The Thrill and Threat of Mind Hacking | Posthuman with Emily Chang
Humans have long hoped to harness the full power of the mind. During the Cold War, the CIA even hired supposed "mind readers" to help spy on the Soviets in a top secret program. What if we don't have to hope anymore? Brain computer interface, a special type of AI technology known as BCI, shows tremendous promise in making our minds do things we've only previously imagined. But this all comes at a price: access to your mind. Are we willing to open up our minds to machines? How much can we trust that in this strange new future, our minds will still be our own? The brain is not just another organ of the body, it is the organ that makes us who we are.
With neurotechnology, we can decide what type of human being we want to be. Everything comes out of the activity of neurons in your brain. And for the first time in history, we've developed technology that lets you record that activity and change it. What you're seeing here is a mouse drinking, not out of desire, but because it was ordered to do so by scientists manipulating its neurons - proof that the brain can be controlled from the outside.
That for me, was an Oppenheimer moment. Because I mean, on the one hand we were super excited, like, oh my God, we finally got into the brain. But of course, what you can do in a mouse today, you can do in a human tomorrow.
And that's when I started to be worried. So what are the most scary scenarios that we can imagine with neurotechnology? Mental privacy, decoding of one's thoughts. They could decode not just what you're thinking, but even worse.
What your subconscious, what you don't know you're thinking. The second are identity. Someone could go and dissolve it, break it.
And this is something that nobody ever worried about in the history of humanity because you cannot change the person. Guess what? Now you can. The third area of concern are the decisions.
This is not science fiction. We've done it with mice. We've turned the mouse into a puppet and make the mouse do one thing or the other. The fourth area of concern is to have a humanity that is fractured into two types of humans.
Ones that are augmented mentally, and other ones that are not, like in underclass. The last nightmare scenario is to have people piping information into your brain that is biased or discriminatory in a way that's sort of changing your belief systems. Some people may be afraid. We're developing technology to get into the brain, to map what the brain does and to change it. The reason we're doing this has to do with the patients. Who doesn't have a family member or a friend that suffers from a brain disease, either Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety? We know painfully well that we cannot help these people because as doctors, we don't have the technology go into the brains of these people and understand their problem and fix it.
That means that we have to develop these methods at any cost as soon as we can. At Motif, we are building implantable electronic devices to help people who suffer from mental health conditions that aren't being effectively treated by their drugs. It's like a brain stimulator for mental health. Jacob interview, take one. Second sticks. Give us a sense of the scope of the problem you're trying to solve. How many people suffer from depression? We estimate it's about 3 million Americans who are suffering from depression and have failed to respond to two or more drugs. For every person with a spinal cord injury,
there are 10 people suffering from treatment resistant depression. It's just invisible. One of the things that we've begun to discover about depression is that, these are circuit level disorders, and in the case of depression, brain activity is predominantly trapped in this state.
The device that we're building is a miniature implant and it stimulates that part of the executive function network that increases its activity. So it becomes strengthened. So now it pulls you out of that ruminating state, the state of those negative emotions, and now you can begin to do the things that were impossible before. How long does the procedure take? We estimate the procedure will take less than 30 minutes.
And you go home that day. That day? That day. Okay. Yeah, it's less invasive than most cosmetic procedures. It's less invasive than a nose job. Drugs don't activate networks. They activate neurons in your body and your in your brain, and it causes all kinds of side effects. If you look at people on antidepressants today, a lot of them fall off because of weight gain, sexual dysfunction.
These are things that we shouldn't even be exposing people to because this is a brain disorder. So how far off is this? We expect that we'll achieve FDA approval in the coming years and a clinical trial will follow shortly after that. What other mental illnesses do you think you can cure? We're looking at PTSD, we're looking at ADHD, and we're looking at OCD. Wow. What about Alzheimer's? I would not be surprised if in the next 10 years we'll have electronic therapy that can prevent the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's. How is this different from Neuralink and what Elon Musk is trying to do? What other brain computer interface companies are trying to do is get as much information as they can into and out of the brain.
