Using Your Brain Signals

...We ought to pay attention...

...It may be that something in the physical nature of the brain will forever prevent a mind from being "uploaded" (this is the term of art among the few thinkers who consider such possibilities...

...Yet even if duplication of the mind were outlawed, it might be difficult to ban the transfer of a single mind from one natural or artificial body to another, as part of the search for immortality...

...In that event, our inattention to recent developments in brain-machine interfacing may be justified...

...A clone, after all, is not an actual duplicate of a person, merely a biological twin, who would have his or her own personality and memories...

...Only a year into the 21 st century, governments around the world, including our own, are debating the ethics of human cloning and human germline manipulation...

...In the spring of 2001, a project sponsored by the European Commission permitted an individual to do exactly that...

...The same might be said of your disembodied brain, if you were still able to sense the world and communicate through mechanical means...

...The skullcap, connected by a cable to a personal computer with specialized software, interpreted the faint electromagnetic signals in O'Philbin's brain...

...After several hours of effort spent with the Adaptive Brain Interface (ABI), the paraplegic learned to write a message with a cursor on a computer screen by thought alone...

...And if, despite the destruction of the original organic matrix itself, that flicker could be preserved in some other form, the argument against doing so would be, in effect, an argument for euthanasia...

...At least in theory, what can be read can be duplicated and stored in another medium...

...On the contrary, far more than genetic engineering, bionics might one day call into question the very nature of human identity...

...With the exception of cloning, genetic engineering is best viewed as a modification of sexual reproduction: creating new, unique organisms by adding genes to those contributed by two parents, or subtracting some of the parental genes...

...For the past 100,000 years, human physical and mental evolution has ceased, except for minor regional variations...

...That had been the fate of reports about previous breakthroughs in the new and rapidly developing field of neural interfaces—direct links between the brain and machines...

...There is no doubt, none whatsoever, that you would still be you, even if you ended at the neck, just as you would still be you even if you lost an arm or a leg...

...Hardly anyone paid attention a few years earlier when other teams of researchers trained rats and rhesus monkeys with electrodes implanted in their brains to move robot arms by means of thought...

...You can always end the process by taking off the cap...

...By the middle or the end of this century, many people may have a variety of devices in their brains, their muscles and their bloodstreams, performing functions ranging from combating Alzheimer's disease to keeping arteries open and injecting tiny doses of prescription medicine at regular intervals...

...We already know that even in its rudimentary form, neural interface technology can "read" certain brain signals...

...Technologies that have supplemented memory and enhanced intellectual ability have included pictograms, numbers, alphabets, abacuses, and slide rules...

...Before the development of sexual reproduction, all life on earth reproduced by fission...

...The organisms that reproduce by the old method of fission remain simple and primitive, like amoebas and bacteria...

...The reproduction of people—or rather, of a single person—by fission might replace sexual reproduction...

...But in their basic physical and mental attributes, people are likely to be the same as they are today— and were 20,000 years ago...

...But what if it became possible to upload a single human mind, duplicate it, and then download copies into new human or robot bodies—a dozen, a hundred, a thousand...

...What if that could only be done by transferring a person's self—the unique pattern of memories and habits and abilities—from one receptacle to another...

...Suppose that it were to become possible—perhaps in a century, perhaps at the turn of the next millennium—to upload a human mind, either into another human body or into an artificial body capable of perception and motion...

...They tend to be slightly altered Xerox copies of their remote originals, a billion or two years ago...

...To be sure, there will be people with implants in their bodies (in this sense, heart patients with pacemakers are already cyborgs...

...The point of bionic technology will be to enhance individual powers, not to destroy individuality...

...The collective mind, another cliché of science fiction, is likely to remain in the realm of fantasy...

...And even if they are, they might remain confined to marginal uses—say, making life easier for paraplegics...

...But the mind or self is a series of electrochemical patterns in a computer made out of meat, and what exists on an organic computer might be recreated in other kinds of devices...

...If ever there were a slippery slope, this is one...

...The bionic approach has the added advantage of being controllable...

...Instead, accounts of experiments like the one involving O'Philbin are not only brief and relatively rare, but most often they conclude with the anticlimactic prediction that neural prosthetics might help paralyzed people lead better lives...

...Sexual reproduction, by scrambling the possible combinations of genes, creates far more diversity for natural selection to work upon...

...To use a contemporary comparison, hearing aids today are small and unobtrusive, compared with the metal ear trumpet that Beethoven lugged around...

...The emergence of bionics, though, may make much of the present speculation about redesigning the human race irrelevant in a few years...

...The implications for reproduction of successful uploading would also be far more profound than those of genetic engineering...

...Bionic enhancement of the mind, in other words, is not about to turn people into subordinate units of a Group Mind, just as the bionic enhancement of the body will not take the form of metallic arms and legs connected by plastic tubes to mutilated flesh...

...At some point, the bodiless head—another science fiction cliché—will become a possibility...

...Something wonderful and amazing and a little frightening, with no precedent in history, is occurring at this very moment...

