Progress is not guaranteed. Be it moral, technological, scientific, or social, there is no reason to assume human civilization marches forever forward in step with time. Understood this way, we can realize that progress is a choice and something we as a species will to happen through the concatenation of our decisions.

Or we can fail to choose, fail to act, and yet, that failure is itself a choice and an action from which consequences follow. There is a reason From Chance to Choice is one of the most essential texts on the bioethics of enhancement – it implies that our continued evolution will hinge upon our decision as to whether or not we want the ability to choose our evolutionary path. We must choose to have a choice.

To be specific, our current generation faces the very real possibility of being asked to decide if human enhancement via technological augmentation and genetic engineering is something we want to pursue. A question already moving beyond the abstract realm of bioethics and making its way into popular culture. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (hereafter DX:HR), prequel to the cyberpunk video game masterpiece Deus Ex, asks the player to take part in answering that question.

DX:HR is that rare video game that offers genuine choice. Some great games, like Mass Effect and Bioshock, allow (or famously disallow) certain choices that, in turn, reflect on the player’s moral compass. DX:HR gives the player the chance to fully explore his or her philosophy and guiding ethic regarding human enhancement and cybernetic augmentation. Choices in DX:HR don’t just ask, are you good or evil, but what do you believe?

Often, what makes a great piece of art is not the message it delivers, but the questions it demands we ask of ourselves. DX:HR, is not a great piece of art, but it aspires to be one. And in some places, it comes damn close by asking us: As humanity moves forward, what do we leave behind?

What follows is not a review but an exegesis of DX:HR and the trials of the main character, Adam Jensen. From behind his switch-blade sunglasses, we see that the future of the human race and of enhancement is not a yes or no question. Instead, we’re forced to face the bleak possibility that there is no right answer and no one to blame.

*Spoilers* from here on out.

The plot of DX:HR can be summarized thusly: Adam Jensen, chief of security for Sarif Industries, a major augmentations manufacturer, is all-but-killed in an attack on one of Sarif’s warehouse. In the attack, Sarif’s chief scientist, Megan Reed, is kidnapped, along with other researchers. Jensen is saved at the cost of his becoming heavily augmented; he is a cybernetic Lazarus. He pursues Dr. Reed’s kidnappers at the behest of the head of Sarif Industries, David Sarif. Jensen quickly uncovers a conspiracy theory with ties to an Illuminati shadow government attempting to use Dr. Reed and her breakthroughs in human augmentation for subliminal social control. As he progresses, Jensen encounters rogue military units, enhancement critics and protestors, and a host of regular people just trying to survive in an augmented world.

Astoundingly, the plot blames no one for this technology’s misuse beyond the Illuminati themselves. The technology gets to remain neutral. Even corporations are given even-handed treatment. More important, when you reach the end of the game, there is no single “end.” There is a selection among endings among which you must choose. In weighing this decision, the-player-as-Jensen is confronted with five avatars who represent the ethics of transhumanism. DX:HR leans heavily on Greek myth, as did the original, so I leverage that here to set these characters in context.

1. Hugh Darrow, inventor of augmentation. Darrow’s right leg is damaged and he must walk with a cane, as his own innovation is rejected by his body, so he cannot be augmented. Darrow views himself like Daedalus watching his creation, augmented humanity, fall like Icarus downward in a flaming spiral after flying to close to the sun. He is the paradox of the innovative status quo. Only the present can create the future, but to let the future flourish, the present must allow itself to become the past.
2. David Sarif, mass producer of augmentations and champion of transhumanism. Sarif recognizes that progress has costs, often calculated in human lives, but argues the utilitarian benefits for future generations far outweigh the harm current generations or certain individuals will suffer. For Sarif, no one person, no set of myopic morals, can stand in the way of where humanity must go. Sarif is Prometheus, a Titan and a thief, stealing augmented fire for humanity.
3. William Taggart, leader of the anti-augmentation movement, Humanity Front. That Taggart shares his last name with an Objectivist hero is curious enough, but his arguments against augmentation come out of a desire for the very thing one might presume transhumanism is trying to achieve: a human future. Taggart is a champion of natural law, a representative of the gods. Humans are limited not out of oppression but protection – to exceed is not evolution, but extinction.
4. Eliza, a self-aware AI construct half-ECHELON, half-spin doctor, that crafts media output into a single subtle message. She tells the public what its opinion is. She is Mercury, Athena, and the Oracle in one – offering information, wisdom, and prophecy. And though her countenance is Apollonian, her option for the world is Dionysian: release the brakes and drop the reigns.
5. Adam Jensen himself. Jensen dreams of himself as Icarus. As the player, one chooses to save those who are merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, or to exercise your newfound power with extreme prejudice. At no point does Jensen betray an opinion about his augmentations that is not in sync with a decision made by the player, including basic dialog response selections.  Jensen forces the player, forces you, to confront your own transhumanist leanings – your own opinions expressed through the choices you make as Jensen will unsettle you.

From these five we develop a rounded picture of enhancement. For Darrow, it is a breakthrough that will leave many deserving people behind. For Sarif, it is a liberating force, a technology that unbridles humanity. For Taggart, it is a gift of dragon’s teeth that glosses over real problems in the name of technophilia. For Jensen, it is for me, but maybe not for thee. For Eliza, it is the technology that brings not the final order of civilization, but must be unleashed into the dark materials of chaos to rebuild the world – perhaps only by destroying the forces controlling it can augmentation and enhancement really liberate humanity.

At the end of the game, Eliza tells Jensen, “This isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from here.” The player-as-Jensen finds oneself at the proverbial and literal end of the world in a bunker in Antarctica with a choice posed by Eliza: which human future is best? Eliza is in the place to offer this choice because of her ability to control opinion and information. What you decide through Jensen will happen at the touch of a button. Suddenly human progress is not an uncontrollable force hurtling along under the power of its own momentum. Standing at a nexus of history, one can choose to apply pressure to nudge civilization in one of four directions. No direction is backwards, but each its own version of forward. All horrifying.

