Nexus n-1

by Naam, Ramez

  I first became aware of the advances in brain computer interface technology in the early 2000s. The experiment that caught my attention was one being conducted at Duke University and led by a scientist named Miguel Nicolelis. Nicolelis and his collaborators were interested in tapping into signals in the brain to restore motion for those who'd been paralyzed or lost limbs. Funded in part by a grant from DARPA – a branch of the US Department of Defense that sponsors advanced research – they showed that they could implant electrodes in a mouse's brain and teach the mouse to control a robot arm simply by thinking about it.

  Here's how it worked. The mouse, in a cage, was taught that it could press a lever when it wanted water. The lever would activate a very simple robot arm that would bring water down into the cage. Meanwhile, the electrodes the scientists had implanted in the mouse's motor cortex (the part of the brain responsible for moving limbs) would record what was happening there. Over time, the researchers found the pattern of what happened in that mouse's brain when it pressed the lever. The next step was simple: they wired the robot arm that delivered water up to the computer reading signals from those electrodes in the mouse brain, and disconnected the lever. The mouse would still press the lever, but the lever wasn't doing anything. It would get water, but entirely due to its brain activity.

  What happened next was even more remarkable – the mouse learned that it didn't even have to press the lever. Over time it figured out that it could stay completely still, and think about getting water, and voilà, the robot arm would deliver it.

  Well, that paper got my attention. Over the next few years, Nicolelis and his team did the same thing in a species of monkey, with more sophisticated arms that could move about in multiple directions. They even took the experiment farther, to its logical extent, and had a monkey control a robot arm six hundred miles away, connected over the internet.

  Meanwhile, in Atlanta, a scientist named Phil Kennedy petitioned the FDA for permission to implant a similar device in a human brain. His first patient was a man named Johnny Ray – a fifty-three year-old year old drywall contractor and blues guitarist who'd suffered a massive stroke and ended up paralyzed from the neck down, unable to speak, or to communicate in any way other than by blinking his eyes.

  The FDA approved the experiment, but based its approval on a key aspect of Kennedy's proposal. The system had to be wireless. The human brain is a very delicate place. Wires going in and out create a risk for infection. Kennedy, knowing this, had built his system so that it could be implanted in a patient's brain, and then wirelessly send signals via very low power radio waves to a cap that the patient wore outside his fully re-healed skull. That same external cap would send power back to the implant inside the brain.

  The operation was a success. The implant was placed in the part of Johnny Ray's motor cortex that he used to control his right hand (prior to his stroke). Gradually, Johnny learned to move a cursor on a computer screen by thinking about moving his hand. With that cursor, he could type out messages to his friends and family – a huge step over only blinking. Later, when asked what it felt like to use the system, Johnny typed out "NO-T-H-I-N-G". He no longer even thought of moving his hand, just of moving the cursor. His brain had adapted to the implant like an entirely new limb.

  Other researchers in the field have had pretty impressive successes with sensory data. The most common neural prosthetic in the world is one that turns audio signals into direct nerve stimulation in the brain – the cochlear implant. More than two hundred thousand people worldwide have one. If you don't have a cochlear implant, or know someone who does, it may seem like just a specialized hearing aid. But it's very different. A hearing aid picks up audio via its microphone, cleans up that audio, amplifies it, and then plays it via a tiny speaker into the wearer's ear. But that only works if the wearer still has some hearing. If all the hair cells of the inner ear are dead, no hearing at all is left in that ear. You could play 120 decibel sound into that ear and still get nothing. So the cochlear implant bypasses this. It picks up sound and turns it into nerve signals – specifically electrical signals that stimulate the auditory nerve. And it's far from perfect, but it gives people who previously had no hearing at all hearing good enough that they can take part in conversations around them.

