Posthumanism

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Posthumanism
I guess Homo erectus Luddites would also have whined about 'future concerns'...

Here's something to chew on: There exists a concern that advances in biotechnology will come at a terrible price - the loss of authentic happiness, the loss of what makes life meaningful ie. struggle, suffering frailty, finitude, and death. Yet this thinking does not appear to square up with what we have already experienced in the wake of biomedical progress. Do those who use glasses, insulin injections, wheelchairs, inhalers, oxygen tanks, hearing aids, or prosthetic limbs feel inauthentic or overcome by a loss of meaning in their lives? If I use a calculator, a computer, or the Internet to solve a problem, do I feel that I have been cheated out of a more authentic experience enjoyed by my grandparents, who used pen and paper calculation, visited a library, or mastered the multiplication table? There is little evidence for the dour view that we can only be happy when we have earned our happiness.


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

More Than Human This fall, the editors of a leading public policy magazine, Foreign Policy, asked eight prominent intellectuals to identify the single idea they felt was currently posing the greatest threat to humanity. Most of the suggestions were merely old demons: various economic myths, the idea that you can fight "a war on evil," Americaphobia and so on. Only Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, came up with a new candidate: transhumanism. By Fred Hapgood CIO (US) 12/27/04 Transhumanism might be described as the technology of advanced individual enhancement. While it includes physical modifications (diamondoid teeth, self-styling hair, autocleaning ears, nanotube bones, lipid metabolizers, polymer muscles), most of the interest in the technology focuses on the integration of brains and computers — especially brains and networks. Sample transhumanist apps could include cell phone implants (which would allow virtual telepathy), memory backups and augmenters, thought recorders, reflex accelerators, collaborative consciousness (whiteboarding in the brain), and a very long list of thought-controlled actuators. Ultimately, the technology could extend to the uploading and downloading of entire minds in and out of host bodies, providing a self-consciousness that, theoretically, would have no definitive nor necessary end. That is, immortality, of a sort. While some of these abilities are clearly quite far off, others are already attracting researchers, and none are known (at the moment at least) to be impossible to achieve. Fukuyama obviously felt the technology was close enough at hand to write a book about it, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, the thrust of which is that society should give the whole idea a miss. His main concern was that transhumanism would place an impossible burden on the idea of equal rights, since it would multiply the number of ways of being human well past our powers of tolerance. (If we have all this trouble with something simple like skin color, just wait until some people have wings, augmented memory and reflex accelerators.) Ignorance Is No Option Still, it's not clear that boycotting neurotech will be a realistic option. When the people around you — competitors, colleagues, partners — can run Google searches in their brains during conversations; or read documents upside down on a desk 30 feet away; or remember exactly who said what, when and where; or coordinate meeting tactics telepathically; or work forever without sleep; or control every device on a production line with thought alone, your only probable alternative is to join them or retire. No corporation could ignore the competitive potential of a neurotech-enhanced workforce for long. Right now, the only people thinking about transhumanism are futurists, ethicists (such as Fukuyama) and researchers. However, if and when we do advance into this technology, several management issues will also need attention. Consider, for instance, the case of upgrade management. From a purely capitalist point of view, one virtue of transhumanism is that it incorporates both body and mind into the continuous upgrade cycle that characterizes contemporary consumption patterns. Once a given modification — such as a cortical display — is successfully invented, newer and better ones will crop up on the market every year, boasting lower power requirements, higher resolution, hyperspectral sensitivity, longer mean time between failures, richer recording, sharing and backup features, and so on. Multiply by all the devices embraced by the transhumanist agenda, and it's clear that every year even the most financially secure users will be forced to winnow a small number of choices from an enormous range of possibilities. Another concern could be digital rights management. When brains can interact with hard disks, remembering will become the equivalent of copying. Presumably, intellectual property producers will react with the usual mix of policies, some generous, some not. Some producers will want you to pay every time you remember something; others will allow you to keep content in consciousness for as long as you like but levy an extra charge for moving it into long-term memory; still others will want to erase their content entirely as rights expire, essentially inducing a contractually limited form of amnesia. While any one of these illustrations might be wrong in detail, there will almost certainly be a whole range of intellectual property issues and complications that will need to be managed. In other words, it looks as though the transhumanist era is going to be a Golden Age for CIOs and their skill sets. Even in the case of problems for which CIOs do not have immediate solutions, they will probably be the right people to think about the answers. Take, for example, the extremely vexing problem of neurosecurity. A brain running on a network will obviously be an extremely attractive target for everyone from outright criminals to bored hackers to spammers. Why worry about actually earning a promotion when you can just write a worm that will configure your