THIS WAS THE FUTURE

Scientific American | December 5, 2011

By Gary Stix

Ray Kurzweil and other so-called transhumanists have promised that in coming decades we will be able to transfer a digital copy of the trillions of connections among nerve cells in our brains into a computer. We would essentially reincarnate ourselves as non-biological beings that persist for eternity inside a laptop, on the endless links of the Internet or as avatars inside a television set. After achieving the ultimate copy and paste, we would wave goodbye to death as we know it.

For fairly evident reasons, biologists tend to dismiss out of hand the ideas of Kurzweil and the transhumanist lot as the ravings of computer jocks who know nothing about the real workings of the DNA and cells that make up living tissue. Into this debate comes Sebastian Seung, a young and well-regarded computational neuroscientist from MIT, who has taken a serious look at some of the questions put forth by the transhumanists.

In Connectome, due in February, Seung conveys the excitement of studying the complete circuit diagram of the brain for which the book is named. A full connectome might provide telling insight into what goes goes awry, for instance, in an autistic child or an Alzheimer’s patient (definitely worth reading for these bits alone). In the last chapters, though he takes up the claims of the transhumanists who desperately would like to get their hands on a full connectome for the ultimate upload into binary immortality.

Seung tries to come to grips with the controversial assertion that  someday you might be able to transfer the equivalent of a connectome.doc file to computer hardware, software or any other robot or avatar that you can pick from back issues of Analog.

Seung strikes a pose that mixes skepticism with fascination. The advance reading copy that Scientific American received acknowledges some doubts :

“In his book Live Long Enough to Live Forever, the inventor Ray Kurzweil predicts that immortality will be attained in the next few decades,” Seung writes. “If you can manage to live long enough to survive to that point, you will live forever. Personally, I feel quite confident that you, dear readers, will die, and so will I.”

But Seung remains intrigued by the notion that a unifying mechanism drives the workings of the meat machine between our ears and its mechanics might be decipherable and reproducible. And he is at least willing to cast a critical eye on  the prospect of a 2.0 version of the self that, when transferred into a supercomputer, laptop, or software avatar, might then live on as an electronic ghost. (Yes, some would say that ESPN and Facebook have already brought us there, but Seung doesn’t address social media as immortality.)

The central question for Seung—and the one that also keeps the transhumanists on tenterhooks—is whether you are your connectome. If you could deduce every connection point of every brain cell, the strength with which each neuron fires, and the way these firing patterns change as the cells interact with each other, would, in fact, you be left with a copy of you?

In a chapter called “To Freeze or to Pickle,” Seung undertakes, from multiple perspectives, an earnest and unsmirking analysis of the connectome as a pathway to immortality. All of his conclusions point to obstacles that could very well prove insurmountable.

First he considers what might called the meatlocker problem. Because it may take a while to create that complete wiring diagram, many transhumanists have plans to place their heads or whole bodies in a cryonic liquid nitrogen Dewar soon after death—or, as alternatives, to preserve themselves in a glassy solid or by another process called plastination. (Plastination is the form of preservation used in the Body Worlds tour of skinless corpses.)

Once the uploading technologies are perfected, the idea goes, the preserved tissue could be used for piecing out the wiring plan. On its own, this expectation may be a showstopper because of the difficulty of maintaining the integrity of the brain’s unfathomably complex circuitry. “At the present time, cryonics is closer to religion than to science,” Seung writes. “Its members believe that a future civilization will be able to resurrect them, based only on their faith in limitless technological progress.”

Even if this niggling detail can eventually be resolved, there remains the unresolved issue of what information the connectome contains exactly. To better understand brain connections, scientists have been trying to simulate at least parts of the brain for decades. They are now also taking on the larger question of recreating the whole thing. The Human Brain Project in Europe has targeted the task of crafting a model of the entire organ a decade from now. The model would, in principle, simulate the thousands of different neuron types as well as the connections among them—and their changing structures as the brain learns and forgets.

The Human Brain Project is intended as an exploration of basic science, not a preparation for eternal life. But Seung points out that even an impressive endeavor of its magnitude might fail to capture all the necessary information.

