Dear Friends,
Be Well.
David
How Much Longer Until Humanity
Becomes A Hive Mind?
Brain-to-brain interfaces have arrived, and they are
absolutely mindblowing
In a stunning first for neuroscience, researchers have
created an electronic link between the of —... Read…
Last month, researchers created an electronic link
between the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles. This was just
another reminder that technology will one day make us telepaths. But how far
will this transformation go? And how long will it take before humans evolve
into a fully-fledged hive mind?We spoke to the experts to find out.
I spoke to three different experts, all of whom have
given this subject considerable thought:Kevin Warwick, a British scientist and
professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading; Ramez Naam, an American
futurist and author of NEXUS (a scifi novel addressing this topic); and Anders
Sandberg, a Swedish neuroscientist from the Future of Humanity Institute at the
University of Oxford.
They all told me that the possibility of a telepathic
noosphere is very real — and it's closer to reality than we might think. And not
surprisingly, this would change the very fabric of the human condition.
Connecting brains
My first question to the group had to do with the
technological requirements. How is it, exactly, that we’re going to connect our
minds over the Internet, or some future manifestation of it?
“I really think we have sufficient hardware available
now — tools like Braingate,” says Warwick. “But we have a lot to learn with
regard to how much the brain can adapt, just how many implants would be
required, and where they would need to be positioned.”
Naam agrees that we’re largely on our way. He says we
already have the basics of sending some sorts of information in and out of the
brain. In humans, we’ve done it with video, audio, and motor control. In
principle, nothing prevents us from sending that data back and forth between
people.
“Practically speaking, though, there are some big
things we have to do,” he tells io9. “First, we have to increase the bandwidth.
The most sophisticated systems we have right now use about 100 electrodes,
while the brain has more than 100 billion neurons. If you want to get good fidelity
on the stuff you’re beaming back and forth between people, you’re going to want
to get on the order of millions of electrodes.”
Naam says we can build the electronics for that
easily, but building it in such a way that the brain accepts it is a major
challenge.
The second hurdle, he says, is going beyond sensory
and motor control.
“If you want to beam speech between people, you can
probably tap into that with some extensions of what we’ve already been doing,
though it will certainly involve researchers specifically working on decoding
that kind of data,” he says. “But if you want to go beyond sending speech and
get into full blown sharing of experiences, emotions, memories, or even skills
(a la The Matrix), then you’re wandering into unknown territory.”
Indeed, Sandberg says that picking up and translating
brain signals will be a tricky matter.
“EEG sensors have lousy resolution — we get an average
of millions of neurons, plus electrical noise from muscles and the
surroundings,” he says. “Subvocalisation and detecting muscle twitches is
easier to do, although they will still be fairly noisy. Internal brain
electrodes exist and can get a lot of data from a small region, but this of
course requires brain surgery. I am having great hopes for optogenetics and
nanofibers for making kinder, gentler implants that are less risky to insert
and easier on their tissue surroundings.”
The real problem, he says, is translating signals in a
sensible way. “Your brain representation of the concept "mountain" is
different from mine, the result not just of different experiences, but also on
account of my different neurons. So, if I wanted to activate the mountain
concept, I would need to activate a disperse, perhaps very complex network
across your brain,” he tells io9. “That would require some translation that
figured out that I wanted to suggest a mountain, and found which pattern is
your mountain.”
Sandberg says we normally "cheat" by
learning a convenient code called language, where all the mapping between the
code and our neural activations is learned as we grow. We can, of course, learn
new codes as adults, and this is rarely a problem — adults already master
things like Morse code, SMS abbreviations, or subtle signs of gesture and
style. Sandberg points to the recent experiments by Nicolelis connecting brains
directly, research which shows that it might be possible to get rodents to
learn neural codes. But he says this learning is cumbersome, and we should be
able to come up with something simpler.
One way is to boost learning. Some research shows that
amphetamine and presumably other learning stimulants can speed up language
learning. Recent work on the Nogo Receptorsuggests that brain plasticity can be
turned on and off. “So maybe we can use this to learn quickly,” says Sandberg.
Another way is to have software do the translation. It
is not hard to imagine machine learning to figure out what neural codes or
mumbled keywords correspond to which signal — but setting up the training so
that users find it acceptably fast is another matter.
