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.

This is the third of a series of posts about the evolution of consciousness. In the first post, I laid out a basic theory that goes something like this: consciousness began to evolve about 350 million years ago, when we emerged from the water on to land. Why? By enabling vision to work over distances many times greater than in water, this move gave us the ability to perceive multiple futures.  As a result, the ability to consciously plan ahead became important.  In my last post, I detailed why long distance vision reigns supreme when it comes to planning (as opposed to other long distance senses such as hearing or sense of smell).

In this post, I want to make the argument more comprehensive. The crucial environmental condition for evolving neural structures to support planning is that there is an interlude— space to breathe— between perception and action. Without such a gap, only simple, fast, and direct transformations between sensory input and motor output can keep an organism safe from predators. But the long-range sensing abilities discussed in the last two posts are just one category of possibilities for such a gap to open: there are other fancy brain abilities unrelated to sensing that can also open this gap.

Here, I consider two such capabilities: memory and communication. An animal can plan to do something based on memory (“I remember good breakfast was always in this direction”), communication (“hey buddy, around the corner is a good place for lunch”), and, as discussed already, perception (“I see something tasty looking over there”). Let’s go through planning via memory and communication, and compare these to the perceptual route. Combined, the three different mechanisms are the very grist of the mill of consciousness-as-planning.

Remembrance of possible futures. If you have an accurate mental map of a space containing memorized landmarks, then you can devise multiple plans without sensing and execute them by going from landmark to landmark, where those landmarks are spaced no further apart than your sensing range (which could now be very short, and even work through touch). For example, imagine the landmarks are bushes of berries, and they are spaced apart a distance equal to or less than the range of the sensory system you are using to perceive the bushes. You’ve visited these bushes so often, you’ve memorized each bush’s position with respect to the others. (Such maps exist in all animal brains where they’ve been looked for. Their neural basis is under intensive investigation. Fairly elaborate ones have even been found in honey bees.)

Now, before you make your first move, you devise a plan for harvesting efficiently: 1) You know that you will be out until dusk, and you want to be able to see your home before it gets too dark, so you decide to start with the furthest bush and end with the bush closest to home; 2) You typically remove all the berries from a bush before moving on, so it’s important not to waste time in revisiting bushes you’ve already picked. So you devise a trajectory through the bushes that has no overlaps. Both aspects of this strategy can be provided by remembering a bush’s position. In fact, birds and bees use strategies of harvesting from plants that avoid revisits, and need to use memory for this.

Communication of possible futures. Bees have fantastic navigational systems that let them roam hundreds of meters from their hive to find a food source and describe its location to their nestmates back home. They use their relatively coarse visual system to obtain a local cue (optic flow) that lets them detect how far they’ve gone, and they sense direction using their ability to sense the angle of polarized light. They come back, and then communicate distance and direction to nest mates via their dance language. This means the hive mind has an extended sensory range and can collectively explore multiple places to find food. The same is true for humans, with their symbol systems. We can go over the hill, come back and tell our friends that there’s an ice cream stand beyond where we can see.  (Our ability to review this ice cream stand on Yelp, thereby enabling anyone in the world to find it on Google Maps, increases humanity’s possible futures exponentially to the point of creating a new phenomenon of choice anxiety.  But that’s another post entirely…)

Both memory and communication, then, can extend our perceptual capabilities, and thereby give us the room for multiple possible futures. One of the core parts of the idea I’ve been discussing here about how/why consciousness emerged in animals is that the neural basis for planning would have really been pushed once we had long range vision (after we came up on land). Could the ability to plan have come about because of improved memory or communication abilities, rather than long distance sensing?  While possible, this seems unlikely. Here’s why.

A problem for both memory-based and communication-based planning is that they depend on the goal being relatively stable in spatial position. For example, you can plan to go hunting in a place where tend to be are lots of antelopes, but to kill a particular antelope, you can’t hunt purely on the basis of memory—unless it happens to be paralyzed or dead, which is generally not the case.   Similarly, bees would not do so well to come home to their nest and communicate the position of a source of nectar if that source of nectar happened to be a very strange plant—a plansect, if you will—that had wings and was constantly moving around.

The point is clear: for stationary food sources or goals, both memory and communication work well in support of planning. But for unpredictable food sources, like the very nutrient rich body of another moving animal, memory and communication can get you part of the way (“antelope over the next hill!”) but can’t close the deal. Planning different possible paths to the most nutritious sources of energy requires long-distance perception.

Perception of possible futures. I therefore hypothesize that the biggest payoffs to our early land-based ancestors came from advances in long-range perception combined with small buffer of working memory to hold some different possible futures being considered. This combination lets you hunt a moving animal that may be devious and require rapid contemplation of multiple possible approaches to capture.

If this logic is correct, then consciousness may only come about in a world where animals developed a taste for eating other animals. Interestingly, experts in the evolution of the nervous system have suggested that it was only after animals started preying upon one another that diffuse neural nets (similar to those in sponges and jelly fish) condensed into what we now know as the brain over 500 million years ago (e.g., Northcutt and Gans’ “New Head Hypothesis” from the early 1980s). However, by my argument, carnivory alone would not have been sufficient for the birth of full-fledged awareness: you and your prey need to move onto land, where you can see it from a distance and envision several ways of successfully capturing it.  Once weighing these various options becomes useful, evolution can work its powerful ways in slowly accreting the necessary neural structures for thinking about these futures.

Image courtesy of GeoKansas.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes caught me off guard. I went into the film thinking it would be another anti-enhancement, “All scientists are Frankenstein’s trying to cheat nature” film. I have rarely been so happy to be wrong. Instead, the film treats the viewer to an entertaining exploration of animal rights, what it means to be human, and what’s at stake when it comes to enhancing our minds.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is told from the perspective of Caesar (Andy Serkis), a chimp who is exposed to an anti-Alzheimer’s drug, ALZ-112, in the womb. ALZ-112 causes Caesar’s already healthy brain to develop more rapidly than either a chimp or human counterpart. Due to a series of implausible but not unbelievable events, Caesar is raised by Will Rodman (James Franco), the scientist developing ALZ-112. Rodman is in part driven the desire to cure his father, Charles, (played masterfully by John Lithgow) who suffers from Alzheimer’s. As Caesar develops, his place in Will’s home becomes uncertain and his loyalty to humanity is called into question. After being mistreated, abandoned, and abused, Caesar uses his enhanced intelligence as a tool of self-defense and liberation for himself and his fellow apes.

That cognitive enhancement is a way of seeking liberty is a critical theme that gives Rise of the Apes a nuance and depth I was not anticipating. Though the apes are at times frightening, they are never monstrous or mindless. Though they are at time’s violent, they are never barbaric. Caesar and his comrades are oppressed and imprisoned – enhancement is a means to freedom. There is less Frankenstein and more Flowers for Algernon in the film than the trailer lets on. It’s an action film with a brain.

As Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not out yet, I’m reluctant to do a full analysis of the implications of the film’s plot. That will have to come after August 5th, when the movie releases.

I had a chance to interview Andy Serkis, James Franco, and director Rupert Wyatt. The interviews are posted after the jump, where you can see how James Franco was caught off guard by my questions about cognitive enhancement, Rupert Wyatt explores the way in which the apes mirror humanity, and Andy Serkis describes enhancement as a tool of liberation. It’s good stuff, enjoy.

These interviews are edited, but I will say I am mighty impressed by the thought and honesty all three put into there answers. If Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the beginning of a new series, I for one am excited by the potential for complexity and exploration of humanity and enhancement in the coming films.

A major argument against human enhancement is that most enhancements won’t be beneficial if everyone is enhanced. Being tall, for example, is only beneficial if you’re taller than most other people. In terms of competitive advantage, nearly any enhancement you look at fails the zero-sum test. Better, stronger muscles? Too bad, everyone else has those, so you won’t be an athletic super-star. Wiz-bang intelligence? Big deal, MIT just ups their entrance exam to compensate so only the most brilliant among a population of geniuses gets in. If all boats rise, you don’t benefit, right?

An excellent example of this mindset can be found in The Incredibles. My love of Pixar is not a mystery to anyone. However, one of the lines that bothers me most in any of their films is Syndrome’s motivating thesis in The Incredibles. Syndrome (Buddy Pine) is a once-in-a-generation genius who, born without superpowers like those of ElastiGirl and Mr. Incredible, builds technology that enables him to be superhuman. In short, Syndrome is what would happen if Tony Stark had been bullied as a kid and told by Captain America to let the big boys take care of everything.

When “monologuing” (the meta humor in the movie is fantastic), Syndrome betrays the kernel of his motivation to be a super villain. His goal is to neutralize those with superpowers (aka “supers”) so that when his robot attacks the city, he can be the sole savior. After being crowned a hero when the supers fail, he will sell his own gizmos and gadgets — rocket boots and zero-point energy among other things — to anyone who wants them. Thereby, he will give every person the opportunity to be super. And, by his logic, “When everyone is super, then no one will be.”

We can apply Syndrome’s concept to cognitive enhancement. That is, “When everyone is gifted and talented, no one will be.” Buddy, you are mistaken. Ender’s Game explains why.

There are enhancements that benefit you regardless of whether or not others have that same enhancement. The most obvious example is health. In order to enjoy being very healthy, I do not need everyone around me to be sick. Physical fitness, resilience to disease and injury, long lifespan, and sound mental health are all “general purpose goods.”

General purpose goods are aspects and capacities a person has that are almost always beneficial no matter the situation or context. Many enhancements that seem like zero-sum benefits within the context of competition are in fact general purpose goods in any other context. More over, some of these general purpose goods have an emergent benefit that results from many people being enhanced in a similar way.

Take intelligence, for example. In Ender’s Game, it initially seems as though the competitions and training missions are designed solely to see who is the best in battle. The best individual will then lead the attack. That, however, is not the purpose of the test. We know from the first lines of the book that Ender is the most intelligent of any human alive.

So what is the purpose of the games in the battle arena? The training process Ender goes through accomplishes two things. First, the school allows him to explore and hone his military skills so that he can be at his absolute best. Second, it allows him to determine who is the best and most intelligent among his peers. Ender never wins a single battle by himself. His victories come from having a brilliant team that can obey and intuit his orders as well as invent and improve ideas on the fly. Because his teammates are so intelligent, Ender can focus on the strategy of the entire war, not on micromanaging every little battle. The conclusion seems obvious, more intelligent people is better. Intelligence within a group is cumulative, not competitive.

The reason I use Ender’s Game as an example is that we human beings face a lot of existential threats. We have our current challenges such as climate change, over-population, the looming health care crisis, and the ever present threat of global nuclear war (forgot about that one for a while there, didn’t ya?); not to mention the improbable but possible future-threats of asteroid impact, AI uprising, or alien invasion. Having more rather than less great minds to work together to solve these problems could be the difference between human survival and extinction.

But, as it stands, the number of geniuses among humanity is a result of genetic statistical probability. Even in Ender’s Game, the generals fear that if Ender is hurt or killed there will be no one to replace him, dooming humanity. That’s where human cognitive enhancement comes in. Be it by genetic engineering, cognition-enhancing drugs, cybernetic-augmentation or some combination of the three, we will have the ability within this century to make most, if not all people, more intelligent. The emergent benefits for humanity that would result of an intelligence boom of this scale could be immense.

So Ender’s intelligence is not only not reduced by having intelligent peers, but it is amplified. As individuals, those who would receive cognitive enhancement benefit as well. No matter what context, I would benefit from being more intelligent. That is, I would benefit from being more creative, more analytical, and more articulate. No matter if I am skiing or playing the banjo or doing vector calculus or performing comedy, intelligence helps me do those things better and enjoy those things more.

Whether you look at it from an individual or a social perspective, cognitive enhancement benefits a person. When the technology exists and is safe, reliable, and affordable, there is no reason people should not be cognitively enhanced. In fact, we have an obligation to enhance our children, because they deserve to have the most opportunities and the best life possible. Therefore, every child deserves to be gifted and talented, both for their own individual quality of life and for the quality of life for future generations of humanity.

You never know when we might need a few good Enders to save our species.

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

Promotional image from Ender’s Game (comic) of Ender jumping into battle arena via Marvel.com

Ethics has a bizarre blind spot around parents and children. For no justifiable reason that I can discern, we deem it perfectly tolerable for a parent to decide unilaterally to raise their child genderless or under the Tiger Mother or laissez-faire method of parenting, but horror at the idea of someone “testing” one of these parental styles on a child. Recall, there is no test to become a parent, no minimum qualification or form of licensing. In fact, if you are so irresponsible as to unintentionally have a child you do not want and cannot support, you have more of a right (and obligation) to rear that child than a stranger with the means and desire to give that child a better life.

We erroneously connect the ability to reproduce with the ability to rear in our social norms and in our laws. As adoption, IVF, sperm/egg donation and surrogate mothers along with new family structures challenge the concept that the person who provides the gametes or womb is also the person who will teach the child to ride a bicycle, we need to investigate the impact of perpetuating the idea that there is a link between reproducing and rearing.

I would like to test this reproduce-rearing correlation with a thought experiment. The details of the thought experiment appear below the fold, but the conclusion is as follows: it would be ethically permissible for a scientist to adopt a large group of children and then perform specific, non-harmful, nature-vs-nurture social experiments on those children. My idea comes from an interview by Charles Q. Choi at Too Hard for Science? with Steven Pinker about just such an experiment:

There is one morally repugnant line of thought Pinker strenuously objects to that could resolve this question. “Basically, every nature-nurture debate could be settled for good if we could raise a group of children in a closed environment of our own design, they way we do with animals,” he says. . .

“The biological basis of sex differences could be tested by dressing babies identically, hiding their sex from the people they interact with, and treating them identically, or better still, dividing them into four groups — boys treated as boys, boys treated as girls, girls treated as girls, girls treated as boys,” he notes. . .

“There’s no end to the ethical horrors that could be raised by this exercise,” Pinker says.

“In the sex-difference experiment, could we emasculate the boys at different ages, including in utero, and do sham operations on the girls as a control?” Pinker asks. “In the language experiment, could we ‘sacrifice’ the children at various ages, to use the common euphemism in animal research, and dissect their brains?”

“This is a line of thought that is morally corrosive even in the contemplation, so your thought experiments can go only so far,” he says.