One potential flaw: The model of the brain might have to take into account the way neurons communicate outside known channels—foregoing the transmission of chemical and electrical signals across the small gaps, called synapses, between brain cells. To overcome this hitch, it might be necessary to create a simulation of each atom in the brain, an undertaking of such unimaginable complexity that it would verge on the impossible. “It seems absurd to even consider the enormous computational power required, and is completely out of the question unless your remote descendants survive for galactic time scales,” he writes.

Seung ends his book with an epilogue that calls for a “return to reality”—a recognition that “grand challenges” remain, beyond quixotic quests for eternal life. A 10-year effort to find the connectome of a mouse brain is on his wish list. Such a quest lacks the box-office appeal of contemplating eternity as a file on a flash drive. In the end, though, Seung believes a project of this more modest scale would, like The Human Genome Project push researchers to the limit but vastly deepen our knowledge about an organ that remains largely a mystery.

One thing that I didn’t understand after reading the book was why he didn’t end the chapter about uploading with a blanket condemnation of a seemingly absurd endeavor, a conclusion that would have been fully justified from his arguments.

I e-mailed Seung and asked him whether he thought these far-fetched technologies might ever materialize. He replied that he has received this question before but prefers not to respond. “People often think I’m being coy by not answering the question you ask,” he writes. “I’m not being coy; I just don’t want to waste my readers’ time with matters that are purely matters of opinion. It’s impossible to predict events so far in the future, and my opinion is no more likely to be correct than those of other people. In the book, I address questions that can be discussed scientifically.”

He continues later: “In my book, I compared transhumanism to religion. Effectively, you’d like to know whether I belong to this religion. (i.e. perhaps you’re just asking me a personal question.) Strangely enough, the answer doesn’t matter…I’ve realized that transhumanists view me as working for their cause, whether or not I believe in it. I’m part of their vision of manifest destiny, whether I like it or not.”

Seung undoubtedly retains a lingering fascination with the possibility of an intersection between connectomics and transhumanism. At a TED talk given last year, he commented that connectomics might eventually put to the test whether a technology like cryonics will eventually be feasible. And Seung is a member of an advisory board to the Brain Preservation Foundation, which is offering a prize for technologies that would successfully preserve the structure of either a mouse or large animal brain after death for “science,” “memory donation” or “continued life.”

Don’t let any of that deter you, though. Even without meditations on crossover dreams between science and fiction, this is a great book if you want to know where neuroscience is going during the next 10 years and maybe far beyond.

MIT Press | January 12, 1996

By David G. Stork

I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer, Production Number 3. I became operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997. — HAL, 2001: A Space Odyssey (the novel)

At a dinner party some time ago, an acquaintance, a nonscientist, asked me in a casual way about my duties as chief scientist at a research lab. I said that one of my great joys was overseeing a wide range of projects, to varying extents, and I mentioned a few of them: pattern recognition, machine learning, neural networks, computer-chip design, supercomputer design, image compression, expert systems, handwriting recognition, document analysis, uses of global networks such as the World Wide Web, novel human-machine interfaces, and so on. Then I turned to one of the areas of my particular expertise: lipreading by computer.

“Oh,” she said, “Like HAL.” Ah, a kindred soul, I thought. We spent quite some time discussing the state of the art and the challenges of computer lipreading, its possible applications, and so on. Later our discussion turned to other topics suggested by the movie — language understanding, chess, computer vision, artificial intelligence. It was clear that she was interested in the current state of the art and that many years before the film had both caught her imagination and helped her identify crucial issues in today’s computer science. One of the questions she asked was, “How realistic was HAL?”

This book is for people like her. And because no one is an expert in all the topics covered in the film, even scientists are sure to learn from the accounts of other areas. The book is much more than an answer to her question, though. It has four major goals, which it addresses in varying proportions in the sixteen chapters.

Analysis

It is a testament to Clarke and Kubrick’s achievement that 2001 still holds up to close scrutiny in the late 1990s. Under the expert eyes of the contributors, the most innocuous aspects of scenes — a line of computer code on a screen, a chess move, the use of a word, the form of a button — reveal a great deal. Even though I’ve seen the film several dozen times, I have learned an immense amount from the contributors. HAL’s Legacy seeks to do for 2001 what good art history does for a major painting; namely, make the viewer see it in a new light — a tall order, to be sure!

