| Posthumanism | ||
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I guess Homo erectus
Luddites would
also have whined about 'future concerns'... |
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| Here's something to chew
on: There exists a concern that advances in biotechnology will come at a terrible price - the loss of authentic happiness, the loss of what makes life meaningful ie. struggle, suffering frailty, finitude, and death. Yet this thinking does not appear to square up with what we have already experienced in the wake of biomedical progress. Do those who use glasses, insulin injections, wheelchairs, inhalers, oxygen tanks, hearing aids, or prosthetic limbs feel inauthentic or overcome by a loss of meaning in their lives? If I use a calculator, a computer, or the Internet to solve a problem, do I feel that I have been cheated out of a more authentic experience enjoyed by my grandparents, who used pen and paper calculation, visited a library, or mastered the multiplication table? There is little evidence for the dour view that we can only be happy when we have earned our happiness. |
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Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims. August 14, 2007 New York Times By JOHN TIERNEY But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation. This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits. You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors. There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world. The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations. “This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.” Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.” My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon. It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude. A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real. David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay. You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person. Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation. (For more on survival strategies in a computer simulation, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.) Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it). Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer? If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation. It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece. If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer. It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.” |
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Life 2.0 The new science of synthetic biology is poised between hype and hope. But its time will soon come The Economist print edition 31 August 2006 IN 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. |
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At the moment, what passes for genetic engineering is mere pottering. It means moving genes one at a time from species to species so that bacteria can produce human proteins that are useful as drugs, and crops can produce bacterial proteins that are useful as insecticides. True engineering would involve more radical redesigns. But the Carlson curve (Dr Carlson disavows the name, but that may not stop it from sticking) is making that possible. In the short run such engineering means assembling genes from different organisms to create new metabolic pathways or even new organisms. In the long run it might involve re-writing the genetic code altogether, to create things that are beyond the range of existing biology. These are enterprises far more worthy of the name of genetic engineering than today's tinkering. But since that name is taken, the field's pioneers have had to come up with a new one. They have dubbed their fledgling discipline “synthetic biology”. Truly intelligent design One of synthetic biology's most radical spirits is Drew Endy. Dr Endy, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to the subject from engineering, not biology. As an engineer, he can recognise a kludge when he sees one. And life, in his opinion, is a kludge. No intelligent designer would have put the genomes of living organisms together in the way that evolution has. Some parts overlap, meaning that they cannot change jobs independently of one another. Others have lost their function but have not been removed, so they simply clutter things up. And there is no sense of organisation or hierarchy. That is because, unlike an engineer, evolution cannot go back to the drawing board, it can merely play with what already exists. Biologists, who seek merely to understand how life works, accept this. Engineers such as Dr Endy, who wish to change the way it works, do not. They want to start again. So Dr Endy has developed an idea invented by Tom Knight, one of his colleagues at MIT. Dr Knight calls the idea “BioBricks”. His inspiration was a children's toy called Lego. What makes Lego successful is that any part can attach to any other via a universal connector. A BioBrick is a strand of DNA that has universal connectors at each end. BioBricks can thus be linked together to form higher-level components and also joined into the DNA of a cell so that they can control its activity. Dr Endy likes BioBricks because they promise the synthetic biologist the standardised set of parts that has been one of the advantages enjoyed by the electronic engineers behind Moore's law. If an engineer wants a particular component for a job, he can go to a catalogue, find a widget with the right parameters and order it from a supplier. He does not have to design it himself. He