There are four options:

1. Expose the conspiracy, but cripple progress towards human enhancement;
2. Promote enhancement without reservation, removing the checks of watchdog groups;
3. Hide the conspiracy, but support watchdog groups and slow enhancement progress to a crawl;
4. Annihilate the tools of control and take yourself out of the equation. Choose not to choose.

None of these is the “right answer.” You have already beaten the game when this choice arises. And therein lies the glory of DX:HR. There is no happy ending. The game serves as a warning and a rejoinder: the future is coming, but it is built not by servos and fiber optics, but by the decisions of people. As such, the future will arrive broken and corrupt, beleaguered with the venom and stench of those who seek power at the cost of their fellow humans. Good will persist, yet it will be required, as always, to strive and struggle to be seen and heard. But still humanity moves, ever forward.

Thus, DX:HR can be distilled to this single question: Having ruled out utopia, what is the least worst option for our human future?

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Guessing at which technologies will come to fruition requires the ability to determine how many intermediate technologies can reasonably be attained in a given amount of time. From there, one can extrapolate and make educated suppositions about when one could reasonably expect something like a life-like prosthetic arm would be possible.

Rosellini explained his process with DX:HR:

My job at Microtransponder in large part is writing near-term science fiction.  I do this by combining all the failure modes from science, business, law etc…and then designing a research strategy to mitigate these risks and get new technologies into patients.  With Deus Ex, I was given the task of explaining in a rigorous all of the player abilities in the game.  To do this, I extrapolated where technologies would be moving in the next 20 years (to 2027, the start of the game).  Most implantable neuroprosthetics take 10 years to get to market, so essentially I was forced to make 1 extra jump to foreseeable technologies.

So what are the background technologies that support this research? Are there any scary government projects with weird code names like MK-ULTRA and project ARTICHOKE that may give us some insight into where neuro-implants might be heading? You bet there are. Read on to learn about just how soon we can hope for retinal displays, neuro-integrated prosthetics, and mind-computer interfaces.

Q: Will, please tell me a little about your current experience, expertise, and the research you’ve been doing.

A: I have six advanced degrees spanning business, law, and science. Before I began these academic pursuits, I was a professional baseball pitcher in the Arizona Diamondbacks system.   After retiring from baseball, I became fascinated with shrinking electronic devices to integrate into the nervous system and help patients with damaged nervous systems. To excel in this field of translational neurotechnology, I obtained the relevant business, accounting, and legal background to develop technology and raise capital for preclinical and clinical studies. While pursuing these deal-making skills, I sought the ability to evaluate the technical feasibility of neuroprosthetic systems. In particular, my degrees are an MBA, MS of Accounting, a JD, a Master’s of Computational Biology, a Master’s of Neuroscience, and a Master’s of Regulatory Science. I am in the final phases of a PhD in Neuroscience. My PhD work is focused on evaluating the safety and efficacy of a novel form of neurostimulation, called voltage-controlled capacitive discharge (VCCD), invented by Dr. Larry Cauller.

My company, Microtransponder, Inc. has been researching the therapeutic benefits of pairing Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) with a variety of rehabilitation tasks to treat several neurological disorders such as tinnitus, post stroke motor rehabilitation, phantom limb pain (PLP), and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  We have developed a method to generate long lasting and spatially restricted changes to neural circuits using paired VNS.  As of July 2011, MicroTransponder has implanted 5 patients in a proof of concept Tinnitus clinical trial in Belgium and the results have been encouraging and will be discussed later in this document.  We have received several NIH grants for the animal research based on the robust nature of the scientific data.  Our researcher Dr. Engineer recently published a paper in Nature, regarding the paired VNS therapy and its ability to reverse the tinnitus precept in rats (Engineer et al., 2011).  Our VNS pairing method was reviewed in the April 2011 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine regarding the potential of our paired VNS therapy to treat a variety of neurological disorders.  Our preclinical and clinical studies suggest that  targeted plasticity using paired VNS therapy would be useful in many neurological disorders such as stoke, tinnitus and phantom limb pain in which plasticity is maladaptive.

Q: How did that impact your work on Deus Ex: Human Revolution?

A: I contacted the CEO of Eidos back in 2008 and explained that I was a big fan of the game and wanted to contribute however I could.  My job at Microtransponder in large part is writing near-term science fiction.  I do this by combining all the failure modes from science, business, law etc…and then designing a research strategy to mitigate these risks and get new technologies into patients.  With Deus Ex, I was given the task of explaining in a rigorous all of the player abilities in the game.  To do this, I extrapolated where technologies would be moving in the next 20 years (to 2027, the start of the game).  Most implantable neuroprosthetics take 10 years to get to market, so essentially I was forced to make 1 extra jump to foreseeable technologies.

Q: There are several technologies in the game that rely on direct connections to a person’s nervous system. If you were to make a conservative estimate, how many years away is technology like retinal displays, neuro-integrated prosthetics, and mind-computer interfaces?

A: In the 1870s, Richard Caton, a British physiologist, began a series of experiments intended to measure the electrical output of the brains of living animals. He surgically exposed the brains of rabbits, dogs, and monkeys, and then used wires to connect their brains to an instrument that measured current. “The electrical currents of the gray matter appear to have a relation to its function,” he wrote in 1875, noting that different actions — chewing, blinking, or just looking at food — were each accompanied by electrical activity. This was the first evidence that the brain’s functions could be tapped into directly, without having to be expressed in sounds, gestures, or any of the other usual ways.

Since then we have seen the wide scale adoption of cardiac pacemaker (electricity into the heart), cochlear implants (electricity into the cochlea), spinal cord stimulators (electricity into the spinal cord), deep brain stimulation and a host of other nerves are targets for activation using a battery, wire and electrode.

In a direct fashion to the game, DOD research arm, DARPA has been working on direct peripheral and cortical neural interfaces for mechanical augmentations since 2003 in the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics program.