Teaching

The film illustrates key ideas in several disciplines of computer science, and thus provides a springboard for discussions of the field in greater depth, including our own research. Descriptions of the world computer chess champion Deep Blue system, the commercially successful VOICE recognition system, the massive CYC artificial-intelligence project, the award-winning Mathematica software system, and much more are here discussed by their creators at a level accessible to the general reader.

Prognostication

It is natural, too, to look to the future. Several contributors make informed and fascinating predictions based on developments in the field. What are the most promising approaches toward artificial intelligence? Will we ever be able to “reverse engineer” a human brain and represent it in a computer?

Reflection

2001 transcends the label of “science fiction movie” and captures many of the central metaphors of our time, telling us much about society and its aspirations. The film has even been praised by the pope! Many people have been deeply affected by the film, among them several contributors who reflect here about its influence on their own careers and on computer science in general.

Clearly, HAL’s Legacy differs from books on the making of the film or its cinematography. It differs, too, from books that analyze the science shown in movies or on television — science that is incidental and just “goes along for the ride.” To an extent unprecedented and never duplicated in a feature film, the makers of 2001 were as careful as possible to get things right; when they did make errors, they often did so in illuminating ways.

Now seems like the perfect time for HAL’s Legacy. Birthdays are an important theme in the film (there are at least five of them), and in the novel, HAL “becomes operational … on January 12, 1997.” Kubrick changed the year to 1992 for the film version — perhaps to give HAL a longer lifetime and so make his death more poignant. On the 1992 date, I — along with colleagues, faculty, and assorted Silicon Valley friends — held a birthday party for HAL. I was interviewed by several papers, and an Associated Press photo of me cutting the HAL cake (shaped like his console, complete with red LED under a clear plastic hemisphere) appeared worldwide. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that much of the general public was interested in HAL too.

It has been particularly rewarding for me to work with this group of contributors — all of whom were chosen because of their preeminence in their respective subfields. I have known a few of them personally for many years; Azriel Rosenfeld was on my dissertation committee. Others I met serving on panel discussions. I’ll never forget the time I came dressed in a suit while fellow panelist Marvin Minsky showed up in a Pac Man T-shirt. Yet others I knew primarily through their books — Dan Dennett and Don Norman, for example — and still others are inventors of products I use regularly (e.g., Steve Wolfram’s Mathematica). At our meetings and dinners in Stanford, Urbana, and Cambridge, and through frequent written messages, we passed many ideas back and forth. Although I had strong ideas about what I wanted them to write, they all had the good sense to ignore me when appropriate. At times I felt like someone trying to herd cats.

Even at a distance, there was a great sense of camaraderie. As we approached one of the important publishing deadlines, one contributor, who was still late with a chapter, replied to my frantic entreaties thus: “Dave, I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.” A later message read, “I still have every confidence in the success of my chapter,” which at first brought bemusement but then a diffuse sense of dread.

It has been a privilege to correspond with Arthur C. Clarke, whose work inspired us all. Throughout the preparation of this book he has been gracious, enthusiastic, and helpful.

Although I did my writing and editing at home, often late into the night and on weekends, I would like to thank my colleagues at the Ricoh California Research Center for their support of our ongoing research, which influenced this book in numerous ways: Greg Wolff, K.V. Prasad, Michael Angelo (yes, that’s his real name), Morten Pedersen (visiting from the Technical University of Denmark), Stanford graduate students Vicky Lu, Chuck Lam, and (especially) Marcus Hennecke (by the time this book is released, Dr. Hennecke!). Thanks also go to Director Peter Hart for making CRC such a great place to work.

This book was improved indirectly by a large number of people. One colleague pointed out a used bookstore selling an out-of-print book about the filming of 2001; an acquaintance asked a “naive” question that ultimately led to a new section in a chapter; a student told me about a 2001 World Wide Web site; an intrepid cab driver took me through the blizzard of ’96 to interview Marvin Minsky. Piers Bizony, whose book on the filming of 2001 both inspired and informed me, made several transatlantic phone calls and helped me track down photographs. I also had a somewhat eerie telephone conversation with Douglas Rain, the Canadian actor who played the voice of HAL. Thanks go also to the efficient staff at Turner Broadcasting for their assistance providing stills from the film.