So let’s test the limits of Pinker’s last line. Ethics is rife with and wrought by horrific thought experiments designed to out our biases and assumptions. And I intend to use a thought experiment to expose our bias that reproductive capacity equals rearing capacity. That is, merely because you can have a kid doesn’t mean you should be allowed to decide how to raise it. Using three scenarios, I’ll prove that a team of scientists adopting a large group of children with the dual intent of raising happy and healthy children while also conducting non-surgical or invasive sociological experiments would be ethically permissible.

The immediate objection against social experimentation on children is that the children would be used as mere means, as objects upon which theories can be tested. That claim is false. Unlike Pinker, I believe you can draw a distinction between the “closed environment” and “sacrificial” kind of experimentation in which, for example, a child is killed and dissected to determine the impact of language on brain formation and social experimentation. “Sacrificial” experimentation shows no concern or respect for the child as a human being and would meet the conditions necessary to be described as being used as “mere means” as Kant intends it. But “sacrificial” experimentation is a gross and barbaric example. Pinker also cites examples of surgical genital alteration and in utero experimentation. These are unacceptable forms of experimentation on a child because, again, the child is treated as mere means and would suffer as a result of the experimentation. I argue that if and only if the experiments to not cause physical damage or severe suffering to the child and that the child is raised in a nurturing, safe, and supportive environment, then it would be acceptable to conduct nature-vs-nurture experiments on children.

To defend my case, I ask you to consider the following three scenarios. We start with the least controversial, which I call the 100 Family Scenario:

1. In a community, there are 100 couples of equal income and education level, each with one biological child. Half the families have a boy, half a girl.
2. In this community, a third of families attempt to raise their children with current gender norms (i.e. boys play in pants with trucks, girls in dresses with dolls), a third attempt to reverse their child’s gender norms (i.e. boys in dresses with dolls, girls in pants with trucks), and a third attempt to raise their children to be neutral (boys and girls wear the same outfits and play with similar toys). The children all live in nurturing, safe, and supportive households.
3. There is no coordination among the families, these numbers are statistical happenstance. Furthermore, by coincidence the families are all vigilant about journaling, recording, and filming unbiased observations and data about their children as they grow up.
4. After 20 years, a team of sociologists collects this data and, upon analysis, uses it to publish a paper about the impact of nurturing environment on gender expression and sexual preferences.

We have no outright ethical problems with this scenario. The data collection and child distribution are all happenstance. No one would find a fault in any one of the above steps. It is true that this isn’t a “closed environment” the way Pinker described, but that would also be an incredibly harsh way to raise a child, raising all sorts of concerns about tainting the data. A controlled approximation of similar life-style among many families acts as a superior variable control than a highly unnatural, closed, laboratory environment.

Now let’s combine steps three and four, in the 100 Sociologist Biological Family Scenario:

1. In a community, there are 100 couples of equal income and education level and within each couple in the community there is at least one parent who is a sociologist. Each family has one biological child. Half the families have a boy, half a girl.
2. In this community, a third of families attempt to raise their children with current gender norms (i.e. boys play in pants with trucks, girls in dresses with dolls), a third attempt to reverse their child’s gender norms (i.e. boys in dresses with dolls, girls in pants with trucks), and a third attempt to raise their children to be neutral (boys and girls wear the same outfits and play with similar toys). The children all live in nurturing, safe, and supportive households.
3. There is no coordination among the families, these numbers are statistical happenstance. The sociologist parents are all vigilant about journaling, recording, and filming unbiased observations and data about their children as they grow up.
4. After 20 years, these sociologists coordinate, collect the data and, upon analysis, use it to publish a paper about the impact of nurturing environment on gender expression and sexual preferences.

Again, there seems to be no major ethical breach in how the data was collected or how the children were raised. Having parents who are sociologists is not an ethical violation. Now consider the final scenario, which I call the 100 Sociologist Adopted Family Scenario:

1. A group of sociologists who wish to start families coordinate to conduct a 20 year study in which they will collect data about children they raise and, upon analysis, use it to publish a paper about the impact of nurturing environment on gender expression and sexual preferences.
2. The sociologists form a community, there are 100 couples of equal income and education level and within each couple in the community there is at least one parent who is a sociologist. Each family has one legally adopted child. The community coordinates to ensure that half the families adopt a boy, half a girl.
3. In this community, a third of families attempt to raise their children with current gender norms (i.e. boys play in pants with trucks, girls in dresses with dolls), a third attempt to reverse their child’s gender norms (i.e. boys in dresses with dolls, girls in pants with trucks), and a third attempt to raise their children to be neutral (boys and girls wear the same outfits and play with similar toys). The children all live in nurturing, safe, and supportive households.
4. There is coordination among the families, the divisions among the children are the result of planning and adherence to scientific standards. The sociologist parents are all vigilant about journaling, recording, and filming unbiased observations and data about their children as they grow up.
5. After 20 years, these sociologists coordinate, collect the data and, upon analysis, use it to publish a paper about the impact of nurturing environment on gender expression and sexual preferences.

My argument here is not that the final scenario is ethically permissible or impermissible, but to show there is no difference between the scenarios. The intent to study the children does not impact their quality of life, how they grow up, or whether or not a paper is published about their rearing. Though the children are a means to studying the nature-vs-nature debate, that is not the sole or primary purpose of the sociologist families adopting their respective children. The parents wish to start families and also wish to study gender norms. The parents in the first scenario have as much parental sovereignty as the parents in the last. Thus, there are no relevant ethical differences between the first and the third scenarios. We only perceive a difference because the children are adopted, which is no basis for a relevant ethical difference. Therefore, if it is morally permissible for parents to independently decide how to raise their children in regards to gender, it should be morally permissible for a team of scientists to conduct a rigorous experiment with their own adopted children on the impact of rearing on gender and sexual preferences.

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

Image of a happy family with a “cloned” child (thank you photoshop) by madnzany under cc license via Flickr Creative Commons

I’m back after a hiatus of a few weeks to catch up on some stuff in the lab and the waning weeks of spring quarter teaching here at Northwestern. In my last post, I put forward an idea about why consciousness– defined in a narrow way as “contemplation of plans” (after Bridgeman)–evolved, and used this idea to suggest some ways we might improve our consciousness in the future through augmentation technology.

Here’s a quick  review: Back in our watery days as fish (roughly, 350 million years ago) we were in an environment that was not friendly to sensing things far away. This is because of a hard fact about light in water, which is that our ability to see things at a far distance is drastically compromised by attenuation and scattering of light in water. A useful figure of merit is “attenuation length,” which in water is tens of meters for light, while in air it is tens of ten thousand meters. This is in perfectly clear water –add a bit of algae or other kinds of microorganisms and it goes down dramatically. Roughly speaking, vision in water is similar to driving a car in a fog. Since you’re not seeing very far out, the idea I’ve proposed goes, there is less of an advantage to planning over the space you can sense. On land, you can see a lot further out. Now, if a chance set of mutations gives you the ability to contemplate more than one possible future path through the space ahead, then that mutation is more likely to be selected for.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll wrote a great summary of my post. Between my original post and his, many insightful questions and problems were raised by thoughtful readers.

In the interest of both responding to your comments and encouraging more insightful feedback, I’ll have a couple of further posts on this idea that will explore some of the recurring themes that have cropped up in the comments.

Today, since many commenters raised doubts about my claim that vision on land was key – raising the long distance sensory capabilities of our sense of smell, and hearing, among other points – I thought I’d start with a review of why, among biological senses, only vision (and, to a more limited degree echolocation) is capable of giving access to the detail that could be necessary to having multiple future paths to plan over. Are the other types of sensing that you’ve raised as important as sight?

Having the kind of overview needed for real-time planning of a path to a goal – at least an unpredictable, moving goal like prey – requires being able to access detail over a large amount of space relative to where you are moving in your immediate future.  I’ll show why the only types of biological sensing capable of providing this sort of broad overview to animals are sight and echolocation, and why sight is easily the more powerful of the two.

Two important factors determine one’s ability to sense from a distance: resolution (the minimum size an object or a feature can be before you can no longer distinguish it), and range (how far away an object can be detected). Given our particular terrestrial environment, sight wins out over all other types of sensing on both counts.

First, a little bit on our yardsticks. Range designates the maximum typical distances that something is sensed. Resolution is fairly intuitive these days, since many of us have had the experience of working with some image we’ve grabbed from the internet with a resolution that is too low for our needs. You can measure it in a variety of ways, such as how many pixels can be resolved or displayed in a given unit of length. The new iPhone’s “retina” display has a resolution of 300 pixels per inch, for example, and as the publicity has suggested, this is similar to the resolving power of our eyes when the display is held at typical viewing distances.

For biological senses, resolution is partially set by how densely packed the sensory receptors are. For visual systems, the packing density in the fovea (for animals that have them), at the central part of the retina, is extremely high, and the density rapidly diminishes away from the fovea.

But there is another constraint, besides how closely spaced the sensory receptors are: the wavelength of the energy you are sensing the world with. As a first approximation, you cannot resolve objects below the wavelength of the energy you are sensing with.  This is true whether you are sensing the consequence of probing the environment with that energy, as in the case of bats and their echolocation, or just passively absorbing the energy emitted by some external object, such as an object reflecting sunlight into your visual system. In the case of vision, the wavelengths are small compared to the packing density of our sensory receptors, so we don’t notice this issue. In the case of probing with sound using an artificial sense (for humans), such as ultrasound, or in the case of echolocation for bats and dolphins, the resolution limits imposed by the energy become more constraining. At 80,000 cycles per second (what some bats use, and four times higher than we can hear), resolution is about one quarter of a centimeter. Dolphins emit at somewhat higher frequencies, but because sound goes about four times faster in water than in air, they end up with a resolution of about 1 centimeter.

With that background on range and resolution, we can ask “what senses provide detailed overviews at far distances (say, at least 100 times longer than your body)?”

Let’s go through some of the biological possibilities: hearing; echolocation, also referred to as sonar (which also involves hearing, but at a much higher frequency, and includes the generation of an echolocation beam); touch; taste; smell; flow sensing (in science referred to as the “mechanosensory lateral line”); sensing of weak electric fields, called “electrosense”; active electrical sensing, called “electrolocation” (similar to normal electrosense, but like echolocation, includes not only perception of electric fields, but generation of them as well—so hearing is to echolocation what electrosense is to electrolocation); magnetosense, the ability to sense Earth’s magnetic field; vision (all types, including polarized light, and ultraviolet). For simplicity, I will consider these one at a time, although in many biological situations, multiple senses would be combined.

Passive hearing: sound can travel a long distance before it can no longer be heard. Underwater, it can travel even further. But there is a problem: hearing can tell you something out there is producing sound (like a screeching animal), but it cannot tell you anything about all the things that are not producing sounds, like the quietly resting boulders nearby the screeching animal or the ferns silently bending in the wind across the stream from said animal. This is in great contrast with vision in daylight: everything that reflects light, which is basically everything, can be seen.

As a consequence, when you hear something, you can get a sense of the direction of the object producing sound, and an estimate of distance. So you can get closer to the thing that produces the sound, but using sound alone, it’s challenging to be clever about how you get closer, since you don’t know anything about the stuff in between you and the thing generating sound (again, we are taking these senses one at a time). If you’ve ever played the Hot and Cold game as a kid, this is similar: the sound gives you enough information to tell if you’re getting hot or cold (approaching or moving away), plus some sense of distance and what kind of object is making the sound.

Active hearing (echolocation, or sonar): echolocation has many of the benefits of vision, but without requiring light. Bats and dolphins generate echolocation pulses which travel out and then return after being reflected by nearby objects. By moving the parts of their body that generate the echolocation pulse (mouth or nose), they can “scan” their environment. However, both resolution and range is significantly worse than in the case of vision, at least on land. We already went through resolution limits of echolocation. In terms of the range of echolocation, in water it is quite good – up to one hundred meters for the kinds of objects dolphins hunt for  — far better than vision in water. It’s interesting that a mammal, that may have been used to large visual ranges on land prior to going back to the ocean, came up with a style of sensing that gives you the best long distance sensing in water. Due to more rapid attenuation of high frequencies in air, bats have a shorter range – on the order a few meters for their prey.

The primary reason for the short range of echolocation systems is that their probe signal falls off with the fourth power of distance. This means that in order to double the range of an echolocation system, you need 16 times more power. Obtaining large ranges with echolocation, therefore, runs into energy consumption issues, and limits to the loudness of sounds that can be generated before damage to tissue ensues.

Touch/taste: This one is easy. While for small insects and rodents, touch appendages can reach out for a good fraction of body length, one body length is about the maximum for the length of things like whiskers and antennae before they become unwieldy. Taste sensors are on the body surface or on things like the tongue, so like touch, isn’t great for sensing at a distance.

Smell: Like passive hearing, the sense of smell can have fantastic range (sharks can smell injured prey from 5 km; male moths can find female moths at up to 10 km). But once again, it only tells you about things emitting odors. This allows you to approach them (if you are lucky with respect to environmental conditions), but you can’t use smell for a detailed overview of the space ahead. It’s fun imagining what would be needed in order to have smell work this way. Every object would need to be emitting a distinct odor, and downstream, these odors would have to stay relatively separated. Then, by scanning your nose through the odor array, you might be able to obtain an “olfactograph” of the space ahead!

Flow sensing: Fish and some other aquatic animals possess special sense organs for detecting flows due to the movement of other animals. This can guide predatory strikes. Seals have been demonstrated to be able to follow flows made by fish after some time has elapsed. In general, however, flow sensing is very “near field”, operating on the range of a body length or two at most.

Passive electrosense. Because all animals in water generate a weak bioelectric field, the ability to detect these fields evolved very early in the history of animals. They are found, for example, in the most ancient vertebrate that still exists, the lamprey (so old it doesn’t even have a jaw). Many other aquatic animals have them as well, such as sharks. The detection of external bioelectric fields occurs at very near range, about a body length or two.

Active electrosense (electrolocation). In active electrical sensing (also called electrolocation), an animal detects how its environment is modulating a self-generated weak electric field. In my doctoral work, I showed that it is effective at less than a body length for prey-like objects, and perhaps a few body lengths for larger objects. Like echolocation, the fall off of active electrosense is with the fourth power of distance, so it rapidly becomes prohibitive to sense at a distance.

