why we're a step closer to merging humans with machines
Scientists are fusing biology and electronics in new and promising ways.
I’m going to open this post by breaking three rules that are sure to send every social media and marketing “growth hacker” into a furious frenzy. First, breaking the fourth wall. The second is starting off with a reference to myself. And the third is requiring a little prior knowledge before proceeding further. Specifically, about a 1993 paper by computer scientist and sci-fi author Vernor Vinge, which was abused to give the tech world an erroneous obsession with creating a machine super-intelligence.
Like many dreamers and technologists, Vinge was wondering whether humanity will hear the siren call of transhumanism and cross into becoming something we would hesitate to call human as we know it. After writing a fairly brief paper on the topic for NASA trying to imagine the relevant advances of the next 30 years, he found a very receptive and excited audience. Unfortunately, said audience would eventually go on to completely mangle his work.
Like I said in the video, there is one scenario in Vinge’s paper which I agree is one of the most plausible futures for humanity, one I’ve been talking about for years. Forget machines overthrowing people either because they’ll want to, or someone made the classic blunder of programming them to maximize paperclips at any cost. Instead, we will merge with our machinery to better overcome disease, injury, old age, and break through the frustrating limits of being made of meat, water, and minerals.
the rough road from screen to lab
Elon Musk’s idea to implant chips in people’s brains can trace its lineage right back to Vinge’s paper, and while its implementation was inept, to put it mildly, the overall idea is on the right track, usually because someone with a real vision and expertise had it in the first place. In the case of superpowered cyborgs, Vinge looked at the then very popular idea in cyberpunk sci-fi of connecting the brain to more and more advanced machinery with the help of an artificial intelligence.
Instead of relying on your mind to keep track of details, recall obscure facts, or find a whole bunch of things for you to research before you can navigate new environments, an assistant that lives in your head — not rent free mind you, it would be some sort of very expensive subscription since it wouldn’t be cyberpunk otherwise — will help you get acclimated to or find anything you need in a matter of seconds.
Don’t speak the language in a new county? You’re fluent in minutes, Babel Fish style. Landed on an alien planet? Here’s a map of all the terrain we know, complete with all the relevant data. Kind of like ChatGPT without all the hallucinations, which means a completely different architecture and an output more like a search engine than your run of the mill chatbot. It wouldn’t be a voice talking to you when you think about it, it would be part of you, deeply integrated into your mind.
Obviously this will require brand new technology as well, chips that are built and work more like neurons than logic gates. Hence, the advent of biochips. They sound like an object right out of science fiction, a cluster of nerve cells called an organoid, wrapped in a substrate that can conduct electricity and interface with computers. But they are very real and being tested right now as potential upgrades to our current silicon chips thanks to their immense density, 3D structure, and low energy requirements.
why we’re pushing to build a brain++
Now, personally I’m not sure about this as a viable replacement for CPUs and GPUs as organic matter has a tendency to eventually die, and limitations on what it can handle. They might be fine for small scale experiments, but there are still a lot of questions as to how well they would handle industrial scale computing, their long term viability and durability, and how much it would take to maintain them.
However, what they show is that given the right scaffolding, our nerve cells can learn to integrate with implants well beyond the level of exchanging a few low voltage zaps with electrodes. We could construct entire new cortices to interact with machinery or control robotic parts of our bodies in the far future using similar techniques, becoming parts of something no longer entirely human, and yet as human as we can since it’s in our nature to experiment, aspire, and push boundaries.
There would be a million questions and rightful concerns about what devices we can and will interface with, why, and whether we can maintain our safety and privacy while doing so. I’m also not entirely sure we will ever have answers to these questions to our full satisfaction. But what I do know is that a little bit of uncertainty won’t stop us if the upside, which in this case is transcending many human limitations, seems worth it.