Who Will Control the Human Brain?
The prospect is that in the decades ahead, biotechnology—together with other sciences—may fundamentally change the human species and thus pose an elemental threat to democracy, the world order, and indeed to all civilizations. As in the past, the rights of biotech researchers to push forward on all fronts will be challenged in the name of religious and ethical principles. Today’s rows over cloning and therapeutic uses of stem cells are merely preliminary skirmishes.7 We will come to see those disputes as petty in comparison with the issue we must inevitably confront one day in the future: To what extent will biotechnology and computer science be allowed, or encouraged, to alter the innermost sanctuary of our existence, the mind that makes us human? We should not hope for meaningful international agreement on this question. Even on the far more limited proposals for regulating stem cell research, international consensus is not within reach. Should some democracies propose an international treaty to limit the permissible scope of interventions in the human brain, they will discover that several dictatorships and autocratic regimes will either reject the proposed agreement or violate it later on. Recall the appalling story of the Soviet Union’s promotion of the “Soviet man,” a new personality whose foremost quality is total commitment to the Communist Party.8
It is against this background that we must assess the continuing progress in brain sciences. Neuroscience is steadily gaining a deeper understanding of how the brain of Homo sapiens enables the functioning of the mind—with its intellect, will power, emotions, and mysterious consciousness. This understanding is helped along by new, noninvasive technologies that permit researchers to observe mental functions within the living brain. The new diagnostic tools include Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, and Positron Emission Tomography. They are already providing valuable data on what goes on inside the brain when it is engaged in specific mental activities. More recently, scientists have successfully used nano-sensors and fluorescent imaging to observe changes in the chemistry of individual brain-cells.9
Might this new knowledge point the way to enhanced human intelligence? Numerous research projects have succeeded in improving the mental faculties of animals via genetic engineering. By targeting a single gene, experiments with mice have shown measurable improvements in memory. Other experiments explored molecular processes affecting the plasticity of certain neural functions, which might show a way to limit, or reverse, age-based declines in learning. But human intelligence appears to be a polygenic trait (i.e., governed by multiple genes), and efforts to raise it substantially via genetic engineering might be difficult.10
Distinguished scientists have mentioned another possibility: An increase in brain size could be the catalyst to bring about decisive gains in intelligence. Among different species, and within our own species, intelligence is correlated with brain size. The brain of a chimpanzee, one of the closest precursors of Homo sapiens, is less than one-third the size of the human brain. During the evolution from man’s primate precursors to Homo sapiens, some change in the genetic endowment governing brain size must have created the larger brain that now accommodates the human mind. What if it turned out that one or a few genes constituted the key to a further enlargement of the human brain, which might in turn lead to a higher level of human intelligence? This tantalizing possibility has gained support from genetic research into the cause of microcephaly (a shrunken braincase).11
The desire to enhance the faculties of the human mind is of course nothing new. Since antiquity, two complementary approaches have been pursued. One works directly inside the human brain, using memory drills, problem-solving practices, as well as chemical interventions, say, with caffeine or Ritalin. The other approach assists the mind from outside the body, via the senses of sight, hearing, or touch. This external approach has employed written text and ever more powerful computational aides from the abacus to the latest computers. But even as new tools were brought to the task (for example, voice tapes to memorize foreign phrases), the enhancement of human intelligence has been modest. Until the computer came along.
Computers powerfully increased the ability of the human mind to exploit immense data collections, and vastly expanded the universe that our mind can penetrate with mathematical reasoning. These enormous enhancements of the human intellect have spread to nearly every country and continue to transform all fields of science. The recent progress in DNA sequencing, for instance, would have been impossible without powerful computers. It is true, and needs to be memorialized, that scientists and engineers performed prodigies in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries using only logarithmic tables, slide rules, and cumbersome mechanical calculators. The first powerful computers were built in the 1940s to meet demands of the Second World War, and since then the technology has graduated from vacuum tubes to transistors (in the 1950s) and silicon chips (since the1970s). It now appears nanotechnology might lead to another big step forward. The expansion of the mind’s mathematical and computational tools has had an impact on civilization almost as great as the invention of writing. It is as if the human mind—by creating computer systems—has pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to higher levels of intellectual capacity.