“So my guess is that if pairs of people really wanted
to ‘get to know each other’ and devoted a lot of time and effort, they could
likely learn signals and build translation protocols that would allow a lot of
‘telepathic’ communication — but it would be very specific to them, like the
‘internal language’ some couples have,” says Sandberg. “For the weaker social
links, where we do not want to spend months learning how to speak to each
other, we would rely on automatically translated signals. A lot of it would be
standard things like voice and text, but one could imagine adding supporting
‘subtitles’ showing graphics or activating some neural assemblies.”
Bridging the gap
In terms of the communications backbone, Sandberg
believes it’s largely in place, but it will likely have to be extended much
further.
“The theoretical bandwidth limitations of even a
wireless Internet are far, far beyond the bandwidth limitations of our brains —
tens of terabits per second,” he told me, “and there are orbital angular
momentum methods that might get far more.”
Take the corpus callosum, for example. It has around
250 million axons, and even at the maximal neural firing rate of just 25
gigabits, that should be enough to keep the hemispheres connected such that we
feel we are a single mind.
As for the interface, Warwick says we should stick to
implanted multi-electrode arrays. These may someday become wireless, but
they’ll have to remain wired until we learn more about the process. Like
Sandberg, he adds that we’ll also need to develop adaptive software
interfacing.
Naam envisions something laced throughout the brain,
coupled with some device that could be worn on the person’s body.
“For the first part, you can imagine a mesh of
nano-scale sensors either inserted through a tiny hole in the skull, or somehow
through the brain’s blood vessels. In Nexus I imagined a variant on this — tiny
nano-particles that are small enough that they can be swallowed and will then
cross the blood-brain barrier and find their way to neurons in the brain.”
Realistically, Naam says that whatever we insert in
the brain is going to be pretty low energy consumption. The implant, or mesh,
or nano-particles could communicate wirelessly, but to boost their signal — and
to provide them power — scientists will have to pair them with something the
person wears, like a cap, a pair of glasses, a headband — anything that can be
worn very near the brain so it can pick up those weak signals and boost them,
including signals from the outside world that will be channeled into the brain.
How soon before the hive mind?
Warwick believes that the technologies required to
build an early version of the telepathic noosphere are largely in place. All
that’s required, he says, is “money on the table” and the proper ethical
approval.
Sandberg concurs, saying that we’re already doing it
with cellphones. He points to the work of Charles Stross, who suggests that the
next generation will never have to be alone, get lost, or forget anything.
“As soon as people have persistent wearable systems
that can pick up their speech, I think we can do a crude version,” says
Sandberg. “Having a system that’s on all the time will allow us to get a lot of
data — and it better be unobtrusive. I would not be surprised to see experiments
with Google Glasses before the end of the year, but we’ll probably end up
saying it’s just a fancy way of using cellphones.”
At the same time, Sandberg suspects that “real” neural
interfacing will take a while, since it needs to be safe, convenient, and have
a killer app worth doing. It will also have to compete with existing
communications systems and their apps.
Similarly, Naam says we could build a telepathic
network in a few years, but with “very, very, low fidelity.” But that low
fidelity, he says, would be considerably worse than the quality we get by using
phones — or even text or IM. “I doubt anyone who’s currently healthy would want
to use it.”
But for a really stable, high bandwidth system in and
out of the brain, that could take upwards of 15 to 20 years, which Naam
concedes is optimistic.
“In any case, it’s not a huge priority,” he says. “And
it’s not one where we’re willing to cut corners today. It’s firmly in the
medical sphere, and the first rule there is ‘do no harm’. That means that
science is done extremely cautiously, with the priority overwhelmingly — and
appropriately — being not to harm the human subject.”
Nearly supernatural
I asked Sandberg how the telepathic noosphere will
disrupt the various way humans engage in work and social relations.
“Any enhancement of communication ability is a big
deal,” he responded. “We humans are dominant because we are so good at
communication and coordination, and any improvement would likely boost that.
Just consider flash mobs or how online ARG communities do things that seem
nearly supernatural.”