Q: The writers of Deus Ex: Human Revolution are trying to tell a story, so sticking to science may have been difficult in places. Where do you feel you took the most creative license?

A: I think there was a nice balance between science and science fiction.  We took some license on invisibility cloaks and the anti-gravity implementations.  However, I still spent some researching this and there is some evidence that this field will be viable at some point in our lifetime.

http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118723&org=ENG

Q: There is a good chance that augmentations will be created by large corporations, how do you think that will impact the development of useful medical prosthetics and artificial organs?

A: This is already the case, with over 1M “augmentations” in place.  Our Vice-President Dick Cheney was a cyborg (he had a cardiac neurostimulation device).  More interesting will be the propensity to abuse the technology, which is the case with any advanced technology.  Checkout this article detailing the underground world of neuroenhancing drugs: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/27/090427fa_fact_talbot

The argument for implantable neuroprosthesis having the potential for abuse is not ripe yet.  This is in part due to the state of the technology.  As of now, no implantable is able to return all function back to the diseased nervous system.   The government has the greatest potential to abuse the technology.  It is now widely known that fear memories can be erased with animals.  Some of that work has been done in our lab for the treatment of PTSD in soldiers (we did this in rats).

However, Project MK-ULTRA or MKULTRA is a government project that started in 1948 and studies mind control through chemical interrogation and neurostimulation.  The project was first run by Sidney Gottlieb, Frank Olson and William Sargant. Although MK-ULTRA is most recognized with the LSD testing in the 1950′s and 1960′s, they have been involved with many other experiments in mind control related testing.  MK-ULTRA has tested interrogation through fear of deadly animals and Subproject 54, which through “perfect concussion” tried to erase the memories of U.S. submarine crew.  Some of the most secret projects in U.S. history all took place under MK-ULTRA, such as Projects Paperclip, Chatter, Bluebird and Artichoke.  The usage of electric shock to the brain for the creation of amnesia with hypnosis was discussed by an ARTICHOKE document dated 3 December 1951: “[Deleted] is reported to be an authority on electric shock. He is a psychiatrist of considerable note. [Deleted] explained that electric shock might be of considerable interest to the ‘Artichoke’ type of work. He stated that the standard electric-shock machine (Reiter) could be used. He stated that using this machine with convulsive treatment, he could guarantee amnesia for certain periods of time, and particularly he could guarantee amnesia for any knowledge of use of the convulsive shock. He stated that the lower setting of the machine produced a different type of shock. When this lower current type of shock was applied without convulsion, it had the effect of making a man talk. He said that this type of shock produced in the individual excruciating pain.  He stated that there would be no question that the individual would bequite willing to give information if threatened with the use of this machine. It was [Deleted]‘s opinion that an individual could gradually be reduced through the use of electro-shock treatment to the vegetable level”(P. 44).

Q: What augmentation do you think has the most potential to benefit humanity?

A: I believe our targeted plasticity using vagus nerve stimulation might be the single greatest innovation to benefit patients coming out of the labs in the next 10 years.  The idea that we can harness the brain’s natural plasticity and redirect to reverse disease states is a big idea that can really help patients.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Among gamers, Deus Ex is something of a legendary fusion of disparate gaming styles. Among science fiction buffs, Deus Ex is lauded for managing to take two awesome genres, William Gibson-esque cyberpunk and Robert Anton Wilson-level conspiracy theories, and jam them together into an immanentizing of the eschaton unlike anything you’ve seen since Doktor Sleepless. And among transhumanists, Deus Ex brought up every issue of humanity’s fusion with technology one could imagine. It is a rich video game.

So when Square Enix decided to pick up the reins from Eidos and create a new installment in the series, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DX:HR), I was quite excited. The first indication DX:HR was not going to be a crummy exploitation of the original’s success (see: Deus Ex 2: Invisible War), was the teaser trailer, shown above. Normally, a teaser trailer is just music and a slow build to a logo or single image that lets you know the game is coming out. Instead, the development team decided to demonstrate that it was taking the philosophy of the game seriously.

What philosophy? you might ask. Why transhumanism, of course. Nick Bostrom, chair of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, centers the birth of transhumanism in the Renaissance and the Age of the Enlightenment in his article “A History of Transhumanist Thought” [pdf]. The visuals of the teaser harken to Renaissance imagery (such as the Da Vinci style drawings) and the teaser ends with a Nietzschean quote “Who we are is but a stepping stone to what we can become.” Later trailers would reference Icarus and Daedalus (who also happened to be the names of AI constructs in the original game), addressing the all-too-common fear that by pursuing technology, we are pursuing our own destruction. This narrative thread has become the central point of conflict in DX:HR. Even its viral ad campaign has been told through two lenses: that of Sarif Industries, maker of prosthetic bodies that change lives, and that of Purity First, a protest group that opposes human augmentation. The question is: upon which part of our shared humanity do we step as we climb to greater heights?

When was the last time a video game asked you an existential question about the nature of our species? The tension between the proponents and opponents of transhumanism in DX:HR is heightened by the ambiguous opinion towards enhancement of the main character, Adam Jensen. Jensen’s own enhancements are a result of the need to save his life after a traumatic attack. Unlike Tony Stark, Jensen does not craft his own mechanized additions, but must instead come to terms with the cybernetic hand he has been dealt. DX:HR is not interested in cybernetics as merely a fun backdrop for a video game, but instead treats enhancement as the serious ethical issue that it is. The world of the game is set in a “Neo-Renaissance” where even the characters’ clothing reminds us that transhumanism is born out of the Age of Enlightenment. As a prequel to the original Deus Ex, DX:HR takes us into a world where augmentation and cyberization are still new to humanity and shows us how painful the transition into a transhuman future might be.

To dive deeper into these issues, I had a chat with Mary DeMarle, the lead writer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, about how the ethics of enhancement and augmentation were considered when crafting the game’s story and characters.