Magnetic field sensing: Certain animals have been shown to detect the direction of Earth’s magnetic field. This is very useful for navigation. It should be clear, however, that it will not, in any circumstance, provide a detailed overview of the space ahead.

Vision: Given our relatively transparent environment, illuminated for at least a portion of the day with loads of light from the sun (about a thousand watts of light per square meter on a clear day at noon, a typical “radiant flux density” at the surface of Earth), vision reigns king as a system for imaging. It’s true that some land environments are dense enough to make vision nearly as short as it is in water – but in places like tidal flats, savannah, and prairie, being able to see far ahead pays big dividends.

Because of the high velocity of the electromagnetic radiation vision uses, the resolution limit for visible light is much, much smaller than our ability to perceive, because the distance between our sensory organs for light is quite large compared to the wavelength of light (for example 500 billionths of a meter is one of the wavelengths we see with). As a consequence, as the distance between receptors of the eye has decreased, and our optical abilities along with it, we are able to resolve a sixtieth of one degree with our visual systems. That means we can see a rabbit at a bit over half a mile, an astonishing capability compared to how far out our water-based ancestors could sense.

In contrast, as my original post mentioned, because of the “attenuation length” of light in water, the distance at which 63% of the light from an object is absorbed by the water, is on the order of tens of meters in perfectly clear water. So light from the sun has to go down into water, thereby losing 63% of its intensity after tens of meters – and then reflect off an object, and get to your eye, again losing 63% of its intensity in some tens of meters. In costal waters or anywhere the water is a bit cloudy with phytoplankton or algae, attenuation length is ten times less – going down to meters. No matter what you do with your sensors and optics, this is going to result in significantly diminishing returns to see things further away.

On land, the attenuation length for light in air is on the order of 100 km. This is similar to the attenuation length of sound in water, which is why dolphins and whales do so well with echolocation underwater (but still, for dolphins only on the order of 100 meters for prey-sized objects).

That finishes our survey of what senses are good for quickly accessing points in a big amount of space. To sum up: to sense something means you need to detect energy emanating from the object. Some things, like sounds or odors emitted by animals or environmental phenomena, are sparsely distributed (not every point in your surroundings is emitting the energy), and this feature enables us to find the croaking frog or cracking branch.

But, in such situations, because our ability to sense these objects depends to some extent on the surrounding objects NOT emitting any such energy, it is not possible to get a detailed point by point sensation of a large amount of space. In contrast, with vision, echolocation, and active electrosense, energy is delivered to all objects of interest. So, you can sense them, whether or not they emit any kind of energy on their own. As such, only these senses (and similar ones) have the capacity to provide detailed point-by-point overviews. Of these, vision on land is by far the most powerful, in part just because there is an intense amount of energy being delivered by our Sun for at least a portion of the day, and easily delivered by artificial means otherwise; and in part, because the short wavelength means that vision systems can perceive with unparalleled acuity.

In the next post, I’ll explore the connection between having a big amount of space at hand, and planning to an unpredictable, moving goal, like another animal you’re hoping to dine on. I’ll argue that such planning requires you to have a big chunk of space at the beck and call of your sensory system, relative to the space you’re about to move into.

Image by Malcolm A. MacIver

Correction: In the original post I stated “Dolphins emit at somewhat higher frequencies, but because light goes about four times faster in water than in air, they end up with a resolution of about 1 centimeter.” Thanks to @Kees for pointing out my mistake – I meant that sound goes four times faster in water.

Cybernetic brains might make that possible. As computing power and storage continue to plod along their 18-month doubling cycle, there is no reason to believe we won’t at least have cybernetic sub-brains within the coming century. We already offload a tremendous amount of information and communication to our computers and smartphones. Why not make the process more integrated? Of course, what I’m engaging in right now is rampant speculation. But a neuro-computer interface is a possibility. More than that: cyber-brains may be necessary.

The idea of a cyber-brain is pretty simple. Our brains are all-in-one systems that store, process, organize, and collect data. A cybernetic brain would augment one, many, or all parts of that system.  The processing and organization part, not to mention analysis and synthesis, would require something resembling artificial intelligence. People would probably be wary to jack themselves into an A.I. helper brain. So, based on current trends and my rudimentary knowledge of computer progress, my guess is that cybernetic collection, storage, and retrieval of information will be the easiest pieces to integrate into our biological brains: a neural external hard drive. We’ve externalized the storage process for ages – the written word, anyone? But what if we could internalize it again?

That’s what cyber-brains could allow. Ever since we started writing things down, we’ve been trying to make it faster and easier to write, to read what others write, and to remember what we read. A cyber-brain takes the externalization potential of computers (massive amounts of stable and inexpensive data storage with rapid and accurate recall) and removes the lag time. Instead of sitting at your computer or pulling out your phone, opening the file, and taking in the contents, the information is already in your cyber-sub-brain. Anything you store on your cyber-brain, from a song to a novel to the contents of Wikipedia, would be as easily and rapidly accessible as your most vivid memories currently are. Speaking of, your memories would be stored more accurately and permanently than regular ol’ neurons can allow. Almost any piece of information you might need, whether experienced or downloaded, would be at your mental fingertips.

We face a spectacular information glut. It is impossible for any one person to, say, watch every good movie on Netflix, read every informative entry on Wikipedia, and follow every worthy news story. There just isn’t enough time to absorb and process all that content. But what if I didn’t have to actually watch or play or read the item in question to grok its quality and content? Cyber-brains might allow you to, a la Neo and Trinity in The Matrix, to download huge data sets and immediately utilize them. The major advantage is that the time-cost of gathering information becomes nearly zero. Thus, the extra time is freed up for information to be analyzed, synthesized, and, more importantly, utilized.

In the coming years, we may need a form of externalized cybernetic memory to compensate for the overwhelming influx of data. The ability to take digital files and put that content within direct, immediate access of the mind would at least give the average person a fighting chance.The possible benefits are almost unimaginable. Instead of the current information crisis, where the wealth of the world’s knowledge is available at a mouse-click but there is literally not enough time to absorb it all, we would be faced with a world of ultra-informed individuals. What would that world look like?

The optimistic part of me wants to believe all of that data would become knowledge that would lead to happier relationships, more logical decisions (e.g. voting, finances), and a better world would result. The pessimistic part of me fears a world of cynics and nihilists, simultaneously overwhelmed by and indifferent to the wealth of information they possess. The world would continue as it is, just a bit more jaded by what we all know.

The realistic part of me suspects something in between. In a world of cyber-brains, everyone would have nearly the same degree of information. However, information is just information until a mind processes and understands it. Thinking would still take a lot of work, and sometimes letting someone else do the thinking for you is still easier.  ”Education” would be all practice and application. Granted, your basic intelligence would limit your processing power. Even though an infant with a cyber-brain might “know” calculus, she wouldn’t be able to understand calculus. Epistemology aside, the take away point is that a cyber-brain would eliminate the need for lectures, text-books, and rote memorization. Critical thinking and creative utilization would become the main priorities of education. Perhaps social stratification due to pure intelligence would be more noticeable, or maybe it’ll be willpower and determination that draw the lines.

My hope is that people would at least be more skeptical and the most egregious liars (coughGlennBeckcough) would have much less flexibility in spinning the facts their way. The first step towards understanding is raw data. The more people who have data, the more people will have real knowledge. What they do with that knowledge is still their prerogative. So I suspect the more things change, the more they will stay the same.

Sadly, cyber-brains are still a long, long way away. Until then, I guess we just won’t know. And I pray I don’t lose my phone. I keep a lot of the best bits of my brain in there.

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

Image of cyber-brain via Wikipedia: Ghost in the Shell

The hardware for Myndplay, made by the company Neurosky, is a slimmed-down version of an electroencephalogram (EEG), a device common in neuroscience and medicine that uses sensors on the scalp to pick up electrical activity caused by neurons firing in the brain. The headset has one sensor that rests on the forehead, to read those electrical brainwaves, and one that rests on the bony part of the head just behind the ear, called a ground electrode, which essentially provides a baseline measurement to compare the brainwave-reading sensor to. (You can see a video of how the headset works—and people testing it out on less cinematic, more educational interactive games that Neurosky also produces—here.)

Unlike CYOA books, which were written in an empowering-yet-accusatory second person, Myndplay videos are in the first person: You’re not only making decisions of what the protagonist should do, but seeing the action through his or her eyes. The interactive videos for the system are available online; some are free, some cost a few dollars. Offerings so far include movies where you attempt to dodge a bullet or, bizarrely, perform an exorcism.

One big limitation of this kind of game is that the mind-reading tech we currently have is pretty limited compared to The Matrix or Total Recall or any one of a hundred other sci-fi digital-reality movies. The EEG headset doesn’t read out specific ideas you have for the plot—say, whether you want to push open the door that’s mysteriously ajar or run away screaming. Instead, it just analyzes brainwaves for patterns that correspond to concentration or relaxation, and uses that info to push the plot one way or another. The key to dodging the bullet isn’t to think, “OK, now I want to weave right!” It’s to concentrate on what’s happening onscreen—really hard.

Myndplay was officially launched at the Birmingham, United Kingdom, Gadget Show, which kicked off yesterday. Click here to don the mind-reading headset, here to keep things old-school.

Image: Flickr / xJasonRogersx

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner‘s dead-tree forebear) opens with Deckard arguing with his wife about whether or not to alter her crummy attitude with the “mood organ.” She could, if she so desired, dial her mood so that she was happy and content. Philip K. Dick worried that the ability to alter our mood would remove the authenticity and immediacy of our emotions. Annalee Newitz at io9 seems to be worried mood manipulations will enable a form of social control.

The worry comes from recent developments in neuro-pharmaceuticals. Drugs are already on the market that allow for mood manipulation. The Guardian‘s Amelia Hill notes that drugs like Prozac and chemicals like oxytocin have the ability to make some people calmer, more empathetic, and more altruistic. Calm, empathetic, and altruistic people are far more likely to act morally than anxious, callous, and selfish people. But does that mean mood manipulation going to let us force people to be moral? And if it does, is that a good thing? Is it moral to force people to be moral?

The question is a strange one. Force people to be moral – what does that even mean? Let’s cast some clarity onto the issue of moral enhancement:

The field is in its infancy, but “it’s very far from being science fiction”, said Dr Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and a Wellcome Trust biomedical ethics award winner.

“Science has ignored the question of moral improvement so far, but it is now becoming a big debate,” he said. “There is already a growing body of research you can describe in these terms. Studies show that certain drugs affect the ways people respond to moral dilemmas by increasing their sense of empathy, group affiliation and by reducing aggression.”

That last sentence is a critical one, so I’m going to disassemble it. Some drugs affect, that is, influence or temper a person’s response to a moral dilemma. Your initial response might be, “I don’t want my decisions being influenced by a drug!” We see ourselves as rational beings in control of our emotions. But our mood is often critical to our decision making, particularly in regard to how we react to others.

We intuitively recognize that mood is often related to morality. When a person is upset or depressed, they can “snap” at a friend, being unjustifiably cruel, violent, or neglectful. Often a person who snaps at a friend will immediately apologize, offering “I don’t know why I did that. I’m in a bad mood, but not at you in particular. I’m sorry.” In these cases, mood creates poor conditions for moral behavior towards friends, let alone acquaintances or general strangers.

The important point is that mood creates conditions conducive to moral behavior. Mood does not determine moral behavior. Like many discussions around human enhancement, it is impossible to overemphasize the difference between determining and enabling a behavior or trait. Think of it like buying a pair of running shoes. Just because you own the shoes, or even if you choose to wear your running shoes every day, doesn’t mean you’ll go running. But you’re more likely to go running in running shoes than if you are wearing flip-flops or snow boots.

Mood enhancers work the same way. I might take a pill that makes me more more likely to be empathetic and altruistic, but it doesn’t guarantee that I will be any more than me having a crummy day will make me a jerk to others. Humans are able to exercise reason and willpower over our emotions and moods to control our actions.

The great thing about mood enhancers is that they make it so that our reason and willpower don’t have to overcome anger, fear, and angst to enable us to do the moral thing. A person in the right mood has an easier time making good choices when faced with moral dilemmas. There is, of course, a caveat:

Ruud ter Meulen, chair in ethics in medicine and director of the centre for ethics in medicine at the University of Bristol, warned that while some drugs can improve moral behaviour, other drugs – and sometimes the same ones – can have the opposite effect.

“While Oxytocin makes you more likely to trust and co-operate with others in your social group, it reduces empathy for those outside the group,” Meulen said.

As with every other technology in existence, mood manipulation and moral enhancement is a double-edged sword. Again, mood manipulation creates the conditions conducive to moral or immoral behavior, as the case may be. But, no matter how you look at it, mood manipulation is not mind control.

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

Image of pills that do who-knows-what by brains the head via Flickr Creative Commons

Could something like that ever happen? While much of the technology in Source Code will remain purely fiction, says University of Arizona neuroscientist and electrical engineer Charles Higgins, modern science may eventually let us take a peek at, and even play around with, someone else’s consciousness. Among the movie’s technological inventions, Higgins says, ”the idea of monitoring and influencing consciousness with a physical neural interface is the most plausible.”

Judging by past and current efforts, pinning down what, or where, consciousness is won’t be easy. But one thing modern science can do is record from small populations of neurons in the brain, as demonstrated by neural prosthetics and recordings taken during brain surgery. “We’re getting better and better at that, rapidly,” Higgins says. A colleague of his at the University of Arizona records motor movements from nerves in one person’s arm, then plays back those movements in someone else’s arm.

To record one person’s consciousness, once we know what exactly that is, “I think you’d have to record from basically all the cortical areas of the brain,” Higgins says, far more than current technologies can handle. ”So monitoring somebody’s consciousness, not even influencing it, is going to require many, many years,” but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Doing so without direct neural interfaces, however, seems less plausible. Neither Stevens nor the man whose consciousness he inhabits are hooked up or jacked in to anything, begging the question of how the experiences were recorded from one’s brain or replayed in the other’s. “It’s getting implausible enough that I’m not sure how it could be reached by modern science,” Higgins says. And the fact that Stevens is somehow going back in time to relive the same moment again and again, well, that’s “an even farther step.” This film took some cinematic liberties.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is how it broaches the important ethical issues that will come with this kind of technology, Higgins says. Brain recording now is generally done on people undergoing brain surgery anyway, to whom it poses little additional risk, or people who are paralyzed or terminally ill, and who have less neural health to lose. In the movie, the technology is being tested on a wounded soldier—a scenario Higgins expects may play out as these techniques become more advanced.