Cell phones, he says, made our schedules flexible in
time and space, allowing us to coordinate where to meet on the fly. He says
we’re also adding various non-human services like apps and Siri-like agents.
“Our communications systems are allowing us to interact not just with each
other but with various artificial agents,” he says. Messages can be stored,
translated and integrated with other messages.
“If we become telepathic, it means we will have ways
of doing the same with concepts, ideas and sensory signals,” says Sandberg. “It
is hard to predict just what this will be used for since there are so few
limitations. But just consider the possibility of getting instruction and
skills via augmented reality and well designed sensory/motor interfaces. A team
might help a member perform actions while ‘looking over her shoulder’, as if
she knew all they knew. And if the system is general enough, it means that you
could in principle get help from any skilled person anywhere in the world.”
In response to the same question, Naam noted that
communication boosts can accelerate technical innovation, but more importantly,
they can also accelerate the spread of any kind of idea. “And that can be
hugely disruptive,” he says.
But in terms of the possibilities, Naam says the sky’s
the limit.
“With all of those components, you can imagine people
doing all sorts of things with such an interface. You could play games
together. You could enter virtual worlds together,” he says. “Designers or
architects or artists could imagine designs and share them mentally with
others. You could work together on any type of project where you can see or
hear what you’re doing. And of course, sex has driven a lot of information
technologies forward — with sight, sound, touch, and motor control, you could
imagine new forms of virtual sex or virtual pornography.”
Warwick imagines communication in the broadest sense,
including the technically-enabled telepathic transmission of feelings,
thoughts, ideas, and emotions. “I also think this communication will be far
richer when compared to the present pathetic way in which humans communicate.”
He suspects that visual information may eventually be possible, but that will
take some time to develop. He even imagines the sharing of memories. That may
be possible, he says, “but maybe not in my lifetime.”
Put all this together, says Warwick, and “the body
becomes redundant.” Moreover, when connected in this way “we will be able to
understand each other much more.”
A double-edged sword
We also talked about the potential risks.
“There’s the risk of bugs in hardware or software,”
says Naam. “There’s the risk of malware or viruses that infect this. There’s
the risk of hackers being able to break into the implants in your head. We’ve
already seen hackers demonstrate that they can remotely take over pacemakers
and insulin pumps. The same risks exist here.”
But the big societal risk, says Naam, stems entirely
from the question of who controls this technology.
“That’s the central question I ask in Nexus,” he says.
“If we all have brain implants, you can imagine it driving a very bottom’s up
world — another Renaissance, a world where people are free and creating and
sharing more new ideas all the time. Or you can imagine it driving a world like
that of 1984, where central authorities are the ones in control, and they’re
the ones using these direct brain technologies to monitor people, to keep
people in line, or even to manipulate people into being who they’re supposed to
be. That’s what keeps me up at night.”
Warwick, on the other hand, told me that the “biggest
risk is that some idiot — probably a politician or business person — may stop
it from going ahead.” He suspects it will lead to a digital divide between
those who have and those who do not, but that it’s a natural progression very
much in line with evolution to date.
In response to the question of privacy, Sandberg
quipped, “Privacy? What privacy?”
Our lives, he says, will reside in the cloud, and on
servers owned by various companies that also sell results from them to other organizations.
“Even if you do not use telepathy-like systems, your
behaviour and knowledge can likely be inferred from the rich data everybody
else provides,” he says. “And the potential for manipulation, surveillance and
propaganda are endless.”
Our cloud exoselves
Without a doubt, the telepathic noosphere will alter
the human condition in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. The Noosphere will
be an extension of our minds. And as David Chalmers and Andy Clark have noted,
we should still regard external mental processes as being genuine even though
they’re technically happening outside our skulls. Consequently, as Sandberg
told me, our devices and “cloud exoselves” will truly be extensions of our
minds.
“Potentially very enhancing extensions,” he says, “although
unlikely to have much volition of their own.”
Sandberg argues that we shouldn’t want our exoselves
to be too independent, since they’re likely to make mistakes in our name. “We
will always want to have veto power, a bit like how the conscious level of our
minds has veto on motor actions being planned,” he says.
Veto power over our cloud exoselves? The future will
be a very strange place, indeed.
Top image: agsandrew/Shutterstock, Nicolesis lab.
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