These Unresolved Ethical Questions Are About to Get Real

As our technologies take us from the theoretical to the practical, a number of thorny moral quandaries remain unanswered. Here are important unresolved ethical questions that are on the verge of becoming highly relevant.

Should people be allowed to clone themselves?

There’s currently a global moratorium on human cloning. But you just know that’s not going to last. Back in 2007, Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk faked a human cloning breakthrough, and it’ll only be a matter of time before some renegade scientist actually does it. This year has already seen two major advancements in this area, including the use of cloning to create embryonic stem cells and a new technique where mammalian cloning lines can be extended and reproduced indefinitely.

Many people consider the act of human cloning to be an affront to our dignity and individuality. It’s also seen by some as an incredibly selfish and egotistical act. Others worry about the potential for clones to be exploited or abused. On the flip-side of the debate, supporters say there’s no harm done so long as the rights of clones are recognized. A common argument in support is that clones are essentially delayed twins. And yet others say it’s a perfectly legitimate way to create biological offspring — that it’s a novel form of assisted human reproduction that could help same-sex or infertile couples reproduce.

Is it okay to introduce non-human DNA in our genome?

This branch of science is called transgenics— the intermingling of human and non-human genetic information. Scientists endow lab animals with bits of human DNA all the time, but the opposite most assuredly doesn’t happen. And in fact, it’s illegal virtually everywhere. Some worry about the creation of chimeras — creatures that are part-human and part-something-else. Supporters say that it could result in novel therapies. It’s possible, for example, that a non-human animal has a natural immunity to a disease. Wouldn’t we want to endow ourselves with this same immunity? More radically and speculatively, it’s also possible that more substantive animal characteristics could be introduced into humans (bird vision, dog hearing, dolphin fins, etc.). If so, what’s the harm? Would we diminish what it means to be human?

Should parents be allowed to design their babies?

Should we allow a Gattaca-like world to come into existence? Like human cloning, the idea of genetically modifying our offspring still falls within the realms of illegality and taboo. Its supporters call it human trait selection; it’s opponents derogatively refer to it as designer babies. Either way, it would allow parents to select the characteristics of their progeny, including non-medical attributes like hair and eye color, height, intelligence, greater empathy, sexual orientation, personality type, and basically any other genetically influenced trait.

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Its detractors complain that it’s simply a way for parents to control the destiny of their offspring. They also worry that an arms race could occur, where parents will feel compelled to modify their offspring as a way to keep up with the Jones's baby. Some are concerned about the potential for abuse — like parents giving their children superfluous physical characteristics (such as extreme height, or even silly things like a tail).

Supporters, on the other hand, say it’s a form of reproductive autonomy, and that well-informed and well-intentioned parents — in conjunction with the laws and their fertility doctor — are well within their rights. Others argue that human trait selection is inherently good, and that parents are simply looking to maximize their child’s potential.

What are the most important areas of scientific research?

Our civilization is currently facing a number of grave challenges — everything from superstorms through to epidemics and the rise of apocalyptic threats. So, when it comes to the funding of important scientific research, what makes the most sense?

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Image via China.org.cn.

Given the looming threat of global warming, some would say that we should we invest in climate science and various geoengineering schemes. There’s also the threat of a global pandemic, like the avian flu. Shouldn’t that be our greatest concern? Or what about the potential for powerful technologies to serve as potential game-changers — things that could actually fix our planet. It's reasonable to argue that we should invest in additive manufacturing techniques (like 3D printing), molecular nanotechnology — and even artificial intelligence. Which brings up another important area: research into mitigating existential risks.

Should people be forced to die once indefinite lifespans are achieved?

The day will eventually come when the problem that is biological aging is finally solved. Needless to say, the advent of indefinite lifespans could result in some serious negative consequences, including overpopulation, the rise of a gerontocracy, widespread boredom and restlessness, and a de-valuing of life. And in fact, in consideration of these possibilities, political scientist Francis Fukuyama — back when he was serving on George W. Bush’s bioethics council — said that governments have the right to tell their citizens that they have to die. It would be a kind of Logan’s Run world.

Such a turn of events would be highly problematic, to say the least, and a complete affront to our civil rights (i.e. the right to medical treatment, the right to life, the right to self-determination etc.). So how are we going to deal with the prospect of indefinite lifespans once they start to emerge? And what about the right to end one’s life?

Should we have guaranteed universal income?

Within a few decades, the global economy could face a collapse the likes of which we've never seen. As robots replace manual workers, and as thought workers start to get replaced by artificial intelligence, unemployment rates could reach staggering levels. The concentration of wealth could become extremely atomized. It would be a disruption similar to the one caused by the Great Depression — an economic and social catastrophe that ushered in the modern welfare state. Should this second Great Depression occur, there could be calls for a guaranteed universal income — a social policy that ensures everyone gets a steady paycheck to make sure basic needs are met. Of course, not everyone will be thrilled with this idea; a population dependant on the government — or more accurately, the forced distribution of wealth — certainly rubs conservative elements the wrong way.

Which animals have moral value?