“Probably the way a lot of this technology will become practical is through experiments on soldiers, unfortunately,” Higgins says. The reason for this, he says, is that such devices must be tested on humans; monkeys can’t chat with you about their conscious experiences. And while already ill or injured patients may be the starting point, the devices must eventually be tested on whole, healthy brains. “When you join the military, there are some limits on your civil liberties that you accept,” Higgins says. Clauses that give the military permission to experiment could be added into soldier’s contracts. “This is exactly my concern with neural prostheses and government uses.”

Image: Summit Entertainment

You will spend a third of  your life asleep. If you don’t, your waking hours will be of reduced quality and productivity. For 99% of us, seven hours a night is biological necessity. For a select 1%, what Melinda Beck at the Wall Street Journal dubs the “Sleepless Elite,” less sleep equals more life. So-called short sleepers operate with a kind of low-intensity mania which allows them to go to bed late and wake up early without needing a gallon of coffee to get through the day. And, as it turns out, the ability might be genetic.

“My long-term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health,” says human geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California-San Francisco. “Everybody can use more waking hours, even if you just watch movies.”

Dr. Fu was part of a research team that discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a pair of short sleepers in 2009. They were studying extreme early birds when they when they noticed that two of their subjects, a mother and daughter, got up naturally about 4 a.m. but also went to bed past midnight.

Genetic analyses spotted one gene variation common to them both. The scientists were able to replicate the gene variation in a strain of mice and found that the mice needed less sleep than usual, too.

Dr. Fu’s research is a reason for excitement because the goal is not just to locate the gene, but to find a way to manipulate sleep pathways safely. For those of us already alive, that means there might be better, safer, more effective stimulants in the future. For those not yet born, genetic engineering may enable future generations to spend less time sawing logs and more time enjoying life. More life! Less sleep! It’s like a longevity enhancement that does nothing to extend your time alive, but instead maximizes your use of that time. But how do short sleepers use their time?

And this, my fine friends, is where the real benefits of whatever genetic magic short sleepers possess comes into focus. Our immediate instinct when we hear we can get a benefit is “what is the cost?” For example, less sleep? I bet I’ll become crazy. Or moody. Or more sleep won’t mean I’m more productive. What ever makes me more energetic will make me too addled to focus.We are programmed by experience to be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true offers. The cynical part of me is reminded of a quote from LCD (R.I.P.) Soundsystem’s jam “Pow Pow:” “But honestly, and be honest with yourself, how much time do you waste? How much time do you blow every day?”

Would we really do any more with our lives if we had more time awake? What are the lives of short sleepers like? University of Utah neurologist Christopher Jones has found common traits among short sleepers in addition to their ability to only catch a few winks:

To date, Dr. Jones says he has identified only about 20 true short sleepers, and he says they share some fascinating characteristics. Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they’re thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). They also seem to have a high tolerance for physical pain and psychological setbacks.

“They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again,” Dr. Jones says.

Short sleep research is still in its early phases, but most of those studied thus far are successful, productive, happy individuals. They quite literally get more out of life. Short sleepers don’t spend a third of their time on this planet asleep. I need to get me some of that.

I’m sad to say I still need a whole pot of java after my requisite seven hours to be a normal human being. Fingers crossed for a pharmaceutical solution sometime soon.

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

Image of sleepy businessmen via Wikipedia Commons

Update 5/24/11: The conversation continues in Part II here.

I recently gave a talk at the Directors Guild of America as part of a panel on the “Science of Cyborgs” sponsored by the Science Entertainment Exchange. It was a fun time, and our moderators, Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant from the HowStuffWorks podcast, emceed the evening with just the right measure of humor and cultural insight. In my twelve minutes, I shared a theory of how consciousness evolved. My point was that if we understand the evolutionary basis of consciousness, maybe this will help us envision new ways our consciousness might evolve further in the future. That could be fun in terms of dreaming up new stories. I also believe that part of what inhibits us from taking effective action against long-term problems—like the global environmental crisis — may be found in the evolutionary origins of our ability to be aware.

This idea is so simple that I’m surprised I’ve not yet been able to find it already in circulation.

The idea is this: back in our watery days as fish, we lived in a medium that was inherently unfriendly to seeing things very far away. The technical way this is measured is the “attenuation length’’ of light through the medium. After light travels the attenuation length through a medium, about 63% of the light is blocked. The attenuation length of light in water is on the order of tens of meters. For a beast of a meter or two in length, which moves at a rate of about a body length or two per second, that’s a pretty short horizon of time and space. In just a few seconds, you’ll reach the edge of where you were able to see. If you’re down in the depths at all, or in less clear water, you may reach the edge of your perceptual horizon in about a second.

Think about that: life is coming at you at such a rate that every second unfolds a whole new tableau of potentially deadly threats, or prey you must grab in order to survive. Given such a scenario, we need to have highly reactive nervous systems, just like we revert to when we find ourselves driving in a fog or at night along a dark and winding road. The problem is that there was no respite from this fog. It was an unalterable fact of how light moves through water, relative to our own movement abilities and size.

But then, about 350 million years ago in the Devonian Period, animals like Tiktaalik started making their first tentative forays onto land. From a perceptual point of view, it was a whole new world. You can see things, roughly speaking, 10,000 times better. So, just by the simple act of poking their eyes out of the water, our ancestors went from the mala vista of a fog to a buena vista of a clear day, where they could survey things out for quite a considerable distance.

This puts the first such members of the “buena vista sensing club” into a very interesting position, from an evolutionary perspective. Think of the first animal that gains whatever mutation it might take to disconnect sensory input from motor output (before this point, their rapid linkage was necessary because of the need for reactivity to avoid becoming lunch). At this point, they can potentially survey multiple possible futures and pick the one most likely to lead to success. For example, rather than go straight for the gazelle and risk disclosing your position too soon, you may choose to stalk slowly along a line of bushes (wary that your future dinner is also seeing 10,000 times better than its watery ancestors) until you are much closer. Here’s an illustration of the two scenarios:

On the left, we have the situation when the distance we sense is close to the distance we will move in our reaction time (our reaction time is about 1/3 of a second; from that point to when we will stop is a bit longer– like those diagrams you see of stopping distance when driving at night show). There isn’t a whole lot of space to plan over. On the right, we can fit three very different plans to get to our prey: b1-b3, among others.

So what does this have to do with consciousness?

In 1992, psychologist Bruce Bridgeman wrote that “Consciousness is the operation of the plan-executing mechanism, enabling behavior to be driven by plans rather than immediate environmental contingencies.” No theory of consciousness is likely to account for all of its varied senses, but at least in terms of consciousness-as-operation-of-the-plan-executing-mechanism, due to some very simple “facts of light,” dwelling on land may have been a necessary condition for giving us the ability to survey the contents of our mind. “Buena vista consciousness,” for lack of a better term, might have been the first kind of consciousness that selection pressures could have brought about.

Given this picture of how a certain kind of consciousness came about, what are the knobs we might twiddle, either for the love of story making, or so that our transhumanist future selves might be conscious in a different way?

Let me borrow a moral quandary from philosopher James Rachels. Maybe you’re eating a sandwich right now. There is a child, far away, who is not, and who is about to die for lack of food. Surely, if that child were beside you, you would share your sandwich. But, then, what’s keeping you from sharing that sandwich anyway? The shipping costs? That’s easily avoided – we find someone on the ground who can buy the sandwich locally. If you think through the various possibilities, the only answer you eventually come to is that the starving child is too far removed from your state of awareness to really matter to you. Likewise with any number of a host of environmental devastations that are going on at this moment.

So, what if we massively expanded the blue space in the picture above, our sensorium? I don’t mean watch video of distant places (which surely is part of the way), but use artificial retina technology to directly pipe visual images from a disconnected place directly into your brain? Say, of the rain forest that is currently being destroyed so that an industrial meat producer in Peru can provide fast food chains in our country with low cost beef? This would be disruptive technology on a big scale.

Here’s another thought experiment: Notice that there is only one being in the pictures above. Consciousness does seem to be for one being at a time. What if we reengineer things so that we see what others in our group see, or so that when you do something good, the entire group feels good, rather than just you? This kind of consciousness has been explored in science fiction (The Borg on TV),  and in art (Mathieu Brand’s Ubiq). We even know mechanisms of how something like the hive mind of bees work, such as regulation of the division of labor through various genes and hormones. Could something like this be the antidote to the endemic selfishness of Homo sapiens?

More details on the idea of buena vista consciousness can be found on pages 492-499 of this chapter I wrote in 2009.

UPDATE: A more technical paper describing how to quantify sensory and movement spaces is here.

Limitless is one of the first movies to directly take on the idea of pharmaceutical enhancement. The trailer is here and fake viral ad for NZT is here. I’m already wary of the film based on the trailer. Not because of the acting, directing, or plot, which all look good enough. Instead, my problem is that the movie appears to take the same boring old stance on enhancement: the cost of making yourself superhuman is too high.

Limitless has a simple set-up: loser/author Bradley Cooper who lives in filth and dresses like a hobo is offered a pill that will make everything all better. The pill makes him much smarter, more creative, and more driven. Thanks to this new found brilliance, Cooper makes boatloads of money and catches the eye of evil Robert De Niro, who threatens Cooper in various menacing and shadowy ways. Then the pill starts making Cooper crazy and his world starts crumbling around him. It’s Flowers for Algernon except with bespoke suits, exotic cars and international intrigue.

The reason I’m getting an overall vibe of “meh, who cares” from Limitless is that the even though the film has a great bad guy with De Niro and his shadowy mega-corporation, it takes the easy way out and makes the drug the enemy as well. Flowers for Algernon is great because the main character, Charlie, has to cope with how his intelligence-burst impacts his social life. We’re confronted with the fact that increased intelligence doesn’t mean increased maturity, worldly experience, or romantic ability. Limitless ignores these deeper issues.

Wouldn’t it be more interesting if the problem of power and wealth was that Cooper had to deal with other wealthy and powerful people, who are, in general, incredibly awful? Or what would Cooper do if the drug simply stopped working? Or how it affected his relationship with the woman he thought he loved when he becomes too smart – way too smart – for her and is bored by a person he once admired?

The theoretical enhancement drug at the center of Limitless could have allowed the writers to ask much more interesting questions than the trailer lets on. Maybe the movie will surprise me, but I doubt it.

Image viral promotional material for Limitless

The word “cheating” has another meaning, one that has nothing to do with competition. When someone has achieved an end through improper means, we might say that person has “cheated herself” out of whatever rewards are inherent in the proper means. The use of study drugs by healthy students could corrode valuable practices that education has traditionally fostered. If, for example, students use such drugs to mitigate the consequences of procrastination, they may fail to develop mental discipline and time-management skills.

On the other hand, Ritalin might enable a student to engage more deeply in college and to more fully experience its internal goods—goods she might be denied without that assistance. The distinction suggests that a blanket policy, whether of prohibition or universal access, is unlikely to be effective.

Instead, colleges need to encourage students to engage in the practice of education rather than to seek shortcuts. Instead of ferreting out and punishing students, universities should focus on restoring a culture of deep engagement in education, rather than just competition for credentials.

Lamkin’s argument is that cog-enhancers are an easy way out for those in school. Struggling to study builds character and good habits. Though he disapproves of cog-enhancers, I appreciate his hesitancy to involve the law. Lamkin doesn’t believe policing cog-enhancing drug usage is necessary, but would prefer honor codes opposing cog-enhancing drugs. He believes honor codes cause one to “internalize” the value of not using the drug. What is curious is that Lamkin doesn’t actually address what Ritalin and Adderall do for a student. As a person who has a legit prescription for Ritalin, and who knows his fair share of folks who’ve taken Adderall off-label, I believe I can speak to how cog-enhancers work in at least an anecdotal sense.

Simply put: cog-enhancers let you focus on one task very intensely, whether that task is organizing your music library or doing the dishes or (ahem) writing a master’s thesis in bioethics. To help clarify this, imagine the parts of a brain actively thinking as bright areas, and those areas not thinking as dim areas. A normal brain might look like the center brain pictured. The hot colors indicate active thought, the cool colors indicate calm parts of the brain. The above images are not scientific, but are a visual analogy for the felt effects of cog-enhancers.

Basic stimulants, like caffeine and the stuff found in energy drinks, cause the whole brain to get brighter – inactive and active areas brighten to the same degree. That is why you feel energized but unfocused after one too many cups of coffee. A rough simulation of what that might look like is the picture to the left. Everything is lit up. The brain is more awake but over-stimulated.

Alternatively, cog-enhancers like Ritalin and Adderall work by making bright areas much brighter while causing dim areas to go very dark. The result is one is able to focus on whatever task is at hand. As I can attest, it is just as easy to lose an hour studying xenomorphs on Wikipedia as it is to actually writing an essay for class. The image on the right is an approximation of what that might look like. Notice the areas of thought are not only brighter but more intense (indicated by darker red).

The key point is that whatever drugs you do or don’t take, a sense of discipline is still necessary to make the drugs useful. If a person takes Ritalin and then plays Call of Duty for hours, they won’t do any better in class. Furthermore, no matter how many pills you take, you aren’t going to know the facts and ideas necessary to write your paper or pass a test. Cog-enhancers enable those who might have trouble focusing or staying awake to do so on demand, but the drugs don’t put an iota of knowledge or a single original thought into a person’s mind. If Lamkin wants a culture that encourages in depth commitment to education, then cognitive enhancers are the way to go. Cog-enhancers allow a person to efficiently utilize the time they have to get the most studying/homework done. A ban on enhancers, as Lamkin notes, won’t do anything positive, but neither will an attitude of disapproval. Cog-enhancers allow a person who wants to study or write to be able to do so in a better, more productive fashion.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on twitter.

Image of delicious looking pills by RambergMediaImages via Flickr Creative Commons; Original image of brain scan by BlatantNews.com via Flickr Creative commons; edits to brain by Kyle Munkittrick.