Leading computer scientists, ever since their vacuum tube machines, expressed confidence that computers will eventually be able to do all the mind’s intellectual work without reinforcement by a living brain. That goal, clearly, has not been reached, despite enormous advances in the science and technology of computers. But the ambitious goal has stimulated a branch of computer science, referred to as Artificial Intelligence, which developed specialized systems that can perform extraordinarily useful tasks. Signal achievements are computers that recognize and categorize patterns (fingerprints and human speech); read, store, and categorize text; perform language translations; and “learn” by adjusting to new information. Although computers do this work much faster and far more reliably than humans, they remain inferior to humans in carrying out many essential tasks—for example, developing new concepts and theories, anticipating political events, interpreting large-scale social trends.
Most computer scientists who sought to develop a machine that would rival human intelligence have used only electronic, mechanical, and other lifeless components. It is easy to see why. Unlike the squashy human brain, computers can be disassembled and put together again, their components can be altered and tested again, and the growth of their capabilities during the last fifty years has been greater than the growth of the brain’s intellectual capability during hundred thousands of years. To be sure, scientists working on Artificial Intelligence seek to learn from the brain. Ray Kurzweil, an accomplished inventor of advanced types of pattern recognition, predicts that the brain will be “reverse engineered,” both in its hardware and software, so as to achieve a more powerful “machine intelligence.” But even this audacious approach would be hobbled by the fundamental limitations of lifeless machinery.12
Lifeless computers lack flexible judgment, creativity, and emotions. Emotions are an attribute of the living brain that indeed seems essential for superior intelligence. Without the diverse experience of pleasure and pain that pulsates from the living body into the brain, it has not been shown that emotions can emerge at all. Emotions impart value, and thus provide a ranking of importance to newly perceived events as well as to remembered data. By prioritizing the welter of information flowing from the brain’s senses and memory, emotions help the mind in deciding what to do. Acquired and inherited emotions stored in the amygdala and hippocampus endow the human mind with a useful image and helpful understanding of the natural and social environment. Many distinguished scholars have concluded that the full intellectual powers of the mind cannot exist in a lifeless machine.13
Social interaction among independent minds—each with its own will, self-consciousness, and emotions—is also essential for intellectual creativity. The pervasive role of language in human intelligenc
e is proof of that. Language can lift our thoughts and sentiments above the realm of our experience. It is the magic carpet on which our mind travels beyond the outskirts of our perceptions. It enables us to form useful thoughts about new problems or new phenomena, and is indispensable for the development of science, ethics, and religion. But language lives and evolves only through social interaction. Computers, lacking emotions, cannot have social interaction and hence must operate with language that has been preprogrammed. By contrast, the human mind, when stimulated by social interaction, expands its vocabulary and idioms to capture new concepts.14
So the next challenge is evident. The lifeless computer must be coupled with the inventive capabilities and judgment of the human brain—the living brain that is both the master and slave of a human body. The scientific literature has reported hundreds of disparate research projects designed to link the brain with computers. Initially, most of these projects were conducted with modest resources, and quite a few were rather playful in design and purpose. But more recently, research projects linking the brain with computers—called brain-computer interface (BCI)—have multiplied and are now being pursued at American and European universities. These BCI projects are designed to help disabled people with prostheses to move their artificial limbs, or for those missing limbs to operate a computer or other equipment with direct signals from their brain.15 These promising projects are bound to receive increasing encouragement and financial support. Since the BCI projects serve such legitimate medical purposes and raise no ethical problems, they will proceed without provoking religious objections and risking government-imposed prohibitions on further research. And so, gradually, progress in neuroscience, biotechnology, computer sciences, and other disciplines will yield a great deal more knowledge about the triangular relationship between mind, brain, and computers.
Yet some of the best experts still seem reluctant to explore this triangular relationship as something that could be transformed into a single, integrated system. On the one hand, most studies about enhancing human intelligence remain narrowly focused on individual human beings—raising IQ one person at a time, so to speak. On the other, the votaries of Artificial Intelligence emphatically stress that they do not wish to smudge their clean work with the slithery brain—as if they feared contamination with mad cow disease. And neurologists and cognitive psychologists rarely invite computer scientists to help them design a symbiotic system combining computers and human brainpower, apart from the therapeutic brain-computer links to help disabled people.16 Such delimiting of different scientific disciplines is more common now because of the growing complexity and richness of each branch of science. Yet from time to time, bridges get built between different disciplines that bring sudden, great advances.