Last year, an international group of scientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in which they proclaimed their support for the idea that many animals are conscious and aware to the degree that humans are — a list of animals that includes all mammals, birds, and even the octopus. As we’re also learning, insects also exhibit someremarkable cognitive capacities. A question is starting to emerge about the moral relevance of these animals, and whether or not we should take more care in ensuring the well-being. To what extent should we work to reduce suffering in the world?

Needless to say, not everyone is onboard with these ideas. It’s largely taken for granted, owing to our position of privilege, that we can exploit animals and use them as we see fit, whether it be for meat, our entertainment, or for medical testing purposes.

Can only humans be persons?

Further, there’s also the issue of non-human animal personhood — the notion that some animals, owing to complex cognitive and emotional attributes, deserve the same sorts of legal protections afforded to all humans. Specifically, these animals would include all great apes, cetaceans (dolphins and whales), and elephants. Looking further ahead, there’s even the potential for artificial intelligence to have not just moral value, but personhood designation itself.

Many would argue that only humans can be persons. This is the basic tenet of human exceptionalism — the idea that humans should always occupy an exalted place atop the food chain, and that there’s something inherently and intangibly special about Homo sapiens.

Should we biologically enhance non-human animals?

Somewhat related to the last point, there’s also the potential for animal uplift. Just last year, scientists demonstrated that a brain implant can improve thinking ability in primates. In short order, and as a consequence of testing human augmentation technologies on animals, we will have it within our means to significantly enhance their cognitive capacities as well. As I’ve argued in the past, we may actually be morally obligated to do this as we bring the entire biosphere into a post-biological, post-Darwinian existence. But others decry this as a form of human imperialism, and as a way to impose human characteristics on animals. Some would simply say that we shouldn’t mess with nature and that it’s none of our business to modify animals in this way.

Do people living in the present have more value than future persons?

This is a classic question that has baffled moral theorists for years, and it’s one that could soon become quite topical. If we’re to deal with climate change and prevent the exhaustion of our planet’s non-renewable resources, we may be forced to scale back our civilization to ensure ongoing sustainability. Otherwise, future generations will have to reap what we sow. The answer, some would say, is to pull back and live simpler lives. But should people living in the here-and-now have to worry and make sacrifices for people who haven’t even been born yet? But what if things are better in the future? Would it all have been worth it?

This article originally appeared at io9.

Top image via Splice

This is what it’s like to shake hands with the future

Meet Nigel Ackland, the recipient of the Bebionic 3 artificial hand — the world’s most advanced cybernetic limb. He was just one of over 30 remarkable scientists, technologists, and futurists who spoke at the recently concluded Global Future 2045 Congress held in New York.

I recently returned from GF2045 after an intense and jam-packed weekend in NYC. The congress, which was organized by the 32-year-old Russian entrepreneur and futurist Dmitry Itskov, was an extension of his 2045 Initiative — an attempt to upload a fully conscious mind to an avatar by mid-century.

To explore and promote this possibility, Itskov assembled a diverse and eclectic set of thinkers that included futurist Ray Kurzweil, biologist George Church, mind theorist Marvin Minsky (via pre-recorded video as he is currently ill), optogenetics neuroengineer Ed Boyden, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis, and many, many others.

But the big hit of the conference had to be Nigel Ackland, a 53-year-old former precious metals worker from Royston, Cambridgeshire, who lost his right hand when it became caught in an industrial blending machine at a smelting plant in 2006. The severity of his injury left him with a flared stump and difficulty finding a suitable artificial limb. Initially, the best that doctors could do for him was a replacement hook.

But in May of last year, Leeds-based prosthetics company RSLSteeper asked Ackland if he would trial its latest artificial hand — the most high-tech available in the world.

Speaking on stage for the very first time, Ackland demo’d the sleek, black device to a rapt audience. He operated the limb by sending the same brain signals he used to move his original arm. Sensors on the artificial limb can pick up these signals and trigger one of 14 pre-programmed movements, including grips, wrist movements — and even individual finger movements (like a forefinger pincer motion).

The crowd gasped when he rotated the wrist a full 360 degrees.

After his talk, and for the duration of the congress, Ackland was swarmed by attendees. At one point there was literally a line-up of people waiting to have their picture taken with him. Cyborgs, it would appear, have very quickly become our heros.

When I finally managed to meet Ackland, I asked him what he thought about all the attention.

“I absolutely love it,” he told me. “And it certainly beats the alterative — being completely ignored.”

He was referring to the previous six years — a challenging period of time before the artificial hand when very few people approached him on account of his hook. The artificial hand, it would seem, has certainly changed his fortunes.

“Having a bionic hand makes me feel like a human again,” he told me.

This article originally appeared at io9.

Are We Screwing Ourselves By Transmitting Radio Signals Into Space?

For nearly a hundred years, Earth has sent radio signals into space. If anyone nearby is listening, they probably know we’re here. In light of this, a new paper assesses the potential danger presented by such signals, concluding that the benefits outweigh the risks. But how can we really know? 

Top image: Scene from Battleship (2012), a film in which an alien civilization discovers Earth by detecting its radio emissions. 

