The Real Cybors
20th October 2014
By Arthur House
Forget wearable tech. The pioneers of our “post-human”
future are implanting technology in to their bodies and brains. Should we stop
them or join them?
BY ARTHUR HOUSE
Ian Burkhart concentrated hard. A thick cable protruded
from the crown of his shaven head. A sleeve sprouting wires enveloped his right
arm. The 23 - year-old had been paralysed from the neck down since a diving
accident four years ago. But, in June this year, in a crowded room in the
Wexner Medical Centre at Ohio State University, Burkhart’s hand spasmed into
life.
At first it opened slowly and shakily, as though
uncertain who its owner was. But when Burkhart engaged his wrist muscles, its
upward movement was sudden and decisive. You could hear the joints – unused for
years - cracking. The scientists and medical staff gathered in the room burst
into applause.
The technology that made this possible, Neurobridge, had
successfully reconnected Burkhart’s brain with his body. It was probably the
most advanced intertwining of man and machine that had so far been achieved.
But such milestones are coming thick and fast. Quietly,
almost without anyone really noticing, we have entered the age of the cyborg,
or cybernetic organism: a living thing both natural and artificial. Artificial
retinas and cochlear implants (which connect directly to the brain through the
auditory nerve system) restore sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf.
Deep-brain implants, known as “brain pacemakers”, alleviate the symptoms of
30,000 Parkinson’s sufferers worldwide. The Wellcome Trust is now trialling a
silicon chip that sits directly on the brains of Alzheimer’s patients,
stimulating them and warning of dangerous episodes.
A growing cadre of innovators is taking things further,
using replacement organs, robotic prosthetics and implants not to restore
bodily functions but to alter or enhance them. When he lost his right eye in a
shotgun accident in 2005, the Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence replaced it with a
wireless video camera that transmits what he’s seeing in real time to his
computer. Last year, the electronic engineer Brian McEvoy, who is based in
Minnesota, made himself a kind of internal satnav by fitting himself with a
subdermal compass.
“This is the frontline of the Human Enhancement
Revolution,” wrote the technology author and philosopher Patrick Lin last year.
“We now know enough about biology, neuroscience, computing, robotics, and
materials to hack the human body.”
The US military is pouring millions of dollars into
projects such as Ekso Bionics’ Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC), an ‘Iron
Man’-style wearable exoskeleton that gives soldiers superhuman strength. Its
Defense Advanced Research Projects Association (Darpa) is also working on
thought-controlled killer robots, “thought helmets” to enable telepathic
communication and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to give soldiers extra
senses, such as night vision and the ability to “see” magnetic fields caused by
landmines.
Ever since the earliest humans made stone tools, we have
tried to extend our powers. The bicycle, the telescope and the gun all arose
from this same impulse. Today, we carry smartphones – supercomputers, really -
in our pockets, giving us infinite information and unlimited communication at
our fingertips. Our relationship with technology is becoming increasingly
intimate, as wearable devices such as Google Glass, Samsung Gear Fit (a
smartwatch-cum-fitness tracker) and the Apple Watch show. And wearable is
already becoming implantable.
In America, a dedicated amateur community — the
“biohackers” or “grinders” — has been experimenting with implantable technology
for several years. Amal Graafstra, a 38-year-old programmer and self-styled
“adventure technologist”, has been inserting various types of radio-frequency
identification (RFID) chips into the soft flesh between his thumbs and index
fingers since 2005. The chips can be read by scanners that Graafstra has
installed on the doors of his house, and also on his laptop, which gives him
access with a swipe of his hand without the need for keys or passwords. He
sells it to a growing crowd of “geeky, hacker-type software developers,” he
tells me, direct from his website, Dangerous Things, having used crowdfunding
to pay for the manufacturing (he raised almost five times his target amount).
Graafstra, a hyper-articulate teddy bear of a man, is
unimpressed by wearable devices. “A wearable device is just one more thing to
manage during the day. I don’t think people will want to deck themselves out
with all that in the future,” he says, dismissing Samsung Gear Fit as “large,
cumbersome and not exactly fashionable”. Instead, he envisages an implant that
would monitor general health and scan for medical conditions, sending the
information to the user’s smartphone or directly to a doctor. This would be
always there, always on, and never in the way – and it could potentially save a
lot of doctors' time and money as fewer checkups would be necessary and health
conditions could be recognised before they became serious.
Graafstra defines biohackers as “DIY cyborgs who are
upgrading their bodies with hardware without waiting for corporate development
cycles or authorities to say it’s OK”. But, he concedes, “Samsung and Apple
aren’t blind to what we’re doing. Somewhere in the bowels of these companies are
people thinking about implantables.” He mentions Motorola’s experiments with
the “password pill”, which sends signals to devices from the stomach. (The same
company has filed a patent for an “electronic throat tattoo” which fixes a
minuscule microphone on the skin so users can communicate with their devices
via voice commands.)