Q: How did you approach the topic of augmentation? What were your thoughts about cyborgs and human engineering before you began your research?

A: As soon as I knew we wanted to center the game around the concept of human augmentation and where advancements in neuroprosthetics might take Mankind, I knew I needed to do a lot of research. I started with a book entitled, “Radical Evolution” by Joel Garreaux. It was a great introduction not only to the subject of human engineering, but also to the various theories and arguments for and against it. After that, I split my research efforts in two, spending some of my time reading up on the technological advancements, and some of my time reading up on the philosophical debate. I have to admit that, before starting all this research, I had tended to think of cyborgs and human engineering as the stuff of Science Fiction — something I love to read and immerse myself in conceptually, but not something I might actually see in this reality.

Q: How have those views changed as you’ve worked on this project?

A: I think the biggest change was the realization that cyborgs and human engineering are not only possible, but probable in our lifetime. When you talk to people who are working in the field — people like Will Rosellini, our technical consultant — and you learn about current projects and how close we are to achieving some of the advancements we depict in the game, you can’t help but be amazed. I’ve also had the opportunity to talk with people who have not just overcome disabilities through advancing technologies, but who have gone on to achieve things most “able-bodied” people never will. In the process, I’ve seen the potential and the incredible allure of human augmentation. At the same time, a lot of my research into the dangers of experimentation and unregulated industries has made me understand the other side of the debate. It truly is a rich, complex issue that becomes all the more fascinating the more you dive into it.

Q: Can you please give a brief summary of how augmentations are invented and popularized in the world of the game? What are the motivating factors for those who oppose augmentation?

A: As part of the game’s backstory, we envisioned a series of technological, historical, economic, and cultural events in the decades leading up to 2027 (the year in which the game takes place) which together lead to the advancement and proliferation of mechanical augmentations. In the technological arena, leading researchers discover how to significantly improve the way implanted (artificial) electrodes and the human nervous system interact, leading to a revolution in neuroprosthetics. At the same time, an increase in the number of people needing prosthetic limbs — due to military conflicts and a few devastating natural disasters in parts of the world — creates a unique demand for the tech. In the economic realm, a devastating terrorist attack destabilizes the oil industry, adding to the world’s existing economic woes, and catapulting the world economy into a severe crisis. Governments respond by opening up oil shale reserves for development; by and large the people getting jobs in this and other high risk, physically demanding industries turn out to be those who are mechanically enhanced. Unable to compete for these lucrative jobs, several “able-bodied” people sue for the right to amputate their own healthy limbs. Meanwhile, on the cultural front, several highly popular artists, entertainers, and athletes begin sporting new augments and winning unprecedented accolades. People begin viewing mechanical augmentations as something everyone could (and maybe even should) have, and their popularity takes off.

Not everyone is pleased, however; people opposed to the technology end up, by and large, falling into three camps. Those who feel threatened by it (not everyone can afford mechanical augmentations and if someone doesn’t get one, might he end up losing his job to someone who does?); those who object to it on religious grounds (God made human beings in his image and trying to change or “improve” them is morally wrong); and those who object to it for intellectual reasons (using biotechnology to alter the human body risks fundamentally changing who we are as a species. Therefore, scientists and researchers are tampering with human nature without even realizing the danger they are putting Mankind in and should be closely regulated.)

Q: How would the average person in the street feel about augmentation in the world of the game?

A: It depends on who the person is and where he lives. Some will see it as a wonderful thing; a chance to improve life for one’s self and others by taking control of your own evolution and becoming all that you can be. Others will see it as dangerous and say we shouldn’t be playing God or tampering with Human Nature. Still others will despise it (and those who use it) due to fear, jealousy, and basic ignorance. Others won’t have made up their minds yet, since they can see both the benefit of the technology and the ways in which the debate itself is tearing at the fabric of society.

Q: I’ve been following the viral marketing campaign for DX:HR. First Sarif Industries was introduced (via their website/advertisements) and then their ads were countered by Purity First activists who exposed the dark side of augmentations and defaced the Sarif website. What is at stake in the conflict between those companies designing and building augmentations and those who oppose human augmentation?

A: On one hand you could say that the basis of the conflict is philosophical, so what’s at stake are people’s very strongly held beliefs. One side believes that achieving self-controlled human evolution is Mankind’s destiny and that fear of the unknown should not prevent us from realizing it. The other side believes that Man does not have the wisdom of God and must let nature run its course. But of course, there are a variety of other factors at stake as well. Mechanical augmentations are part of a highly lucrative industry, and some people want to ensure that this remains true without rules or regulations so they can “cash in.” Others fear the unregulated, uncontrolled spread of the technology within the “ignorant masses” and will do anything they can to control who gets to use it and who doesn’t.

Q: Adam Jensen, before his accident, is torn between augmentation and remaining “all natural.” How does that perspective shift over the course of the game?

A: Adam hasn’t decided how he feels about the whole augmentation debate at the start of the game, precisely because we wanted to use his initial indifference and ignorance as a way of exposing the debate to players. He gets tossed into the middle of things when his company is attacked and he’s forced to become augmented. He never has a choice in the matter, and as he struggles to understand who attacked him and why, he gets exposed to the full brunt of prejudice on both sides. Since you are playing Adam, you get to experience this firsthand as well. Thus, how Adam’s perspective changes over the course of the game really depends on how your perspective shifts. You’re the one playing him. You are the one making choices and witnessing the consequences.

Q: What are your personal opinions around augmentation? Do you think prosthetics should only be available to those who’ve lost limbs? If the technology progresses enough, would it make sense to deliberately replace a fully functional natural limb with a cybernetic one?

A: I think augmentation can be both a positive and a negative thing. It’s a tool — and like all tools, it really depends on who’s welding it and why. Individuals should be able to decide what is good for them as individuals (so long as their choice doesn’t harm others) and if the technology progresses enough, it may very well make sense for people to choose to replace a fully functional natural limb with a cybernetic one. I, however, would probably choose not to.