  In the mid 2000s, scientists started to do the same for vision. A scientist named William Dobelle created the first neural vision prosthesis, and with the help of a neurosurgeon, implanted it into the brain of a man named Jens Naumann who'd lost his eyes twenty years earlier. The system is pretty simple – a digital camera worn on a pair of glasses picks up images. Those images are processed by a simple computer. And then they're sent into the visual cortex – the part of the brain responsible for vision – by a set of electrodes that enter the brain through a jack in the back of the skull. Jens, the patient who received the first of those, didn't get back vision anywhere near as good as he'd had before losing his eyes, but he got back vision good enough that he could see objects and navigate around them. In a video I play for people, you can watch Jens drive a Mustang convertible around in a parking lot, using his new prosthesis to see the obstacles in his path. The direction of research has shifted a bit since then, with current work focusing more on getting the data into the brain by stimulating the optical nerve behind the retina instead of deeper in the brain, but the principle is the same – we can take sensory data and turn it into nerve impulses that the brain understands.

  We can also do the opposite. In 2011, a group of scientists at UC Berkeley, led by Jack Gallant, showed that by using a functional MRI machine (a brain scanner that can see some activity going on inside the brain) they could reconstruct video of what the person was currently seeing. The video is awfully rough, but it's a start. We can not only send sensory data into the brain, we can get it out.

  One striking thing about all of these efforts is the very small amount of data going in and out of the brain. The most sophisticated brain implants created to date – like the one implanted in Jens' brain to restore vision – have only 256 electrodes. By contrast, the brain has around one hundred billion neurons. The visual cortex and motor cortex each have billions of neurons on their own. It's amazing we can get anything useful in and out with such limited data. The small amount of data bandwidth we have explains why the vision we restore is grainy, why the hearing isn't good enough for music appreciation, and so on. But one thing we've learned over the years is that electronics get better fast.

  Indeed, one of the pioneers of neuroscience, an elder statesman of the field named Rodolpho Llinas who chairs the NYU Department of Neuroscience, has proposed a way to get a million or more electrodes in the brain – use nanowires. Carbon nanotubes can conduct electricity, so they can be used to carry signals. And they're so small that a bundle of one million nanowires would slide easily down even the smallest blood vessels in the brain, leaving plenty of room for blood cells and nutrients and so on. Llinas imagines inserting a million-nanowire bundle, and then letting its individual wires spread through your brain like a bush, until a million neurons in different parts of the brain could all be communicated with. A system like that would revolutionize our ability to get information in and out of the brain, enabling much of what I've described in this book.

  Of course, it's still fiction. The research to date has been a great proof of principle. It's shown that we can get data in and out of the brain. It's shown that we can interpret that data to make sense of what the brain is doing, or to input new data in a way that the brain can make sense of. What we're left with is an incredible challenge for engineering and for medicine – taking that proof of principle, and building on it to increase the amount of data we can transmit, decoding more and more of that data, and doing so in a way that's safe and healthy for humans. That work will be motivated by medicine – finding ways to restore sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, motion to the paralyzed, and full mental function to those who've suffered brain damage. And that work will take decades to brin
g to full fruition, if not longer.

  A few other tidbits: Genetic enhancements to boost strength, speed, and stamina are likely already possible. Over the last decade researchers looking for ways to cure muscular dystrophy, anemia, or other ailments have shown that single injections loaded with additional copies of select genes (delivered by a tame virus) can have a lifelong impact on the strength and fitness of animals ranging from mice to baboons. Those enhancements, by the way, are nearly impossible to detect in humans. It's possible that some athletes, for example, are using them today. And DARPA has shown quite a bit of interest in such enhancement technologies for future soldiers.

  Finally, the Nexus backdoor that Kade and Rangan code on the airplane is based on a very real hack created by Ken Thompson, one of the inventors of the Unix operating system, that gave Thompson and his colleagues a back door into every copy of Unix that existed for several years. That hack went undiscovered until Thompson revealed its existence in a public lecture, after all versions containing the back door were gone, more than a decade later.