does not even have to know how it works. Dr Endy thinks BioBricks can put biologists in the same position. The DNA of a BioBrick contains a combination of genes that acts as a standardised component. When translated into protein in a cell, it makes that cell do something—and that something is often more than just “make more of protein X”. In particular, Dr Endy is interested in switches and control systems that regulate other genes. Such switches are the basis of electronics and he hopes they may one day become the basis of an industrialised synthetic biology. At the moment, BioBricks, like Lego, are still a toy. They have been used for proof-of-principle studies such as taking photographs with films made of modified bacteria, but not yet for serious applications. But there are a lot of them around—many in the public domain at MIT's Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Such “open wetware” is one reason for the emergence of biohacking (see article). Whether BioBricks will come to dominate the field remains to be seen. One difficulty they face is the cussed tendency of biological things to evolve. An electronic component, once designed, can be turned out reliably in a factory. BioBricks are bred, rather than made, and that introduces scope for error. Meanwhile, other researchers are content to work with things that more closely resemble natural components, although they still assemble them in unconventional ways. A new synthesis One of the leading proponents of this method is Jay Keasling, of the University of California, Berkeley, who also believes that synthetic biology will ultimately need standard, well-characterised parts if it is to thrive. But he is trying to get there via a practical project, rather than by generating lots of components and waiting for others to think of what to do with them. Dr Keasling's project is to do biologically what no chemist has yet managed to accomplish—to synthesise an antimalarial drug called artemisinin cheaply. At the moment, artemisinin is a herbal remedy. It is extracted from Artemisia annua, a type of wormwood, and the best source is in China. Making artemisinin by standard chemistry requires so many steps that it is impractical. So Dr Keasling persuaded the Gates Foundation to back his idea for doing the job using synthetic biology. For this, he has built a metabolic pathway in yeast cells that synthesises a chemical called artemisinic acid which chemists can easily convert into artemisinin. Some of the genes to do this have come from Artemisia, but others have been created from other sources. Dr Keasling's project is not the only one to lay down artificial metabolic pathways. One goal of synthetic biology is to make what is known as cellulosic ethanol. At the moment, ethanol—whether for wine, beer or fuel—is made by fermenting sugar or starch. But even in crops such as sugar cane and maize, which have been bred for their high yields, a lot of the plant is wasted. Although yeast cannot digest cellulose or lignin, the molecules that form a plant's skeleton, some bacteria and other species of fungi are able to do the job. Identifying the genes for the enzymes that do this, modifying them and assembling them into new pathways would produce systems that could digest the whole plant and turn it into ethanol. Nancy Ho, of Purdue University, in Indiana, has already worked out a way to enable yeast cells to ferment the sugars produced by breaking down cellulose—which natural yeast cannot do. This is important stuff. Cellulosic ethanol is the great hope of many environmentalists since its carbon, unlike that in fossil fuels, comes from the atmosphere and thus cannot make a net contribution to global warming when it returns there. The ultimate proof of the success of synthetic biology, though, would be not merely an artificial metabolic pathway, but an artificial organism. That is the goal of Craig Venter. Dr Venter, the man who first sequenced the entire genome of a living creature (a bacterium) and then went on to run a private-enterprise rival to the publicly funded Human Genome Project, has re-invented himself again. This time he is synthesising genomes, rather than analysing them. Three years ago he made the first viable synthetic virus from off-the-shelf chemicals. (It is a parasite of bacteria, not humans.) Now he has a bacterial genome in his sights. To make the task easier, Dr Venter is first creating what he and Hamilton Smith, his collaborator at the Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, call the minimal genome. This is a stripped-down bacterial genome that contains the smallest set of genes consistent with life in the cushy environment of a laboratory. Such a genome would have several advantages for synthetic biologists. First, being small, it would be easier to make. Second, it would not survive in the big, bad world outside the laboratory, should it chance to escape. Third, it would not dissipate its biochemical effort on non-essential tasks. That means it could be used as a platform on which to bolt commercially useful pathways. According to Dr Venter, the raw materials for those pathways are abundant. As he observes, half the mass of living organisms on the planet is made of bacteria and these bacteria are divided into zillions of species with countless unidentified genes. For the past couple of years he has been sampling the oceans and collecting bacterial genes. He has identified about 6m. Among them are, for example, 20,000 genes for hydrogen-metabolising proteins. That is of particular interest, since Dr Venter sees synthetic biology as a source of new energy-generating technologies—and he has the backing of America's Department of Energy to prove the point. He has also found numerous genes for versions of rhodopsin. In vertebrates this protein is found in retinal cells, where it transduces the energy of light into a nerve signal to the brain. What it is doing in so many bacteria is not known, though one possibility is signalling how deep they are in the ocean as a consequence of how dark it is. Whatever the cause, the energy conversion that rhodopsin brings about is also of interest. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it Dr Venter reckons he will be able to synthesise a working bacterial genome from scratch within two years. More complex genomes, of the sort that make plants, animals and fungi, will take longer. But they, he thinks, should be possible within a decade. Even this definitive erasure of the distinction between the living and non-living worlds is not, however, the most radical idea in synthetic biology. Some people want to go beyond the toolkit that evolution has provided and create biological systems that work with a chemistry that is not found in natural living things. Biology's operating system relies on two sorts of molecule: nucleic acids and amino acids. Nucleic acids (DNA and its cousin, RNA) act as information stores. The information they store is how to assemble amino acids into proteins, which are chains of linked amino acids. Proteins then go on to do the work of sustaining life. They manufacture other sorts of biological molecules, such as fats and sugars. They process energy. They provide structural support for cells. One of the recurrent principles of evolution is “if it ain't broke, don't fix it”. That is why the kludges Dr Endy is trying to eliminate have endured across the millennia. Once the nucleic acid-amino acid operating system came into existence it could never be “fixed” into anything else by evolution, because the immediate consequences would have been so serious. But that does not mean it cannot be changed by an intelligent designer, and a number of such people are looking into how this might be done. One obvious improvement would be to increase the number of amino acids that can be assembled into proteins. At the moment only 20 are used routinely in biology, but chemists can make thousands of others. Proteins containing those “non-biological” amino acids would have novel properties, and some of those properties might be useful. That, at least, is the thinking behind the attempt by Lei Wang, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, to extend the amino-acid parts set. Dr Wang's starting point is the redundancy of the genetic code used by nucleic acids. This code is spelled out in the genetic “letters” A, C, G and T, which correspond to chemical sub-units of nucleic acids. The letters are grouped into three-letter “words” known as codons, meaning that there are 64 of them. All but three of the codons correspond to particular amino acids, and the order of the codons in the nucleic acid corresponds to the order of the amino acids in the protein. The remaining three are signals that the protein is complete. But, with more codons than amino acids, many amino acids have more than one codon to describe them. There is also a superfluity of stop signals. Dr Wang has managed to reassign one of the stop codons in E. coli, the bacterial workhorse of geneticists, to recognise an unnatural amino acid. This can now be incorporated into proteins made by the bacterium. Peter Carr of MIT and Farren Isaacs of Harvard Medical School have an even more ambitious plan. They intend to recode E. coli completely, eliminating the redundant codons. They have settled on one codon for each natural amino acid and one for the stop signal and plan to go through the bacterium's entire genome replacing alternative codons with their chosen ones. The idea is that the cleaned up bacterium will be more efficient. That remains to be seen; natural selection has been working on E. coli for a long time, so whether two intelligent designers can do a better job is questionable. But if their new bacterium is at least viable, it will have 43 codons that can be re-assigned to other tasks. The debate evolves Where all this will lead is anybody's guess. But synthetic biologists themselves are aware of the risks. The most obvious is that somebody, whether a malicious biohacker or a political terrorist, will do something deliberately nasty. The other risk is that something will escape accidentally. No technology is risk free, but synthetic biology has the twist that its mistakes can breed. Today the risks are not great. As David Baltimore, the president of the California Institute of Technology, observes, “nature is a very tough critic”. Any organism modified in a laboratory is unlikely to make it in the outside world in competition with creatures toughened up by natural selection. Nevertheless, as knowledge increases, so will the risk that something truly nasty might be unleashed. To avoid that and the opposite problem of hasty legislation to curb their activities, researchers are trying to get their retaliations in first by promoting public debate. Their historical model is the Asilomar conference of 1975, when the first biotechnologists met to agree on self-denying ordinances that went a long way towards establishing their credentials as responsible and trustworthy people. Despite initial fears, biotechnology has not, up to now, caused any serious problems. A recent meeting of biosynthesists in Berkeley issued a discussion document; the Sloan Foundation has paid for a report, coming out soon, on the risks and social implications of synthetic biology. So far, perhaps surprisingly, the wider public has shown little interest. Perhaps it should. |