Q: Using your crystal ball to look into the future, how realistic do you think a “Purity First” style conflict is? Do you foresee conflicts between those who choose to alter their bodies and those who oppose cyberization?

A: It’s really hard for me to say. People have an awful tendency to want to force their views on others, and intolerance of what is different can definitely devolve into violence. I think the reasons we’ve ascribed to both sides of the debate in the game — fear, greed, jealousy, religious and/or personal beliefs and ethics — are valid enough to spark conflicts, so I think it definitely could happen if the issue ever grew contentious enough. But I would hope that saner minds would prevail.

Deus Ex 3: Human Revolution is a cyberpunk video game coming out later this year. I, for one, am pretty excited. Set in the near future the game is a prequel to the original Deus Ex. For those of you who aren’t video game fanatics, the first Deus Ex is a cyberpunk conspiracy thriller that follows around a transhuman protagonist, JC Denton, as he tries to keep the world from spiraling into Armageddon. Robots, A.I., genetically modified animals, and cyborgs aplenty help and hinder him. Denton himself has several nano-augmentations that give him superhuman abilities (e.g. cloaking, super-strength). Deus Ex 3 explores the rise of general cybernetic augmentation and the corporate espionage that accompanies it. As part of the viral ad campaign you can access the website for Sarif Industries, the leading manufacturer of cybernetic prosthetics. I love the boilerplate:

No one should ever have to give up a normal life because of a random incident, or indeed, lose a dream over a physical limitation. So believes David Sarif, idealist, philanthropist, founder and CEO of Sarif Industries. Pursuing his belief, Mr. Sarif acquired a failing Detroit auto factory in 2007 and repurposed it for the automated manufacture of prosthetics.

The weirdness of the site comes from its nearness to reality. There are links for the stock price and pictures of the interior of the main headquarters. There is even an ethics statement!

A standout piece is the ad for Sarif’s products (cyber hands, eyes, and arms), which seemed like a perfect pastiche of every pharmaceutical ad I’ve seen in the past year: testimonials by attractive people in bright lighting engaging in their favorite cultural or outdoor activities, like rock climbing and football throwing (though mercifully not through a tire wing). Also interesting is the news feed which features headlines I had to research a bit to see they aren’t quite true. The “road to here” also provides a strange alt-history of augmentation and prosthetics that gives you the feeling this all might just be right around the corner. The site’s slickness and dedication to near-reality makes it an eerie predictor of what a future prosthetics company may actually look like.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Image via Sarif Industries

When you bundle up all the time that gamers everywhere pour into their favorite games, the statistics are simply staggering. World of Warcraft’s legion of devotees, for example, have now spent more than 50 billion hours—about 6 million years—roaming their mythical, digital universe. Halo 3 players banded together to reach a kill tally of 10 billion, and when they blew past it, kept on shooting in pursuit of 100 billion.

If 10,000 hours of practice represents a sort of genius threshold, then gamers around the world are crossing that threshold. “This means that we are well on our way to creating an entire generation of virtuoso gamers,” writes game designer Jane McGonigal.

You might recognize McGonigal from her talk at TED, “Gaming Can Make a Better World.” But now that speech has become a full-on how-to guide: her new book Reality Is Broken, which came out yesterday. It details how games can fix what’s wrong with the real world (and not just escape from it).

When commentators bandy about those eye-popping numbers about how much time gamers invest in games, it’s usually done to bemoan the youth of America wasting their time on trivial pursuits. But to McGonigal, the allure of games can be used for good. Where our workaday lives can be filled with tedium and busy work, games challenge us with what she calls “hard fun”—hard work that’s satisfying. Games can improve our social connections, and they can provide a huge arena for collaboration.

Games, McGonigal writes, can fix what’s wrong with reality on small or large scales. A personal example: When she was struggling to recover from a concussion, she invented a game and enlisted friends and family as characters with tasks to fulfill, like coming over to cheer her up or keeping her off caffeine. A world-level example: EVOKE, a free online multiplayer games that challenges its players to solve major social ills like hunger and poverty.

We talked to her recently about her mission to save the world with games:

DISCOVER: What are you working on right now?

Jane McGonigal: There are a couple of big things. One of them is Gameful—we’re calling it a secret headquarters online for gamers and game developers who want to change the world. That was based on how many emails and Facebook messages I get from people who saw my TED talk or heard about these games and want to make one or play one, or learn how to design games so that they can make one. It’s a cross between a social network and a collaboration space online. So far we have over 1,100 games developers signed up. That’s a pretty significant proportion of game developers in the U.S. They committed to not just entertaining with games, but making a positive impact.

I also have a new start-up company, called Social Chocolate. It’s a company with which we’re creating gameful experiences that are based on scientific research about power-positive emotions and positive relationships—basically, games that are designed from top to bottom to improve your real life and to strengthen your relationships.

In the book, you write about games’ ability to captivate and satisfy our minds on a “primal” level. Why are games so good at getting in touch with our primal nature?

That is such a cool question. We’ve been playing games since humanity had civilization—there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It’s so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases. If you give us a good game, we can overcome our society’s “make you feel stupid for dancing in front of other people” feeling, or trying to block all thoughts of death because it’s depressing and we’re not supposed to be depressed. The game is much older than any of these societal constraints. So that, I think, makes it a powerful platform for getting in touch with things we’ve lost touch with.

Dancing’s really interesting because if you look at the new games with Kinect and PS Move and the Wii, it’s opening up this different kind of gamer experience. When you watch people play these games, the word “joy” is what you’d use to describe it. It’s different from the kind of immersion that we think of with games where we’re really focused mentally. The physical engagement in combination with music and movement and other people makes it feel more like ritual than computer games have been.

Yet, you say, the mission to create joy in games is often hampered because of the “uncoolness” of happiness. So how do we get over ourselves?