Leaky Earth?

We’ve been shouting out into the cosmos for quite some time now. Electromagnetic waves of various intensities and frequencies have been streaming away from Earth for well over a century, the remnants of TV broadcasts, mobile phone conversations, satellite transmissions, and military, civil and astronomical radars.

We’ve even deliberately tried to get ET’s attention — a controversial practice known as METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligences). There have been many such attempts, including the 2001 Teen-Age Message to the Stars organized by the Russian cosmologist Alexander Zaitsev. His work, and those of others, have been criticized as being insanely risky given the dearth of information we have about the nature of ETIs. Two years ago, John Billingham and James Benford called for a global moratorium on METI, an initiative similar to the one David Brin and myself worked on last decade.

But now, owing to all this human activity, the Earth has a radiosphere that’s inexorably billowing outwards at the speed of light — a clear signal that’s just waiting to be picked up.

And indeed, according to the new paper’s authors, Jacob Haqq-Misra, Michael Busch, Sanjoy Som, and Seth Baum, this leakage could in fact be detected by an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) armed with the right listening equipment.

Our signals decrease in intensity as they leak out into the cosmos. But depending on the signal’s strength and frequency, these waves can propagate for cosmologically vast distances and still carry enough information to connote the presence of intelligent life.

Arecibo Observatory. Credit: H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF.

The Arecibo Planetary Radar in Puerto Rico provides a good example. As the researchers note, at a transmitting power of 0.8 MW and a frequency of 2,380 MHz, the APR’s powerful signal could be picked up by a “watcher” with a 1 km² receiving antenna at distances of up to 200,000 light years!

Credit: Haqq-Misra et al.

That's a rather extraordinary claim, so I spoke to SETI expert and scifi novelist David Brin about it — and he's not convinced detection is this easy. He tole me that, even if an ETI had a one square kilometer array, they would have to point it a at Earth for the duration of an entire year. "Because it would take that long," he told io9. "But why stare if you don't already have a reason to suspect?"

Like SETI Institute's Seth Shostak, Brin believes that Earth is not detectable beyond five light years. 

"With one exception: Narrow-focused, coherent (laser-like) planetary radars that are aimed to briefly scan the surfaces of asteroids and moons," he says, "And not to be confused with military radars that disperse."

This new paper, says Brin, is very unconvincing about detectability of leakage.

To transmit or not to transmit?

Earth's leakiness aside, we also need to know if anyone out there is even listening.

As the authors note, some SETI experts contend that, if an ETI really wanted to know that we’re here, they could locate us without having to listen for our radio waves. For example, they could figure out that life is here by analyzing the spectrum of reflected ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared sunlight from the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. Or, an ETI could learn of our technological civilization by detecting artificial nighttime lighting of large urban areas, or by detecting exaggerated amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

More conceptually, advanced civs could could pepper the galaxy with Bracewell communication probes — a point the authors fail to mention in the paper; they could already be in the neighbourhood waiting for a particular signal. 

There’s always the possibility, of course, that we’re too far away from the nearest ETI. Or that alien life is rare. Depending on how one fills in the Drake Equation, there could be anywhere from one (just us) to 100,000 — or even millions — of civs currently residing in the galaxy. But we just don’t know, so we don’t really have a good way of knowing how detectable we really are.

Furthermore, and as Brin pointed out to me, the authors failed to address the possibility of colonization. "If travel happens, then the number of sites skyrockets," he says.

Also, ETIs may be able to detect our signals, but they may not be able to make any sense of them — but this is unlikely. If an alien receives a METI signal, it would likely consist of easily decipherable mathematical concepts built upon a computational language (a la Carl Sagan’s Contact). Radio leakage, on the other hand, would be meaningless and almost completely devoid of context. But as the authors write:

Earth’s radio leakage and deliberate transmissions will likely be identifiable by ETI as a technological signature because no other examples of such signals exist in nature. The ability of ETI to decipher or interpret the content of a signal is therefore irrelevant to their ability to use it to learn that humans exist...

But assuming detection is not easy, and that there are other variables at play (like cosmologically vast distances and the potential for many short-lived civilizations), we still need to ask whether or not humanity would benefit or face terrible consequences from alien contact.

To transmit or not to transmit

And indeed, as the authors note, a standard risk assessment is in fact warranted: We should evaluate the probability of an event occurring by multiplying the magnitude of the harm from that event if it does occur.  

Sure — sounds sensible. But it’s difficult, if not impossible, to assess the magnitude of the harms that could come from ETI contact. We don’t know the nature of the interactions, nor do we know alien ethics (particularly from a super-technological machine-based civilization).

We also don’t know how we’d interact. The entire relationship could be conducted via remote messaging. But they could send us something rather nasty. At the same time, a positive, non-malicious message could really benefit us. An ETI could provide information about itself or its technologies which could advance and greatly influence the human condition.

Alien contact could also have positive and negative outcomes for many societal structures, religions, and philosophies; different human groups would be affected differently. Interstellar civilizational encounters could be similar to — if not considerably worse than — Europeans who made first contact with stone age societies.