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The next big bang: Man meets machine |
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A ‘Singular’ Man, Ray Kurzweil Aims for
Human Omnipotence |
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| 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. |
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| 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 |
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| More Than Human This fall, the editors of a leading public policy magazine, Foreign Policy, asked eight prominent intellectuals to identify the single idea they felt was currently posing the greatest threat to humanity. Most of the suggestions were merely old demons: various economic myths, the idea that you can fight "a war on evil," Americaphobia and so on. Only Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, came up with a new candidate: transhumanism. By Fred Hapgood CIO (US) 12/27/04 Transhumanism might be described as the technology of advanced individual enhancement. While it includes physical modifications (diamondoid teeth, self-styling hair, autocleaning ears, nanotube bones, lipid metabolizers, polymer muscles), most of the interest in the technology focuses on the integration of brains and computers — especially brains and networks. Sample transhumanist apps could include cell phone implants (which would allow virtual telepathy), memory backups and augmenters, thought recorders, reflex accelerators, collaborative consciousness (whiteboarding in the brain), and a very long list of thought-controlled actuators. Ultimately, the technology could extend to the uploading and downloading of entire minds in and out of host bodies, providing a self-consciousness that, theoretically, would have no definitive nor necessary end. That is, immortality, of a sort. While some of these abilities are clearly quite far off, others are already attracting researchers, and none are known (at the moment at least) to be impossible to achieve. Fukuyama obviously felt the technology was close enough at hand to write a book about it, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, the thrust of which is that society should give the whole idea a miss. His main concern was that transhumanism would place an impossible burden on the idea of equal rights, since it would multiply the number of ways of being human well past our powers of tolerance. (If we have all this trouble with something simple like skin color, just wait until some people have wings, augmented memory and reflex accelerators.) Ignorance Is No Option Still, it's not clear that boycotting neurotech will be a realistic option. When the people around you — competitors, colleagues, partners — can run Google searches in their brains during conversations; or read documents upside down on a desk 30 feet away; or remember exactly who said what, when and where; or coordinate meeting tactics telepathically; or work forever without sleep; or control every device on a production line with thought alone, your only probable alternative is to join them or retire. No corporation could ignore the competitive potential of a neurotech-enhanced workforce for long. Right now, the only people thinking about transhumanism are futurists, ethicists (such as Fukuyama) and researchers. However, if and when we do advance into this technology, several management issues will also need attention. Consider, for instance, the case of upgrade management. From a purely capitalist point of view, one virtue of transhumanism is that it incorporates both body and mind into the continuous upgrade cycle that characterizes contemporary consumption patterns. Once a given modification — such as a cortical display — is successfully invented, newer and better ones will crop up on the market every year, boasting lower power requirements, higher resolution, hyperspectral sensitivity, longer mean time between failures, richer recording, sharing and backup features, and so on. Multiply by all the devices embraced by the transhumanist agenda, and it's clear that every year even the most financially secure users will be forced to winnow a small number of choices from an enormous range of possibilities. Another concern could be digital rights management. When brains can interact with hard disks, remembering will become the equivalent of copying. Presumably, intellectual property producers will react with the usual mix of policies, some generous, some not. Some producers will want you to pay every time you remember something; others will allow you to keep content in consciousness for as long as you like but levy an extra charge for moving it into long-term memory; still others will want to erase their content entirely as rights expire, essentially inducing a contractually limited form of amnesia. While any one of these illustrations might be wrong in detail, there will almost certainly be a whole range of intellectual property issues and complications that will need to be managed. In other words, it looks as though the transhumanist era is going to be a Golden Age for CIOs and their skill sets. Even in the case of problems for which CIOs do not have immediate solutions, they will probably be the right people to think about the answers. Take, for example, the extremely vexing problem of neurosecurity. A brain running on a network will obviously be an extremely attractive