I was curious when I started the Gameful project if game developers would really get behind this idea. Because, there’s definitely that sense among some game developers that it would ruin the fun to be serious about making people happy or improving real life. Is it corny? Does it take away from the fantasy of games? I think there will be a huge part of the game development world that continues to feel that way. But what I’m seeing every year at the gamers’ conferences in a higher percentage of the game industry waking up to the responsibility that comes with the power. I hate to say this, but it’s not so much about wanting to make the world a better place as it is saying, “Wow, we are wielding a tremendous amount of power over young people’s lives. This is great; we’ve invented this powerful medium that’s capable of engaging people like nothing else. But is that what we want to do with our lives, or do we want to do something that matters while we’re wielding that power?”

If you make it a game, gamers will play it no matter what your motivation is in making it. FoldIt is a good example. Clearly, a lot of gamers would rather cure cancer while they’re gaming than do nothing while they’re gaming. It didn’t make the game less exciting to be doing good; it made the game more exciting to be doing good. But it only works because they made a really good game.

Is the world ready for this idea that games can fix serious real-world problems?

In general, I think there are 2 groups of people who don’t push back at all. One are the hardcore gamers who know that they’re capable of doing amazing things and are happy to hear somebody actually talk about that possibility seriously. There’s been a lot of talk about gamers as if they’re wasting their lives, or they’re never going to amount to anything, or they’re not learning anything that really matters. People who play a lot of games love to hear this idea—the games that you love could become a part of your life, not a distraction from your life.

Parents of gamers also seem to get it right away. Parents know that their kids are capable of doing extraordinary things, and they want to believe the best in them—and to have somebody explain to them the science of why games could actually empower their kids rather than waste their lives. They see how much time their kids are playing games and they know that there’s nothing wrong with their kids. They just don’t understand what that passion is about.

People who don’t have gamer friends or family are the hardest to convince. There’s still a perception that games are like single-player experiences with guns more often than not. Usually I have to explain to people that 3 out of 4 gamers prefer cooperative to competitive, and that the majority of our game play is social.

What about the idea of gamer’s regret? Despite all the positive possibilities you’ve outlined for games, even gamers get that creeping feeling—after hours of play—like perhaps they’re wasting their time. How much is too much, and will that stand in the way of games changing the world?

There was a really significant study that tracked 1,100 soldiers for a year, and looked at how they were spending their free time with things they considered coping mechanisms—using Facebook, listening to music, reading, working out, or playing video games. They correlated this with incidences of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, suicide attempts, and domestic violence. The found that by a very wide margin, the most psychologically protected individuals—who had the lowest rates of any of these negative experiences—were people who were playing video games 3 to 4 hours a day. The benefit started at an hour a day, and it got better and better on this perfect U-curve up to 3 to 4 hours a day. And then if you started to play more than 4 hours a day, it got steeply less beneficial until it was actually harmful to play a lot of video games. That was fascinating—it was more beneficial than anything but working out 7 hours a day.

If you think about how much time that is, that’s about 21 hours a week, which is where you see gamer’s regret kicking in. Usually, after 20 hours a week, people start going online and asking questions like, “Is this too much?” or “Am I the only one doing this?” It’s almost as if gamers have naturally hit upon the appropriate level. And now we have this huge scientific study that shows, with a lot of rigorous data analysis, that that is the level at which it becomes dangerous and harmful. It’s in the science, and it’s in our experience.

There have all kinds of interesting studies that have come out even since the book was finished about games providing psychological resilience or preventing nightmares or preventing PTSD by playing Tetris. The short version is: If you start to look at the literature about how absolutely, quantifiably games are making us better—better psychologically, better socially—then you don’t really need to worry about how much time you’re spending playing games unless you cross that threshold.

You talk about using games to strengthen relationships you already have, like playing Lexulous with your Mom. But what can games do to build new relationships?

There are a lot of people thinking about city-scale games, and neighborhood-scale games, which definitely hold the possibility of strengthening relationships with people whom it could be useful in the future for you to know and trust. I’ve talked to people about designing apartment-scale buildings, multi-unit scale buildings where nobody in the building knows each other, or playing games in companies, where there are a thousand people and you don’t interact with most of them. There are a lot of companies that are using games to facilitate that ambient sociability, so if you walk down the hallway you’re more likely to recognize somebody and know who you might want to cooperate with.

Take something like a game on a plane: Even a weak social connection with a flight attendant or someone you might see again is important. Evidence shows that having even weak social connections in a stressful situation is really good for your health and your ability to handle that situation. Just a vaguely familiar face can diminish your stress levels. It’s interesting to think about weak social connections. Obviously playing with your mom is important, but even that possibility of someone’s face being more familiar as you walk down the street or get on a plane could be really beneficial.

But is gaming really making us more connected? Just a few weeks before your book was released MIT professor Sherry Turkle‘s book Alone Together came out, warning about the isolating dangers of technology. What’s you’re response to that?

The social connectivity benefits of gaming do work better when you’re playing in the same room, because face-to-face contact and physical presence are crucial to the social bonding science. When parents or gamers ask me “what’s the best game to play?”, I say that playing face-to-face is more beneficial than playing online.

But a lot of people don’t have access to friends and family face-to-face as often as they would like. You’ve got kids who move so they don’t see their friends anymore, or their parents won’t let them out. They want them to be home; there’s a lot of sense that the world isn’t safe. So you see a lot of young gamers saying this is the closest way that they have to keep their old friendships alive or to actually have social interaction in the evening. That’s definitely better and more social than nothing, than just passively watching TV or passively reading a comic book.

And you also see for introverts, who are less likely to seek out social interactions, the online meditation can serve as a good psychological buffer. They can build social connection through the Internet that they would be less likely to build in real life, because in real life it’s stressful and exhausting. But the Internet makes it safer and less exhausting. It can be kind of a gateway for them to new friendships or relationships.