As robotics and brain-computer interfaces continue to
improve and, with them, the likelihood that advanced cybernetic enhancement
becomes widely available, several worrying questions emerge. Will those with
the resources to access enhancements become a cyborg super-class that is
healthier, smarter and more employable than the unenhanced? Will the unenhanced
feel pressured into joining their ranks or face falling behind? And who will regulate
these enhancements? In the wrong hands, cyborg technology could quickly become
the stuff of dystopian science fiction. It’s all too easy to imagine
totalitarian regimes (or unscrupulous health insurers) scraping information
from our new, connected body parts and using it for their own gain.
***
Kevin Warwick can justifiably claim to be the world’s
first cyborg. In the 1990s, Reading University’s visiting professor of
cybernetics started implanting RFID chips into himself. In 2002, he underwent
pioneering surgery to have an array of electrodes attached to the nerve fibres
in his arm. This was the first time a human nervous system had been connected
to a computer. Warwick’s “neural interface” allowed him to move a robotic hand
by moving his own and to control a customised wheelchair with his thoughts. It
also enabled him to experience electronic stimuli coming the other way. In one
experiment he was able to sense ultrasound, which is beyond normal human
capability. “I was born human,”, Warwick has said, “ but I believe it’s
something we have the power to change.”
Cheerleaders for a cyborg future, like Prof Warwick, call
themselves “transhumanists”. Transhumanism aims to alter the human condition
for the better by using technology (as well as genetic engineering, life
extension science and synthetic biology) to make us more intelligent, healthier
and live longer than has ever been possible – eventually transforming humanity
so much it becomes “post-human”.
The Cybernetic Human
1. Brain implants augment memory and provide access to
the internet
2. Wearable exoskeleton boosts strength and endurance
3. Internet-connected spinal implant stimulates genitals
for long-distance sex
4. Interchangeble limbs match capabilities to tasks
5. Access-control chips replace keys and passwords
One of the most prominent transhumanists is the inventor
and philosopher Ray Kurzweil, currently director of engineering at Google, and
populariser of the concept of the technological “singularity” – a point he puts
at around 2045, when artificial intelligence will outstrip human intelligence
for the first time. The predicted consequences of such a scenario vary wildly
from the enslavement of humanity to a utopian world without war (or even, as a
result of self-replicating nanotechnology, the transformation of the planet, or
perhaps the entire universe, into something called “grey goo” – but that’s a
whole other story).
Kurzweil, the award-winning creator of the flatbed
scanner, also believes he has a shot at immortality and intends to resurrect
the dead, including his own father. “We will transcend all of the limitations
of our biology,” he has said. “That is what it means to be human – to extend
who we are.”
Many transhumanists, particularly in Silicon Valley,
where belief in the singularity has assumed the character of an eschatological
religion, think that fusing with technology is our only hope of surviving the
consequences of this great change.
“We’re not physically more competent than other species
but in our intellectual capabilities we have something of an edge,” Warwick
tells me. “But quite soon machines are going to have an intellectual power that
we’ll have difficulty dealing with.” The only way to keep up with them, he
believes, is to artificially enhance our poor organic bodies and brains. “If
you can’t beat them, join them,” he says.
Professor James Lovelock, the veteran scientist and
environmentalist, is considerably less alarmed than Warwick. “Artificial
intelligence is never going to be able to intuit or invent things – all it can
do is follow logical instructions. Perhaps in the future when computing systems
operate like our brains, then there really would be a fight, but that’s an
awful long way off.”
Many would disagree, however. IBM, Hewlett Packard and
HRL Laboratories have all received many millions of dollars from Darpa to develop
exactly what Lovelock fears: so-called “cognitive” or “neuromorphic” computing
systems designed to learn, associate and intuit just like a mammalian brain.
IBM brought out its first prototype in 2012.
Warwick may have been the first to experiment with
cybernetics but the honour of being the world’s first government-recognised
cyborg goes to the artist Neil Harbisson. Born with the rare condition of
achromatopsia, or total colour blindness, Harbisson developed the “eyeborg” — a
colour sensor on a head-mounted antenna that connects to a microchip implanted
in his skull. It converts colours into sounds (electronic sine waves) which he
hears via bone conduction.
Harbisson’s severe bowl cut and hard-to-place accent (his
mother is Catalan and his father Northern Irish) only heighten the impression
that he might have been beamed down from another planet.
Over time he has learned to associate every part of the
spectrum with a different pitch until these associations have become second
nature. “It was when I started to dream in colour that I felt the software and
my brain had united,” he said in TED talk in 2012.
Ten years ago, he won a battle with the British
government to have the “eyeborg” recognized as a part of his body. It now
appears in his passport photo.
He set up the Cyborg Foundation two years ago with his
partner, Moon Ribas, a dancer and a fellow “cyborg activist” (she has a seismic
sensor in her arm, which enables her to feel vibrations of varying intensity
when an earthquake occurs anywhere in the world). She and Harbisson believe
that everyone should have the right to become a cyborg. Like the biohackers,
they propose that would-be cyborgs use open-source technology to design and
make their own enhancements, rather than buying a finished product off the
shelf.