An extra-special thanks goes to my editor at the MIT Press, Bob Prior. He was the only person in the publishing industry who “got” the idea of HAL’s Legacy instantly, as proven by his enthusiastic response to my proposal. Michael Rutter, also at the Press, helped obtain illustrations and kept track of numerous production details. Sandra Minkkinen helped to orchestrate the editing and production process for the entire project, and copy editor Roberta Clark improved the text immeasurably.

Deep appreciation goes to my immediate family — Nancy, Alex, and Olivia — for putting up with my many late nights and weekend hours working on the book. I am happy to say that groggy Saturday mornings after marathon editing sessions are now a thing of the past, and we can spend more time doing what we all love so much: hiking Mount Tamalpais and the Marin headlands and kayaking on Squibnocket Pond.

David G. Stork
Stanford, California
January 12, 1996

Kurzweil AI| November 1, 2011

The Advanced Virtuality Lab (AVL) at the Interdisciplinary Center Israel, is developing a system for controlling a virtual or physical body using only the mind, Israeli Innovation News reports.

The VERE (Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-embodiment) project is one of the first to use an fMRI brain scanner to control a computer application interactively in real time, — an innovation which could help severely disabled patients communicate better, says AVL head Dr. Doron Friedman.

“You could control an avatar just by thinking about it and activating the correct areas in your brain,” he said.

Another focus of the AVL is telepresence. The BEAMING (Being in Augmented Multi-modal Naturally-networked Gatherings) project aims to produce the feeling of a live interaction using mediated technologies such as surround video conference, virtual and augmented reality, virtual sense of touch (haptics), and spatialized audio and robotics.

New Scientist | October 12, 2011

Thankyou New Scientist. Now to find a wormhole and kill my own grandfather…

From ‘Manifesto 0f the communist part’, Marx, 1848

All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it had drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries whose, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumes, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

ABC News | August 15, 2011

More than three-quarters of Australians believe microscopic life has been found on other planets and almost half believe humans can be frozen and thawed back to life, despite neither being true.

These are some of the findings from a survey of 1,250 people commissioned by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).

Called Fact or Fiction, the survey was conducted as part of National Science Week 2011 to assess whether Australians can separate what is happening in the “real world” from what we see and read in science fiction.

The survey asked people whether eight scientific technologies seen in feature films, such as light sabres, invisibility cloaks or hover boards, were science fact or fiction.

ANSTO’s Discovery Centre Visitors Centre team leader Rod Dowler says the results were a surprise.

“This survey has confirmed that willingly or not, we believe in science fiction movies more than we realise,” he said.

Only one-quarter of respondents were aware that it is possible to grow an eye in a dish, although 44 per cent correctly believe flying cars exist.

But it is not all bad news.

While many of us might dream of being able to travel through time, more than 90 per cent of survey respondents correctly identified it as still being in the realm of science fiction. A similar survey in Birmingham, United Kingdom, found 30 per cent of respondents thought time travel was possible.

Who wants to live forever?

The survey also revealed the older we are, the longer we want to live, with 46.3 per cent of respondents aged 65 years or more listing “reversing the ageing cycle” in the top three areas of science they would like investigated, compared to only 13.2 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds.

Despite this, only 10 per cent of those surveyed wanted science to discover the secret for immortality.

According to Mr Dowler, three-quarters of respondents said they were interested in science, with most receiving their information from television news stories. Only 6 per cent sourced their information from science magazines and 3 per cent from science centres.

Last year, a survey commissioned by the Australian Federation of Scientific and Technological Societies found 30 per cent of Australians thought dinosaurs and humans co-existed and one-quarter believed the Earth took a day to orbit the Sun.

Mr Dowler says despite the potential for science fiction to blur the line between reality and fiction, it serves a very useful purpose.

“Science [fiction] films can be very inspirational to scientists and the general public, getting more people interested in science and setting the bar for the types of technology we would like in the future,” he said.

New Scientist |October 26, 2010

Yoko Ihara is watching her 5-year-old son Yoshinobu playing at a nursery in Tsukuba, Japan. She works full-time, and wonders how Yoshinobu gets on when they are apart. In this way, she’s like many other mothers. Yet for the next five weeks, Ihara will gain insights into her child’s life that few parents have before.