There is another possibility — that the vast majority of our transmissions, and those of a civilization for that matter, will be detected long after we’re gone. Consequently, this is all a futile exercise. If the galaxy is littered with short-lived civilizations — a possible reconciliation of the annoying Fermi Paradox — all radio-transmitting ETIs are essentially sending “time capsule” messages or trace-signatures into space. The galaxy could be awash with echos from extinct civilizations. Determining civilizational longevity, therefore, is crucial to our assessment of the risks and benefits of transmitting into space.

Which brings up another interesting point: Maybe there’s value in transmitting a comprehensive “time-capsule” into space as a way of archiving or preserving our civilization’s vast history. If we go extinct, at least some other civilization may learn about us. Or more romantically, we’ll rest knowing that our signals are propagating through space long after we’re gone.  

So, in response to the question of whether or not we should transmit, the authors write:

[B]ecause we cannot estimate the probability or magnitude of contact with ETI, we make no attempt to calculate the term. By extension, any conclusions that depend on knowing are conditional.

Which seems like a rather wishy-washy answer. The authors conclude that “the benefits of radio communication on Earth today outweigh any benefits or harms that could arise from contact with ETI.” What they mean is that it may be more important to our security and survival if we continue to develop powerful communications technologies; it’s simply too valuable (and disruptive) to give up.

But how can they possibly know for sure!? Brin referred to it as "arm-waving mumbo jumbo" — and an "utterly tendentious and unsupported claim."

In regards to METI, the authors conclude that current efforts, which are weak and mostly symbolic, are mostly harmless:

These transmissions create benefits such as opportunities for educational public outreach and the ability to develop scientific groundwork for future METI projects. The costs associated with METI at low levels of detectability are small, so such projects create overall positive value for humanity and should continue.

But ramping up the METI project, like creating powerful beacons, could result in highly uncertain outcomes. Mercifully, the authors conclude that governments and other agencies need to get their act together and start talking about it.

“Even if we never succeed in receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization, METI may still prove a worthwhile investment as a way to increase humanity’s awareness of itself in the greater cosmos.”

Unless, of course, someone is in fact listening, and they'd like to pay us a visit...

Read the entire study at Space Policy: “The Benefits and Harms of Transmitting Into Space.”

This article originally appeared at io9.

Postscript

David Brin wrote this to me in a follow-up email:

The authors' arguments boil down to excusing METI via what is known as the "barn door argument -- the notion that Earth civilization is already drawing attention to itself (the horses are already out) so why bother restricting anyone from shouting into the cosmos (don't bother closing the barn door once the horses are gone.)  It is both specious and manipulatively hypocritical on several levels. 

1) The paper is flawed because it does not even discuss the dwell or integration time that an alien square kilometer array (SKA) must dedicate, staring solely at Earth for an extended period, in order to pick out signal from noise.  If that time is long, and most scholars think so, then no civilization will do it unless they already suspect there is something or someone here!  That is, unless they have gobs and gobs of SKAs to play with. Both of those are possible, for varied reasons.  But they aren't super-likely. 

2) It is disingenuous to imply that METI beams -- e.g. Zaitsev's from Evpatoria -- are just like the radars used by the USAF to characterize orbital debris.  I'd like to see Dr. Busch and his colleagues defend that implication.  Narrow, coherent, laser-like and powerful, beams like the ones used by Zaitsev to do his cosmic shouting are like a lighthouse next to a flashlight. 

3) The Barn Door excuse takes "disingenuous" to a level that tips over into outright sophistry and deceit.  Let us ask, if aliens already detect us, why are some fetishists so eager to blast away "yoo-hoo" shouts into space?  They aim to accomplish a major and dramatic change in the visibility of Earth civilization... they say so publicly.  Hence, the Barn Door excuse is a travesty of verbal legerdemain. 

Busch & company then dive into the worst part of the paper, a razzle-dazzle arm-waving of "risk factors" that bear no relationship to the way the science of risk analysis operates, conjuring inputs out of thin air and then declaring or "positing" that the likely good outweighs any calculation of possible bad outcomes.  This exercise was too grimly awful to even be amusing, especially since the "dissidents" in the SETI community, including John Billingham, Michael Michaud and myself, have not asked for a ban on transmissions from Earth, only widespread and eclectic collegial discussion of this issue, with inputs by experts who actually know about the many and varied risk factors involved. 

Reiterating, the thing we have asked for is a wider discussion, beyond the insular community of SETI fans and a few dozen radio astronomers, of a matter that could have great bearing on the success - and even survival - of our descendants. We seek a vast and fascinating exchange, bringing together the planet's best minds to enthrall the public with open deliberation of all factors.  Those who refuse such discussion - shrugging aside any need or moral obligation to consult the rest of us - are the ones practicing censorship.  They are the ones engaging in reckless assumptions, willing to wager our posterity on a few "posits" on the back of an envelope.

Humans With Amped Intelligence Could Be More Powerful Than AI

 
With much of our attention focused the rise of advanced artificial intelligence, few consider the potential for radically amplified human intelligence (IA). It’s an open question as to which will come first, but a technologically boosted brain could be just as powerful — and just as dangerous – as AI. 

