Sullivan mulls new tech that lets monkeys and people control robot arms and fly simulated helicopters with their brains alone. I will breeze through a couple points quickly to get to my larger concern.
– It will be great for amputees to have better and more powerful prosthetics. There is also no real reason why a healthy person cannot pick up a couple of extra super strong tentacle arms or whatever. Bionic augmentation possibilities are basically limited by the imagination (first up: a remote for people too lazy to move their thumbs).
– An infallible and ubiquitous lie detector would be a godawful idea. I suppose that case law would keep such a thing limited to where it is used (unreliably) today. However, if it uses the same tech that thousands or millions of people will have at home then it would be nearly impossible to keep a lid on grey market ‘apps’. Abuse possibilities are almost endless.
– As soon as they give monkeys brain-controlled exoskeletons with lasers, I’m moving to Greenland. It ought to be a vacation spot soon anyway.
I think that the most significant concern is that the brain is not a ROM device. Researchers have used quite similar weird science electro-hats (technically, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS) to activate or inactivate countless different parts of the brain. Switch off Broca’s area and you can no longer understand or use language (though, oddly, you can sing). Switch on somewhere else and you have a religious experience. Switch off another bit and you cannot control the urge to buy something you see advertised on TV. It certainly would give new meaning to the term ‘universal remote’.
cleek
turn off the areas that control empathy, logic and adaptability to new situations and you can experience what it’s like to be a “conservative” !
Linda Featheringill
We as humans can’t be trusted to control our own brains so we’re developing the technology to control other brains?
The Neanderthals were around for a quarter of a million years. We won’t be.
Gin & Tonic
Those who cannot abide Sullivan can read a good overview of the same subject in this Economist article.
deep cap
One step closer to the singularity. I plan to make sure I have plenty of backups of my psyche so when they can start uploading viruses to people’s brains I’ll be able to just upload myself to the internet.
JPL
Wasn’t there an episode on Twilight Zone about this?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I want a math coprocessor, a lot of ram, and then the ability to copy myself onto the net (Permutation City was a pretty good book).
RSA
I’ve lately been reading about various approaches to brain-computer interfaces, and while there’s been great progress, I suspect that BCIs won’t be ready for casual use for years, at least to do the kind of Doc Ock things we might expect, with portable and non-invasive devices. The best rates for command entry that I’ve seen, for example, are in the range of 5 to 10 per minute. That’s great for someone who has no other way of controlling a prosthetic hand, with the hand carrying out routine movements, but otherwise…
WereBear
Something important to know when retraining; for instance, after a stroke. Get them singing, and you can get them talking, again.
Bill E Pilgrim
@deep cap:
I think there are some people who have pretty much uploaded themselves to Balloon-Juice by now, or are well into the migration from RL to just living here. John better be sure this thing is backed up.
cleek
let me know when i can become a Cylon. that’s all i want. immortality, guns in my hands and a glowing spine.
Judas Escargot
If only some people, bad people, had access to the technology, then yes.
If the technology were accessible to everyone, then I’m not so sure. Imagine a television that flashed a red “LIAR ALERT” on the screen whenever the speaker’s voice patterns indicated s/he was being dishonest. Certain news organizations would go bankrupt in a matter of months.
I’m half kidding with my example, but people do need to get used to the idea that many of our current social arrangements and assumptions are not going to survive this century. If something can be built, then it will be built, eventually. Wringing our hands about consequences hasn’t stopped a single technology from being developed in the past. There’s no reason to believe that approach will work in the future, either.
andrewsomething
The first place something like will see use is in testing low wage employees.
Yesterday, on NPR there was a segment about seasonal labor (i.e. UPS warehouse and temp retail). The guest mentioned that applicants for most of these jobs would need to pass drug tests. She obviously approved. The funny thing was that the NPR host was so out of touch with normal people’s lives that she seemed a little taken back. She never heard of low wage workers being drug tested. This is nothing new. ~15 years ago, I was drug tested while in high school to get a job bagging groceries. I also had to take a test that ask me such questions as “Do you think it is acceptable to take a pencil from your job?”
victory
Good name for a band.
cleek
@andrewsomething:
this week, my wife interviewed for a part-time job doing pre-employment phone-screens for salespeople in the bio-tech industry. she’s a former bio-tech recruiter with years of high-level experience, so it seems like a perfect fit.
as part of the interview process, she had to complete a 260 question aptitude and psych-profile test.