I am a scientist and academic by day, but by night I’m increasingly called upon to talk about transhumanism and the Singularity. Last year, I was science advisor to Caprica, a show that explored relationships between uploaded digital selves and real selves. Some months ago I participated in a public panel on “Mutants, Androids, and Cyborgs: The science of pop culture films” for Chicago’s NPR affiliate, WBEZ.  This week brings a panel at the Director’s Guild of America in Los Angeles, entitled “The Science of Cyborgs” on interfacing machines to living nervous systems.

The latest panel to be added to my list is a discussion about the first transhumanist opera, Tod Machover’s “Death and the Powers.” The opera is about an inventor and businessman, Simon Powers, who is approaching the end of his life. He decides to create a device (called The System) that he can upload himself into (hmm I wonder who this might be based on?). After Act 2, the entire set, including a host of OperaBots and a musical chandelier (created at the MIT Media Lab), become the physical manifestation of the now incorporeal Simon Powers, who’s singing we still hear but who has disappeared from the stage. Much of the opera is exploring how his relationships with his daughter and mother change post-uploading. His daughter and wife ask whether The System is really him. They wonder if they should follow his pleas to join him, and whether life will still be meaningful without death. The libretto, by the renown Robert Pinsky, renders these questions in beautiful poetry. It will open in Chicago in April.

These experiences have been fascinating. But I can’t help wondering, what’s with all the sudden interest in transhumanism and the singularity?

The media is so saturated with the claim that the Singularity will arrive by 2045 that skeptics are by default on the defensive. Worth noticing amidst the rancor is a recent result by friend and colleague Konrad Kording, who just showed that the number of neurons that we can simultaneously record from is following Moore’s Law. Not long ago, we were limited to recording the activity of a single brain cell at a time; more recently, we can record from several hundred at once. When you examine the trend over 56 different studies, Kording and his student showed that the number is doubling every seven years. Although this is a longer interval than Moore’s Law (two year doublings), what’s really important is that the growth is exponential. Exponential growth lies at the heart of the arguments for the nearness of the Singularity. Given Kording’s result, however, how long do you think it will be before we can record from every neuron in the brain at once? You might be surprised: even with this incredible exponential growth, it will take 220 years. If we suppose that uploading our consciousness will at a minimum entail recording the pattern of activity of the entire brain (why not–it’s no less plausible than every other argument out there), then we can’t even get cracking until 2231.

Of course, the time of the Singularity is not the time when we can upload consciousness, but rather when we create super-intelligent machines (which, according to some, will then devote themselves to figuring out how to beat aging and upload our consciousness, rather than chasing us to the ends of the galaxy). Whether 2045 is reasonable is hotly debated. I expect it’s on the short side by a century or so–but as someone who often thinks in evolutionary time scales, I still view this as an inconsequential amount of time.

But if we weigh the evidence for when the Singularity will occur versus the evidence for world-wide environmental destruction (such as that we’re now exceeding three of ten “planetary boundaries” for sustainable human existence), it’s pretty clear that these threats to our continued existence as a species are looming far faster on the horizon than either the Singularity or uploaded immortality.

So what’s going on? Is environmentalism “tired” and transhumanism “wired”? Is transhumanism just a fleeting new fascination like colonizing space was not long ago, and this soon will also pass? Or is there something more primal going on?

As I pondered these questions recently, it occurred to me that perhaps the transhumanism trend has something to do with secular people–as scientists, engineers, and sci-fi fans tend to be–having an outlet for talking about things that people with religion have more established frameworks for expressing.

Consider this: Scott Atran, among others, has argued that the urge for religion has an evolutionary basis, rooted in our fears of death and predators. Since Darwin, if not before, it’s become increasingly difficult, though, for scientifically-minded people to put stock in religion. Added to this, it’s difficult to have conversations in public about religion, not least because we live in a multi-denominational society where the public expression of creed can be viewed as exclusionary. It’s simply not politically correct in many instances. What if the reason for the rapid spread of Singularity and transhumanism talk is that it’s giving people a secular outlet for thinking through their fears of death and dreams of immortality?

A great deal has been written about relationships between religion and transhumanism. Much of it has drawn parallels between transhumanism and religion. But I don’t think that transhumanism is trying to be a religion: I think that it’s giving secularists (like me) an opportunity to talk publicly about death, the afterlife, and the strange puzzles of personal identity that will someday arise in transforming ourselves into cyborgs, copies of our original selves, or fully digital beings (which I’ve explored here, here, and here). It is letting us safely explore these ideas in a less morose way than the typical meat-to-worms narrative to which secularists are usually limited. In doing so, perhaps it is filling a void that religion used to fill but no longer can for many of us.

Image of cylon by Shawn Sharp, from DVICE’s steampunk cylon contest, via GIZMODO.

Plot from “How advances in neural recording affect data analysis,” by Ian H. Stevenson and Konrad P. Kording, in Nature Neuroscience. Published online 26 January 2011; doi:10.1038/nn.2731.

People who work in robotics prefer not to highlight a reality of our work: robots are not very reliable. They break, all the time. This applies to all research robots, which typically flake out just as you’re giving an important demo to a funding agency or someone you’re trying to impress. My fish robot is back in the shop, again, after a few of its very rigid and very thin fin rays broke. Industrial robots, such as those you see on car assembly lines, can only do better by operating in extremely predictable, structured environments, doing the same thing over and over again. Home robots? If you buy a Roomba, be prepared to adjust your floor plan so that it doesn’t get stuck.

What’s going on? The world is constantly throwing curveballs at robots that weren’t anticipated by the designers. In a novel approach to this problem, Josh Bongard has recently shown how we can use the principles of evolution to make a robot’s “nervous system”—I’ll call it the robot’s controller—robust against many kinds of change. This study was done using large amounts of computer simulation time (it would have taken 50–100 years on a single computer), running a program that can simulate the effects of real-world physics on robots.

What he showed is that if we force a robot’s controller to work across widely varying robot body shapes, the robot can learn faster, and be more resistant to knocks that might leave your home robot a smoking pile of motors and silicon. It’s a remarkable result, one that offers a compelling illustration of why intelligence, in the broad sense of adaptively coping with the world, is about more than just what’s above your shoulders. How did the study show it?

Each (simulated) robot starts with a very basic body plan (like a snake), a controller (consisting of a neural network that is randomly connected with random strengths), and a sensor for light. Additional sensors report the position of body segments, the orientation of the body, and ground contact sensors for limbs, if the body plan has them. The task is to bring the body over to the light source, 20 meters away.

A bunch of these robots are simulated, and those that do poorly are eliminated, a kind of in-computo natural selection. The eliminated robots are replaced with versions of the ones that succeeded, after random tweaks (“mutations”) to these better controllers have been made. The process repeats until a robot that can get to the light is found. So far, there’s been no change in the shape of the body.

With the first successful robot-controller combination found (one that gets to the light), the body form changes from snake-like to something like a salamander, with short legs sticking out of the body. (All body shape changes are pre-programmed, rather than evolved.) The evolutionary process to find a successful controller-bot combination repeats, with random changes to the better controllers until, once again, a controller-bot combination is found that is able to claw its way to the light.

Then the short legs sticking out to the side slowly get longer, and rather than sticking out to the side, they progressively become more vertical. With each change in body shape, the evolutionary process to find a controller repeats. Eventually, the sim-bot evolves to something that looks like any four-legged animal.

That was all for round one of evolution. For round two, the best controller from round one was copied into the same starting snake-like body type that round one began with. But now, the change in body forms occurs more rapidly, so that by the time 2/3 of the “lifetime” of the robot is completed, it has reached its final dog-like form. For round three, this all happens within 1/3 of the robot’s lifetime. For round four, the body form starts off as dog-like and stays there.

So there are changes occurring at two different time scales: changes over the “lifetime” of the robot, similar to our own shape changes from fetus to adulthood; and changes that occur over generations, through which development during a lifetime occurs more rapidly. The short time scale is called “ontogenetic” and the long scale (between the different rounds) is “phylogenetic.”

The breakthrough of the work is that it found that having these variations in body shape occur over ontogenetic and phylogenetic time scales resulted in finding a controller that got the body over to the light much faster than if no such changes in body shape occurred. For example, when the system began with the final body type, the dog-like shape, it took much longer to evolve a solution than when the body shapes progressed from snake-like to salamander to dog-like. Not only was a controller evolved more rapidly, but the final solution was much more robust to being pushed and nudged.

The complexity of the interactions over 100 CPU years of simulated evolution makes the final evolved result difficult to untangle. Nonetheless, there is good evidence that the cause of accelerated learning in the shape-changing robots is that the controllers developed through changing bodies have gone through a set of “training-wheel” body shapes: a robot starting with a four-legged body plan and a simple controller quickly fails—it can’t control the legs well and simply tips over. Starting with something on the ground that slithers, as was the case in these simulations, is less prone to such failures. So not any old sequence of shape changes works: mimicking the sequence seen in evolution garners some of the advantages that presumably made this sequence actually happen in nature, such as higher mechanical stability of more ancient forms.

Less clear is the source of increased robustness—the ability to recover from being nudged and pushed in random ways. Bongard suggests that the increased robustness of controllers that have evolved with changing body shapes is due to those controllers having had to work under a wider range of sensor-motor relationships than the ones that evolved with no change in body shape. For example, any controller that’s particularly sensitive to a certain relationship between, say, a sensor that reports foot position, and one that reports spine position would fail (and thus be eliminated) as those relationships are systematically changed in shifting from salamander-like to dog-like body form and movement. So that means that if I suddenly pushed down the back of a four-legged dog-like robot, so that its legs would splay out and it would be forced to move more like a salamander, the winners of the evolutionary competition would still be able to work because the controllers had worked in salamander-like bodies as well as in dog-like bodies.

In support of this idea, the early controllers, that were purely based on moving the body axis (“spine”), appear to be still embedded in the more advanced controllers; so if something happens to the body (say, one leg gets knocked), the robot can revert to more basic spine-based motion patterns that don’t require precise limb control. Bongard observed that the controllers evolved through changing body shape exhibited more dependence on spinal movement, using the legs more for balance, than those evolved without changing body shape. (It would be interesting to try his approach with simulated aquatic robots, which can be neutrally buoyant like many aquatic animals are, and thus don’t have the “tipping over” problem that Bongard’s simulated terrestrial robots had).

To be fair to existing robots, even with a controller that worked under every conceivable body shape and environmental condition, they would still break all the time. This is because the materials we make them out of are not self-healing, in contrast to the biomaterials of animals. Animals are also constantly breaking (at least on a micro level), and the body constantly repairs this. Bones subjected to higher loads, like the racket arm of a tennis player, get measurably thicker. Not only is the body self-repairing, recent innovative computer simulations of real neurons that generate basic rhythms like walking and chewing have shown that the neurons keep generating the rhythm despite big variations in the functioning and connections of these neurons. These functions are so important to continued existence—the body’s version of too big to fail—that embedded within them are solutions to just about everything the world can throw at them.

This new work provides the fascinating and useful result that fashioning controllers that work through a sequence of body shapes mimicking those seen in evolution accelerates the learning of new movement tasks and increases robustness to all the hard knocks that life inevitably delivers. It suggests that without the sequence of body shapes that evolution and development bring about, we might have nervous systems that are much too finely tuned to our adult upright bipedal form. Instead of crawling to help after we twist our ankle in the woods, we’d be left with nothing but howling for help.

During the competition, each of four judges will type a conversation with one of us for five minutes, then the other, and then will have 10 minutes to reflect and decide which one is the human. Judges will also rank all the contestants—this is used in part as a tiebreaking measure. The computer program receiving the most votes and highest ranking from the judges (regardless of whether it passes the Turing Test by fooling 30 percent of them) is awarded the title of the Most Human Computer.

What makes the competition so intriguing is that, as all contestants are ranked, be they human or computer, there is not only an award for the Most Human Computer, but also an award for the Most Human Human. Brian Christian is one of the vetted few humans who has earned the accolade. He describes his experience in the competition in his outstanding article “Mind vs. Machine” in The Atlantic. The article presents a snippet of what will surely be a wonderful book, The Most Human Human.

Like Sherry Turkle, Christian argues that machines are calling our humanity into stark relief. Yet he sees human-like computers not as automatons dragging us into banality, but as imperfect mirrors, reminding us of what makes us human by what they cannot reflect. I suspect it’s Christian’s double-life as a science journalist and poet that drew him to consider our dual-natured human brain:

Perhaps the fetishization of analytical thinking, and the concomitant denigration of the creatural—that is, animal—and bodily aspects of life are two things we’d do well to leave behind. Perhaps at last, in the beginnings of an age of AI, we are starting to center ourselves again, after generations of living slightly to one side—the logical, left-hemisphere side. Add to this that humans’ contempt for “soulless” animals, our unwillingness to think of ourselves as descended from our fellow “beasts,” is now challenged on all fronts: growing secularism and empiricism, growing appreciation for the cognitive and behavioral abilities of organisms other than ourselves, and, not coincidentally, the entrance onto the scene of an entity with considerably less soul than we sense in a common chimpanzee or bonobo—in this way AI may even turn out to be a boon for animal rights.

Among many conclusions Christian draws is that to be more human you must be yourself. But this is no idle command. The process of being oneself is an active, conscious, and, in some cases, laborious task. Consider your average conversation at a cocktail party – safe topics, non-confrontational questions, scripted answers. Part of Christian’s message, it seems, is not that we should worry about a computer sounding human, but that we humans may make the task too easy. So go forth and be quirky, odd, unique, expressive, honest, clever, eccentric, and above all yourself; in a phrase, be more human.

Image of The Most Human Human via RandomHouse

Rochellys Diaz Heijtza and Sven Pettersson and colleagues raised mice in a germ free environment and compared them to mice raised with normal gut bugs. The researchers found that compared to the germ-free mice, the normal mice had reduced expression of two brain molecules, synaptophysin, and PSD-95, in a region of the brain called the striatum. Correlating with this, the germ-free mice had higher levels of activity, and less anxiety than the mice with the normal complement of gut microbes. Amazingly, they also found that there was a “sensitive period” of exposure — a time before which exposure to the gut bugs mattered, and after which exposure didn’t change the brain any more. This is characteristic of many brain regions such as visual cortex, which needs normal visual input to develop properly and provide normal visual ability. If you provide that normal input after the sensitive period, the brain doesn’t fix itself. The scientists found that exposing the germ-free mice to normal gut microbes up to about 6 weeks of age resulted in normal levels of movement and anxiety; but exposure after that age resulted in no change.