As a species, we’ve been amplifying our brains for millennia. Or at least we’ve tried to. Looking to overcome our cognitive limitations, humans have employed everything from writing, language, and meditative techniques straight through to today’s nootropics. But none of these compare to what’s in store.

Unlike efforts to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), or even an artificial superintelligence (SAI), the human brain already presents us with a pre-existing intelligence to work with. Radically extending the abilities of a pre-existing human mind — whether it be through genetics, cybernetics or the integration of external devices — could result in something quite similar to how we envision advanced AI.

Looking to learn more about this, I contacted futurist Michael Anissimov, a blogger at Accelerating Future and a co-organizer of the Singularity Summit. He’s given this subject considerable thought — and warns that we need to be just as wary of IA as we are AI.

Michael, when we speak of Intelligence Amplification, what are we really talking about? Are we looking to create Einsteins? Or is it something significantly more profound?

The real objective of IA is to create super-Einsteins, persons qualitatively smarter than any human being that has ever lived. There will be a number of steps on the way there.

The first step will be to create a direct neural link to information. Think of it as a "telepathic Google."

The next step will be to develop brain-computer interfaces that augment the visual cortex, the best-understood part of the brain. This would boost our spatial visualization and manipulation capabilities. Imagine being able to imagine a complex blueprint with high reliability and detail, or to learn new blueprints quickly. There will also be augmentations that focus on other portions of sensory cortex, like tactile cortex and auditory cortex.

The third step involves the genuine augmentation of pre-frontal cortex. This is the Holy Grail of IA research — enhancing the way we combine perceptual data to form concepts. The end result would be cognitive super-McGyvers, people who perform apparently impossible intellectual feats. For instance, mind controlling other people, beating the stock market, or designing inventions that change the world almost overnight. This seems impossible to us now in the same way that all our modern scientific achievements would have seemed impossible to a stone age human — but the possibility is real.

For it to be otherwise would require that there is some mysterious metaphysical ceiling on qualitative intelligence that miraculously exists at just above the human level. Given that mankind was the first generally intelligent organism to evolve on this planet, that seems highly implausible. We shouldn't expect version one to be the final version, any more than we should have expected the Model T to be the fastest car ever built.

Looking ahead to the next few decades, how could AI come about? Is the human brain really that fungible?

The human brain is not really that fungible. It is the product of more than seven million years of evolutionary optimization and fine-tuning, which is to say that it's already highly optimized given its inherent constraints. Attempts to overclock it usually cause it to break, as demonstrated by the horrific effects of amphetamine addiction.

Chemicals are not targeted enough to produce big gains in human cognitive performance. The evidence for the effectiveness of current "brain-enhancing drugs" is extremely sketchy. To achieve real strides will require brain implants with connections to millions of neurons. This will require millions of tiny electrodes, and a control system to synchronize them all. The current state of the art brain-computer interfaces have around 1,000 connections. So, current devices need to be scaled up by more than 1,000 times to get anywhere interesting. Even if you assume exponential improvement, it will be a while before this is possible — at least 15 to 20 years.

Improvement in IA rests upon progress in nano-manufacturing. Brain-computer interface engineers, like Ed Boyden at MIT, depend upon improvements in manufacturing to build these devices. Manufacturing is the linchpin on which everything else depends. Given that there is very little development of atomically-precise manufacturing technologies, nanoscale self-assembly seems like the most likely route to million-electrode brain-computer interfaces. Nanoscale self-assembly is not atomically precise, but it's precise by the standards of bulk manufacturing and photolithography.

What potential psychological side-effects may emerge from a radically enhanced human? Would they even be considered a human at this point?

One of the most salient side effects would be insanity. The human brain is an extremely fine-tuned and calibrated machine. Most perturbations to this tuning qualify as what we would consider "crazy." There are many different types of insanity, far more than there are types of sanity. From the inside, insanity seems perfectly sane, so we'd probably have a lot of trouble convincing these people they are insane.

Even in the case of perfect sanity, side effects might include seizures, information overload, and possibly feelings of egomania or extreme alienation. Smart people tend to feel comparatively more alienated in the world, and for a being smarter than everyone, the effect would be greatly amplified.

Most very smart people are not jovial and sociable like Richard Feynman. Hemingway said, "An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools." What if drunkenness were not enough to instill camaraderie and mutual affection? There could be a clean empathy break that leads to psychopathy.

So which will come first? AI or IA?

It's very difficult to predict either. There is a tremendous bias for wanting IA to come first, because of all the fun movies and video games with intelligence-enhanced protagonists. It's important to recognize that this bias in favor of IA does not in fact influence the actual technological difficulty of the approach. My guess is that AI will come first because development is so much cheaper and cleaner.

Both endeavours are extremely difficult. They may not come to pass until the 2060s, 2070s, or  later. Eventually, however, they must both come to pass — there's nothing magical about intelligence, and the demand for its enhancement is enormous. It would require nothing less than a global totalitarian Luddite dictatorship to hold either back for the long term.