target for everyone from outright criminals to bored hackers to spammers. Why worry about actually earning a promotion when you can just write a worm that will configure your superior's brain so that the very thought of you triggers his or her pleasure centers? Why bother with phishing when you can direct your victims to transfer their assets straight to your bank account? Why tolerate the presence of infidels when they can be converted to the one true faith with the push of a button? Who Do You Trust? Not You Peter Cassidy, secretary-general of The Anti-Phishing Working Group, is one of the few analysts thinking about neurosecurity. He says that a key problem is that the brain appears to consider itself a trusted environment. When brain region A gets a file request from region B, it typically hands over the data automatically, without asking for ID or imposing more than the most minimal plausibility check. It is true that with age and experience our brains do gradually build up a short blacklist of forbidden instructions, often involving particular commands originating from the hypothalamus or adrenal glands (for example, "bet the house on red," or "pick a fight with that bunch of sailors"), but in general, learning is slow and the results patchy. Such laxity will be inadequate in an age when brainjacking has become a perfectly plausible form of sabotage. Cassidy points out that one of the core problems in neurosecurity is defining trusted agents. All security depends on the concept of two trusted parties (a trusted identity and a computer) and a trust applicant. The neurosecurity conundrum is that it mixes all these identities in the same brain. It forces you to face the questions of when, whether and how to trust yourself. Still, CIOs (and CSOs) are familiar with the essence of even this issue, which is much like analyzing the problem of defending an enterprise against an employee who has gone bad. One possible approach to neurosecurity might be to implant a public-key infrastructure in our brains so that every neural region can sign and authenticate requests and replies from any other region. A second might be maintaining a master list of approved mental activities and blocking any mental operations not on that list. (Concerns about whether the list itself was corrupted might be addressed by refreshing the list constantly from implanted and presumably unhackable ROM chips.) It might also be necessary to outsource significant portions of our neural processing to highly secure computing sites. In theory, such measures might improve on the neurosecurity system imposed on us by evolution, making us less vulnerable to catchy tunes and empty political slogans. New Security Horizons Lance James, CSO of Secure Science Corp., a security services company, is writing a book (working title: Eye Own You) on the security aspects of neuronetworking. In it, he observes that engineering research on this topic is going to be harder than conventional security research, which of course has not completely cleared its own agenda. Conventional networking allows researchers to launch experimental attacks on simulated networks that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Simulated minds are nowhere on the horizon, which means that neurosecurity engineers are going to have to work on real brains. This is likely to be awkward, as volunteers will be few. And the fact that neurotech will almost certainly be wireless (The Matrix notwithstanding, people are not going to walk around with open brain sockets) will just add to the security headaches. However, James continues, the news is not all bad. A large fraction of today's computer network security problems can be attributed to the uniformity of our hardware and software. Hackers do their damage by learning how to exploit these "monocultures." If every user built and programmed his computer himself, security would be dramatically easier. Brains are not only self-programming but self-organizing, which almost certainly means that every adult brain is radically different from every other. In the terms of the trade, James says, "Brains might share the same kernel, though even that is a guess, but they probably run different services and have different programming calls." This diversity might be a problem for neurotech vendors hoping for the economies of mass production, but it gives CIOs and CSOs lots of room to breathe. Second, all these problems are not going to be dropped in our lap at once. The first neurocomputational products will probably be thought-controlled actuators. Though such devices might show up in quite a range of environments — embracing apps from wheelchairs to body extenders to computer games to controlling industrial machinery — they can be made relatively safe by keeping the data traffic one-way, pushing control signals out through the electrodes while shunting feedback through the physical senses, which are relatively secure. The machinery itself might have a network connection (and therefore be subject to attack), but not the brains of its operators. Security issues will become more pressing when the second generation of neurotech products arrives: cortical implants allowing sensors and data stores to "print" directly to consciousness. (Much of the research under way today on such implants can be characterized as figuring out how to write a consciousness driver — such as a driver for a printer or a graphic card — only for awareness.) Fortunately, the first generation of these devices will probably be electronic eyes that return sight to the blind, a function that does not require Internet connectivity. From there, however, it is just a step (conceptually, although the engineering itself is another question) to a device that accepts any feed at all, from infrared cameras to television programming. Once at that point, the demand for some sort of connectivity will become intense. Who wouldn't want to be able to read their e-mail (or watch The Sopranos) while pretending to listen to a boring presentation? CIOs have been urging users to take security seriously for decades, to not use "PASSWORD" for their passwords, to be careful where they find their wireless access points and to use firewalls. By and large, they have been studiously ignored. Perhaps the advent of neuronetworking will encourage people finally to take these cautionary procedures seriously. But probably not. |