How can this be? The paper has some specific technical suggestions, but if you think broadly about animals versus plants, it isn’t completely surprising. Next time you are eating your salad, consider how it is that you ended up eating your greens, rather than the greens eating you. It’s a story that’s almost two billion years in the making.

About 1.6 billion years ago, animals and plants went on their separate ways. One type of organism has the “stay in place and absorb” energy strategy. These are the plants, which sit and photosynthesize all day. The other organism has the “go around and get it” energy strategy – that’s you. The innovation of being an animal, in comparison to plants, is to have a gut with an ability to move, and a nervous system to detect the next good thing to put into that gut and then control the movement system to get the gut to the food.

The correspondence between a mobile gut and having a nervous system is so deep that some animals that give up mobility later in life also lose their nervous system. Ironically, they digest it. This is the tunicate, an animal that swims around in early life, but once they mature, they find a place to settle down on the ocean floor. Having done that, they digest most of their nervous system (some have compared this to getting tenure).

So, it is not a big surprise that key neurotransmitters like serotonin (most of which is excreted by cells in the gut wall in response to food), dopamine, glutamate, GABA, and norepinephrine are heavily represented in the gut, or that the gut is equipped with its own nervous system that has some one hundred million neurons, and almost the same number of types of neurons as the brain (Heribert Watzke has a stimulating TED talk on this).

I know what you’re thinking. This is just a story of how brains came to be. For the purposes of intelligence, the energy may as well come from a portable fusion reactor for all it matters. So any suggestion that AI needs a gut to reach the next level is misguided. I’ll argue that this viewpoint is overly simplistic.

Years ago the philosopher Patricia Churchland and the computational neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski wrote a book called “The Computational Brain.” In it, they made a striking point regarding a pervasive belief in the AI community regarding the study of the brain. Most of the AI community view the key cognitive powers they are chasing as logically independent of any specific implementation. That is, it’s a formal system they are trying to uncover, and whether that formal system is encoded in silicon, punch cards, a hydraulic machine, biological material, or whatever, does not matter, just as whether the pieces of a chess game are made out of plastic or wood, or pictures on a computer screen, doesn’t matter. Because of this—the multiple realizability of formal systems–some people in AI believe that study the brain is irrelevant.

The brilliant point that Churchland and Sejnowski made was that, although it is true that once you understand the mechanism of the brain, at least certain parts of it may be formally independent of any particular instantiation, the key question for humanity right now is how do we get to this understanding. To get there, they said, we might take our cue from the only existing examples of things that are truly intelligent: animals. We need to study how real examples of intelligence work, crack their mechanism in their full wetware glory, and after that, we can potentially formalize and instantiate in silicon or whatever material we want.

Until recently, most of neuroscience had little inclination to mine questions of how appetitive drives such as hunger, and motivations in general, feed into the rich biomechanical and neuronal story that is being uncovered through the mechanistic study of animals. And yet, as I wrote above, the acquisition of energy through moving the gut around is foundational to “animal-hood” in the first place. Studies like the one showing ties between brain development and the gut testify to the deep interconnections of nervous systems and the guts they evolved to satisfy.

We have every reason to think that a full understanding of gut-brain interactions, and associated reward systems, will lead to a better understanding of how to build an intelligent machine. From this understanding we are also more likely to be able to build machines with the “right” connection between motivations and action, a central issue for people concerned about the consequences of The Singularity for the future of our species.

Image of Olaf Breuning’s “Big Brain Small Stomach” from Arrested Motion

At night in the rivers of the Amazon Basin there buzzes an entire electric civilization of fish that “see” and communicate by discharging weak electric fields. These odd characters, swimming batteries which go by the name of “weakly electric fish,” have been the focus of research in my lab and those of many others for quite a while now, because they are a model system for understanding how the brain works. (While their brains are a bit different, we can learn a great deal about ours from them, just as we’ve learned much of what we know about genetics from fruit flies.) There are now well over 3,000 scientific papers on how the brains of these fish work.

Recently, my collaborators and I built a robotic version of these animals, focusing on one in particular: the black ghost knifefish. (The name is apparently derived from a native South American belief that the souls of ancestors inhabit these fish.  For the sake of my karmic health, I’m hoping that this is apocryphal.) My university, Northwestern, did a press release with a video about our “GhostBot” last week, and I’ve been astonished at its popularity (nearly 30,000 views as I write this, thanks to coverage by places like io9, Fast Company, PC World, and msnbc). Given this unexpected interest, I thought I’d post a bit of the story behind the ghost.

Our first desire for this robot was to provide a kind of telescope. Let me explain. Watching how animals behave so that we can learn how the brain works is challenging. They almost never do the same thing twice and you can’t ask them to please repeat what they just did. But, we scientists love repeatability: only through repetition can we assess whether something is statistically significant. Without repetition, we are at a loss. Enter the robots. With a robot, commanded to move in the same ways as our animal, we can get at previously very difficulty issues. For example, with our robot, we can tell it to repeat a strange and unexpected movement we’ve observed in the fish over and over until we have precisely figured out the underlying mechanical principles of the movement.

So using this approach, we were able to convincingly demonstrate the basis of something quite special. As you know, fish usually swim forward, mostly in a horizontal plane. Our fish is very different. Because it hunts in total darkness and can sense in all directions, it doesn’t really care which way it swims. It’s as agile and responsive swimming backward as it is swimming forward. See below for a sense of how it moves (this high speed video is from my collaboration with George Lauder at Harvard, who shot it):

The ability to swim in the dark forward and backward with equal agility depends on two special abilities: first, the weak electric field I mentioned provides a kind of underwater sonar (think of these fish as underwater bats). Second, the strange way they swim means they can shift from forward to reverse almost instantly. If you look at the photo or video above, you see a long fin along the body. The fish simply wiggles this fin in one direction or the other to swim forward or reverse — all while keeping the body straight! (Very handy if you want to build an underwater robot that is practical, since flexing a body is troublesome to implement.)

Now we watch this fish move forward and backward all the time and we’ve published studies on how it works. But when you watch them, it’s clear they have more tricks than that up their fins. They are quite acrobatic. It really hit us one day when my then student, Oscar Curet, observed the fish moving vertically without any difficulty. But wait! How can a fin, that usually only moves a body forward or back, move a body vertically? This is the mystery that the robot helped us solve—the fish doesn’t do it frequently enough, for a long enough time, for us to really nail it by observation of the animal itself.

So the GhostBot was born. It’s very advanced, with 32 independently controllable motors in a package the size of your forearm (for comparison, industrial robot arms typically have less than 10 independently controllable motors). Because we needed to pack things so tightly, Kinea, a company we are affiliated with who built the robot, designed 32 custom “fish steaks”—circuit boards for each of the 32 motors, which stack together through a spine-like bus connector. These printed circuit board steaks are an integral part of the structure of GhostBot. Here’s what they look like, with one of the motors and a quarter for scale:

A stack of these fish steaks, along with 32 small Swiss-made motors, goes into a cylindrical water proof hull, and then we attach 32 very fine rods and a lycra fin to the bottom to make the artificial ribbon fin. We currently send control signals via a tether so we can move the fin in exactly the way we tell it, allowing us to recreate the fish fin’s motion on command. Finally we get to wash, rinse, and repeat, all while measuring complex mechanical effects in the comfort of our lab.

Here’s a video of the robot swimming in a flow tunnel (an artificial stream). It doesn’t look like it’s moving, because we’ve adjusted the stream speed to match the swimming speed. The rods going up suspend the robot on a frictionless air rail (think of it being suspended from two hovercraft floating on a surface that is out of view), so it is free to move forward, backward, and sideways:

With that done, we can go back and program our robot to do the strange and complex motion we witnessed. The fish sends a wiggle from tail to head, and, at the very same time, a wiggle from head to tail. These two wiggles collide (thankfully, not creating anti-wiggles!) in the middle of the fin. So the propulsion in the horizontal direction is completely canceled out. But the fluid jets that those wiggles had created live on – they collide as well and the result is a spout of fluid going in a downward direction. Like every other animal, this one moves thanks to Newton’s third (to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction)—so the spout of fluid downward pushes the fish upward.

We can see that spout by putting a bunch of reflective particles in the water, and shining a very powerful laser sheet at it. Here’s what we first saw when we did this, a little over a year ago in George Lauder’s lab (note that the robot is being held rigidly, so we can measure how hard it is pushing up):

A beautiful mushroom-cloud like structure, with an inverted jet. The ghost knife has tamed some very complex fluid mechanics to make the fluid do its bidding. For an animal that hunts in the dark, frequently in large tree root masses alone rivers, the maneuverability this buys it is likely to be essential to its survival.

The GhostBot, and its future offspring, have a promising future. It has a number of compelling attributes compared to other fish for use in robotics, such as being able to near instantaneously change directions, and swimming while keeping the body rigid, making robotic implementation and deployment more practical. Another key advantage arises due to how smoothly the force the fin generates varies as we change things like amplitude of the wiggle down the fin. This adds to other advantages that the robot shares with other fish-based propulsion systems, such as resistance to getting stuck in weeds and other debris, which conventional propulsive technologies like propellers are prone to.

We’ve also built an artificial version of how the fish’s electric sonar works and put that on the robot. We are about to start experiments in which the robot is able to autonomously approach an object, sense it with its electrical field, and then position itself nearby. We are designing a new version of the GhostBot that will have additional capabilities, including fins at the front of the body for pitching and rolling.

Having underwater vehicles powered by such bio-inspired technology will enable new capabilities, such as detailed inspection work in cluttered quarters (a sunken ship, or an exploded well head undersea), and situations where only divers can be used because of the need for up close work near delicate structures (coral reef health monitoring, for example.)

Our ultimate goal is to simultaneously improve our understanding of how to process sensory information for agile movement and develop two stand-alone technologies: robotic undulators for propulsion of highly maneuverable underwater vehicles, and artificial electrosense for use in all kinds of devices where vision may not work. Stay tuned!

For all the details, you can check out the study, published by the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

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.

The Singularity seems to be getting less and less near. One of the big goals of Singularity hopefuls is to be able to put a human mind onto (into? not sure on the proper preposition here) a non-biological substrate. Most of the debates have revolved around computer analogies. The brain is hardware, the mind is software. Therefore, to run the mind on different hardware, it just has to be “ported” or “emulated” the way a computer program might be. Timothy B. Lee (not the internet inventing one) counters Robin Hanson’s claim that we will be able to upload a human mind onto a computer within the next couple decades by dissecting the computer=mind analogy:

You can’t emulate a natural system because natural systems don’t have designers, and therefore weren’t built to conform to any particular mathematical model. Modeling natural systems is much more difficult—indeed, so difficult that we use a different word, “simulation” to describe the process. Creating a simulation of a natural system inherently means means making judgment calls about which aspects of a physical system are the most important. And because there’s no underlying blueprint, these guesses are never perfect: it will always be necessary to leave out some details that affect the behavior of the overall system, which means that simulations are never more than approximately right. Weather simulations, for example, are never going to be able to predict precisely where each raindrop will fall, they only predict general large-scale trends, and only for a limited period of time. This is different than an emulator, which (if implemented well) can be expected to behave exactly like the system it is emulating, for as long as you care to run it.

In short: we know how software is written, we can see the code and rules that govern the system–not true for the mind, so we guess at the unknowns and test the guesses with simulations. Lee’s post is very much worth the full read, so give it a perusal.

Lee got me thinking with his point that “natural systems don’t have designers.” Evolutionary processes have resulted in the brain we have today, but there was no intention or design behind those process. Our minds are undesigned.

I find that fascinating. In the first place, because it means that simulation will be exceedingly difficult. How do you reverse-engineer something with no engineer? Second, even if a simulation is successful, it by no means a guarantees that we can change the substrate of an existing mind. If the mind is an emergent property of the physical brain, then one can no more move a mind than one could move a hurricane from one system to another. The mind, it may turn out, is fundamentally and essentially related to the substrate in which it is embodied.UPDATE: Hanson’s main claim is that we can make “economically-sufficient substitutes for human workers” at some point because “we already have pretty good signal-processing models of some cell types; we just need to do the same for all the other cell types.”  I acknowledge non-biological minds may be possible, but not within this century.

The problem is two-fold. First, we don’t understand the neurons in sensory organs well enough to replicate them, we just skip over broken ones with an entirely different system and let the brain figure the data out. The mind can “see” with almost any sufficiently nuanced set of information. As Lee notes, we can do that because we already know how to make an artificial ear, the problem was connecting it to a brain. Second, understanding the neuron does not mean we understand the network, nor how the network uses each neuron to process and retain information. Lee’s protein example is designed to show this micro/macro incongruence.

Finally, even if I grant Hanson’s point that the mind was “designed,” evolution is a messy and lazy inventor. As such, replication of biological structures is notoriously difficult. Perhaps unplanned is a better word?

I’m eager to see how this debate progresses, but it seems to me that Hanson takes the computer analogy a bit to strongly.

Image of DTI Sagittal Fibers via Wikipedia

A brief synopsis: Having run out of energy on Earth, humanity has gone to the Moon to extract helium-3 for powering the home planet. The movie begins with shots outside of a helium-3 extraction plant on the Moon. It’s a station manned by one worker, Sam, and his artificial intelligence helper, GERTY. Sam starts hallucinating near the end of his three-year contract, and during one of these hallucinations drives his rover into a helium-3 harvester. The collision causes the cab to start losing air and we leave Sam just as he gets his helmet on. Back in the infirmary of the base station, GERTY awakens Sam and asks if he remembers the accident. Sam says no. Sam starts to get suspicious after overhearing GERTY being instructed by the station’s owners not to let Sam leave the base.