You say games can fix reality both on the small scale—like bringing joy and connectivity into people’s lives—and the large scale, addressing serious issues. What real-world problems need games, but don’t have them?

The two biggest problems that will be solved together, potentially, are obesity and world peace.

There’s really interesting research that came out this year looking at the rise in diabetes and the influence of diabetes on aggression and violence and crime. It turns out that there’s an extraordinary correlation between rising diabetes rates and all kinds of violent crime, and the tendency to wage war—even when you control for poverty and other social aspects.

So there’s new, interesting thinking that the best way to create world peace would be to reduce the diabetes trend, which is tied to the obesity trend, which is our number one health concern in the U.S. There is this huge space of games that are being created for physical activity, and games have also historically had quite a lot of content around war—World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Call of Duty. But this idea that we could use games to reduce obesity, stop diabetes, and that that would lead to world peace, I think is really fascinating.

I would like to see long-term future forecasting games dedicated to exploring connections like that between unexpected trends. If you weren’t in the field of glucose research, you might not know that the fastest way to innovate peace is to solve diabetes. So you get people from different fields looking at really science, and then they can start to make connections.

A strange additional element of the social dimension of science operating in this comment is a certain fixation with credit among scientists, nicely expressed by Kissinger in his “There is no politics quite as vicious as academic politics, because there is so little at stake.” In doing science, few things cause more grief than arguments over who contributed what to a scientific study, and what order the authors names should have on some publication. The suggestion that Feynman got his idea from elsewhere will immediately incite a credit fight among supporters and detractors; the fact that the source was literature just adds another dimension to this fight.

Colin Milburn also talks about barriers in the humanities to properly understanding the interactions between narrative fiction and bench work in the laboratory. One of these is the idea of narrative fiction having organic unity that doesn’t take well to decomposition into the most adaptable and usable parts from a scientific perspective.

Despite these barriers from both sides, it’s clear that there’s lots of ideas flowing from science fiction into science itself. Milburn suggests we think of science fiction as being repurposed and remixed into lab bench practice through three different kinds of “mods“. The first is the blueprint mod where some discrete part of science fiction is used as a blue print for something in real life. He gives the example of Second Life, which was a blue print mod from the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash.” The second is the supplementary mod, where the originating sci-fi has elements of technical impossibility to it, so it can’t be taken into the lab without some substantial modifications. Teleportation is an example of this: the quantum entanglement underlying recent examples can only occur with zero-mass states of atoms, which is to say pure information, a bit of a problem for applying it to people a la Star Trek even with the most strenuous of diets.  The third is the speculative mod. Here science projects its future possibilities using the language of sci-fi. Milburn gives Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” as an example of one of these mods.

As Milburn’s categorization of the ways in which fictional narratives about science and technology get put into practice percolates in my mind, I see a rich stream of case studies in my own work and those of my colleagues. It would be good if the result of looking at scientific practice through the lens of these ideas would be to nudge these two creative enterprises — work at the bench, and the crafting of stories — a bit closer together. Perhaps in the future scientists will have workshops (modshops?) with story creators in a similar way in which business execs collaborate with creatives to get people thinking outside of their usual constraints.

Other links: The science-humanities gap is often discussed with reference to C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. Interdisciplinary programs that combine art and science studies attempt to heal the divide: here’s a discussion of some work on that.

Launch Pad 2010 Attendees

Launch Pad is a free, NASA-funded workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

The workshop’s mission is to:

…teach writers of all types about modern science, primarily astronomy, and in turn reach their audiences. We hope to both educate the public and reach the next generation of scientists.

The person who runs Launch Pad, Mike Brotherton, is a wizard at using sci-fi as a vehicle to teach actual science (or, in his own words, he’s a wizard at funding his own science-fiction habit).  A few years ago he received NSF funding to compile ”Diamonds in the Sky” — an anthology of hard science-fiction stories that also can be used by physics and astronomy teachers as a vehicle to teach real science. Some of the stories are quite good and worth the read. Perhaps we’ll see “Diamonds in the Sky II”  in the not-too-distant future, populated with stories from former Launch Pad attendees!

Launch Pad 2011 and 2012 are funded, and there’s still time to apply for next year!

The Acceleglove is clunky and ungraceful by comparison. The cloth is thick, because it has to conceal circuitry, and long metal rods reach from the wrist up past the elbow to capture arm motion. (Former DISCOVER columnist Jaron Lanier pointed out that one problem with the interface that Minority Report made famous was that it caused a lot of arm fatigue; presumably, the metal rods will not improve that situation.) Sometimes warts emerge when a sci-fi device becomes real.

Earlier versions of the data glove have been around for years in the form of motion-capture suits or virtual-reality gloves (and, of course, the old-school Nintendo Power Glove). Fifth Dimension, a leader in virtual-reality equipment, has gloves that run from $2,000 to $40,000 for a top-of-the-line, 21-sensor, wireless pair. But those prices have limited it to high-end markets, like mainstream motion pictures and TV commercials.

The Acceleglove, which will come in at about $500, uses an accelerometer in each finger to measure its position. These devices measures use tiny crystals to measure changes in the finger’s orientation with respect to gravity, the force that puts the “accele” in accelerometer. (Accelerometers tell iPhones when to switch between portrait and landscape mode, and they’re used in laptops to turn off the hard drive the poor thing is dropped.) As a finger of the glove moves, the crystals’ charge changes, indicating the finger’s location and orientation to a computer. The accelerometers transmit the data to a circuit board at the back of the hand, which in turn uses a USB cable to link to a computer. (Here’s a demo video.)

Applications for the Acceleglove are still under development, but there are some pretty nifty ideas out there.  Researchers at George Washington University (where the glove was first developed) hope to use the glove to allow speakers of sign language to translate their signs directly into text on a computer screen, or even into speech. The military, naturally, wants to use the gloves for fine control of unmanned drones, and games makers see incredible new forms of entertainment entertainment.

