Transhumanism: Increasing Human Thought Capabilities VIII

When considering augmentation of humans thinking capabilities ethical and dark areas emerge. Slide credit: Frost & Sullivan – Transhumanism

Following on the previous post on the potential implication of increasing human thought capabilities, issues that will be examined by Derrick de Kerckhove in his keynote at the Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Workshop on October 30th in San Diego in conjunction with TTM 2018.  Make a point to be there and participate in the discussion. And, by all means, start commenting and sharing your thoughts here.

  • Identity
    We are, by far, our brain. It is through our brain that we process the world and react to it Our interaction with it and its components, including other people, depends on it. Our feelings also depend on it. In most legislations it is accepted that if the brain is “malfunctioning” the person is not held responsible for its actions. At the same time legislators usually pursue those that are inducing malfunctioning in their brain, like getting drunk or taking drugs (and of course actions carried out under the effects of mind altering substances are persecuted!).
    Hence the question of what happens when a brain is “enhanced” is well posed. Is that person the “same” person he was before the brain enhancement or should he be considered a new person? Once a circuit is implanted in a brain, becoming part of its circuitry and changing its processing, including its thoughts, can we still say that person is the same as before?
    We keep learning through our lifetime, we keep forming new memories, but at the same time old ones may fade away (and they do). It is not just about “forgetting” because we also are our memories since the processing (and so our thoughts and behaviour) is influenced by our memories (as emphasised by post traumatic syndromes where the presence of dreadful memories affect the behaviour of that person to the point that life becomes miserable). Hence, a “memory chip” that would ensure the preservation of all memories would lead to a different processing and, some may claim, to a different person. What about systems that can alter the moods and feelings (via chemical injection, electrical stimulation, …)? They may compare to some of today’s drugs, but they can be much more specific, may be without undesired side effects. Yet, would that person be the same one?
  • Balancing responsibility
    As it was considered in a previous post we may come to the point of creating a symbioses between our brain and other “thinking tools” all together working as a distributed system. These complementary thinking tools may be in the form of implanted chips, remote processing and AI somewhere in the environment that can even become plug ins depending on the need. As an example a military pilot may plug into her brain aircraft smart components that will work in symbioses with her brain during the mission, a surgeon may link into a symbioses with robots actually performing the surgery and so on! Actually, one might even envisaged, in the remote future, the symbioses among human brains, what about a classroom where the educator’s brain and the students’ brain are linked and operate in a symbiotic way?
    The question is where can responsibility for decisions be assigned. Who is accountable among the several thinking processes interacting with one another?
    How can the quality of thinking be measured and proved that it gets better (nd who decides what “better” means?) as more thinking processes are pooled together? Notice that we have similar issues in any human communities, team work and we have invented “organisations” to manage them. Can we invent some equivalent of organisations in symbiotic thinking processes?

Continue …

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.