...Consider the two methods of augmenting intelligence, bionics and genetic engineering...

...The story was carried by a few wire services and quickly forgotten...

...It would also be more sensible to use bionics rather than genetics to enhance physical powers...

...The evolution of sex therefore resulted, in a comparatively brief period of geological time (a few hundred million years of the earth's four billion year history), in the explosive radiation of complex life forms...

...The Hippocratic Oath requires doctors to try to extend life...

...Unlike the camera and the motion picture, devices like the Adaptive Brain Interface that permitted Cathal O'Philbin to write "Arsenal Football Club" by guiding a cursor with his mind may prove to be nothing more than specialized tools with limited and inconsequential uses, rather than omens of an unimaginably alien future...

...The moral dilemmas involved in destroying fertilized eggs used in stem-cell research are minor by comparison with the questions raised by the possibility of a migratory mind...

...To say that bionics will not turn people into monsters, however, is not to say it won't transform existence...

...The place of alterations in the body and brain has been taken by the development of an increasingly sophisticated kit of tools—beginning with flints and mammoth-ivory needles and extending to today's pacemakers, neural implants and mind-reading skullcaps...

...Indeed bionic technology that magnifies conventional human abilities represents less of a break with tradition than genetic engineering that would alter the traits of human beings...

...But we can be confident that most, if not all, of the devices will be invisible or hardly visible, and as technology improves these implants may be made of organic substances rather than the shiny metal and plastic beloved by Hollywood special effects artists...

...The bionic method of increasing mental power— say, putting on a cap that permits you to download a computer archive directly into your neocortex—is surely much more efficient than the time-consuming and uncertain process of trying to create a child with the mind of Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton...

...The bionicallyaugmented people of the future might or might not strike us as demigods, but they certainly would not be zombies...

...The ethical questions related to human cloning are trivial compared with those raised by human uploading...

...Researchers attached a plastic cap to the head of Cathal O'Philbin, a severely disabled London resident suffering from spinal muscular atrophy, a degenerative disease that has robbed him of the use of his arms and legs...

...They might never be developed at all...

...His first three words were "Arsenal Football Club...

...Now that several patients at different research facilities are using brain signals to type words on screens, you might expect the world to take notice...

...Nevertheless, the fact remains that rats and monkeys are manipulating robot arms with their thoughts, while a growing number of people are learning to type using only their brain signals—and hardly anybody has noticed...

...This may turn out to be one of the greatest understatements of all time...

...In an era of advanced bionics, visions and auditory hallucinations may replace old-fashioned forms of communication such as reading and telephony, and individuals may commonly operate machinery at a distance by thought alone— as rats, monkeys and paraplegic patients are already able to do...

...The upload, by contrast, would really be another version of you...

...While genetically engineered human beings might be conceived in vitro, at least in the foreseeable future their gestation period would be the same as that of ordinary babies and they would be raised like normal children...

...That stereotypical character of science fiction, the "cyborg" (cybernetic organism), halfhuman and half-machine, is unlikely to appear, at least in the grotesque forms familiar from movies and television...

...A person who accesses a computer data bank directly, via a neural link, is likely to retain his or her distinctiveness no less than somebody who uses a branch library...

...Even before the Internet stock bubble burst, it was clear that the Web was an innovation of the second order, more like the spread of telegraphy and telephony than the invention of metallurgy or the splitting of the atom...

...Those words were not splashed across front pages around the world...

...Why use genetic engineering to create an overmuscled freak when a simple, computerized exoskeleton could permit a scrawny individual to lift up a car with ease...

...The irreducible core of human personality consists of the flicker of neurons in the brain tissues...

...A device capable of implanting images directly into the optic nerve or information directly into the brain might seem magical to us, but a handheld computer would have seemed equally magical to a Cro-Magnon hunter or a Neolithic fanner...

...If the person whose mind was duplicated continued to live, there would be two versions of the same person, sharing identical memories up to the moment of duplication...

...Although neural prosthesis is in its infancy, we can safely dismiss several disturbing possibilities...

...Should technology of that sort be invented, humanity might reach a consensus in favor of banishing it—for fear of reducing the diversity of the human race, or to avert the threat that a single personality will multiply like a computer virus...

...These speculations may be premature...

...Today doctors feel obliged to amputate a limb to save a body...

...Nor are brain-machine interfaces likely to turn people into automatons controlled by a sinister supercomputer or an ambitious dictator...

...The truth is that bionics—the augmentation of the body and brain by machines —is far more revolutionary in its implications than othernew technologies...

...The almost magical bionic technologies I have discussed may not be developed for centuries or millennia...

...For the equivalent, you would have to find a 19thcentury prediction that the newly-invented camera might have some limited use as an aide-mémoire for oil painters and watercolorists, or a prophecy in the 1900s that motion pictures might have a glorious future ahead as a sideshow attraction at carnivals and boardwalks...

...The quickly advancing technology of genetic engineering, by contrast, deserves all the hype it is receiving...