As night follows day, enterprising scientists will build such a bridge between computer-based Artificial Intelligence and brain science. They will begin to organize interdisciplinary projects to integrate computer systems with the mental power of living brains. Their ambitious aim will be to reach a level of intelligence well above the human range. At this time, no one can describe all the theoretical and technical problems that have to be solved for the project to be started in earnest, and it would likely require an effort with generous financing and strong support by many scientists—neither of which is available today. But at some uncertain date in the future, the search for this superhuman intelligence will become a major priority of the world’s leading countries. This will happen when it sinks in that superhuman intelligence really might be attained, and that its attainment would revolutionize all prior considerations about national security.
If U.S. intelligence organizations discovered that a nation with strong scientific capabilities—for example, China—had made significant breakthroughs on such a project, government support for a competing project in the United States would suddenly become available. Recall that America’s expensive project for the manned mission to the moon—something for which there had previously been little enthusiasm—easily garnered Congressional support when it appeared that the Soviet Union was about to accomplish the feat. Recall also that the fear Nazi Germany might acquire the atomic bomb (although in the event unwarranted) triggered the U.S. decision to launch the Manhattan Project, at the time an immense and uncertain venture. At the start of that project, none of the physicists involved could have described the full research and development program which produced the atomic bomb three years later.
A competitive race with China to build the first super-intelligent system might start sooner than most think tanks and government forecasters expect. And also sooner than I had expected when I wrote a first draft of these pages three years ago. Since then, Chinese scientists and institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have published numerous articles about an “integrated” large facility for linking a brain trust and computers to work on complex policy issues. It seems this project is meant to draw on brain science and computer science (Artificial Intelligence) to combine human intelligence with high-performance computers. I am indebted to Michael Pillsbury for his insightful and knowledgeable assessment of these Chinese projects.17
Could such a two-nation race for achieving a super-intelligence system lead to the construction and actual use of an integrated brain-computer system, and a subsequent strategic competition between two or more national systems? I have not seen a good case made that such a system could not be developed before the end of this century. Its purpose would be greatly to enrich and expand what advanced computers can do by creating a symbiosis between, on one side, a computer system designed for this purpose, and on the other side, the judgmental capacities and essential emotive functions of the human brain. The contribution of the living human brain would probably not come from one individual “hooked up” to a computer, but from computer linkages to an expert committee or group of policy advisors. Such a symbiosis would be far more advanced than the latest brain-computer links.
If successful, this new intelligence system would exceed the intellectual performance of the best expert group. It would integrate human minds with the enormous memories and calculating and organizing capacities of advanced computers. If and when such a well-financed and focused project achieves its first demonstrable success, the door will be opened to a fundamental transformation of human civilization. In my judgment, the greatest, most profound transformation of the human condition will not derive from the prolongation of life, or from the anxiously debated—and probably vastly overrated—possibilities of human cloning and “designer babies.” Instead, I see an effective synthesis of the computer with living human brains as the agent that will lead to a truly revolutionary upheaval for the human race.
What is at stake in any such synthesis is an increase in intelligence comparable to the step from primates to Homo sapiens. The obstacles to our comprehension of such a world are fundamental, and in the last analysis perhaps insurmountable. We can no more imagine the political order of this new world than a group of chimpanzees in the forest can comprehend what goes on among humans in a nearby village. Whether we should welcome or oppose any such transformation is one of those philosophical questions to which a crisp answer seems impossible. As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it: “Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.”
The idea that a national project might construct an effective super-intelligent system cannot be dismissed as science fiction. This prospect is thrust forward by at least two forces—the continuing progress of brain science (which is widely supported to find cures for brain-related diseases), and the steady advances in computers (which are fueled by the ambitions of powerful corporations). Although progress today is most visible in the United States, we cannot assume that America would prevail over a future adversary in a race to develop this super-intelligence. Despite America’s strength in computer science and brain science, it would have some disadvantages in any such race. One would be the constraints on research imposed by ethical and religious considerations. In the past, neuro
scientists have gained critical knowledge by studying patients with major brain injuries. At some stage in the project’s development, a nation’s research might greatly benefit from intrusive experiments on living human brains. Liberal democracies would normally shun such experiments, but ruthless dictatorships would not.
A related but potentially more important inhibition in America would derive from ethical and religious objections to the very pursuit of superhuman intelligence. This might limit the participation of some of America’s best scientists. The legions of ethicists now worried about cloning would suddenly discover they had focused on the wrong issue. Religious organizations would come to regard the quest for a super-intelligence as the ultimate threat to their faith and doctrine—and rightly so. Thus a two-country competition to build the first superhuman intelligence system could turn into a race the most ruthless nation would win.
Annihilation from Within Page 4