superior's brain so that the very thought of you triggers his or her pleasure centers? Why bother with phishing when you can direct your victims to transfer their assets straight to your bank account? Why tolerate the presence of infidels when they can be converted to the one true faith with the push of a button? Who Do You Trust? Not You Peter Cassidy, secretary-general of The Anti-Phishing Working Group, is one of the few analysts thinking about neurosecurity. He says that a key problem is that the brain appears to consider itself a trusted environment. When brain region A gets a file request from region B, it typically hands over the data automatically, without asking for ID or imposing more than the most minimal plausibility check. It is true that with age and experience our brains do gradually build up a short blacklist of forbidden instructions, often involving particular commands originating from the hypothalamus or adrenal glands (for example, "bet the house on red," or "pick a fight with that bunch of sailors"), but in general, learning is slow and the results patchy. Such laxity will be inadequate in an age when brainjacking has become a perfectly plausible form of sabotage. Cassidy points out that one of the core problems in neurosecurity is defining trusted agents. All security depends on the concept of two trusted parties (a trusted identity and a computer) and a trust applicant. The neurosecurity conundrum is that it mixes all these identities in the same brain. It forces you to face the questions of when, whether and how to trust yourself. Still, CIOs (and CSOs) are familiar with the essence of even this issue, which is much like analyzing the problem of defending an enterprise against an employee who has gone bad. One possible approach to neurosecurity might be to implant a public-key infrastructure in our brains so that every neural region can sign and authenticate requests and replies from any other region. A second might be maintaining a master list of approved mental activities and blocking any mental operations not on that list. (Concerns about whether the list itself was corrupted might be addressed by refreshing the list constantly from implanted and presumably unhackable ROM chips.) It might also be necessary to outsource significant portions of our neural processing to highly secure computing sites. In theory, such measures might improve on the neurosecurity system imposed on us by evolution, making us less vulnerable to catchy tunes and empty political slogans. New Security Horizons Lance James, CSO of Secure Science Corp., a security services company, is writing a book (working title: Eye Own You) on the security aspects of neuronetworking. In it, he observes that engineering research on this topic is going to be harder than conventional security research, which of course has not completely cleared its own agenda. Conventional networking allows researchers to launch experimental attacks on simulated networks that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Simulated minds are nowhere on the horizon, which means that neurosecurity engineers are going to have to work on real brains. This is likely to be awkward, as volunteers will be few. And the fact that neurotech will almost certainly be wireless (The Matrix notwithstanding, people are not going to walk around with open brain sockets) will just add to the security headaches. However, James continues, the news is not all bad. A large fraction of today's computer network security problems can be attributed to the uniformity of our hardware and software. Hackers do their damage by learning how to exploit these "monocultures." If every user built and programmed his computer himself, security would be dramatically easier. Brains are not only self-programming but self-organizing, which almost certainly means that every adult brain is radically different from every other. In the terms of the trade, James says, "Brains might share the same kernel, though even that is a guess, but they probably run different services and have different programming calls." This diversity might be a problem for neurotech vendors hoping for the economies of mass production, but it gives CIOs and CSOs lots of room to breathe. Second, all these problems are not going to be dropped in our lap at once. The first neurocomputational products will probably be thought-controlled actuators. Though such devices might show up in quite a range of environments — embracing apps from wheelchairs to body extenders to computer games to controlling industrial machinery — they can be made relatively safe by keeping the data traffic one-way, pushing control signals out through the electrodes while shunting feedback through the physical senses, which are relatively secure. The machinery itself might have a network connection (and therefore be subject to attack), but not the brains of its operators. Security issues will become more pressing when the second generation of neurotech products arrives: cortical implants allowing sensors and data stores to "print" directly to consciousness. (Much of the research under way today on such implants can be characterized as figuring out how to write a consciousness driver — such as a driver for a printer or a graphic card — only for awareness.) Fortunately, the first generation of these devices will probably be electronic eyes that return sight to the blind, a function that does not require Internet connectivity. From there, however, it is just a step (conceptually, although the engineering itself is another question) to a device that accepts any feed at all, from infrared cameras to television programming. Once at that point, the demand for some sort of connectivity will become intense. Who wouldn't want to be able to read their e-mail (or watch The Sopranos) while pretending to listen to a boring presentation? CIOs have been urging users to take security seriously for decades, to not use "PASSWORD" for their passwords, to be careful where they find their wireless access points and to use firewalls. By and large, they have been studiously ignored. Perhaps the advent of neuronetworking will encourage people finally to take these cautionary procedures seriously. But probably not.