So Sam tricks GERTY into letting him go out of the station in one of the rovers. He finds the first Sam who has crashed and brings him back to nurse him to health. The new Sam decides that chronic communication difficulties—which have only permitted seeing previously recorded messages from his wife and daughter waiting for him to return back on Earth—might be an elaborate deception. He goes far enough off base to get outside of the range of jamming antennas and calls back home to Earth to discover his daughter, who was an infant in the pre-recorded messages, is now a teenager, his wife is now dead—and her father Sam is there on Earth.

The sinister truth of the helium-3 base is now fully disclosed. What is actually happening is that the “first” Sam was himself a clone (where this means everything, including all his memories, not simply a genetic clone). Evidently, the copying occurred early in Sam 1’s stay at the station. Each clone is awakened with the thought of returning home to his family in three years. What actually happens at the end of those three years is that the clone is incinerated in the return capsule, and a new clone is awakened, to begin the cycle anew.

Near the end of the film comes a striking moment. The Sam that nearly died in the earlier crash has gotten increasingly sick and will die soon. The two Sams realize that the bosses of the station are coming to kill both of them and activate a new clone. They hatch a plan that has one of them leaving back to Earth in one of the helium-3 delivery shuttles. After newly awakened Sam tells dying Sam that he deserves to go back—“you did the three years”—dying Sam disagrees, and tells new Sam that he should return to Earth, because dying Sam is too sick to make it. This is a really powerful moment in the film, and our feelings about it are helpful in untangling our own mangle of thoughts about identity and death.

Dying Sam’s sacrifice seems less significant than, say, me telling an unrelated co-worker to take the capsule home. There are suggestive biological resonances to this feeling. Think of how, in social insects like bees, individuals give up the right to reproduce in order to facilitate the genetic continuity of individuals that they are closely related to. So, would the fact that you have a copy of yourself, which diverged from you even quite some while back (in this case, three years of solitude on a Moon base), ease your anxiety about dying?

Consider the following thought experiment. Rather than three-year stints, the clones of Moon get replaced on a 24-hour cycle. You fall asleep. Your memories and any other physical changes from the “base copy” get noted and propagated to a new clone. You are then, in Moon-like fashion, vaporized, and in the morning, a new clone is awakened after these changes have been “installed.” You awake, none the wiser for this change in body. Consciousness is not continuous, of course, and discontinuities such as sleep are natural places where we can do the “body change” business with minimal mess (not unlike what was depicted in the fantastic sci-fi film Dark City). The gap between what actually happens in sleep and this scenario seems too small to quibble over. Or is it?

As experiences and other physical changes separate you from your base clone as weeks, months, and years pass, your ability to separate your own identity from that of the clone grows similarly. It is like a core scene in the play “On Ego,” when a Star Trek-like teleporter fails to vaporize the original version of the protagonist. So two protagonists now exist. From that moment forward what was once one person is now two people, with increasingly different senses of self and experiences.

Your sense of how much you would sacrifice for your copy might be a good test for how different you feel from him or her. Your sense of how much comfort you would feel in dying, knowing that this other version of you lives on, might be another good test for how much of your identity has leaked out of the lump of tissue that has hitherto conveniently been bounded off by your jacket of skin. Perhaps in the first few days after such a teleporter accident, you would feel you could give up your life for your copy (and be relaxed about the idea of dying so that one of you can go on); after a few weeks, maybe something less than your life, and after some years of passed, perhaps you’d feel you could sacrifice nothing more than you would sacrifice for a close friend. (Topic for a future movie and post: Does forming a close friendship involve blurring and merging of your two identities?)

Here’s some final thought experiments for you to puzzle over. The great anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote in her paper “The Forensic Self,”

[In] western culture, whatever we say seriously about persons and selfhood needs to some extent to be compatible with what a jury in a court of law will accept.

For a graduate degree in philosophy with Ian Hacking many years ago, I once applied this idea to the issue of multiple personality disorder (MPD), to see how the judicial system dealt with defenses of MPD. The courts have mostly taken a view most eloquently put by Judge Birdsong in the case of Georgia v. Kirkland: “…we will not begin to parcel criminal accountability out among the various inhabitants of the mind.”

Rather than MPD, let’s see where we get when we apply Douglas’ insight to the problem of multiple person disorder: having multiple copies of yourself present at once. What if, just prior to copying, one of you formed a criminal intent. Because of slightly different post-copying existences, one of you now decide to stop the other. Would it be ethical to kill your copy? What would ethics require of how you treat one another? After all, we have sometimes odd ideas of what we are allowed to do to ourselves: Yes to smoking ourselves to death, no to elective limb amputations. These confusions would only be amplified by the peculiar situation of having multiple person disorder. Or being the victim of a sinister plot by Lunar Industries on the Moon.

Independence Day has one of my most favorite hero duos of all time: Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum. Brawn and brains, flyboy and nerd, working together to take out the baddies. It all comes down to one flash of insight on behalf of a drunk Goldblum after being chastised by his father. Cliché eureka! moments like Goldblum’s realization that he can give the mothership a “cold” are great until you realize one thing: if Goldblum hadn’t been as smart as he was, the movie would have ended much differently. No one in the film was even close to figuring out how to defeat the aliens. Will Smith was in a distant second place and he had only discovered that they are vulnerable to face punches. The hillbilly who flew his jet fighter into the alien destruct-o-beam doesn’t count, because he needed a force-field-free spaceship for his trick to work. If Jeff Goldblum hadn’t been a super-genius, humanity would have been annihilated.

Every apocalyptic film seems to trade on the idea that there will be some lone super-genius to figure out the problem. In The Day The Earth Stood Still (both versions) Professor Barnhardt manages to convince Klaatu to give humanity a second look. Cleese’s version of the character had a particularly moving “this is our moment” speech. Though it’s eventually the love between a mother and child that triggers Klaatu’s mercy, Barnhardt is the one who opens Klaatu to the possibility. Over and over we see the lone super-genius helping to save the world.

Shouldn’t we want, oh, I don’t know, at least more than one super-genius per global catastrophe? I’d like to think so. And where might we get some more geniuses? you may ask. We make them.

In his essay, “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”, philosopher David Chalmers notes that there is a very real chance that if machines become self-aware and start improving themselves, we’re going to have a problem (*cough* Skynet *cough* Liquid T-1000 *cough, cough*). One of his potential solutions is to enhance ourselves to keep up:

This might be done genetically, pharmacologically, surgically, or even educationally. It might be done through implantation of new computational mechanisms in the brain, either replacing or extending existing brain mechanisms. Or it might be done simply by embedding the brain in an ever more sophisticated environment, producing an “extended mind” whose capacities far exceed that of an unextended brain.

Does any of that sound familiar? Perhaps a little film called Gattaca may ring some bells? Chalmers is arguing enhancement may be necessary to prevent extinction. Why not extrapolate that logic to other existential risks. Alien invasion? Superhumans would probably put up a better fight. Skynet goes live? An army of hackers with a collective IQ of 200+ and neuro-integrated interfaces would clean that up in a jiffy. But what about our current problems? Although heavy-handed, the message in both versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still is that humanity’s greatest existential threat is itself. War, suffering, poverty, and environmental destruction all seem like problems that would merit allowing our best and brightest to become even better and brighter for the sake of everyone.

A common fear is that the super-intelligent would just step on us normals, creating second-class citizens. Enhancement doesn’t just mean the ability to do complex equations and create new molecular compounds; raw intellectual horsepower is just one among many possibilities. We know that some people have moral problems caused by damage to specific parts of their brain. As neuroscience progresses, there is a very real possibility we’ll be able to improve those specific parts of the moral brain. I don’t mean we’d have a society of lock-step rule followers, but instead people who were genuinely better at being moral than most of us. Can you imagine a world where politicians had improved ethical scruples? Or, to put it simply, where the most brilliant minds were also the most caring?

Which brings me back to Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. Not only does he come up with the solution, but he selflessly gets in the nuke-strapped UFO with Will Smith to fly into the middle of the enemy mothership. Same for professor Barnhardt, who is as good at moral philosophy as it seems he is math, attempting to show Klaatu the best of our species.

In science fiction, when humanity is faced with existential crises, we turn to great minds attached to great hearts. While we aren’t under alien attack or facing sentient machines, our world has its own share of problems. Human cognitive enhancement might just be the solution from which all other solutions are born; or maybe it brings too many risks of its own.

ID4 Promotional Image via Wikipedia under fair use

Are zombies really dead? How do we know? People are often reported “clinically dead” only to be revived later. If it is moving, if it reacts to stimuli like a food source or sounds, and if metabolic processes are in play, how can we call a zombie dead?

The most basic definition of life is the ability to have “signaling and self-sustaining processes” as the all-knowing Wikipedia tells us:

Living organisms undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, possess a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and, through natural selection, adapt to their environment in successive generations.

Zombies do indeed undergo a qualified form of metabolism, sort of maintain homeostasis, and definitely respond to stimuli. Alternately, zombies do not grow, reproduce, or go through natural selection. So much for a clear answer there.

Consider the following: When we “kill” something, we are implying that our action has made an “alive” thing “dead.” We commonly refer to “killing” zombies. Therefore, a zombie is alive until it is killed. Not quite, some might argue, a zombie is undead. Undead is a special word that describes an entity which was once alive in the full meaning of that word, then died, and was then re-animated (e.g. a zombie). The zombie was not re-vivified, that is, brought back to life, but its bare biological systems were re-started.

For example, dismembered frog legs that are given electrical shocks are not “alive” they are merely re-animated. But the frog leg example is insufficient, because the electrical shocks are external, and not part of an organism. In the case of a zombie, the electrical shocks that trigger muscle movement are, as with a living being, generated internally by metabolic processes and neural pathways. The frog legs are not “re-animated,” just artificially stimulated.

At the other end of the spectrum, how about a person who has a heart attack and, due to a delay in resuscitation, temporarily experiences cardio-pulmonary-death and brain-death: a total cessation in life functions. The person is, for a moment, clinically dead. That person is then successfully revived. The heart and lungs begin functioning again and the re-oxygenated brain “comes back to life” with no harm done. This person who is “back from the grave” is revivified. Though their biological functions ceased, for a variety of reasons the destructive postmortem processes were delayed long enough to allow total system restoration.

A zombie isn’t a shocked frog leg nor is it a revived person. Instead, we want to understand whether or not a moving, metabolizing, stimulus-responding corpse is alive. I submit that various parts of a zombie may resemble life, but in reality, it has less “life” than the bacterium eating its eyeball. It is more accurate to say that the pathogen inside the zombie is alive, while the corpse itself is dead. The corpse, as noted in my description of a zombie, is in a constant state of decomposition. While decomposition may be slowed by the pathogen, the process is not stopped.

Most important to the entire discussion, however, is brain activity. Though the body and some parts of the brain stem are reactivated, a zombie is, quite literally, brain-dead. Beating-heart cadavers are a primary example of a “functioning” body preserved by external means. In a zombie, organs function independently to a minimal degree and reflexes (such as balance) exist to some extent. Thus, while the zombie pathogen would do more than our current medical technology can do for a beating-heart cadaver, it neither reverses brain-death nor does it properly maintain basic conditions of life like metabolic processes or homeostasis. Some specific stimulus response systems are re-animated, but this is an illusion of bodily life, not an actual case of life.

Thus, a zombie is a dead body that affects some life-like behavior because it is being controlled by a living pathogen. “Killing” a zombie is, in effect, destroying it in a sufficient way to prevent the pathogen from utilizing the corpse.

Promotional Image via AMCtv.com

Halloween is a-comin’ and this Sunday brings us AMC’s The Walking Dead. In honor of that, we’re discussing The Ethics of the Undead here at Science, Not Fiction. This is part II of IV. (Check out parts I, & III)

Before we can start investigating whether or not something that craves brains has a mind or should be pitied, we need to define just what, exactly, we’re talking about when we talk about zombies.

I’m going to start by ruling out the 28 Days Later zombies and the voodoo/demonic zombies of Evil Dead. First, the name of this blog is Science, not Fiction, which means any religious hokum is right out the door. Demon possession, souls back from Hell, and voodoo are not going to be considered in this investigation. On the other end of the spectrum, in 28 Days Later anything infected with “Rage” becomes a “fast” zombie. In essence, Rage is rabies only way, way scarier. Thus we aren’t dealing with the “undead” so much as the violently insane. So non-fatal pathogens don’t count either. If the pathogen doesn’t first kill you, then re-animate you, then you aren’t a zombie.

Which leads us to the next question: how does the pathogen work? I am not denying here the multitude of variations and nuances among zombie plague viruses, so we have to come up with a generic, realistic version to have our discussion. Zombies generally meet three important criteria. They are 1) stimulus-response creatures that seek flesh 2) continually decomposing and 3) contagious via bodily fluids. If we can explain, reasonably, how and for what reason a pathogen might cause/allow these conditions, we can describe a realistic zombie pathogen.

Condition 1, that zombies are stimulus-response creatures that seek flesh, implies that the pathogen must act to re-animate the existing neural pathways and motor functions in some fashion. Let us presume human-only infection and that the virus, being species specific, results in a cannibalism preference. Thus the sensory systems which are re-activated are capable of distinguishing four key things: flesh-vs-not-flesh; species; infected-vs-uninfected; self. Furthermore, for the sake of simplicity, the virus does not create any new systems, it merely hijacks existing ones.

Next, we have to remember that contracting the zombie pathogen is terminal. Whatever the hijacking process involves, we must presume that an intermediate stage of infection between contamination and zombification is fatal. If I had to guess, the infection of the medulla oblogata – where most automatic processes are regulated – is what results in cardio-pulmonary death, followed shortly by brain-death. Sometime after brain-death the medulla is fully hijacked by the zombie pathogen, jump-started (I won’t attempt an explanation) and re-animation is underway.

Whether it is musculature, perceptive organs, or circulatory and digestive systems, the virus must work with what it has. The metabolic process continues, arguably for both the body and the pathogen, which in large part informs the indiscriminate hunger for flesh. It is critical here to note that a zombie body is not uniquely strong (in fact, the opposite), nor can the body function properly without oxygen, waste disposal, and nutrients. We can, however, presume that a zombie body can, in its own way, marginally function when some of these requirements are missing. However, when an eyeball is gone or the intestines finally rupture, that zombie has lost whatever sense or function was associated with the now deteriorated organ: no healing happens.

