood as a futuristic prediction, and
false if construed as a claim about metaphysical
necessity.
There are many things wrong with the fictional society that Huxley
described. It is static, totalitarian, caste-bound; its culture is a
wasteland. The brave new worlders themselves are a dehumanized and
undignified lot. Yet posthumans they are not. Their capacities are
not super-human but in many respects
substantially inferior to our own. Their
life expectancy and physique are quite normal, but their intellectual,
emotional, moral, and spiritual faculties are stunted. The majority
of the brave new worlders have various degrees of
engineered mental retardation. And everyone, save
the ten world controllers (along with a miscellany of
primitives and social outcasts who are confined to fenced
preservations or isolated islands), are barred or
discouraged from developing individuality,
independent thinking and initiative, and are conditioned not to desire these
traits in the first place. Brave New World is not a tale of human
enhancement gone amok but a tragedy of technology and social
engineering being used to deliberately cripple
moral and intellectual capacities - the exact
antithesis of the transhumanist proposal.
Transhumanists argue that the best way to avoid a Brave New World is by
vigorously defending morphological and reproductive freedoms against
any
would-be world controllers. History has shown the dangers in letting
governments curtail these freedoms. The last century's
government-sponsored coercive eugenics programs,
once favored by both the left and the right, have
been thoroughly discredited. Because people are likely to differ
profoundly in their attitudes towards human enhancement technologies,
it is crucial that no one solution be imposed on
everyone from above but that individuals get to
consult their own consciences as to what is right for
themselves and their families. Information, public debate, and
education are the appropriate means by which to
encourage others to make wise choices, not a
global ban on a broad range of potentially beneficial medical and other
enhancement options.
The second fear is that there might be an eruption of violence between
unaugmented humans and posthumans. George Annas, Lori Andrews, and
Rosario
Isasi have argued that we should view human cloning and all inheritable
genetic modifications as "crimes against humanity" in order to reduce
the probability that posthuman species will arise,
on grounds that such a species would pose an
existential threat to the old human species:
-- The new species, or "posthuman," will likely view the old "normal" humans
as inferior, even savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter. The
normals, on the other hand, may see the posthumans
as a threat and if they can, may engage in a
preemptive strike by killing the posthumans before they
themselves are killed or enslaved by them. It is ultimately this
predictable potential for genocide that makes
species-altering experiments potential weapons of
mass destruction, and makes the unaccountable genetic engineer a
potential bioterrorist.[6] --
There is no denying that bioterrorism and unaccountable genetic engineers
developing increasingly potent weapons of mass destruction pose a
serious threat to our civilization. But using the
rhetoric of bioterrorism and weapons of mass
destruction to cast aspersions on therapeutic uses of
biotechnology to improve health, longevity and other human capacities
is unhelpful. The issues are quite distinct.
Reasonable people can be in favor of strict
regulation of bioweapons while promoting beneficial medical uses
of genetics and other human enhancement technologies, including
inheritable and "species-altering" modifications.
Human society is always at risk of some group deciding to view another group
of humans as fit for slavery or slaughter. To counteract such
tendencies, modern societies have created laws and
institutions, and endowed them with powers of
enforcement, that act to prevent groups of citizens from enslaving
or slaughtering one another. The efficacy of these institutions does
not depend on all citizens having equal
capacities. Modern, peaceful societies can have
large numbers of people with diminished physical or mental
capacities along with many other people who may be exceptionally
physically strong or healthy or intellectually
talented in various ways. Adding people with
technologically enhanced capacities to this already broad distribution
of ability would not need to rip society apart or trigger genocide or
enslavement.
The assumption that inheritable genetic modifications or other human
enhancement technologies would lead to two distinct and separate
species should also be questioned. It seems much
more likely that there would be a continuum of
differently modified or enhanced individuals, which would
overlap with the continuum of as-yet unenhanced humans. The scenario
in which "the enhanced" form a pact and then
attack "the naturals" makes for exciting science
fiction but is not necessarily the most plausible outcome.
Even today, the segment containing the tallest ninety percent of the
population could, in principle, get together and kill or enslave the
shorter decile. That this does not happen suggests
that a well-organized society can hold together
even if it contains many possible coalitions of people sharing
some attribute such that, if they ganged up, they would be capable of
exterminating the rest.