Redshift
@Judas Escargot:
I’m not so sure. I suspect that sociopaths might be able to beat it by being able to believe that whatever they’re saying at the moment is true. If so, Fox would probably be able to keep most of their current hosts.
Davis X. Machina
@JPL: Max Headroom certainly did. There were Neurostim bracelets handed out by a fast-food chain….
David Fud
Not only is the brain not ROM, it literally isn’t ROM: every time a memory is accessed, it is modified. This is why eyewitness testimony is so suspect. As long as scientists are just reading what is going on in the brain, I guess that fact won’t impact these studies, but I wonder what happens when scientists want to tap directly into the brain and make it a two-way affair, as in direct writing to the brain.
Excuse me, having a Matrix moment.
David Fud
@andrewsomething: Ah, the good old integrity test. There are arguments in academia about the validity of these, as these tests are basically proprietary. I don’t know what exactly a grocery sacker could steal, but… I guess they have the right to ask applicants. Clearly, treating their applicants as potential thieves didn’t leave a good impression on you, since you remember it all these years later.
S. cerevisiae
A lie detector like that would be very bad and have many unintended consequences. Just imagine everyone everywhere suddenly having to tell the truth all the time. Divorce lawyers would get very rich.
David Fud
@cleek: When there is so much competition for employment, it is easier to do this. It is better than hiring without such tests (which is full of every bias and problem imaginable), but there has to be a happy medium. How long did the test take her?
jeffreyw
Brainstorm
Certified Mutant Enemy
@cleek:
I once had to take such a test while applying for a position. Under normal circumstances, I would have terminated the interview at that point. Unfortunately, I was a motivated job seeker at the time. (I actually got the job, but the company had huge cut back right at the time I was made an offer — a good thing, in retrospect).
Judas Escargot
@Redshift:
You might be half-joking as I was (hard to tell), but this is actually a very valid point: Clinical Sociopaths are known to be able to spoof polygraphs with training, using this exact technique.
Our hypothetical Liargraph would have to be designed to detect sociopaths, as well.
Special Patrol Group
The great Lewis Black covered this a few years back:
samson
Shades of Philip K. Dick’s Mood Organ from “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
JGabriel
@Judas Escargot:
“Honey, does this shirt make my stomach look fat?”
“How many lovers have you had?”
“Do you love {insert pet’s name here} more than me?”
Maybe not such a good idea.
.
Argive
And I thought that flicking vending machines at people’s heads was limited to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Soon, Adam Jensen will have NOTHING on me!
cleek
@Redshift:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn_PSJsl0LQ
Crusty Dem
I work in this field (I’m actually working on autonomous neural control for recovery from stroke/spinal cord injury) and the lie detector stuff is ridiculously bogus tripe dreamed up by those wanting DARPA grants. Neural control of (one-dimensional) X is pretty straightforward, adding extra dimensions gets tricky in a hurry. Lots of people are using really crappy models (IMHO) to extract details that aren’t really there (the computer analyzing the data learns the task, not the subject’s neurons).
Anyway, it’s an awesome field, but between the sci-fi geeks and bioethicists, you pretty much can’t scratch your ass without someone losing their fucking mind…
Joel
We are all Krang.
Martin
@Judas Escargot:
Fixed!
Judas Escargot
@JGabriel:
“Oh no, honey, white spandex stirrup pants are very flattering!”
My now-wife, gods bless her, learned some years ago to never ask me a question unless she really wanted the answer.
It’s a complete mystery as to how I didn’t get married until my 40s, isn’t it?
Martin
@Crusty Dem:
That would require three dimensional control, right? And some kind of fail-safe filter to make sure it was your ass.
I see what you’re getting at. It is complicated.
ornery
oh good sully said something thank you for the very important information
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@cleek: Yes, the only way it would really work is for it to be an oracle.
Quaker in a Basement
What? Monkeys with robot arms?
Which evil supervillain came up with that one?
Poopyman
@JGabriel: Piece o’ cake.
Answers:
Martin
@Quaker in a Basement:
My daughter came up with that idea.
28 Percent
I used to only get worried about the convergence of self-replicating robots with carnivorous robots. Now I have to worry about the inevitable creation of self-replicating, carnivorous robots that can control human brain waves.
