The “Mind-Blowing Benefits of Merging Human Brains and Computers”
Mass Media Promoting Transhumanism: the “Mind-Blowing Benefits of Merging Human Brains and Computers”
Ray
Kurzweil in Time Magazine
We’ve
seen in previous articles (notably in The
Transhumanist and Police State Agenda in Pop Music) that the concept
of transhumanism, which can be defined as the merging of humans and robots, is
being abundantly promoted in music videos, movies and video games. On top of
this “indirect” kind of promotion, transhumanism is being sold through more
direct channels such as documentaries, television features and news reports.
The main face of the movement is the American inventor Ray Kurzweil who has
recently been on a massive PR campaign to promote what he calls “Singularity”
(a term that is probably less threatening than “transhumanism”).
Kurzweil
is however not a lone nut with a crazy futuristic dream. He works in
collaboration with the world’s most powerful people in business and politics.
For example, in February 2009, Kurzweil collaborated with Google and the NASA
Ames Research Center, to create the Singularity
University training center for corporate executives and government officials. The
University’s self-described mission is to “assemble, educate and inspire a
cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of
exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to
address humanity’s grand challenges”. It is safe to say that transhumanism is
not only the goal of one man but of the entire global elite. For this reason,
the merging of humans and robots is not only promoted as something “cool” and
positive in mass media, it is announced, despite its potential pitfalls, as an
inevitability.
Here’s an article from the Daily Mail about Singularity. It
bares the typical “overwhelmingly-positive-but-with-a-hint-of-obligatory-criticism-to-appear-objective”
tone most mainstream news sources use when covering the issue.
Hitler would have loved The Singularity: Mind-blowing benefits
of merging human brains and computers
Of all the tall tales in the science-fiction TV series Star
Trek, what impressed me most when I was a little boy was the Vulcan mind
meld.
Laying his hands on the head of a human (or, in one of the
films, a humpback whale), Mr Spock could, for a moment, dissolve the distance
between two living things.
Each experienced everything the other felt, thought, knew and
saw.
Now it seems scientists are about to make the Vulcan mind meld a
reality – and go far beyond it.
Ten years ago, the US National Science Foundation predicted
‘network-enhanced telepathy’ – sending thoughts over the internet – would be
practical by the 2020s.
Man and
machine: Computers could soon be hardwired into the human brain and unlock
amazing powers
And thanks to neuroscientists at the University of California,
we seem to be on schedule.
Last September, they asked volunteers to watch Hollywood film
trailers and then reconstructed the clips by scanning their subjects’ brain
activity.
‘We’re opening a window into the movies in our minds,’ Professor
Jack Gallant announced.
Last week, the scientists boldly went further still. They
charted the electrical activity in the brains of volunteers who were listening
to human speech and then they fed the results into computers which translated
the signals back into language.
The technique remains crude, and has so far made out only five
distinct words, but humanity has crossed a threshold.
We can now read people’s minds. On Star Trek, the Vulcan mind
meld had medical benefits, curing a nasty imaginary infection called Pa’nar
syndrome.
Science
fact?: Harnessing the power of the mind was a favourite of science fiction,
including Star Trek's Vulcan mind meld
But the new breakthroughs promise to deliver much greater – and
real – benefits.
No longer need strokes and neurodegenerative diseases rob people
of speech because we can turn their brainwaves directly into words.
But this is only the beginning. Neuroscientists are going to
make the mind meld look like child’s play. Mankind is merging with its
machines.
The process began centuries ago with simple devices such as
eyeglasses and ear trumpets that could dramatically improve human lives.
Then came better machines, such as hearing aids; and then
machines that could save lives, including pacemakers and dialysis machines.
By the second decade of the 21st Century, we have become used to
organs grown in laboratories, genetic surgery and designer babies.
In 2002, medical researchers used enzymes and DNA to build the
first molecular computers, and in 2004 improved versions were being injected
into people’s veins to fight cancer.
By 2020 we may be able to put even cleverer nanocomputers into
our brains to speed up synaptic links, give ourselves perfect memory and
perhaps cure dementia.
But inserting technology into human brains is not the only thing
going on. Some scientists also want to insert human brains into technology.
Since the Sixties, computer chips have been doubling their speed
and halving their cost every 18 months or so.
If the trend continues, the inventor and predictor Ray Kurzweil
has pointed out that by 2029 we will have computers powerful enough to run
programs reproducing the 10,000 trillion electrical signals that flash around your skull every
second.
They will also have enough memory to store the ten trillion
recollections that make you who you are.
Dangerous
technology: The huge potential unlocked by the technology raises frightening
prospects if it were to be used by evil dictators like Adolf Hitler
And they will also be powerful enough to scan, neuron by neuron,
every contour and wrinkle of your brain.
What this means is that if the trends of the past 50 years
continue, in 17 years’ time we will be able to upload an electronic replica of
your mind on to a machine.
There will be two of you – one a flesh-and-blood animal,
the other inside a computer’s circuits.
And if the trends hold fast beyond that, Kurzweil adds, by 2045
we will have a computer that is powerful enough to host every one of the eight
billion minds on Earth.
Carbon and silicon-based intelligence will merge to form a
single global consciousness.
Kurzweil calls this ‘The Singularity’, a moment when ‘the pace
of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep . . . that technology
appears to be expanding at infinite speed’.
At that point, we will have left the Vulcan mind meld far
behind. But even this may not be the end of the story.
Much of the research behind last week’s breakthrough in brain
science was funded not by universities but by DARPA, the US Defence Advanced
Research Projects Agency.
It was DARPA that brought us the internet (then called the
Arpanet) in the Seventies, and DARPA’s Brain Interface Project was a pioneer in
molecular computing.
More recently, DARPA’s Silent Talk programme has been exploring
mind-reading technology with devices that can pick up the electrical signals
inside soldiers’ brains and send them over the internet.
With these implants, entire armies will be able to talk without
radios. Orders will leap instantly into soldiers’ heads and commanders’ wishes
will become the wishes of their men. Hitler would have loved it.
Thing
of the past: Advances in technology could revolutionise the way armies
communicate
Cyborg-soldier:
The defence industry could soon try implanting computer technology into the
brain of soldiers
Some of the clearest thinking about the new technologies has
been done in the world’s departments of defence, and the conclusions the
soldiers draw are alarming.
For example, US Army Colonel Thomas Adams thinks that military
technology is already moving beyond what he calls ‘human space’, as robotic
weapons become ‘too fast, too small, too numerous, and . . . create an environment too complex
for humans to direct’.
Technology, Col Adams suspects, is ‘rapidly taking us to a place
where we may not want to go, but probably are unable to avoid’.
As goes war, so, perhaps, goes everything else. The
merging of mankind and its machines that Kurzweil predicts for the mid-21st
Century may, in fact, turn out just to be a lay-by on the way to a very
different destination.
Later in the century, what we condescendingly call ‘artificial’
intelligence might replace us humans just as thoroughly as we humans once replaced
all our evolutionary ancestors.
All this will come to pass . . . unless, of course, it doesn’t. Maybe the trends Kurzweil and
Col Adams identify will slow down, or even stall altogether.
And maybe the critics who mockingly call the Singularity ‘the Rapture
for Nerds’ will be proved right.
But on the other hand, maybe the Nobel Prize-winning chemist
Richard Smalley is closer to the truth when he points out: ‘When a scientist
says something is possible, they’re probably underestimating how long it will take.
But if they say it’s impossible, they’re probably wrong.’
The University of California’s neuroscientists have taken us one
more step towards a final frontier far beyond anything dreamed of in Star Trek.
No comments