Cognitive Freedom Fighter With brain implants and memory erasure becoming reality, Wrye Sententia is bringing constitutional rights into your head Shannon Foskett, Betterhumans Staff 11/23/2004 Free thinking: "We're working for both the freedom to use new neurotechnologies for benefit, and a freedom from surreptitious or compelled uses of the same," says neuropolicy advocate Wrye Sententia "I can imagine the tabloid ads for personal injury lawyers specializing in things like 'faulty cerebral implants' and 'accidents' involving memory erasure," says Wrye Sententia, cofounder of the Davis, California-based Centre for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics (CCLE). "As bizarre as it may sound, if we do not work to ensure that our democratic, constitutional rights can weather the transition to tomorrow, we may find ourselves unprotected in a world where we have no recourse for complaint." Following the hit films Paycheck (2003) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004), the specter of corporate memory control has reappeared in the popular imaginary. We know the dream factory has pulled much here from fiction, but how much do these stories draw from fact? I had the chance to speak with Sententia about the explosive developments in the fields of neurotechnology and cognitive liberty—and the even more fascinating legal problems they raise. Here are some excerpts from our conversation: In an interview with New Scientist, CCLE cofounder Richard Glen Boire made the spooky intimation that cognitive liberty is poised to be one of the major civil rights issues of the century. What is this new concept, exactly? Cognitive liberty is the right of an individual to liberty, autonomy and privacy over his or her own intellect, and is situated at the core of what it means to be a free person. This principle is what gave rise to some of our most well-established and cherished democratic rights. Cognitive liberty presupposes at least these three principles: cognitive privacy (what and how you think should be private unless you choose to share it); cognitive autonomy (self-determination over one's own cognition is central to free will); and cognitive choice (the capabilities of the human mind should not be limited). If we stop and think about what freedom of thought means to us, it's really about personal autonomy—in the sense that I can direct my life, not necessarily that I am outside of a web of social relations—and privacy. Not necessarily because I don't want to share my thoughts, but because I want to retain authority over when, where, how and with certain caveats, I may do so. Most people believe—and to a large extent, this has been the case—that we do have freedom of thought. Until recently, freedom of thought has been a kind of commonsense assumption, a birthright in a functioning democracy which allows us to more or less pick and choose our own ideology and guide our life according to our own experience, beliefs and influences. Yet as some of the plausible outgrowths of today's neurotechnologies take hold in society at large, we will face a qualitatively different kind of freedom. It is going to be important that we know and anticipate valid concerns over the use of neurotechnologies. The thought that someday I might need a lawyer to protect my individual "rights of mind" is rather incredible, to say nothing of the horror I feel at the thought of "mental violation," if one can conceive of it as such. You hit on it. Both a disgust at a potentially invasive abuse of your private thoughts, and at the prospect of lawyers encroaching on yet another area to litigate our lives. Are we merely expanding the definition of personal privacy, or are there new, empirical developments that give us cause to believe that our freedom of thought is or might at some point be endangered? Today, new drugs and other technologies are being developed for augmenting, monitoring and manipulating mental processes. The very definitions of medicine and mental health are evolving as a result of the explosion in neurotechnologies and neuropharmaceuticals. Things like fMRIs, that grew out of MRI technology; "noninvasive" brain scanning techniques; "brain fingerprinting" as a tool for law enforcement; applications such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation; preventative "mental health"; enhancement pharmaceuticals; "neuromarketing" are all examples that are getting more attention these days in relation to higher cognitive functions. Another example that the CCLE is tracking is the proposed use of hypersonic sound to project noise, music or voices directly inside your head. Hypersonic sound is a "silent" sonic device that could be used, for instance, as yet another way to get our attention. You might walk by a soda machine on a hot day, and hear the refreshing sound of ice shifting in a glass. There's