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| Cognitive Freedom Fighter With brain implants and memory erasure becoming reality, Wrye Sententia is bringing constitutional rights into your head Shannon Foskett, Betterhumans Staff 11/23/2004 Free thinking: "We're working for both the freedom to use new neurotechnologies for benefit, and a freedom from surreptitious or compelled uses of the same," says neuropolicy advocate Wrye Sententia "I can imagine the tabloid ads for personal injury lawyers specializing in things like 'faulty cerebral implants' and 'accidents' involving memory erasure," says Wrye Sententia, cofounder of the Davis, California-based Centre for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics (CCLE). "As bizarre as it may sound, if we do not work to ensure that our democratic, constitutional rights can weather the transition to tomorrow, we may find ourselves unprotected in a world where we have no recourse for complaint." Following the hit films Paycheck (2003) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004), the specter of corporate memory control has reappeared in the popular imaginary. We know the dream factory has pulled much here from fiction, but how much do these stories draw from fact? I had the chance to speak with Sententia about the explosive developments in the fields of neurotechnology and cognitive liberty—and the even more fascinating legal problems they raise. Here are some excerpts from our conversation: In an interview with New Scientist, CCLE cofounder Richard Glen Boire made the spooky intimation that cognitive liberty is poised to be one of the major civil rights issues of the century. What is this new concept, exactly? Cognitive liberty is the right of an individual to liberty, autonomy and privacy over his or her own intellect, and is situated at the core of what it means to be a free person. This principle is what gave rise to some of our most well-established and cherished democratic rights. Cognitive liberty presupposes at least these three principles: cognitive privacy (what and how you think should be private unless you choose to share it); cognitive autonomy (self-determination over one's own cognition is central to free will); and cognitive choice (the capabilities of the human mind should not be limited). If we stop and think about what freedom of thought means to us, it's really about personal autonomy—in the sense that I can direct my life, not necessarily that I am outside of a web of social relations—and privacy. Not necessarily because I don't want to share my thoughts, but because I want to retain authority over when, where, how and with certain caveats, I may do so. Most people believe—and to a large extent, this has been the case—that we do have freedom of thought. Until recently, freedom of thought has been a kind of commonsense assumption, a birthright in a functioning democracy which allows us to more or less pick and choose our own ideology and guide our life according to our own experience, beliefs and influences. Yet as some of the plausible outgrowths of today's neurotechnologies take hold in society at large, we will face a qualitatively different kind of freedom. It is going to be important that we know and anticipate valid concerns over the use of neurotechnologies. The thought that someday I might need a lawyer to protect my individual "rights of mind" is rather incredible, to say nothing of the horror I feel at the thought of "mental violation," if one can conceive of it as such. You hit on it. Both a disgust at a potentially invasive abuse of your private thoughts, and at the prospect of lawyers encroaching on yet another area to litigate our lives. Are we merely expanding the definition of personal privacy, or are there new, empirical developments that give us cause to believe that our freedom of thought is or might at some point be endangered? Today, new drugs and other technologies are being developed for augmenting, monitoring and manipulating mental processes. The very definitions of medicine and mental health are evolving as a result of the explosion in neurotechnologies and neuropharmaceuticals. Things like fMRIs, that grew out of MRI technology; "noninvasive" brain scanning techniques; "brain fingerprinting" as a tool for law enforcement; applications such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation; preventative "mental health"; enhancement pharmaceuticals; "neuromarketing" are all examples that are getting more attention these days in relation to higher cognitive functions. Another example that the CCLE is tracking is the proposed use of hypersonic sound to project noise, music or voices directly inside your head. Hypersonic sound is a "silent" sonic device that could be used, for instance, as yet another way to get our