Which leads us to Condition 2, that zombies are continually decomposing. No one thinks of a zombie as a healthy, mindless body; you think of a corpse that moves. The re-animation process is, we assume, imperfect or it would be revivification. One of the imperfections is that autolysis – the process wherein a cell’s own enzymes begin to consume it – is not stopped or reversed. As autolysis is the first step in postmortem decay, even a brief period between death and re-animation would cause it to start. Other aspects of decomposition, such as purification and insect infestation, though significantly slowed would likely continue as well.

Based on the average zombie, we can presume a few things about the virus’ relationship to decomposition. First, is that the zombie virus slows decomposition by providing cells with some nutrients. Second, is that the immune system, at least a crippled version, still functions to slow human bacterial flora from consuming their host. Third, it could be presumed that while some cell division continues, repairs and restoration are lost. Fourth, the virus would likely only preserve essential functions, allowing irrelevant parts of the body, such as skin, secondary musculature, and some organs to decay. Finally, we can presume the virus itself must consume flesh to some degree, rendering the zombie’s metabolic processes incredibly inefficient and explaining the insatiability of a zombie. Thus, a zombie frozen in the arctic would likely re-animate upon thaw (pathogen in stasis; corpse preserved) while a zombie at the bottom of the ocean would first suffocate (albeit more slowly) and then be crushed.

Condition 3, that the pathogen is contagious via bodily fluids only, is a critical detail in terms of both staying true to the mythology of zombies and for presenting a scenario in which not everyone would instantly be zombified. An airborne pathogen, particularly one with any sort of incubation period, would be total, unstoppable pandemic. But, more importantly, we are dealing with a creature of fiction. And, just as with other members of the undead (e.g. vampires, werewolves) the bite gets in the blood and turns you

Remember, we almost never see someone getting bitten by a zombie and then not dying and “coming back.” The reason is that a bite both by-passes traditional levels of the immune system and delivers a huge dose of the pathogen directly into the circulatory system. Furthermore, it immediately contaminates the flesh directly exposed. As the zombie pathogen, whatever it is, seems able to interact with most cell types, not just specific ones (as with HIV), it would make sense that direct exposure would allow the virus both permeate the whole system (body) while beginning total infection at the site of contamination as well. It only takes one bite!

There you have it. A zombie pathogen must 1) be transmitted via bodily-fluids to 2) ensure sufficient and total infection which 3) is always fatal due to the fact that pathogen must 4) either consume the host or host-acquired flesh 5) hijack all the necessary functions for movement and sensation 6) provide at least some nutrients to itself and the body 7) allow continued movement and 8.) slow the decomposition of the host body.

Promotional Image via AMCtv.com by Scott Garfield

Halloween is a-comin’ and this Sunday brings us AMC’s The Walking Dead. In honor of that, we’re discussing The Ethics of the Undead here at Science, Not Fiction. This is part I of IV. (Check out parts II, & III)

Zombies are everywhere! Zombieland, Shawn of the Dead, and 28 Days Later in the movies; World War Z and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on the bookshelf; Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising and Resident Evil in your video games - not to mention the George A. Romero and Sam Rami classics in your DVD collection. And this Sunday Robert Kirkman’s epic The Walking Dead lurches from the pages of comic books onto your television thanks to AMC.

Where ever you turn, zombies are there. We can’t seem to get enough of the re-animated recently departed. But why do we love these ambling carnivorous cadavers so?

Zombies are horrifying. An outbreak would almost certainly lead to global apocalypse. Unrelenting, unthinking, uncaring, undead, they are a nightmare incarnate. They remind us of mortality, of decay, of our own fragility. Perhaps worst, they remind us of how inhuman a human being can become.

Zombies are familiar. Refrains of “Brains!”, guttural groans, and mindless shambling instantly trigger the idea of a zombie in our mind. We all know, somehow, that decapitation – that is, destruction of the zombie brain – is our only salvation. I bet you’ve dressed as one for Halloween. Every time “Thriller” comes on you probably dance like a zombie. Some mornings I feel like a zombie. Even philosophers talk about zombies. We know zombies. They are hilarious, they are frightening, they are part of us. And that is why we love them.

But have you ever asked yourself: is a zombie still a human? is a zombie dead, really? can it feel pain? does a zombie have dignity? Has the question ever popped up in your quite-live brain: is it ok to kill a zombie? Could a zombie be cured? If you could cure it, would you still want to? In honor of Halloween and our culture’s current love affair with brain-eating corpses, I present The Ethics of the Undead, your universal guide for answering all of your most pressing zombie questions. Stay tuned for posts throughout Halloween weekend!

Images via ThatZombiePhoto.com and lolzombie.com

CLARICE: Zoe Graystone was Lacy’s best friend. A real tragedy for all of us. She was very special. I mean, she was brilliant.

NESTOR: At computer stuff, right? That’s my major. Did you know that there are bits of software that you use every day that were written decades ago?

LACY: Is that true? Oh, that’s amazing.

NESTOR: Yeah. You write a great program, and, you know, it can outlive you. It’s like a work of art, you know? Maybe Zoe was an artist. Maybe her work… Will live on.

From: Rebirth, Season 1.0 of Caprica

I’m excited that today Caprica is back on the air for the second half of its first season. As the show’s science advisor, I thought I’d pay homage to its reentry into our living rooms with some thoughts about how the show is dealing with the clash between the mortality of its living characters and the immortality of its virtual characters.

As Nestor says in the passage above, a great program can outlive you. It’s a clever reference to Zoe’s hacking leading to her digital self outliving her biological self. But the extent to which a piece of art can outlive you differs radically depending on what you “paint” with. Philosopher John Haugeland’s 1981 work “Analog and Analog” is full of great insights into the difference between digital and analog systems. Haugeland defines a digital device as*:

1. A set of types (for example, our alphabet; or 1 and 0s of computers),

2. A set of feasible procedures for writing and reading tokens of those types, and

3. A specification of suitable operating conditions, such that

4. under those conditions, the procedures for the write-read cycle are positive and reliable.

Using Haugeland’s criteria, if you are dealing with words, then you are dealing with a digital system. Shakespeare’s sonnets are largely as he wrote them, and they will remain this way for an eternity, perhaps with small adjustments to account for changes in English (though there will always be versions in the original form for scholars). Because the alphabet is a set of types (1), and we have a set of feasible procedures for writing and reading tokens of those types (2), and a specification of suitable operating conditions (e.g., light to read and write by!) (3), such that under those conditions, we can read the sonnets and copy them in a reliable fashion without error (4). So the work of Shakespeare will live on, potentially eternally, because it is enmeshed in digital system (written language) in which perfect copying is possible. We don’t complain, when we read a reprint of his work, that we are not “reading the original”—it is the original.

Now contrast this with a Rembrandt painting, which can never be perfectly copied; so, once—despite the efforts of art conservationists—it finally turns to dust, this Rembrandt painting will be no more. Eventually all of his work will be lost this way. Clearly, a Rembrandt does not fit the criteria for a digital device.

An interesting analog to these concepts is the idea that biological aging represents the accumulation of small errors of copying DNA over the course of your lifetime. If the copying was perfect, again we’d be a digital device—and eternal.

In Caprica, Zoe’s and Tamara’s switch from their biological to virtual selves leaves a lot for their biological family and friends to ponder, similar to questions that characters in BSG had about the 12 human-looking cylon models. Are these virtual selves “real”? Do they have a “soul”? How does the lack of aging, and impossibility of death, affect relationships between digital and analog selves? How can a digital self inhabit both the virtual worlds of Daniel Graystone’s creation and the analog world? These are some questions that will continue to lurk beneath the surface as we see the stories of series 1.5 unfold. Stay tuned!

Reference: Haugeland, J. (1981). Analog and Analog. Philosophical Topics, 12, 213-226.

Below are short excerpts of the guest scientists’ responses, with links to the full versions:

Ken Caldeira: “…If you could directly produce chemical fuel from sunlight and do it affordably, that could really be a game changer…”

Jack Horner: “…If we want to see an animal like a velociraptor, we will be able to create one by genetic engineering. It might even be possible to make something that looks like a T. rex…”

Oliver Sacks: “…We thought that every part of the brain was predetermined genetically, and that was that. Now we know that enormous changes of function are possible…”

Sylvia Earle: “…We’ve explored only about 5 percent of the ocean. For us to have better maps of the moon, Mars, and Jupiter than of our own ocean floor is baffling…”

Rodney Brooks: “…The arguments we have about drugs and sports are minuscule compared with what’s coming, such as ‘What is the definition of human?’ We have the Paralympics now, but we’ll have the Augmented Olympics in the future…”

Debra Fischer: “…Every year since 1995, we have discovered more extrasolar planets than the year before. A parallel thing could happen with extraterrestrial life: After we find one example, we’ll hone our strategies to be smarter and more efficient…”

Tachi Yamada: “…I don’t believe just because you’re poor, you shouldn’t have access to lifesaving technology…”

Neil Turok: “…The science has reached the point where questions that used to be just philosophy could be observationally testable in 10 or 20 years…”

Ian Wilmut: “…We should be able to control degenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and heart disease…”

Sherry Turkle: “…Sometimes a citizenry should not ‘be good.’ You have to leave room for real dissent…”

Brian Greene: “…We may establish that there is not a unique universe—that ours is just one of many in a grand multiverse. That would be one of the most profound revolutions in thinking we have ever sustained…”

Having robots with minds implementing the scientific process rather than math problem solving is essentially what’s happening in a few corners of robotics, most recently with the Xpero project, an effort to develop an embodied cognitive system that learns about its world much like an infant would. It’s one of a host of robo-infants being worked on (here’s a nice overview graphic). This approach has led to some very impressive achievements including an “evil starfish” robot that can quickly learn how to control its body after several of its “limbs” have been chopped off.

Hod Lipson (left) and yours truly pulling legs off the evil starfish in 2006.

In 2006, Hod Lipson and co-workers published a short paper with the sexy title “Resilient Machines Through Continuous Self-Modeling.” In it, he demonstrated how a small, starfish-like robot (aka, “the evil starfish”) could automatically learn its own body shape and movement capabilities. It did this through an automatic process of scientific inquiry. It worked something like this: first, make an arbitrary movement. What this means is that the robot sends out signals to its body, without knowing what those signals will do. While sending these movement signals out, the robot records sensory signals that tell it about what happened to the body due to that movement (scientific process analog: experiment). Second, generate a small number of models of the body that are compatible with movements resulting in the recorded sensory information (analog: hypothesis generation). Third, through some fast on-board simulation (aka, thinking), the robot figures out what movement(s) would give it the most information to distinguish between the different body models that are compatible with the information it has collected (analog: prioritizing hypotheses for testing). Fourth, the robot executes these movements, and uses the resulting sensory information for further refinement of its guess as to what its body is (analog: hypothesis testing and refinement).

What is great about this process, as I discovered when I visited Lipson’s lab some years ago to give a talk at Cornell, is that the robot has an amazing degree of robustness. The starfish robot shown in the photo has had one of its arms pulled off, and after a brief learning process, it figures out its new body shape and saunters off! It was slightly unnerving to witness this process. There is something about an animal recovering from damage that gives us a sense that it cares about its continued existence. In some sense, this is part of the essence of what it means to be a living organism: something that cares about its continued existence and acts so as to further that goal. When you see a machine act in this manner, it triggers certain associations that make it feel biological.

If indeed, as Alison Gopnik and others have argued, we all grow up absorbing all the important things we need to know through something like the scientific process, then the current work on making an algorithm that emulates the scientific process may be just the thing that AI needs for making breakthroughs on solving the problems we really want our robots to solve, such as making us a coconut mojito with just the right amount of muddled mint.

For more information on the European Xpero project, visit their website. A prior project, also EU-sponsored, was the iCub. A nice overview graphic of different robot infant approaches was in this July’s issue of IEEE Spectrum. Some interesting recent work on formalizing the discovery of regularities through experiments can be found in Hod Lipson’s “Selected Recent Publications.” Here is a thoughtful commentary on the starfish robot work by Chris Adami. Using data to automatically do science has also received attention in bioinformatics, most recently highlighted in articles about Sergey Brin’s datamining efforts to find a cure for Parkinson’s, in this podcast, and in academic circles here and here.

Image of robot in crib by Malcolm MacIver using free 3-D models on TurboSquid.

My complaint isn’t that he has set a date by which we’ll understand the brain, but that he has provided no baseline value for his exponential growth claim, and has no way to measure how much we know now, how much we need to know, and how rapidly we will acquire that knowledge.

The part which I have bolded is the central flaw of much Singul-itarian thought. They cannot show how technologies are changing exponentially or explain why that will allow whole brain emulation. Even if Kurzweil could give us the necessary data, exponential growth does not guarantee practical results, as I discussed in my post on progress in genomic sequencing. George Dvorsky, a Canadian futurist and colleague of mine at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, defends whole brain emulation as a possibility, but hedges his bets on the timeframe:

Kurzweil’s prediction of 2030 is uncomfortably short in my opinion; his analogies to the human genome project are unsatisfying. This is a project of much greater magnitude, not to mention that we’re still likely heading down some blind alleys.

My own feeling is that we’ll likely be able to emulate the human brain in about 50 to 75 years. I will admit that I’m pulling this figure out of my butt as I really have no idea. It’s more a feeling than a scientifically-backed estimate.

Since we’re pulling figures out of our posterior, I’m going to throw a guess from a futurist I really respect, Gene Roddenberry, into the ring: successful whole brain emulation will first occur in the twenty-fourth century. That’s when Data and his unique “positronic brain” was built in the Star Trek universe. Seems like a more reasonable time frame to me.

Why? Consider the state of current prosthetics and robotics. The most advanced robotic arms in the world, be they the iLimb or DEKA’s Luke Arm, are cumbersome, heavy, weak, clumsy, and delicate compared to a human arm. They lack touch receptors; texture, heat, density, and other basics of sensation are decades away. One of the only successful osso-integrated prosthetics is a set of what are essentially peg-legs of metal and rubber on a cat named Oscar. Don’t even get started with me on neuro-integration. In short, we’re still struggling with replicating knees and elbows, so how the hell is the whole brain a mere few decades away?

The answer to the titular question of this post would seem to be: nope. At least Kurzweil is adhering to the Law of Futurology!

Image by digitalbob8 via Flickr