And that's important if you're trying to treat something like paralysis. But we're looking at a different problem. We're thinking about how can we restore the circuits in the brain. There are all kinds of potential use cases here, and certainly curing incurable diseases is at the top of the list. But what if a brain implant could make you smarter? Is that possible? I think the short answer is sort of. I, you know,
making someone smarter? Maybe. Giving someone the ability to focus on demand? Absolutely. Wouldn't it be great if I could push a button and then suddenly my attention level is at 11? So that's possible? Absolutely. That's coming. Absolutely. What are you most excited about in terms of the potential? Mental illness can be measured and is going to be measured in the same way that we can measure the progression of cancer or any other kind of disease.
We can measure it, we can treat it, we can beat it. When you think about somebody who tells you that they have cancer, your immediate thought inside is, I feel so sorry for you. And you tell them that, I'm sorry. I love you.
Let me help you. The exact opposite is what happens with mental illness. And you're judged, labeled and ostracized by society.
You struggled with severe depression for a long part of your life. You hear about a possible solution, but it involves implanting a chip. Yep. In your brain. Yep. Were you scared? Oh, I was the exact opposite.
You know, that's one of the main things that I hear a lot is "You got brain surgery, were you freaked out?" Couldn't care less. You know, I was euphoric to die. And so the worst case scenario was I died and I loved it. Like bring it on. Cause my life insurance didn't pay out unless I died by an accident, right? I didn't have suicidal coverage. So how is your implant different from what Motif is working on? So my implant is, you know, older technology, so invasive, you know, eight hour procedure surgery, very intense, very in depth, very costly, right? This is a big endeavor.
What Motif is doing is they've essentially created a technology the size of a pea as, as tiny as you can get. And it's not a brain surgery, it's a minimally invasive procedure. They essentially drill a hole in the skull, which is an extremely normal procedure for a neurosurgeon. They place the pea there, cover it up, we activate that power and that's gonna be able to provide the therapy for the patients. The greatest potential here is stopping the massive public health crisis that is out there.
It's reducing costs for the overall healthcare system. It's making literally millions of people, millions and millions and millions of people in this country, multiply that times a hundred for the world, right? It gives them their life back. What would your wife say? What would, your kids say? They're blown away. You know, I had this moment with my son, my middle guy.
We were quiet in the car for a couple minutes and then he just said, you know, dad, I really appreciate you fighting and sticking around, right? And so you get those moments. It's just life. Life is incredible. That's beautiful. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you.
Most of us touch our phones hundreds of times a day. We talk to loved ones and friends, text, email, order food. Imagine if an illness or accident meant you could no longer do any of that.
Thanks to brain computer interfaces, There's now hope we could do many of those things just by using our brains - truly hands free. Hi, this is Rodney. We're now at a period in medicine where lots of technology for the brain has shown a lot of potential, but we've had trouble getting into the brain in a safe and scalable way. And so Synchron's vision was, how can we build technology using the natural highways, the blood vessels into the brain in a way that can solve problems that haven't previously been solvable? So the stentrode is stent electrode. We took the concept of a stent in medicine. It's a technology that's delivered in through a catheter, through a tiny little break in the skin to get into the blood vessels.
The first application of the stentrode is in the use of an implantable brain computer interface. If we can detect activity in the brain that is associated with the control of movement, then you could restore their ability to exert their free will, exert their volition in the world directly from the brain. This is Rodney. He has ALS and can't speak, but with the help of his implant, he's able to send me a text message using only his brain. What the technology is about is the restoration of agency, of autonomy, of giving people back control over their world. And that has a huge impact on how you have relationships in your life.