attention. You might walk by a soda machine on a hot day, and hear the refreshing sound of ice shifting in a glass. There's also the whole emerging field of nanotechnology and nanomedicine as explored by Robert Freitas that will have implications for how we interact with consciousness, the brain-mind, the body-brain, etc. We can also anticipate a day when so-called germ line or genetic engineering biotechnologies of the future will potentially impact the selective reshaping or enhancing of cognitive abilities, and consequently these distant possibilities raise the same polarized issues regarding personhood and human "essence." Most people have heard of Prozac or Paxil, but how much time will it be before some of these more dramatic applications become household names? To my knowledge, even though a number of nascent applications of brain imaging and brain scanning technologies currently exist, most are in the experimental or research stage, and certainly are not yet being used unwittingly on private citizens. The hard technical feasibility of gauging or influencing a person's thoughts is still in its infancy. Most of the equipment used to glean information from our brain's patterns has only been around for a couple decades. Likewise, while EEG technology has improved, and the invention of LED "noninvasive" brain scanning techniques are underway, the applications are still largely in the research phases and the scientific viability of some of these methods are still hotly disputed. I'm not sure how likely the neural net possibility will be; the scientists, computer engineers and neurologists are better judges of that than I. I honestly think that we're not even close to uploading our consciousness to computers—whatever that would entail and if ever we would want to. Nonetheless, the applications are already being touted. Neuropharmaceuticals are an area where changes in culture and deficiencies in the law are already apparent and are already influencing how we, as a society, think about drug chemistry and the brain. Today's spectrum of antidepressants that work on the dopamine and norapinephrine neurotransmitters make people feel better by readjusting the chemical activity, or say, serotonin levels in the brain. Even though some take a prohibitionary position in regards to "human enhancement"—like the President's Council on Bioethics who issued their Beyond Therapy report on this topic about a year ago—it's likely that, even if the US bans a generalized, nonprescription use of future drugs to improve attention, mood and even memory, these drugs will go on a "black market" in the same way Ritalin has become a subverted drug in high schools and even junior high. Suffice it to say that neurotechnologies are already here, and more are coming—and we have more examples up on our Website (http://www.cognitiveliberty.org). Just to take a closer look at what may or may not be already obvious, what do these technologies give us to worry about? Aren't they being developed in the aim of improving general mental health and functioning for everyone? Quite simply, individuals and collective freedom are threatened when these technologies are applied or regulated without clear guiding principles. Because our laws currently, as I understand them, only protect people from unreasonable or hurtful decibels, in other words, from loud noise, what happens when you are subjected to silent sound? If your thoughts can be subject to unwanted scrutiny, what rights do you have to keep others' probing at bay? How do physicians distinguish between medical and "enhancement" applications? Should they? What about insurance coverage? What does "treating the well" mean? These are just a few of the neuroethical questions doctors are facing, and that society will also increasingly face, and the sort of issues among many that my colleagues and I grapple with on a daily basis. But to date, only a small handful of neuroscientists are concerned about issues like mind-reading or merged consciousness as real possibilities, and most—if they think about this at all—are concerned with neuroethics in relation to experimental subjects in a lab. Neuroethics, obviously, deals with the responsibilities behind the creation and use of applications such as fMRIs. Neuroethics is a relatively new field concerned with the benefits and dangers of modern research on the brain, and by extension, with the social, legal and ethical implications of treating or manipulating consciousness. It's important for us to think about what is at issue in the use or application of neurotechnologies. Some people are more apt to embrace new experiences and new technologies while others are less inclined to experiment. As with biotechnology developments, the shift from strictly therapeutic uses of neurotechnologies, including drugs, will (and indeed already is) move from deficit to enhancement applications. Some will use neurotechnologies only if they absolutely have to, in order to compensate for a 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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. |
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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. |
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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." |
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| 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. |
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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 Source: Nick Bostrom
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