What are the advantages and disadvantages to the two different developmental approaches?

The primary advantage of the AI route is that it is immeasurably cheaper and easier to do research. AI is developed on paper and in code. Most useful IA research, on the other hand, is illegal. Serious IA would require deep neurosurgery and experimental brain implants. These  brain implants may malfunction, causing seizures, insanity, or death. Enhancing human intelligence in a qualitative way is not a matter of popping a few pills — you really need to develop brain implants to get any significant returns.

Most research in that area is heavily regulated and expensive. All animal testing is expensive. Theodore Berger has been working on a hippocampal implant for a number of years — and in 2004 it passed a live tissue test, but there has been very little news since then. Every few years he pops up in the media and says it's just around the corner, but I'm skeptical. Meanwhile, there is a lot of intriguing progress in Artificial Intelligence.

Does IA have the potential to be safer than AI as far as predictability and controllability is concerned? Is it important that we develop IA before super-powerful AGI?

Intelligence Augmentation is much more unpredictable and uncontrollable than AGI has the potential to be. It's actually quite dangerous, in the long term. I recently wrote an article that speculates on global political transformation caused by a large amount of power concentrated in the hands of a small group due to "miracle technologies" like IA or molecular manufacturing. I also coined the term "Maximillian," meaning "the best," to refer to a powerful leader making use of intelligence enhancement technology to put himself in an unassailable position.

Image: The cognitively enhanced Reginald Barclay from the ST:TNG episode, "The Nth Degree." 

The problem with IA is that you are dealing with human beings, and human beings are flawed. People with enhanced intelligence could still have a merely human-level morality, leveraging their vast intellects for hedonistic or even genocidal purposes.

AGI, on the other hand, can be built from the ground up to simply follow a set of intrinsic motivations that are benevolent, stable, and self-reinforcing.

People say, "won't it reject those motivations?" It won't, because those motivations will make up its entire core of values — if it's programmed properly. There will be no "ghost in the machine" to emerge and overthrow its programmed motives. Philosopher Nick Bostrom does an excellent analysis of this in his paper "The Superintelligent Will". The key point is that selfish motivations will not magically emerge if an AI has a goal system that is fundamentally selfless, if the very essence of its being is devoted to preserving that selflessness. Evolution produced self-interested organisms because of evolutionary design constraints, but that doesn't mean we can't code selfless agents de novo.

What roadblocks, be they technological, medical, or ethical, do you see hindering development?

The biggest roadblock is developing the appropriate manufacturing technology. Right now, we aren't even close.

Another roadblock is figuring out what exactly each neuron does, and identifying the exact positions of these neurons in individual people. Again, we're not even close.

Thirdly, we need some way to quickly test extremely fine-grained theories of brain function — what Ed Boyden calls "high throughput circuit screening" of neural circuits. The best way to do this would be to somehow create a human being without consciousness and experiment on them to our heart's content, but I have a feeling that idea might not go over so well with ethics committees.

 Absent that, we'd need an extremely high-resolution simulation of the human brain. Contrary to hype surrounding "brain simulation" projects today, such a high-resolution simulation is not likely to be developed until the 2050-2080 timeframe. An Oxford analysis picks a median date of around 2080. That sounds a bit conservative to me, but in the right ballpark.

This article originally appeared at io9.

Top image: imredesiuk/shutterstock.

How Much Longer Until Humanity Becomes A Hive Mind?

Earlier this year, researchers created an electronic link between the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles. This was just another reminder that technology will one day make us telepaths. But how far will this transformation go? And how long will it take before humans evolve into a fully-fledged hive mind? We spoke to the experts to find out.

I spoke to three different experts, all of whom have given this subject considerable thought: Kevin Warwick, a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading; Ramez Naam, an American futurist and author of NEXUS (a scifi novel addressing this topic); and Anders Sandberg, a Swedish neuroscientist from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.

They all told me that the possibility of a telepathic noosphere is very real — and it's closer to reality than we might think. And not surprisingly, this would change the very fabric of the human condition. 

Connecting brains

My first question to the group had to do with the technological requirements. How is it, exactly, that we’re going to connect our minds over the Internet, or some future manifestation of it?

“I really think we have sufficient hardware available now — tools like Braingate,” says Warwick. “But we have a lot to learn with regard to how much the brain can adapt, just how many implants would be required, and where they would need to be positioned.”

Naam agrees that we’re largely on our way. He says we already have the basics of sending some sorts of information in and out of the brain. In humans, we’ve done it with video, audio, and motor control. In principle, nothing prevents us from sending that data back and forth between people.

“Practically speaking, though, there are some big things we have to do,” he tells me. “First, we have to increase the bandwidth. The most sophisticated systems we have right now use about 100 electrodes, while the brain has more than 100 billion neurons. If you want to get good fidelity on the stuff you’re beaming back and forth between people, you’re going to want to get on the order of millions of electrodes.”

Naam says we can build the electronics for that easily, but building it in such a way that the brain accepts it is a major challenge.

The second hurdle, he says, is going beyond sensory and motor control.