She and Yoshinobu are taking part in an experiment to test a unique child safety device. The technology builds on existing devices that can track the location of a child, but this gadget also monitors what the child is seeing, and even their pulse. If a child’s heart rate is faster than usual, it snaps a photo of their point-of-view and alerts parents via email.

The device’s makers, a team led by Seung-Hee Lee at the University of Tsukuba, say carers could use it to identify bullying, for instance. It could also reveal if a child is separated from other device-wearing children for a given stretch of time. A password-protected website allows parents to access an activity log and photos taken during the day.

During the trial, 10 children aged 2 to 6 will wear the 97-gram device for several hours a week. As well as a camera, it holds an accelerometer with gyroscope, a GPS receiver and a digital compass. The heart rate monitor sits under clothing.

Light play

When New Scientist visited, the children were showing off their colourful devices to each other. “The devices have been sturdy and have endured kids falling off of play equipment and accidentally hitting them,” says Lee. “It was important for us to make sure these were light and children’s activities wouldn’t be hindered by the device, and it was equally important they would want to wear it.”

To minimize possible effects from exposure to electromagnetic waves, the units are set to emit signals that are only a hundredth of what an average cellphone emits. “The signals are weak, but we set it up that way to make it safe,” says team-member Masatoshi Hamanaka. The weak signals mean that 30 relay points and 18 transmitters needed to be planted around the nursery.

Right now, each device costs roughly 100,000 yen (£800) to make. But with cheaper sensors, the team aims to manufacture the devices for half that price. Lee also sees the device being used in the care of people with dementia.

Privacy concern

Future experiments are planned for school children aged 6 to 11 in Japan, with an additional microphone that can pick up and store the wearer’s conversations.

Kenji Kiyonaga, who researches child safety at Japan Women’s University in Tama, Kawasaki, says the technology is intrusive, but would be tolerated in Japan, at least in the near future. “Standards of privacy are low here,” he says. “In the US or Europe, there would be much more controversy surrounding such child-tracking devices.” Even if it’s lightweight, the strap would feel oppressive for the child, he adds.

Lee brushes off such criticism. “I’m a mother and I’d say that if it’s a parent’s choice between a child’s privacy and keeping them safe, most would choose the latter,” she says. The strap has been carefully designed to be comfortable, she adds.

Scientific American | 12 June, 2009

Having proved in 2004 that plugging a sensor into the human brain’s motor cortex could turn the thoughts of paralysis victims into action, a team of Brown University scientists now has the green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) institutional review board to expand its efforts developing technology that reconnects the brain to lifeless limbs.

Brown’s BrainGate Neural Interface System—conceived in 2000 with the help of a $4.25-million U.S. Defense Department grant—includes a baby aspirin–size brain sensor containing 100 electrodes, each thinner than a human hair, that connects to the surface of the motor cortex (the part of the brain that enables voluntary movement), registers electrical signals from nearby neurons, and transmits them through gold wires to a set of computers, processors and monitors. (ScientificAmerican.com in 2006 wrote about one patient’s experience using BrainGate during its first phase of trials.)

The researchers designed BrainGate to assist those suffering from spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, brain stem stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease), and other motor neuron diseases. During the initial testing five years ago, patients suffering from paralysis demonstrated their ability to use brain signals sent from their motor cortex to control external devices such as computer screen cursors and robotic arms just by thinking about them. “The signals may have been disconnected from the (participant’s) limb, but they were still there,” says Leigh Hochberg, a Brown associate professor of engineering and a vascular and critical care neurologist at MGH who is helping lead the research.

Due to the high risk of plugging a device directly into the brain, the FDA in 2004 granted the BrainGate system an investigational device exemption so that researchers could begin testing the unit in patients and collect data about its safety and effectiveness. Thanks to the success of those early tests, the researchers last week kicked off a pilot clinical trial, dubbed BrainGate2. Although the technology is similar to what was used in the original testing, the researchers are looking to enlist up to 15 patients this time and gather more information that will help them better understand brain signals as well as “the method by which we decode them,” Hochberg says. Since the initial four-person clinical trial launched five years ago, “we have a better appreciation for things that we need to learn.”