Good morning. How are you doing today? Right now, this technology is only available to a select few, but it could change the lives of millions. To have the impact that we think neurotechnology can have, we have to solve problems in a way that can scale. Neurological disability is the number one cause of disability in the world.
Huge patient need. But the problem traditionally in, in neurotechnology has been, if the technology requires open brain surgery, it's been limited to very specialized academic centers. So what's different about what we're doing is we've taken the view that to be successful, we have to solve the problems without open surgery. We know that can scale and help millions of people a year.
There has not been a company yet that's achieved market approval, FDA approval for an implantable brain computer interface. It's, it's a great big challenge and we've got some really exciting breakthroughs coming that mean that we can get to a whole range of regions in the brain. We'll be rolling out a pipeline of, of products over the course of the next couple of years. I think the pipeline would be: neurotechnology shows up in the form of non-invasive wearable technologies that we can take on, take off. For instance, five or six years ago, Meta acquired Control Labs, a company that makes neurotechnology in the form of a wristband.
So just by thinking about something you would be able to file or shuffle through music on your smart glasses, which we also know that they recently launched. So we're basically designing this neural interface, which is, I think one of the more wild things that, that we're doing. It's not reading your mind, but what it is doing is allowing your brain to communicate with something the same way that your brain would communicate with your hand.
Apple filed a patent for an EEG capability in their AirPods. So you could imagine controlling aspects of your device, maybe checking your email and having your AI in your AirPod read that email to you. But you're doing that just by thinking. Brain computer interfaces, they really do present the possibility of creating super humans, allowing us to have senses that currently aren't possible.
Whether that's hearing things we currently can't hear or seeing ultraviolet light that we currently can't see. I mean, right now you might replay a memory by watching a video on your phone. With a brain computer interface, you could actually go and transport back to that memory and be in it. I think the goal of some scientists would be that we don't just use a brain interface to control aspects of our body, but of systems outside the body. That is the goal: to provide humans eventually with superhuman capabilities.
You are one of the many people who helped create AI that emulates the brain and now you say their brains are better than ours in many ways, Their brains will become better than ours because they can share different copies of the same model, the same neural net can share information much more efficiently. So what's the next move? Putting AI devices in our brains to catch up? So Ray Kurzwell thinks hybrids of AI devices in our brains are the future. I'm not so convinced. I think once these things are smarter than us, they just won't need us. Hmm. So we just won't have a chance?
Well, but we are building them, remember? So we do have a chance, but we're gonna need to be very careful about what we build and I think we could easily build things that wipe us out. And so just leaving it to private industry to maximize profits doesn't seem like a good strategy. Isn't the genie out of the bottle? The genie is definitely out of the bottle. But for the existential threat, we'll get collaboration between governments on how you prevent this existential threat. What is openBCI? OpenBCI started as an open source brain computer interfacing company. Over time we've evolved from building just the low cost open source modules into working on much more complex integrated systems like Galea.
Alright, let's fly. Alright. So what we're looking at now is four separate channels that are isolating four locations on my face. Basically my left eyebrow, my right eyebrow, my left cheek, and my right cheek.
And what we've done is we've mapped those four muscles into the four controls of the drone. Check it out. No hands. You flew a drone without a controller.
That's really just the tip of the iceberg. We look at things like the heart, the brain, the muscles, the sweat on your skin. And we try to make inferences or decode your intention inside of a computer, your emotions. Things like stress, arousal,
fatigue, workload. If you can take a person's emotions and bake them into any application inside of a computer in real time, you'll have things like movies or games or stories where the ending isn't written already, but rather the game is changing based on the way that you're perceiving and interacting with characters in the story, the narrative, the game. What about telepathy? Will I literally be able to read your mind? Will I be able to know what my partner is thinking from across the table? To know what another person is thinking, I think it's up to the person who's thinking, right? Like, like we shouldn't have a window into everybody else's mind without them giving us permission. If I gave you permission, right? Would you be able to read my mind? Eventually or soon at a crude state, right? Like high level emotions. Are you happy? Are you sad? You know, are you stressed? Are you calm? You can already look at those metrics at, at a somewhat high level. The way computers are gonna change is that we will integrate the individual's mind or the individual's emotions as a core component of what a computer is.
