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Topic: More Than Human (Read 716 times) |
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David Lucifer
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More Than Human
« on: 2005-01-07 16:29:43 » |
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source: CIO.com
vector: Max More
More Than Human
Transhumanism—the practice of enhancing people through technology—sounds like science fiction. But when it arrives (and it will), it will create unique problems for CIOs.
BY FRED HAPGOOD
THINKING AHEAD | This fall, the editors of a leading public policy magazine, Foreign Policy, asked eight prominent intellectuals to identify the single idea they felt was currently posing the greatest threat to humanity. Most of the suggestions were merely old demons: various economic myths, the idea that you can fight "a war on evil," Americaphobia and so on. Only Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, came up with a new candidate: transhumanism.
Transhumanism might be described as the technology of advanced individual enhancement. While it includes physical modifications (diamondoid teeth, self-styling hair, autocleaning ears, nanotube bones, lipid metabolizers, polymer muscles), most of the interest in the technology focuses on the integration of brains and computers—especially brains and networks. Sample transhumanist apps could include cell phone implants (which would allow virtual telepathy), memory backups and augmenters, thought recorders, reflex accelerators, collaborative consciousness (whiteboarding in the brain), and a very long list of thought-controlled actuators. Ultimately, the technology could extend to the uploading and downloading of entire minds in and out of host bodies, providing a self-consciousness that, theoretically, would have no definitive nor necessary end. That is, immortality, of a sort.
While some of these abilities are clearly quite far off, others are already attracting researchers (see "Brain Gain"), and none are known (at the moment at least) to be impossible to achieve. Fukuyama obviously felt the technology was close enough at hand to write a book about it, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, the thrust of which is that society should give the whole idea a miss. His main concern was that transhumanism would place an impossible burden on the idea of equal rights, since it would multiply the number of ways of being human well past our powers of tolerance. (If we have all this trouble with something simple like skin color, just wait until some people have wings, augmented memory and reflex accelerators.)
Ignorance Is No Option
Still, it's not clear that boycotting neurotech will be a realistic option. When the people around you—competitors, colleagues, partners—can run Google searches in their brains during conversations; or read documents upside down on a desk 30 feet away; or remember exactly who said what, when and where; or coordinate meeting tactics telepathically; or work forever without sleep; or control every device on a production line with thought alone, your only probable alternative is to join them or retire. No corporation could ignore the competitive potential of a neurotech-enhanced workforce for long.
Right now, the only people thinking about transhumanism are futurists, ethicists (such as Fukuyama) and researchers. However, if and when we do advance into this technology, several management issues will also need attention.
Consider, for instance, the case of upgrade management.
From a purely capitalist point of view, one virtue of transhumanism is that it incorporates both body and mind into the continuous upgrade cycle that characterizes contemporary consumption patterns. Once a given modification—such as a cortical display—is successfully invented, newer and better ones will crop up on the market every year, boasting lower power requirements, higher resolution, hyperspectral sensitivity, longer mean time between failures, richer recording, sharing and backup features, and so on. Multiply by all the devices embraced by the transhumanist agenda, and it's clear that every year even the most financially secure users will be forced to winnow a small number of choices from an enormous range of possibilities.
Another concern could be digital rights management.
When brains can interact with hard disks, remembering will become the equivalent of copying. Presumably, intellectual property producers will react with the usual mix of policies, some generous, some not. Some producers will want you to pay every time you remember something; others will allow you to keep content in consciousness for as long as you like but levy an extra charge for moving it into long-term memory; still others will want to erase their content entirely as rights expire, essentially inducing a contractually limited form of amnesia. While any one of these illustrations might be wrong in detail, there will almost certainly be a whole range of intellectual property issues and complications that will need to be managed.
In other words, it looks as though the transhumanist era is going to be a Golden Age for CIOs and their skill sets. Even in the case of problems for which CIOs do not have immediate solutions, they will probably be the right people to think about the answers. Take, for example, the extremely vexing problem of neurosecurity.
A brain running on a network will obviously be an extremely attractive target for everyone from outright criminals to bored hackers to spammers. Why worry about actually earning a promotion when you can just write a worm that will configure your superior's brain so that the very thought of you triggers his or her pleasure centers? Why bother with phishing when you can direct your victims to transfer their assets straight to your bank account? Why tolerate the presence of infidels when they can be converted to the one true faith with the push of a button?
Who Do You Trust? Not You
Peter Cassidy, secretary-general of The Anti-Phishing Working Group, is one of the few analysts thinking about neurosecurity. He says that a key problem is that the brain appears to consider itself a trusted environment. When brain region A gets a file request from region B, it typically hands over the data automatically, without asking for ID or imposing more than the most minimal plausibility check. It is true that with age and experience our brains do gradually build up a short blacklist of forbidden instructions, often involving particular commands originating from the hypothalamus or adrenal glands (for example, "bet the house on red," or "pick a fight with that bunch of sailors"), but in general, learning is slow and the results patchy. Such laxity will be inadequate in an age when brainjacking has become a perfectly plausible form of sabotage.
Cassidy points out that one of the core problems in neurosecurity is defining trusted agents. All security depends on the concept of two trusted parties (a trusted identity and a computer) and a trust applicant. The neurosecurity conundrum is that it mixes all these identities in the same brain. It forces you to face the questions of when, whether and how to trust yourself. Still, CIOs (and CSOs) are familiar with the essence of even this issue, which is much like analyzing the problem of defending an enterprise against an employee who has gone bad.