The AcceleGlove is also easily capable of manipulating images on a screen, like a mouse, and it hardly seams a stretch to imagine that one day we too will be able to say, Scotty-style, “Keyboard. How quaint.”

Now, Wolfenstein 3D has been released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Three things are interesting about this release: first is that the project was handled largely by the John Carmack, the programming genius who co-created the original Wolfenstein for the PC (which, in 1992, meant designing for a world where a 33 MHz 486 was considered to be a computing powerhouse).

Second is that the code used in the iPod version descends directly from Carmack’s original codebase—many ports of classic games on modern platforms are in fact rewrites, which often fail to preserve that magic something that made the original so playable. Carmack has benefited from a decision he made years ago to release the code for the original Wolfenstein to the open source community. The open source code had been modified over the years to run with modern systems, making the port to the iPod platform much easier.

Third, Carmack has come up with a decent way to control the game on the iPod, sans keyboard or mouse. This is pretty significant—although the PC version of Wolfenstein is most celebrated for its impressive graphics engine, it, and its successor, Doom, established a defacto standard for controlling first person games that is still used today on PCs. While other first-person games on the iPod have already been released, I have often found them difficult to play, with non-intuitive controls. But Wolfenstein’s control system is simple, intuitive and effective, allowing me to mow down bad guys and blast through levels just as effectively as I did back in 1992. By creating an effective control interface for the iPod’s touch screen, the rerelease of Wolfenstein may herald a new wave of gaming on the iPod (in fact, the iPod version of Wolfenstein was originally conceived as a toy internal project to test different control interfaces, according to Carmack’s programming notes). Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just happen to have a Pixies playlist on my iPod Touch waiting to go…

A helluva lot of fun actually, dispelling my fears about its premise. You see, Wright has tried to make a game based around evolving a creature from a tidepool through sentience and beyond before: in 1990, as a sequel to the seminal SimCity, he released SimEarth. SimEarth allowed players to control things like plate tectonics, or bombard a planet with comets to create oceans, in the hopes of creating an ecosystem conducive to intelligent life. While intellectually interesting, the actual gameplay was a little dull.

But Spore has fun baked into its DNA: the game takes up a whopping 4 gigabytes of disk space, and all those bytes show up in the deep richness of the game’s environments (and then some. For example, in a later stage of Spore, there’s an in-game tool you can use to compose your own national anthem.) A huge amount of effort has gone in making the gameplay intuitive, rather than have the player drown in a sea of complex controls with no clear idea of what to do (which was big part of the problem with SimEarth.) Rather than an omniscient God looking down on your worlds, Spore puts you right into the action, and gives you the feel of truly exploring something vast.

Spore has five distinct stages, and the biological evolution angle actually only shows up in the first two. The first stage is brief, as you try to avoid being eaten in a tidepool and accumulate enough points to be allowed to crawl onto land. The second stage is where things really get interesting: as a land creature, now the goal is to accumulate enough points to develop sentience. As you roam the landscape, you have frequently have the chance to alter and incorporate new parts into your body plan. Your personal preferences and style of play will soon mold a unique creature–want to feast on that herd of heavily-armored herbivores two hills over? Invest in some serious teeth and claws. Tired of getting eaten by a nasty predator? Maybe faster feet are what you want.

The kind of choices you make in each stage of the game manifest in different starting abilities at the next stage. After the initial two stages, cultural evolution takes over, and you find yourself designing villages and airplanes rather than better tails and arms. In truth, the two middle stages, where you bring your tribe to continental prominence, and then seek global economic, military or religious domination, are the weakest, simply for being the least original. The gameplay adopts a style familiar to anyone who has played a real-time strategy title. But they’re still fun.

The final stage is when you achieve interstellar flight: you can explore the universe, searching for rare artifacts, or trade and establish diplomatic relations with your neighbors, or go to war, or all of the above. Comets, asteroid belts, nebulae, black holes, gas giants and more fill a galaxy full of stars. You can visit every star, every planet orbiting every star, and every valley and hill on every planet–I’ve visited 250 star systems so far, and I haven’t even really made a dent in the total population.

My only quibble with the game is that there is no autosave and only one “save” slot per game, meaning that if you make a mistake that leads to disaster, you sometimes find yourself spending a lot of time just digging yourself out, but, on the other hand, this does play into the whole evolutionary concept of effects–good and bad, small and large–inexorably shaping the future.

So, Spore came out a few years later than anyone expected. Usually that means Bad Things (veteran gamers will remember the Daikatana debacle), but in this case the obvious attention to getting the details right means that Spore was worth the wait.

The central premise is that a Men-in-Black-style superhero, the Middleman, has recruited Wendy Watson, a struggling artist working temp jobs, to be his sidekick.

One of Wendy’s main qualifications? The Middleman figures her hours spent shooting XBox baddies with a light gun has given her a quick-draw and aim to rival Wild Bill Hickok’s.

It’s not a new idea in science fiction — video games surreptitiously or incidentally preparing young heros for real combat, with the 1984 movie The Last Starfighter being the prototype for the trope. It’s also an idea that had a pretty smooth and swift transition to the real world: in 2002 the U.S. Army launched America’s Army, a free First Person Shooter with production values that rival any commerical game’s. The game is designed to promote team play and is modelled on what a soldier would experience during training, rather than the elite-lone-wolf-warrior-blazing-guns-throughout-a-villian-filled-level style of most games, and the Army makes no bones about using the the game as a recruitment tool.

Do other games teach real-world skills? Certinaly, the line between flight simulation games and flight simulators used for training is now quite blurred — for example X-Plane comes in both a home version and a version that pilots can use to train towards various FAA-certificates. The flight software in each version is the same — it’s just that the official training version works with simulation hardware somewhat more sophisticated than a PC keyboard and a mouse. Nor can we forget Guitar Hero: if the secret vulnerability of the aliens bent on world conquest happens to be an aversion to air guitar, we’ll be all set. (What? It’s no worse an idea than some other ultimate weaknesses.)