“If you want to beam speech between people, you can probably tap into that with some extensions of what we’ve already been doing, though it will certainly involve researchers specifically working on decoding that kind of data,” he says. “But if you want to go beyond sending speech and get into full blown sharing of experiences, emotions, memories, or even skills (a la The Matrix), then you’re wandering into unknown territory.”

Indeed, Sandberg says that picking up and translating brain signals will be a tricky matter.

“EEG sensors have lousy resolution — we get an average of millions of neurons, plus electrical noise from muscles and the surroundings,” he says. “Subvocalisation and detecting muscle twitches is easier to do, although they will still be fairly noisy. Internal brain electrodes exist and can get a lot of data from a small region, but this of course requires brain surgery. I am having great hopes for optogenetics and nanofibers for making kinder, gentler implants that are less risky to insert and easier on their tissue surroundings.”

The real problem, he says, is translating signals in a sensible way. “Your brain representation of the concept "mountain" is different from mine, the result not just of different experiences, but also on account of my different neurons. So, if I wanted to activate the mountain concept, I would need to activate a disperse, perhaps very complex network across your brain,” he tells me. “That would require some translation that figured out that I wanted to suggest a mountain, and found which pattern is your mountain.”

Sandberg says we normally "cheat" by learning a convenient code called language, where all the mapping between the code and our neural activations is learned as we grow. We can, of course, learn new codes as adults, and this is rarely a problem — adults already master things like Morse code, SMS abbreviations, or subtle signs of gesture and style. Sandberg points to the recent experiments by Nicolelis connecting brains directly, research which shows that it might be possible to get rodents to learn neural codes. But he says this learning is cumbersome, and we should be able to come up with something simpler.

One way is to boost learning. Some research shows that amphetamine and presumably other learning stimulants can speed up language learning. Recent work on the Nogo Receptor suggests that brain plasticity can be turned on and off. “So maybe we can use this to learn quickly,” says Sandberg.

Another way is to have software do the translation. It is not hard to imagine machine learning to figure out what neural codes or mumbled keywords correspond to which signal — but setting up the training so that users find it acceptably fast is another matter.

“So my guess is that if pairs of people really wanted to ‘get to know each other’ and devoted a lot of time and effort, they could likely learn signals and build translation protocols that would allow a lot of ‘telepathic’ communication — but it would be very specific to them, like the ‘internal language’ some couples have,” says Sandberg. “For the weaker social links, where we do not want to spend months learning how to speak to each other, we would rely on automatically translated signals. A lot of it would be standard things like voice and text, but one could imagine adding supporting ‘subtitles’ showing graphics or activating some neural assemblies.”

Bridging the gap

In terms of the communications backbone, Sandberg believes it’s largely in place, but it will likely have to be extended much further.

“The theoretical bandwidth limitations of even a wireless Internet are far, far beyond the bandwidth limitations of our brains — tens of terabits per second,” he told me, “and there are orbital angular momentum methods that might get far more.”

Take the corpus callosum, for example. It has around 250 million axons, and even at the maximal neural firing rate of just 25 gigabits, that should be enough to keep the hemispheres connected such that we feel we are a single mind.

As for the interface, Warwick says we should stick to implanted multi-electrode arrays. These may someday become wireless, but they’ll have to remain wired until we learn more about the process. Like Sandberg, he adds that we’ll also need to develop adaptive software interfacing.

Naam envisions something laced throughout the brain, coupled with some device that could be worn on the person’s body.

“For the first part, you can imagine a mesh of nano-scale sensors either inserted through a tiny hole in the skull, or somehow through the brain’s blood vessels. In Nexus I imagined a variant on this — tiny nano-particles that are small enough that they can be swallowed and will then cross the blood-brain barrier and find their way to neurons in the brain.”

Realistically, Naam says that whatever we insert in the brain is going to be pretty low energy consumption. The implant, or mesh, or nano-particles could communicate wirelessly, but to boost their signal — and to provide them power — scientists will have to pair them with something the person wears, like a cap, a pair of glasses, a headband — anything that can be worn very near the brain so it can pick up those weak signals and boost them, including signals from the outside world that will be channeled into the brain.

How soon before the hive mind?

Warwick believes that the technologies required to build an early version of the telepathic noosphere are largely in place. All that’s required, he says, is “money on the table” and the proper ethical approval.

Sandberg concurs, saying that we’re already doing it with cellphones. He points to the work of Charles Stross, who suggests that the next generation will never have to be alone, get lost, or forget anything.

“As soon as people have persistent wearable systems that can pick up their speech, I think we can do a crude version,” says Sandberg. “Having a system that’s on all the time will allow us to get a lot of data — and it better be unobtrusive. I would not be surprised to see experiments with Google Glasses before the end of the year, but we’ll probably end up saying it’s just a fancy way of using cellphones.”

At the same time, Sandberg suspects that “real” neural interfacing will take a while, since it needs to be safe, convenient, and have a killer app worth doing. It will also have to compete with existing communications systems and their apps.