One possible approach to neurosecurity might be to implant a public-key infrastructure in our brains so that every neural region can sign and authenticate requests and replies from any other region. A second might be maintaining a master list of approved mental activities and blocking any mental operations not on that list. (Concerns about whether the list itself was corrupted might be addressed by refreshing the list constantly from implanted and presumably unhackable ROM chips.) It might also be necessary to outsource significant portions of our neural processing to highly secure computing sites. In theory, such measures might improve on the neurosecurity system imposed on us by evolution, making us less vulnerable to catchy tunes and empty political slogans.
New Security Horizons
Lance James, CSO of Secure Science, a security services company, is writing a book (working title: Eye Own You) on the security aspects of neuronetworking. In it, he observes that engineering research on this topic is going to be harder than conventional security research, which of course has not completely cleared its own agenda. Conventional networking allows researchers to launch experimental attacks on simulated networks that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Simulated minds are nowhere on the horizon, which means that neurosecurity engineers are going to have to work on real brains. This is likely to be awkward, as volunteers will be few. And the fact that neurotech will almost certainly be wireless (The Matrix notwithstanding, people are not going to walk around with open brain sockets) will just add to the security headaches.
However, James continues, the news is not all bad. A large fraction of today's computer network security problems can be attributed to the uniformity of our hardware and software. Hackers do their damage by learning how to exploit these "monocultures." If every user built and programmed his computer himself, security would be dramatically easier. Brains are not only self-programming but self-organizing, which almost certainly means that every adult brain is radically different from every other. In the terms of the trade, James says, "Brains might share the same kernel, though even that is a guess, but they probably run different services and have different programming calls." This diversity might be a problem for neurotech vendors hoping for the economies of mass production, but it gives CIOs and CSOs lots of room to breathe.
Second, all these problems are not going to be dropped in our lap at once. The first neurocomputational products will probably be thought-controlled actuators. Though such devices might show up in quite a range of environments—embracing apps from wheelchairs to body extenders to computer games to controlling industrial machinery—they can be made relatively safe by keeping the data traffic one-way, pushing control signals out through the electrodes while shunting feedback through the physical senses, which are relatively secure. The machinery itself might have a network connection (and therefore be subject to attack), but not the brains of its operators.
Security issues will become more pressing when the second generation of neurotech products arrives: cortical implants allowing sensors and data stores to "print" directly to consciousness. (Much of the research under way today on such implants can be characterized as figuring out how to write a consciousness driver—such as a driver for a printer or a graphic card—only for awareness.)
Fortunately, the first generation of these devices will probably be electronic eyes that return sight to the blind, a function that does not require Internet connectivity. From there, however, it is just a step (conceptually, although the engineering itself is another question) to a device that accepts any feed at all, from infrared cameras to television programming. Once at that point, the demand for some sort of connectivity will become intense. Who wouldn't want to be able to read their e-mail (or watch The Sopranos) while pretending to listen to a boring presentation?
CIOs have been urging users to take security seriously for decades, to not use "PASSWORD" for their passwords, to be careful where they find their wireless access points and to use firewalls. By and large, they have been studiously ignored. Perhaps the advent of neuronetworking will encourage people finally to take these cautionary procedures seriously.
But probably not.
Fred Hapgood (fhapgood@pobox.com) is a freelance writer based in Boston.
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DJ dAndroid
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Ballet Mechanique
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Re:More Than Human
« Reply #1 on: 2005-01-19 18:36:01 » |
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Wow! That's a sexily written article from a purely technophiliac POV! 
...diamondoid teeth, self-styling hair, autocleaning ears, nanotube bones, lipid metabolizers, polymer muscles...
I've never heard the idea presented before of (concievable) augmented memory being subject to copyright & taxes etc; and that particularly interested me!
As a DJ/Music-Promoter, I've been on the front-lines (as it were) of the entire file-sharing, peer-2-peer, intellectual copyright, etc. fights for a few years now. I have seen many! independent record-labels fold, as well as small record stores. The argument of course, is the onus truly on evil downloaders & their Ipods, or is it the business-owners' own short-sightedness in not evolving with the market-place, and working out a business model to compete? I tend to believe it's the latter.
As far as memory implants etc. go, it's all guesswork right? But I assume the surgery would come with a hundred papers to be signed, probably including an "oath" to respect privacy and copyright. What else could really be done? Is an autistic-savant (or simple super-talented musician) liable for sitting at a piano and perfectly replicating a piece of music which they only heard once?
The idea of discrimination occurring against the post-human is certainly not new! However, I tend to believe that our lovely underground of Punk/Goth/ whatever subcultural children, have always and continue to be the (unwitting in their rebellion) transhumanist army! With tattoo & piercing shops on every corner, and when every hair salon offers plastic extensions, with cheap, funky contact lenses, etc. With the advent of newer & cheaper plastic surgeries. (And the silly reality shows pushing the idea of ugly-duckling-into-swan). Will future generations seriously balk at a bio-luminescent wrist-watch installed under the skin? (For eg.) Not much, not for long!
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Shouldn't robots have the same right as humans to have gender and express their sexuality?
_Clayton Bailey_
http://www.claytonbailey.com/monrobot.htm
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