  If you're interested in more, feel free to pick up my non-fiction book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. That book goes in depth into brain computer interfaces and also into the genetic enhancements that might make humans stronger, faster, smarter, and longer lived than ever. As a bonus, it dives into the politics, economics, and morality of human enhancement – other topics that Nexus touches on.

  To understand a thing is to gain the power to change it. We're surging in our understanding of our own makeup – our genes, our bodies, and especially our minds. The next few decades will be more full of wonders than even the greatest science fiction.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing is thought of as a solitary craft. Yet for me, the production of this book has been an experience of tremendous support, encouragement, and constructive engagement from others. This novel was born as a purely recreational exercise in writing fiction, in a casual writing group including Kira Franz, Gabriel Williams, Leo Dirac, Corrie Watterson-Bryant, Dana Morningstar, and Scotto Moore. Those Sunday meetings and that first handful of readers gave me something to write for. Their encouragement and critique helped me tremendously.

  Eventually this work transformed from a lark to an actual attempt to write a novel. Through the subsequent process of writing a book, Molly Nixon provided me with invaluable assistance, going above and beyond what an author can ask of anyone, serving as first reader and often nightly reader of raw pages, as a keen mind to bounce ideas off of, and as a bottomless well of enthusiasm.

  A number of already established science fiction authors helped me turn this from a manuscript into a published book. Brenda Cooper took the time to read a huge second draft and gave me incredible encouragement. Greg Bear, David Brin, John Barnes, Alastair Reynolds, Dani Kollin, and Daniel H. Wilson also en couraged me at multiple steps along the way. Karl Schroeder gave me clear, no-nonsense advice on the steps I had to take to make the manuscript publishable.

  My agent, Lucienne Diver, took a chance on a submission from a first time novelist who approached her at a convention. My editor, Lee Harris, did the same. The book has reached you due to their willingness to give those sorts of chances to new authors.

  Anne Zanoni, ostensibly my copyeditor, went far beyond that job in checking fact, logic, style, and consistency of the novel throughout.

  Most of all, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the tremendous number of people who read drafts of this novel along the way and took the time to give me their thoughts, on everything from neuroscience to geopolitics to dialogue.

  Those beta readers include those I've mentioned above, and also: Ajay Nair, Alexis Carlson, Alissa Mortenson, Allegra Searle-LeBel, Anna Black, Betsy Aoki, Beverly Sobelman, Brad Woodcock, Brady Forrest, Brian Retford, Brooks Talley, Cat Koehn, Coe Roberts, Dan Farmer, Dana Morningstar, Darci Morales, David Lockhart, David Perlman, Doug Mortenson, Elene Awad, Eric Schurman, Gabriel Williams, Grace Stahre, Ivan Medvedev, Jaime Waliczek, Jenna Udren, Jennifer Mead, Jessica Glein, Jim Jordan, Joe Pemberton, Kevin MacDonald, Lars Liden, Lesley Carmichael, Linda Mortenson, Llew Roberts, Lori Waltfield, Mason Bryant, Mellington Cartwright, Michael Chorost, Mike Tyka, Miller Sherling, Ming Holden, Nat Torkington, Oliver Lange, Paul Dale, Peter Tiemann, Rob Gruhl, Robert Fisher, Rose Hess, Sean Daily, Simon Cooke, Simon Winder, Stephanie Schutz, Stuart Updegrave, Suzanne Picard, and Thomas Park.

  The input and assistance of so many people has made this not just a better book, but one that was far more enjoyable to write. Thank you all.

  Copyright

  © Ramez Naam 2013

  Ramez Naam asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-0-85766-292-7

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85766-294-1

  Cover design: ARGH! Oxford.

  Set in Meridien by THL Design.

  Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: cbb9c626-7bce-4363-84dc-7bf06f5dcd01

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 25.12.2012

  Created using: calibre 0.9.11, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software

  Document authors :

  Naam, Ramez

  About

  This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.

  (This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)

  Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.

  (Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)

  http://www.fb2epub.net

  https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/