also the whole emerging field of nanotechnology and nanomedicine as explored by Robert Freitas that will have implications for how we interact with consciousness, the brain-mind, the body-brain, etc. We can also anticipate a day when so-called germ line or genetic engineering biotechnologies of the future will potentially impact the selective reshaping or enhancing of cognitive abilities, and consequently these distant possibilities raise the same polarized issues regarding personhood and human "essence." Most people have heard of Prozac or Paxil, but how much time will it be before some of these more dramatic applications become household names? To my knowledge, even though a number of nascent applications of brain imaging and brain scanning technologies currently exist, most are in the experimental or research stage, and certainly are not yet being used unwittingly on private citizens. The hard technical feasibility of gauging or influencing a person's thoughts is still in its infancy. Most of the equipment used to glean information from our brain's patterns has only been around for a couple decades. Likewise, while EEG technology has improved, and the invention of LED "noninvasive" brain scanning techniques are underway, the applications are still largely in the research phases and the scientific viability of some of these methods are still hotly disputed. I'm not sure how likely the neural net possibility will be; the scientists, computer engineers and neurologists are better judges of that than I. I honestly think that we're not even close to uploading our consciousness to computers—whatever that would entail and if ever we would want to. Nonetheless, the applications are already being touted. Neuropharmaceuticals are an area where changes in culture and deficiencies in the law are already apparent and are already influencing how we, as a society, think about drug chemistry and the brain. Today's spectrum of antidepressants that work on the dopamine and norapinephrine neurotransmitters make people feel better by readjusting the chemical activity, or say, serotonin levels in the brain. Even though some take a prohibitionary position in regards to "human enhancement"—like the President's Council on Bioethics who issued their Beyond Therapy report on this topic about a year ago—it's likely that, even if the US bans a generalized, nonprescription use of future drugs to improve attention, mood and even memory, these drugs will go on a "black market" in the same way Ritalin has become a subverted drug in high schools and even junior high. Suffice it to say that neurotechnologies are already here, and more are coming—and we have more examples up on our Website (http://www.cognitiveliberty.org). Just to take a closer look at what may or may not be already obvious, what do these technologies give us to worry about? Aren't they being developed in the aim of improving general mental health and functioning for everyone? Quite simply, individuals and collective freedom are threatened when these technologies are applied or regulated without clear guiding principles. Because our laws currently, as I understand them, only protect people from unreasonable or hurtful decibels, in other words, from loud noise, what happens when you are subjected to silent sound? If your thoughts can be subject to unwanted scrutiny, what rights do you have to keep others' probing at bay? How do physicians distinguish between medical and "enhancement" applications? Should they? What about insurance coverage? What does "treating the well" mean? These are just a few of the neuroethical questions doctors are facing, and that society will also increasingly face, and the sort of issues among many that my colleagues and I grapple with on a daily basis. But to date, only a small handful of neuroscientists are concerned about issues like mind-reading or merged consciousness as real possibilities, and most—if they think about this at all—are concerned with neuroethics in relation to experimental subjects in a lab. Neuroethics, obviously, deals with the responsibilities behind the creation and use of applications such as fMRIs. Neuroethics is a relatively new field concerned with the benefits and dangers of modern research on the brain, and by extension, with the social, legal and ethical implications of treating or manipulating consciousness. It's important for us to think about what is at issue in the use or application of neurotechnologies. Some people are more apt to embrace new experiences and new technologies while others are less inclined to experiment. As with biotechnology developments, the shift from strictly therapeutic uses of neurotechnologies, including drugs, will (and indeed already is) move from deficit to enhancement applications. Some will use neurotechnologies only if they absolutely have to, in order to compensate for a