It is hard, however, to see the majority of people
adopting a DIY philosophy like this when state-of-the-art options become
available commercially. In computer gaming, headsets using electroencephalogram
(EEG) technology are being developed so that users can control games with their
thoughts. “For example,” explains Zach Lynch, organizer of the first
“Neurogaming” conference in San Francisco last year, “players can smash
boulders by concentrating or scare away demons with angry facial expressions.”
A British gaming company, Foc.us, is using technology that was first developed
by Darpa to train snipers, to boost playing performance. According to Lynch,
its “transcranial direct current stimulation device literally zaps your head
with a miniscule electric pulse [which you can’t feel] during training to help
make your brain more susceptible to learning.”
Chad Bouton, the inventor of the Neurobridge technology
at Batelle Innovations that is enabling Ian Burkhart to move his hand again,
believes that invasive brain-computer interfaces could also one day cross over
into the non-therapeutic field.
“Talking about this bionic age that we’re entering,” he
says on the phone from Ohio, “you certainly can imagine brain implants that
could augment your memory”. Or give you direct access to the internet . “You
could think about a search you’d like to make and get the information streamed
directly into your brain,” he says. “Maybe decades from now we’ll see something
like that.”
Prof James Lovelock, who himself is fitted with a wi-fi
controlled pacemaker, thinks these innovations come with dangers. He is chiefly
“worried about the spam. If I had a cybernetic eye I wouldn’t want to wake up
in the middle of the night with [an advert for] somebody’s used car flashing
through my brain.”
Then there is the prospect of spying. Could insurance
companies harvest biometric data from people’s enhancements, or paranoid
governments use them to monitor their citizens? Amal Graafstra is adamant that
his access-control chip is not at risk from such things, due to the close
proximity (two inches or less) required to read it. “If the government was
handing out these tags and requiring people to use them for banking, say, that
would be pretty suspect”, he tells me. “But it doesn’t need to do that, because
we have our phones on us all the time already” – a perfectly effective
“tracking device,” as he puts it, should governments be interested in our
movements.
Even assuming that cybernetic technology could be made
safe from such dangers, opponents of transhumanism (sometimes termed
“bioconservatives”) argue the medical principle, that technology should only
restore human capabilities, not enhance them.
“The fascination with ‘enhancement’ is a way to convince
healthy people that they are in need of treatment,” says Dr David Albert Jones,
director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford. “It is a wasteful
distraction when we are failing to meet the basic needs of people with real
health problems.”
He’s not against what he terms “human-technology
interfaces” but, he says, they “should be developed to address the needs of
people with disabilities, not to create a market for the self-regarding and the
worried-well.” Many medical professionals would agree.
Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian, worries about
enhancements leading to unprecedented levels of inequality. “Medicine is moving
towards trying to surpass the norm, to help [healthy] people live longer, to
have stronger memories, to have better control of their emotions,” he said in a
recent interview. “But upgrading like that is not an egalitarian project, it's
an elitist project. No matter what norm you reach, there is always another
upgrade which is possible." And the latest, most high-tech upgrades will
always only be available to the rich.
But where does a case like Neil Harbisson’s fall? He
couldn’t cure his colour blindness, so he developed an extra sense to make up
for it. Is this restoration or augmentation? Where cyborg ethics are concerned,
the lines are blurred.
Rich Lee was also drawn to biohacking in order to
overcome a disability. Lee, a 35-year-old salesman from Utah whose
wet-shave-and-goatee look is more 1990s nu-metal than cybernetic citizen of the
future, is losing his vision, and last year was certified blind in one eye.
He’s best known for having a pair of magnets implanted into his traguses (the
nubs of cartilage in front of the ear-hole). They work with a copper coil worn
around his neck, that he hooks up to his iPod, to become internal headphones.
But he can also attach other things to the coil, such as wi-fi and
electromagnetic sensors, enabling him to sense things normally outside of human
capability. By attaching it to an ultrasonic rangefinder, he hopes to learn how
to echolocate, like a bat, so when he goes blind he will be still able to judge
his distance from objects – essentially, to see in the dark.
One of Lee’s many other projects is a vibrating implant
which is placed at the base of the penis, which he calls the Lovetron9000. “I
have broken many prototypes and it is trickier than it looks,
engineering-wise,” he says. In the next ten years, Lee thinks, it might be
possible to take part in a “MMO Orgy [Massively Multiplayer Online Orgy]” – a
group of people with spinal implants which stimulate the users’ genital nerves
linked together over the internet. It’s still only an idea, but Lee sees great
commercial promise in this area: “I’ve probably had the most emails from people
wanting to get the spinal implant,” he says. “Once you have cyborg sex,” he
predicts, “you will never want to return to normal sex.”
Cyborg sex may sound unappealing now, but attitudes
change fast. “It can flip very quickly,” says Kevin Warwick. “Take something
like laser eye surgery. About 15 years ago people were saying ‘Don’t go
blasting my eyes out’ and now they’re saying ‘Don’t bother with contact
lenses’.”
In a sense, cyborg technology is nothing new —
pacemakers, for example, have been around for decades. But recent advances have
opened up new possibilities, and people are embracing them. Real cyborgs
already walk among us. Soon, we may have to decide whether we want to join
them.
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