It must have been nice being Alduous Huxley, when the big thing you had to worry about the future holding was easy access to birth control.
Kristine
PK Dick was a time traveler, and his books were actually trip reports.
Crusty Dem
@Martin:
I think Nicolelis was working on that using an unscented Kalman filter for control and 768 electrodes in bilateral M1 and S1. The ass-detection algorithm is pretty convoluted, but they have it working with a piece of Bayesian code fitting it to N+1 dimensional space by balancing out the Eigenvectors. If that doesn’t work, you can just feed your input through an interocitor (assuming you have a Cathermin tube with inindium complex of +4)..
Judas Escargot
@Kristine:
Well, the second half of that sentence is correct…
Michael Finn
If you use an MRI machine to look at a brain, you can actually see the person’s mind getting ready for the lie because of the activity in the creative side of the brain.
catclub
@Judas Escargot: Just remember, a diplomat is someone who can convince his wife that a fur coat would make her look stout.
Villago Delenda Est
@Judas Escargot:
Let’s see now. Dick Cheney. The entire GOP Presidential candidate field. All CEOs. The Village. The police. The 27%. Your wife and/or girlfriend.
This is not an exhaustive list, I might add…
Judas Escargot
@Villago Delenda Est:
That would be a fearful asymmetry, agreed.
Linnaeus
@Judas Escargot:
I guess it depends on how one defines “wringing our hands about consequences.” It’s true that there are powerful drivers of technology, but I don’t think we should fall back into technological determinism, either. The issue isn’t stopping technology so much as figuring out how technology impacts social arrangements, what’s good and bad about that, modifying social arrangements and creating new ones where necessary.
NobodySpecial
Except that the first time said person goes to actually USE the arm, it detaches right from the quite human attachment point….
Janus Daniels
“An infallible and ubiquitous lie detector would be…” great IF it were really ubiquitous, and IF it really worked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
Mnemosyne
@JGabriel:
I actually have specifically instructed my husband that when I ask if something makes me look fat, I do actually want to know the truth because most of the time, I’m trying something on that I just bought and deciding if I want to keep it.
Usually, he says something diplomatic like, “It’s not very flattering” rather than, say, “Wow, you look like a hippo in that!”
ruemara
@cleek: I’ve been trying to get an interview to do media for a grocery chain. As of yet, despite 3 postings of the job in over a month, I have not heard from them. They have this arcane series of questions you have to fill out each time you apply and I keep wondering if this bizarre psych profile shit is why I never hear from them. I hate those things with a passion. I just don’t believe they work as anything other than an endurance test.
mick
need a new heart? new lungs? we nearly have the technology to grow you your own genetically identical body part in a petri dish. the .1% may already be growing their own cloned spare parts in china or india.
but you can’t do this with the brain. you can’t download the software to that grey hardware. and if you live long enough, alzheimers does come for everyone.
so in the future, we will have alot of physically healthy but very senile wealthy people living off the interest on their interest. driving their fucking bentley’s real slowly and erratically, blocking supermarket aisles in Boca Raton and Monaco, and asking the same fucking questions over and over and over again. these senile pests will be here on earth running the world when our children are born, and they will be here when our children’s children are dead, and it will be the same goddamned people. same names generation after generation. these people will need a new name for their group’s identity. something like Vampires or Zombies. the Frankenwealthy.
but it is easy to rip off old senile people with roofing and driveway sealant scams, so we have that going for us.
Catsy
@Argive: I was waiting for someone to make a DX3 reference. For my money, Human Revolution is currently game of the year. Just magnificent.
And extraordinarily timely, especially if you hack everything so that you can dive deep into all the lore buried in people’s emails. Though as an aside, I have to assume that everyone’s infosec habits in that world are so godawful because it’s apparently trivially easy to hack anything with the right implant.
Seriously though, the game is right about one thing: within most of our lifetimes, we are going to have to come to terms with a complete redefinition of the human condition–indeed, of what it means to be “human” at all.
Cybernetic augmentation technology may be in its infancy now, but it is a matter of when–not if–it matures to the point where we start blurring the lines between man and machine. Direct neural control of electronic systems really is the sticking point–once we master that, it blows the doors wide open.
When, not if.