To note that the extreme case of a war between humans and posthumans is not
the most likely scenario is not to say that there are no legitimate
social concerns about the steps that may take us
closer to posthumanity. Inequity, discrimination,
and stigmatization - against, or on behalf of, modified
people - could become serious issues. Transhumanists would argue that
these (potential) social problems call for social
remedies. One example of how contemporary
technology can change important aspects of someone's identity
is sex reassignment. The experiences of transsexuals show that
Western culture still has work to do in becoming
more accepting of diversity. This is a task that
we can begin to tackle today by fostering a climate of
tolerance and acceptance towards those who are different from
ourselves. Painting alarmist pictures of the
threat from future technologically modified
people, or hurling preemptive condemnations of their necessarily
debased nature, is not the best way to go about it.
What about the hypothetical case in which someone intends to create, or turn
themselves into, a being of so radically enhanced capacities that a
single one or a small group of such individuals
would be capable of taking over the planet? This
is clearly not a situation that is likely to arise in the
imminent future, but one can imagine that, perhaps in a few decades,
the prospective creation of superintelligent
machines could raise this kind of concern. The
would-be creator of a new life form with such surpassing
capabilities would have an obligation to ensure that the proposed
being is free from psychopathic tendencies and,
more generally, that it has humane
inclinations. For example, a future artificial intelligence programmer
should be required to make a strong case that
launching a purportedly human-friendly
superintelligence would be safer than the alternative. Again,
however, this (currently) science-fiction scenario must be clearly
distinguished from our present situation and our more immediate
concern with taking effective steps towards
incrementally improving human capacities and
health-span.
Is human dignity incompatible with posthuman dignity?
Human dignity is sometimes invoked as a polemical substitute for clear
ideas. This is not to say that there are no important moral issues
relating to dignity, but it does mean that there
is a need to define what one has in mind when one
uses the term. Here, we shall consider two different senses of
dignity:
1. Dignity as moral status, in particular the inalienable right to be
treated with a basic level of respect.
2. Dignity as the quality of being worthy or honorable; worthiness, worth,
nobleness, excellence. (The Oxford English Dictionary[7]
On both these definitions, dignity is something that a posthuman could
possess. Francis Fukuyama, however, seems to deny this and warns that
giving
up on the idea that dignity is unique to human beings - defined as those
possessing a mysterious essential human quality he calls "Factor
X"[8] would invite disaster:
-- Denial of the concept of human dignity - that is, of the idea that there
is something unique about the human race that entitles every member
of the species to a higher moral status than the
rest of the natural world - leads us down a very
perilous path. We may be compelled ultimately to take this
path, but we should do so only with our eyes open. Nietzsche is a
much better guide to what lies down that road than
the legions of bioethicists and casual academic
Darwinians that today are prone to give us moral advice
on this subject.[9] --
What appears to worry Fukuyama is that introducing new kinds of enhanced
person into the world might cause some individuals (perhaps infants,
or the mentally handicapped, or unenhanced humans
in general) to lose some of the moral status that
they currently possess, and that a fundamental
precondition of liberal democracy, the principle of equal dignity for all,
would be destroyed.
The underlying intuition seems to be that instead of the famed "expanding
moral circle", what we have is more like an oval, whose shape we can
change but whose area must remain constant.
Thankfully, this purported conservation law of
moral recognition lacks empirical support. The set of individuals
accorded full moral status by Western societies has actually
increased, to include men without property or
noble decent, women, and non-white peoples. It
would seem feasible to extend this set further to include future
posthumans, or, for that matter, some of the higher primates or
human-animal chimaeras, should such be created -
and to do so without causing any compensating
shrinkage in another direction. (The moral status of
problematic borderline cases, such as fetuses or late-stage Alzheimer
patients, or the brain dead, should perhaps be decided separately
from the issue of technologically modified humans
or novel artificial life forms.) Our own role in
this process need not be that of passive bystanders. We can
work to create more inclusive social structures that accord
appropriate moral recognition and legal rights to
all who need them, be they male or female, black
or white, flesh or silicon.
Dignity in the second sense, as referring to a special excellence or moral
worthiness, is something that current human beings possess to widely
differing degrees. Some excel far more than others do. Some are
morally admirable; others are base and vicious.
There is no reason for supposing that posthuman
beings could not also have dignity in this second sense. They
may even be able to attain higher levels of moral and other
excellence than any of us humans. The fictional
brave new worlders, who were subhuman rather than
posthuman, would have scored low on this kind of dignity, and partly
for that reason they would be awful role models for us to emulate.