Similarly, Naam says we could build a telepathic network in a few years, but with “very, very, low fidelity.” But that low fidelity, he says, would be considerably worse than the quality we get by using phones — or even text or IM. “I doubt anyone who’s currently healthy would want to use it.”

But for a really stable, high bandwidth system in and out of the brain, that could take upwards of 15 to 20 years, which Naam concedes is optimistic.

“In any case, it’s not a huge priority,” he says. “And it’s not one where we’re willing to cut corners today. It’s firmly in the medical sphere, and the first rule there is ‘do no harm’. That means that science is done extremely cautiously, with the priority overwhelmingly — and appropriately — being not to harm the human subject.”

Nearly supernatural

I asked Sandberg how the telepathic noosphere will disrupt the various way humans engage in work and social relations.

“Any enhancement of communication ability is a big deal,” he responded. “We humans are dominant because we are so good at communication and coordination, and any improvement would likely boost that. Just consider flash mobs or how online ARG communities do things that seem nearly supernatural.”

Cell phones, he says, made our schedules flexible in time and space, allowing us to coordinate where to meet on the fly. He says we’re also adding various non-human services like apps and Siri-like agents. “Our communications systems are allowing us to interact not just with each other but with various artificial agents,” he says. Messages can be stored, translated and integrated with other messages.

“If we become telepathic, it means we will have ways of doing the same with concepts, ideas and sensory signals,” says Sandberg. “It is hard to predict just what this will be used for since there are so few limitations. But just consider the possibility of getting instruction and skills via augmented reality and well designed sensory/motor interfaces. A team might help a member perform actions while ‘looking over her shoulder’, as if she knew all they knew. And if the system is general enough, it means that you could in principle get help from any skilled person anywhere in the world.”

In response to the same question, Naam noted that communication boosts can accelerate technical innovation, but more importantly, they can also accelerate the spread of any kind of idea. “And that can be hugely disruptive,” he says.

But in terms of the possibilities, Naam says the sky’s the limit.

“With all of those components, you can imagine people doing all sorts of things with such an interface. You could play games together. You could enter virtual worlds together,” he says. “Designers or architects or artists could imagine designs and share them mentally with others. You could work together on any type of project where you can see or hear what you’re doing. And of course, sex has driven a lot of information technologies forward — with sight, sound, touch, and motor control, you could imagine new forms of virtual sex or virtual pornography.”

Warwick imagines communication in the broadest sense, including the technically-enabled telepathic transmission of feelings, thoughts, ideas, and emotions. “I also think this communication will be far richer when compared to the present pathetic way in which humans communicate.” He suspects that visual information may eventually be possible, but that will take some time to develop. He even imagines the sharing of memories. That may be possible, he says, “but maybe not in my lifetime.”

Put all this together, says Warwick, and “the body becomes redundant.” Moreover, when connected in this way “we will be able to understand each other much more.”

A double-edged sword

We also talked about the potential risks.

“There’s the risk of bugs in hardware or software,” says Naam. “There’s the risk of malware or viruses that infect this. There’s the risk of hackers being able to break into the implants in your head. We’ve already seen hackers demonstrate that they can remotely take over pacemakers and insulin pumps. The same risks exist here.”

But the big societal risk, says Naam, stems entirely from the question of who controls this technology.

“That’s the central question I ask in Nexus,” he says. “If we all have brain implants, you can imagine it driving a very bottom’s up world — another Renaissance, a world where people are free and creating and sharing more new ideas all the time. Or you can imagine it driving a world like that of 1984, where central authorities are the ones in control, and they’re the ones using these direct brain technologies to monitor people, to keep people in line, or even to manipulate people into being who they’re supposed to be. That’s what keeps me up at night.”

Warwick, on the other hand, told me that the “biggest risk is that some idiot — probably a politician or business person — may stop it from going ahead.” He suspects it will lead to a digital divide between those who have and those who do not, but that it’s a natural progression very much in line with evolution to date.

In response to the question of privacy, Sandberg quipped, “Privacy? What privacy?”

Our lives, he says, will reside in the cloud, and on servers owned by various companies that also sell results from them to other organizations.

“Even if you do not use telepathy-like systems, your behaviour and knowledge can likely be inferred from the rich data everybody else provides,” he says. “And the potential for manipulation, surveillance and propaganda are endless.”

Our cloud exoselves

Without a doubt, the telepathic noosphere will alter the human condition in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. The Noosphere will be an extension of our minds. And as David Chalmers and Andy Clark have noted, we should still regard external mental processes as being genuine even though they’re technically happening outside our skulls. Consequently, as Sandberg told me, our devices and “cloud exoselves” will truly be extensions of our minds.

“Potentially very enhancing extensions,” he says, “although unlikely to have much volition of their own.”

Sandberg argues that we shouldn’t want our exoselves to be too independent, since they’re likely to make mistakes in our name. “We will always want to have veto power, a bit like how the conscious level of our minds has veto on motor actions being planned,” he says.

Veto power over our cloud exoselves? The future will be a very strange place, indeed.

This article originally appeared at io9.

Top image: agsandrew/Shutterstock, Nicolesis lab.