IEEE Future Directions
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In this second round of posts on Transhumanism, stimulated both by reading the Frost&Sullivan report on Transhumanism and by the preparation of the second White Paper on Symbiotic Autonomous Systems I have addressed the possibilities of increasing human thought capabilities. Clearly I expressed very personal opinions on the feasibility of the various approaches and on their evolution in time and I should say that within the team working on the White Paper there are different opinions, mine being probably one of the most conservative one.
We will be discussing this at the coming workshop on October 30th in San Diego in conjunction with TTM 2018 where there will be another opportunity of debating the various technological, societal and ethical aspects. Hope you can make both events, looks like there will be plenty to discuss as well as contributing in setting the agenda for the coming years in this area.
My basic reservation on the possibility of significantly improve our brain thinking capabilities rests on the complexity of the brain. Tweaking with part of it is not likely to produce the desired results since all the brain is involved in thinking, and in the variety of aspects involved in thinking, like perception, feeling, memory…
Of course, never say never. It might well be that the increasing knowledge we are gaining from studying the brain and the ever more sophisticated technology becoming available to interact with the brain will first lead to fix brain problems (Alzheimer, Parkinson, depression, attention deficit disorders,…) and eventually to increase its thinking capabilities. I don’t see the latter happening in the short term (20 years).
However, as Frost & Sullivant point out in their report, such possibility, if it will come to pass, will bring significant risks in the societal and ethical context that need to be considered.
As shown in the F&S slide, there are several aspects needing consideration:
- Control
The interaction with the brain, as seen, may take place in a variety of ways using technology in part available today and evolving, plus technology that will be invented tomorrow. In all cases there is the potential risk of hacking. It would be naive to assume that brain interfaces will not be subject to attack. They already are! Think about advertisement. Isn’t a form of hacking into our brain to steer our decision (as well as feeling and desire) in a specific direction? - Influence
This seems to relate to the previous one but it is not about hacking the interface, it is about the kind of stimuli, answers, information, we get as result of a symbiosis of our brain with an external co-processor, intelligence. To what extent such external co-pocessor will influence our understanding and decisions? There are so many ways this can happen and providing wrong information is probably the least of concern. What about providing a limited set of information that as a matter of fact skew our understanding and decision in a very specific way? This is equivalent to provide a deluge of information! I often observe that Google search is the most effective way to “hide” information by providing you sufficiently good information that will stop your quest. How many time did you go to the 10th page of Google results? Very, very few I bet. And there are probably some other thousands pages of answers reported. What about creating a sense of trust on your co-processor (today we can call it the “internet”) that you lose the need to perform a critical analyses of what is going on? Notice how this is already happening to pilots that have to trust the ILS as they land in the fog with zero visibility. Once in a while the system fails and the pilots are usually unable to detect that it is non longer to be trusted.
More on next post.