But surely we can create more uplifting and
appealing visions of what we may aspire to become.
There may be some who would transform themselves into
degraded posthumans - but then some people today do not live very
worthy human lives. This is regrettable, but the
fact that some people make bad choices is not
generally a sufficient ground for rescinding people's right
to choose. And legitimate countermeasures are available: education,
encouragement, persuasion, social and cultural reform. These, not a
blanket prohibition of all posthuman ways of
being, are the measures to which those bothered by
the prospect of debased posthumans should resort. A liberal
democracy should normally permit incursions into morphological and
reproductive freedoms only in cases where somebody is abusing these
freedoms to harm another person.
The principle that parents should have broad discretion to decide on genetic
enhancements for their children has been attacked on grounds that
this form of reproductive freedom would constitute
a kind of parental tyranny that would undermine
the child's dignity and capacity for autonomous choice; for
instance, by Hans Jonas:
-- Technological mastered nature now again includes man who (up to now) had,
in technology, set himself against it as its master... But whose
power is this - and over whom or over what?
Obviously the power of those living today over
those coming after them, who will be the defenseless other side of
prior choices made by the planners of today. The other side of the
power of today is the future bondage of the living
to the dead.[10] --
Jonas is relying on the assumption that our descendants, who will presumably
be far more technologically advanced than we are, would nevertheless
be defenseless against our machinations to expand
their capacities. This is almost certainly
incorrect. If, for some inscrutable reason, they decided
that they would prefer to be less intelligent, less healthy, and lead
shorter lives, they would not lack the means to achieve these
objectives and frustrate our designs.
In any case, if the alternative to parental choice in determining the basic
capacities of new people is entrusting the child's welfare to nature,
that is blind chance, then the decision should be
easy. Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she
would have been in jail for child abuse and murder. And
transhumanists can accept, of course, that just as society may in
exceptional circumstances override parental autonomy, such as in
cases of neglect or abuse, so too may society
impose regulations to protect the child-to-be from
genuinely harmful genetic interventions - but not because
they represent choice rather than chance.
Jürgen Habermas, in a recent work, echoes Jonas' concern and worries that
even the mere knowledge of having been intentionally made by another
could
have ruinous consequences:
-- We cannot rule out that knowledge of one's own hereditary features as
programmed may prove to restrict the choice of an individual's life,
and to undermine the essentially symmetrical
relations between free and equal human beings.[11]
--
A transhumanist could reply that it would be a mistake for an individual to
believe that she has no choice over her own life just because some
(or all) of her genes were selected by her
parents. She would, in fact, have as much choice
as if her genetic constitution had been selected by chance. It could
even be that she would enjoy significantly more choice and autonomy
in her life, if the modifications were such as to
expand her basic capability set. Being healthy,
smarter, having a wide range of talents, or possessing
greater powers of self-control are blessings that tend to open more
life paths than they block.
Even if there were a possibility that some genetically modified individuals
might fail to grasp these points and thus might feel oppressed by
their knowledge of their origin, that would be a
risk to be weighed against the risks incurred by
having an unmodified genome, risks that can be extremely
grave. If safe and effective alternatives were available, it would be
irresponsible to risk starting someone off in life with the
misfortune of congenitally diminished basic
capacities or an elevated susceptibility to
disease.
Why we need posthuman dignity
Similarly ominous forecasts were made in the seventies about the severe
psychological damage that children conceived through in vitro
fertilization would suffer upon learning that they
originated from a test tube - a prediction that
turned out to be entirely false. It is hard to avoid the
impression that some bias or philosophical prejudice is responsible
for the readiness with which many bioconservatives
seize on even the flimsiest of empirical
justifications for banning human enhancement technologies of
certain types but not others. Suppose it turned out that playing
Mozart to pregnant mothers improved the child's
subsequent musical talent. Nobody would argue for
a ban on Mozart-in-the-womb on grounds that we cannot rule
out that some psychological woe might befall the child once she
discovers that her facility with the violin had
been prenatally "programmed" by her parents. Yet
when it comes to e.g. genetic enhancements, arguments that are
not so very different from this parody are often put forward as
weighty if not conclusive objections by eminent
bioconservative writers. To transhumanists, this
looks like doublethink. How can it be that to
bioconservatives almost any anticipated downside, predicted perhaps on the
basis of the shakiest pop-psychological theory, so readily achieves
that status of deep philosophical insight and
knockdown objection against the transhumanist
project?