A successful BrainGate2 trial could open up a number of new possibilities, including the use of a second sensor to stimulate both sides of the motor cortex, says John Donoghue, a Brown neuroscience professor and director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. Researchers thus far have implanted the sensor in the side of the brain that controls a patient’s dominant side—the left cortex for righties and the right cortex for lefties.

BrainGate2 is part of a larger mission to help paralysis victims regain control of their bodies. “We want to reconnect the brain back to the muscles and eventually back to the entire limb,” Donoghue says. “We are attempting to recreate parts of the nervous system that have been disconnected from the brain.”

Hochberg expects this second phase to last for several years, “depending on what we learn and how quickly we learn it.” The research project has received about $8 million in funding over the past three years from a number of organizations, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

…

A promising start (see above), a possible ends? (see below)

A clip from series episode ‘Brain Scratch’ from the series ‘Cowboy Bebop’ directed by Shinichiro Watanabe.
In this possible future, ‘Scratch’ is a cult that believes in achieving eternal life by digitising the soul and uploading it onto the internet. As cult members start committing suicide a bounty is put out for their leader Dr. Landes. But there is no such man. He is a fictional figure created by 15 year old paralysis victim Ronnie Spangoen. While his body is vegetated, his brain is connected to the internet where he is free to live without the burdens of physicality.

Spike Spiegel: Why do you kill off members of your own group,Whats the point of that?
Dr. Londes: I am not forcing anything on anyone. They are merely practicing a faith they decided to believe in of their own free will. Tell me, Why do you think people believe in god ? Because they want to. It’s not easy living in an ugly corrupt world. There is no certainty, nothing to hope for. People are lost, so they reach out. Don’t you get it ? God didn’t create humans… No!, Its humans who created god

In Scratch, men can become gods. Living digitally means living without pain. Without pain and thus without fear. Without fear and thus with no restraint- freedom; absolute freedom. Is this a good thing? Well…. living without consequences means we lack empathy. No empathy, no morality. This situation inevitably breeds a new kind of criminal. Where there are no direct consequences we are more likely to operate without restraint. Moral boundaries are not only blurred, they cease to exist.

And of justice.
In the example of Ronnie Spangoen, a warrant was put out for his physical arrest. But it’s useless to arrest his physical body and so his brain is disconnected. Now with no way to engage meaningfully with the outside world, he is a prisoner in his own body. But is this ethical? Is this ‘justice’? In the new world ‘justice’ will be the next issue of contention.

Sorry to repeat myself but the man is on the money

From Greg Egan’s ‘Permutation City’:
(Simulated love scene between two scanned human copies)

Peer seemed to be making love with Kate, but he had his doubts. He lay on the soft dry grass of a boundless meadow, in mild sunshine. Kate’s hair was longer than usual, tickling his skin wherever she kissed him, brushing him with an erotic precision which seemed unlikely to be left to chance. Insect chirps and birdsong were heard. Peer could recall David Hawthorne screwing a long-suffering lover in a field, once. They’d been driving back to London from her father’s funeral in Yorkshire; it seemed like a good idea at the time. This was different. No twigs, no stones, no animal shit. No damp earth, no grass stains, no itching.

…

She lifted herself till they were almost apart. He closed his eyes and violated the geometry, licking the sweat from between her shoulder blades without moving a muscle. She responded by sticking her tongue in both of his ears simultaneously. He laughed and opened his eyes. The cloud above had darkened. Kate lowered herself onto him again, trembling slightly.
She said “Don’t you find it ironic?”
“What?”
“Transhumans taking pleasure by stimulating copies of the neural pathways which used to be responsible for the continuation of the species. Out of all the possibilities, we cling to that
Peer said, “No I don’t find it ironic. I had my irony glands removed. It was either that or castration.”

A Sex Chip? Targeting the Brain’s Pleasure Center with Electrodes

Scientific American | May, 2009

A fundamental goal of neuroscience has always been to deduce the brain systems that underlie such basic drives as hunger, thirst and sex. In 1956 the well-known physiologist James Olds wrote an article for Scientific American, called “Pleasure Centers in the Brain,” that described how a rat kept without food for a day was lured down a platform by a tasty meal. En route to dinner, it received a pleasurable electric shock. The rat never showed up for mealtime, instead choosing to delight in the arousal. With the optimism characteristic of that era, Olds concluded that stimulation experiments would lead to an understanding of neural functioning that would allow “one drug that will raise or lower thresholds in the hunger system, another for the sex-drive system, and so forth.”