When we do that, we'll actually be able to look at emotions on a very personal level. There are real concerns about privacy here. Oh yeah. Imagine if my mental
and emotional states are stored online. They already are. Yeah. Well what if the government has access to them and advertisers and corporations? Yep. How do I protect myself? Well, this is the kind of sad reality is that we already have these kind of digital twins that exist on the internet inside of the servers of a lot of major technology companies.
It's kind of sad how much control we've lost of our own emotions. And especially when you consider that at the same time, we have no access to it. I like to say that today we, we actually have an immense amount of ethical debt that we have to pay off with technology.
We've extracted people's emotions. We've started to classify people into different camps, and now we're tailoring and sculpting advertisements and information and news and videos and content based on these representations of people. It's probably the most difficult technological problem to solve these days.
How do we backtrack from ways that we built computers and, and most specifically, how we harvest and collect psychological information about people. How do we backtrack and how do we give that power back to the user? Is backtracking even possible at this point? Or are we hurdling towards giving up more and more of our minds to technology? And how much choice do we really have? If your phone was constantly reading your thoughts, would you give it up? Brain computer interfaces are enabling direct communication between the brain and machines. Do you think this crosses one final barrier? Like are we giving up this last part of ourselves that makes us human? I don't think so actually. I think they're a kind of neat idea. I don't, I don't see that as a loss of humanity. Would you put a chip in your brain if you knew it could enhance your neurological functions? If I knew it could enhance my neurological function and it wouldn't have any nasty side effects and there was a very high probability it wouldn't kill me. Yes, I would.
As AI is influencing more and more of our decisions, are we willingly opening ourselves up to some form of mind control? Like could AI challenge what it means to have free will? In order to answer that, we need to agree on what free will is. And most people think free will is some kind of randomness. I think that's complete nonsense. Free will is doing it to achieve your own goals, not to achieve somebody else's goals. So if AI is influencing more and more of our desires and our decisions, are we making any autonomous decisions anymore? If I have a goal and I do something to achieve that goal, it seems to me I'm acting as my own free will. If other people are creating the goals in surreptitious ways, then that does seem to be an intrusion on my individuality.
Well, that's the fear, is that once we open our minds to these devices, that tech companies and the government will have access to all of our thoughts and then take advantage of them. Just like some people would argue they already have. If tech companies, the government could see all our thoughts, do you think they wouldn't take advantage of it? Why would they not? Why would they not. If you could put a chip in your brain that would make you happier, would you do it? Okay. This feels like an like an episode of Black Mirror. But yes, if it's gonna make me happier, but then it's like, what is, like how would they get it to fit everybody's definition of happiness? Like I would it work with your brain chemistry? I guess I would need the logistics, but yes, you can't really be happy all the time. Yeah, I think you need to experience all emotions Because I want to know what exactly it is that I'm feeling so I know what the problem is.
If I have a chip in my brain to make me happier, then I'm not fixing the problem of why I'm not happy. Would you wear a helmet that if you put it on it would make you smarter and double your salary? Geez, that's a lot of pressure, huh? I have to keep the helmet on all the time? Yeah, well you put, if you put the helmet on, you get smarter and richer, but tech companies and the government have access to your thoughts. Hmm. I'm not hiding anything. So maybe. What if it would make you smarter and double your salary? Yes. I feel like I should say no, but I'm gonna say yes. Cause I was such a C average college student. I'll take the help where I can get it. So yes.
Well that's changing the field a little too much now. As long as it is not invasive in changing who I am as a person. What if it means tech companies and the government have access to your thoughts? Oh, right. No, no, no. Definitely not.
2024-12-01 19:11
