Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs)
will change what it means to be human, machine or animal.
A conscious summary by The Economist (January 13th), reminds us how rapidly are brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) improving. BCIs can already process neural signals into electronic commands to control muscles, implants or robots; they can detect what words and images people have heard and seen. Information can also be encoded and used to stimulate the brain, ranging from hearing aids sending signals directly into the brain, to injecting direct instructions to perform actions via electrical pulses.
“ Facebook dreams of thought-to-text typing. Elon Musk thinks that, if humanity is to survive the advent of artificial intelligence, it needs an upgrade. Entrepreneurs envisage a world in which people can communicate telepathically, with each other and with machines, or acquire superhuman abilities, such as hearing at very high frequencies... BCIs may change the idea of what it means to be human.” (The Economist , January 13th 2018)
However, The Economist also identifies the barriers that may potentially slow down the spread of BCIs:
1. Technology: Currently many applications require implants that interact directly with neurons via wires passing through the skull – provoking harmful immune responses and limiting the available bandwidth to only a few hundred of the 85 billion neurons in the human brain.
2. Science: While some parts of the brain, such as the motor cortex, are better understood, complex functions like memory formation are still mostly terra incognita.
3. Business: It takes considerable time, money and expertise to get brain implants approved. Consumer applications will take off only if there is a strong enough demand to make this huge investment worthwhile, and it is currently unknown how big the market is for telepathy or superhuman senses.
4. Society: While many of the medical/restoration applications are unambiguous, societies and governments may take a negative stance on the augmentation of abilities for military use or commercial purposes:
“Privacy is an obvious concern: the refuge of an inner voice may disappear. Security is another: if a brain can be reached on the internet, it can also be hacked. Inequality is a third: access to superhuman cognitive abilities could be beyond all except a self-perpetuating elite. Ethics needs to answer questions of identity and agency that arise when a machine is in the neural loop.” (The Economist , January 13th 2018)
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To balance out the The Economist’s cautiously optimistic take on BCIs, Peter Watts’s story about Zephyr, the Colonel’s cat can easily provide us with an (un)healthy dose of pessimism:
“Zephyr’s willing to let the apartment feed him but he doesn’t like it much.
He refused outright at first,rendered psychotic by some cross-species dabbler who must have thought it would be enlightening or transcendent or just plain cute to “share consciousness” with a small soul weighing in at one-tenth the synapse count.
The Colonel tries to imagine what that kind of forced fusion must have been like: thrust into a maelstrom of incomprehensible thought and sensation, blinding as a naked sun; thrown back into stunned bleeding darkness once some narcissistic god got bored and cut the connection…
The Colonel indulges him, and pretends not to notice the ragged fraying of the armrest on the living room couch. He doesn’t even have the heart to get the socket removed from the patch of twisted scar tissue on Zephyr’s head. No telling what post-traumatic nightmares might be reawakened by a trip to the vet…
The Colonel hopes that whoever inflicted that torment went on to try more exotic interfaces once they got bored with mammals. A cephalopod, perhaps. By all accounts, things get a lot less cuddly when you go B2B with a Pacific octopus.”
(Peter Watts: The Colonel)
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