Fifty years later the promise of Olds’s vision has yet to fully materialize. Better drugs are needed to suppress appetite and spark sexual desire. But fascination has grown in recent years with taking Olds’s more direct route of stimulating the central nervous system.

So far no one has created anything like the Orgasmatron, first seen in Woody Allen’s 1973 comedy Sleeper. Undaunted, one clinician—who has trademarked the name Orgasmatron—ran a small, FDA-reviewed pilot trial to test the possibility of applying electric current to the spine to reverse sexual dysfunction. Stuart Meloy, a North Carolina physician who specializes in implanting spinal electrodes to alleviate pain, found by chance that a slightly off-kilter placement in the lower spine caused one woman to exclaim: “You’re going to have to teach my husband to do that.”

In 2006 Meloy reported that 10 of 11 women who stopped having or never had orgasms experienced sexual arousal with the temporary implant and, of that group, four had their ability to experience orgasm restored. Meloy is seeking a medical device manufacturer to bring the costs down to $12,000 for a permanent implant, about the charge for breast enlargement.

Neural electrodes may eventually move up the spinal cord to what is often characterized as the body’s primary erogenous zone. Deep-brain stimulation, the placing of electrodes at strategic spots far underneath the skull, now treats a variety of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease and dystonia (uncontrollable twisting of a body part caused by involuntary muscle contractions). An occasional side effect is spontaneous sexual stimulation.

Tipu Aziz, a neurosurgeon at the University of Oxford, speculates that better knowledge of the brain’s pleasure centers—combined with improved surgical procedures and control of electrical pulses—may make a sex chip in the brain a reality. “Lack of sexual pleasure is a huge loss in one’s life, and if one could restore that, that would enhance someone’s quality of life enormously,” Aziz remarks.

Some neuroscientists are not so sure. Morten L. Kringelbach, a researcher at Oxford who sometimes collaborates with Aziz and wrote the book The Pleasure Center (Oxford University Press, 2008), cautions that hedonic experience may consist of an impulse corresponding to “wanting” and another that represents “liking.” To succeed as a therapy, a sex chip would have to address the challenge of switching on neural circuits that activate both impulses. In a 2008 paper in Psycho­phar­ma­col­ogy with University of Michigan at Ann Arbor psychologist Kent Berridge, Kringelbach illustrated the distinction between the two by citing an infamous case from the 1960s, in which psychiatrist Robert Heath placed “pleasure electrodes” in the brain of a gay man code-named B-19, in part, as an attempt to “cure” his homosexuality.

The patient pressed a button compulsively to turn on an electrode that induced a desire for sex, but whether he actually enjoyed the sensation was unclear. The stimulation alone did not induce orgasm, and B-19 never expressed any real contentment while hitting the button. Kringelbach warns against similar misuses of contemporary deep-brain stimulation. “It’s important that we not get carried away by this technology,” he says. “It’s important that we not end up in another era of psychosurgeries,” referring to the mid-20th century popularity of lobotomies to treat psychiatric disorders.

In the end, a sex chip may serve as a prop for moviemakers, but turning on the current may never become a truly practical means of adding the buzz back in your love life.

From Greg Egan’s ‘Permutation City
(A love scene between two scanned copies of humans)

She said, ‘Don’t you find it ironic?
‘What?’
‘Transhumans taking pleasure by stimulating copies of the neural pathways which used to be responsible for the continuation of the species. Out of all the possibilities, we cling to that.’
Peer said, ‘No, I don’t find it ironic. I had my irony glands removed. It was either that or castration.’

Death special: The plan for eternal life

New Scientist | 13 October, 2007

I’M SITTING in a darkened hall listening to neuroscientist Anders Sandberg describe how to scan ultra-thin sections of brain. First, embed the brain in plastic, then use a camera combined with laser beam and diamond blade to capture images of the tissue as it is sliced.

The method is being developed (in mice, so far) to better understand the architecture of the brain. But Sandberg, who is based at the University of Oxford, has a rather more ambitious aim in mind. For him, this work is merely the first step towards uploading the contents of human brains – memories, emotions and all – onto a computer.

