‘HUMANS OF THE FUTURE, ARTIFICIAL OR AUGMENTED’
Neurotech, or the interface between machines and the human nervous system, is now frontier science. But what will our lives be like between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation? Murali Doraiswamy, a leading expert in the areas of brain, b
Raj Chengappa: Machine brain versus human brain, who will win that battle? We once thought that would be a distant reality, but now it looks like this future is upon us. It has come to our homes, if you have not noticed. Just to explain very simply this very complex subject, my son recently picked up Alexa, an intelligent personal assistant developed by Amazon. Now whenever he wants to do something, he just commands Alexa: “Put out the light, Alexa”, and the lights go off in his room. If he wants to listen to music, he says, “I want this song”, and Alexa puts that on for him. Alexa also wakes him up. That’s artificial intelligence (AI), to put it very simply, programmed to do tasks for you. Now, what is intelligence augmentation (IA)? I was recently in Paris, to interview the French president, Emmanuel Macron. On my way to the Charles de Gaulle airport, I had taken a cab. The cab suddenly screeched to a halt, I was thrown forward. I asked the driver what happened. He said that his car apparently sensed there was going to be a collision and it automatically prevented that collision. He said, “I’m sorry, I have no control over it.” That is IA, in some sense, assisting a human in very important tasks. So clearly the battle is on between machine brain and human brain. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, widely considered one of today’s leading innovators, has recently called AI more dangerous than nuclear warheads and that there needs to be a regulatory body overseeing the development of super intelligence. My question to the experts here is: are we heading toward a neurotechnology war, with machines battling us, just like in sci-fi movies? Brain-computer interface could change our future radically, but are we in control? Do we even know where to draw the line?
Kris Gopalakrishnan: I was part of the digital revolution when the first wave of computing came. It was all about telling the computer what needed to be done. You first understood the problem, created an algorithm, programmed it, fed it to the computer and the computer executed those instructions precisely. The current way of computing is driven by artificial intelligence: you teach the computer how to find the right solution. Programming is not necessary anymore. That’s a paradigm shift. And that’s why you know it’s going to transform industries and lives. That’s where the fear comes in: it’s something we don’t understand fully but
we are unleashing it on people. What can be the consequences? I believe in this wave driven by artificial intelligence, we cannot afford to miss it. It is transformative; it will change everything that we know about.
Murali Doraiswamy: The short answer to your question is yes, that’s because no country wants to send human beings to suffer casualties. So, we’re going to have virtual wars that are largely neuroscience driven. Countries have already showcased at various defence conferences the Brain Control Drone, that’s directly wired to the soldier’s brain. Elon Musk has launched a company called Neural Link, aiming to directly connect your brain to the internet not just through a phone. You just think and it’s connected directly to Google, without using any external device, by perhaps implanting a wire mesh. In animal experiments, they have shown that in the developing mouse you can actually implant a flexible electronic material on the mouse’s brain and a mouse’s brain grows and develops with this electronic material so that they’re all interlinked with each other. So, it’s almost like if you implant internet related wires into the brain at a very young age, the brain develops and grows with it. I’m not sure if that’s going to be done in humans but that’s a sign of where we are headed.
Q: How serious is this invasion to privacy if you have a state that really has control over a lot of these inputs that are coming in. How do we protect our privacy? Are we leaving it too much to the scientists to determine what these rules should be or should the state be stepping in?
Gopalakrishnan: We don’t have the answers today. Elections are already being influenced by social media and those who can manipulate social media will control elections in people’s minds. That is already happening. Today our smartphone knows more about ourselves than we do: whom I speak to, who my friends are, when I am awake, when do I eat, how many steps I take—it knows everything. Actually, it knows my calendar. It knows everything about me.
Q: So, what should we be doing to regulate it?
Gopalakrishnan: Regulation is one way but society also creates cultural norms over a period of time, because everything cannot be regulated. This technology has come in our midst too fast. The browser was introduced in 1993. That’s when internet really took off. Facebook was in around 1997 and the social media revolution started 20 years ago. iPhone was introduced in 2007. The smartphone revolution happened 10 years ago. All this has happened so fast that we still have not understood the power of this technology. So, I strongly believe that we must assume that privacy is gone.
Q: Privacy is gone. Are you okay with that?
Gopalakrishnan: I assume everything that we do, everything that we say, will be public. Somebody will disclose it, somebody will hack into it. So be careful and assume that you are in the public eye— cameras are all over the place, people are listening in to you.
Doraiswamy: I think we need some guidelines for privacy, especially for children. There are a lot of toys that