Perhaps a part of the answer can be found in the different attitudes that
transhumanists and bioconservatives have towards posthuman dignity.
Bioconservatives tend to deny posthuman dignity and view posthumanity
as a threat to human dignity. They are therefore
tempted to look for ways to denigrate
interventions that are thought to be pointing in the direction of
more radical future modifications that may eventually lead to the
emergence of those detestable posthumans. But
unless this fundamental opposition to the
posthuman is openly declared as a premiss of their argument, this then
forces them to use a double standard of assessment whenever
particular cases are considered in isolation: for
example, one standard for germ-line genetic
interventions and another for improvements in maternal nutrition (an
intervention presumably not seen as heralding a posthuman era).
Transhumanists, by contrast, see human and posthuman dignity as compatible
and complementary. They insist that dignity, in its modern sense,
consists in what we are and what we have the
potential to become, not in our pedigree or our
causal origin. What we are is not a function solely of our DNA but
also of our technological and social context. Human nature in this
broader sense is dynamic, partially human-made,
and improvable. Our current extended phenotypes
(and the lives that we lead) are markedly different from those of
our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We read and write; we wear clothes; we
live in cities; we earn money and buy food from
the supermarket; we call people on the telephone,
watch television, read newspapers, drive cars, file taxes,
vote in national elections; women give birth in hospitals;
life-expectancy is three times longer than in the
Pleistocene; we know that the Earth is round and
that stars are large gas clouds lit from inside by nuclear fusion,
and that the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old and
enormously big. In the eyes of a hunter-gatherer,
we might already appear "posthuman". Yet these
radical extensions of human capabilities some of them
biological, others external - have not divested us of moral status or
dehumanized us in the sense of making us generally unworthy and base.
Similarly, should we or our descendants one day succeed in becoming
what relative to current standards we may refer to
as posthuman, this need not entail a loss dignity
either.
From the transhumanist standpoint, there is no need to behave as if there
were a deep moral difference between technological and other means of
enhancing human lives. By defending posthuman dignity we promote a
more inclusive and humane ethics, one that will
embrace future technologically modified people as
well as humans of the contemporary kind. We also remove a
distortive double standard from the field of our moral vision,
allowing us to perceive more clearly the
opportunities that exist for further human
progress.[12]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] N. Bostrom et al. 2003. The Transhumanist FAQ, v. 2.1. World
Transhumanist Association. Webpage:
www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html
[2] N. Bostrom. Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective.
Journal of Value Inquiry 2004, forthcoming.
[3] L. Kass. Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of
Perfection. The New Atlantis 2003; 1.
[4] See e.g. J. Glover. 2001. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth
Century. New Haven. Yale University Press.
[5] L. Kass. 2002. Life, Liberty, and Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for
Bioethics. San Francisco. Encounter Books: p. 48.
[6] G. Annas, L. Andrews and R. Isasi. Protecting the Endangered Human:
Toward an International Treaty Prohibiting Cloning and Inheritable
Alterations. American Journal of Law and Medicine 2002; 28, 2&3: p.
162.
[7] J. A. Simpson and E. Weiner, eds. 1989. The Oxford English Dictionary,
2nd ed. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
[8] F. Fukuyama. 2002. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the
Biotechnology Revolution. New York. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: p.
149.
[9] Fukuyama, op cit. note 8, p. 160.
[10] H. Jonas. 1985. Technik, Medizin und Ethik: Zur Praxis des Prinzips
Verantwortung. Frankfurt am Main. Suhrkamp.
[11] J. Habermas. 2003. The Future of Human Nature. Oxford. Blackwell: p.
23.
[12] For their comments I am grateful to Heather Bradshaw, John Brooke,
Aubrey de Grey, Robin Hanson, Matthew Liao, Julian Savulescu, Eliezer
Yudkowsky, Nick Zangwill, and to the audiences at the Ian Ramsey
Center seminar of June 6th in Oxford, the
Transvision 2003 conference at Yale, and
the 2003 European Science Foundation Workshop on Science and Human Values,
where earlier versions of this paper were presented, and to two
anonymous referees.
Source: Nick Bostrom
www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/dignity.html#_ftn2
|
|