Brain enhancements | The augumented you
In the famous sci-fi movie “The Matrix,” there’s a scene where the female heroine, Trinity, learns to fly a helicopter by uploading instructions straight to her brain. Neuro-scientists would have to master that trick so that they could help patients suffering from brain injuries and diseases.
Scientific progress already allows scientists to tackle all the aspects of brain repair and enhancement in animals. Using electronic implants and biological techniques scientists are able to boost the memory and other functions in animals. There have even been a few lab tests where human subjects were given the opportunity to control a computer cursor with their thoughts.
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There’s no telling how today’s research will shape the world in the next 10 or 20 years, but once the tools and techniques are perfected, there’s little question competitive individuals will get swept up in a race to expand their brain capacity.
It’s been said that a Sunday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average 19th-century citizen accessed in his entire life. We now wonder at that… But it’s possible that the electronically augumented person of 2025 will be able to absorb whole new fields of information – the knowledge we now accumulate in a lifetime - by beaming it, Matrix-style, to the circuits in his modified cortex. All that in a just a few short moments. Those people will say: “a single memory chip of ours carries twice as much information than one expert from two decades ago encountered in his entire life.”
Even if the development of this field has therapeutic purposes at it’s foundation, strong and troublesome ethical issues are raised by the prospect.
Many people are put off by the notion of physically battering the brain - the root of thought, personality, individuality and human nature itself. And not just that, but some ethicists question the wisdom of handing new brain tools over to society so that privileged individuals can exploit them to get even further ahead of everyone else.
There are of course other people that don’t see any harm in it.
The truth is that if the cost of advanced brain technologies drops quickly and the surgical risks become less dire, people may request brain chips as casual as they receive a shot of Botox or an anti-flu vaccine.
We must keep up with the times but remember to stay true to our personal and moral values.
Now, want to learn how to fly that plane that I was talking about in the title? Just hang around in this world for a little longer.
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As with any tool, the ability to work with the brain directly comes with many sticky ethical questions. These are not simple questions, either. An example off the top of my head would be “will the ability to use these techniques be available for all, or will it be limited to a few?”, along the same lines as you expressed. Or how about “Will such modification be compulsory?”
The tools themselves are not the problem. We are. If (and admittedly it’s a big “if”) we are strong enough, wise enough, and compassionate enough, new tools and techniques will only serve us.
My projection is that during the initial phases there are going to be a few “loose cannons”, but that by the time the technology matures, society will have regulated it so that abuses of the technology will be at a minimum. I can only imagine what the penalties would be.
Of course, this does assume that society will survive the initial phase. Robert Heinlein in the short story “Gulf”, suggested that the defining characteristic of a superman was that the superman takes humankind’s evolutionary advantage, thought, to a new level. It is possible (albeit unlikely in my opinion), that someone who has gotten a cognitive boost may have greatly increased ambitions.
In the end it comes down to a simple question: Do we trust ourselves? The answer to that, I leave to you.
To some degree I think that these modifications will be compulsory - a basic implementation would be required. Beyond their medical and cognitive uses, we must face the fact that this technology could be used to directly influence and control people.
At the present moment schools are serving that purpose (control through formulaic means), but given that an increasingly number of people are becoming aware of school’s “side effects,” something will be changed. Maybe brain chips will become the next “school,” who knows.
About the greatly increased ambitions, I believe they will seem to be increased only when looked upon from the perspective of the present time, but in those future circumstances peoples ambitions will be as normal as ever. Everything evolves.
Do we trust ourselves? This is a very good question, with many sides to it.
Assuming that we will trust ourselves, Jack Handey said an interesting thing in one of his “Deep Thoughts”:
“I can picture in my mind a world with out war, a world with out hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.”
We are - each of us - the only ones that can limit the potential misuses of such revolutionary technology. We can do that by educating ourselves and our thoughts, by knowing or striving to know the know the meaning of our lives, by helping each other out and by becoming aware that no matter how many new technologies time will bring us, this world will still remain just a place in our minds, nothing more than a persistent illusion…
At the moment I’m very excited about these technologies and I have no doubt that they will further improve our lives in a very good way. There will be minor problems with it (there always are), but the only thing that worries me is: what will happen to blogging?
Transcranial RSS feeds.
That would be interesting indeed. If RSS survives…
Maybe the information from the actual RSS feeds will simply be uploaded to our brains, wireless. We would simply *know* what’s new on our favorite sites.
Trying to picture life in a bio-enhanced world is an interesting (and exciting) imagination exercise. Highly suggested for everyone!
[...] I am, with yet another connection to The Matrix movie. Let’s take a look at the “there is no spoon” [...]