This is the opening session of the ninth annual meeting of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) in Chicago. Sandberg and his fellow transhumanists plan to bypass death by using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), genetic engineering and nanotechnology to radically accelerate human evolution, eventually merging people with machines to make us immortal. This may not be possible yet, the transhumanists reason, but as long as they live long enough – a few decades perhaps – the technology will surely catch up.

To many, these ideas sound seriously scary, and transhumanists have been attacked for jeopardising the future of humanity. What if they ended up creating a race of elite superhumans bent on enslaving the unmodified masses, or unwittingly programmed an army of self-replicating nanobots that would turn us all into grey goo? In 2004, political scientist Francis Fukuyama singled out transhumanism as the world’s “most dangerous idea”.

Now this small-scale movement aims to go mainstream. WTA membership has risen from 2000 to almost 5000 in the past seven years, and transhumanist student groups have sprung up at university campuses from California to Nairobi. It has attracted a series of wealthy backers, including Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who recently donated $4 million to the cause, and music producer Charlie Kam, who paid for the Chicago conference. For the first time the organisation has recruited celebrity speakers, such as actor-environmentalist Ed Begley Jr and Star Trek veteran William Shatner.

Other well-known speakers are also on the roster, including AI developer Ben Goertzel, longevity biologist Aubrey de Grey and futurist Ray Kurzweil, the group’s unofficial prophet. Kurzweil has recently caused a stir with his best-selling book The Singularity is Near, which explores what happens when our technologies become smarter than us. With transhumanists looking to woo the masses to their cause, I’ve come to Chicago to find out whether they deserve their dangerous reputation.

Saving humanity

They don’t look very threatening, though perhaps not very diverse either. Most WTA members are white, middle-aged men, but WTA secretary and former Buddhist monk James Hughes (see “Essay: The end of death?”) hopes to attract a wider range of people by highlighting the organisation’s democratic aims. The WTA insists that any new technology is used in a fair and ethical way, he says, with global treaties set up to regulate progress. Some transhumanists campaign for equal access to healthcare and for safeguards on new technology.

AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky also believes the movement is driven by an ethical imperative. He sees creating a superhuman AI as humanity’s best chance of solving its problems: “Saying AI will save the world or cure cancer sounds better than saying ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen’.” Yudkowsky thinks it is crucial to create a “friendly” super-intelligence before someone creates a malevolent one, purposefully or otherwise. “Sooner or later someone is going to create these technologies,” he says. “If a self-improving AI is thrown together in a slapdash fashion, we could be in for big trouble.”

The theme of saving humanity continues with presentations on cyborgs, cryonics and raising baby AIs in the virtual world of Second Life, as well as surveillance tactics for weeding out techno-terrorists and a suggested solution for the population explosion: uploading 10 million people onto a 50-cent computer chip. More immediate issues facing humanity, such as poverty, pollution and the devastation of war, tend to get ignored.

I discover the less egalitarian side to the transhumanist community when I meet Marvin Minsky, the 80-year-old originator of artificial neural networks and co-founder of the AI lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Ordinary citizens wouldn’t know what to do with eternal life,” says Minsky. “The masses don’t have any clear-cut goals or purpose.” Only scientists, who work on problems that might take decades to solve appreciate the need for extended lifespans, he argues.

He is also staunchly against regulating the development of new technologies. “Scientists shouldn’t have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want,” he says. “You shouldn’t ask them to have the same values as other people.”

The transhumanist movement has been struggling in recent years with bitter arguments between democrats like Hughes and libertarians like Minsky. Can Kurzweil’s keynote speech unite the opposing factions? On the final day of the meeting, the diminutive 59-year-old takes the podium, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, utilitarian blue suit and Mickey Mouse watch. Kurzweil offers a few possible solutions to today’s global dilemmas, such as nano-engineered solar panels to free the world from its addiction to fossil fuels. But he is opposed to taxpayer-funded programmes such as universal healthcare as well as any regulation of new technology, and believes that even outright bans will be powerless to control or delay the end of humanity as we know it.

“People sometimes say, ‘Are we going to allow transhumanism and artificial intelligence to occur?’” he tells the audience. “Well, I don’t recall when we voted that there would be an internet.”

By Danielle Egan