Can Google avoid being evil with the release of its new technology?

HALF a century ago, the Russian-born US sciencefiction writer Isaac Asimov, who also happened to be a biochemist, wrote that human beings were surrounded by a choking mist in which they could not understand or trust one another. In that isolation, brutality reigned.

One creature, the Mule, could overcome isolation thanks to his telepathic powers. This gift could have been used for the benefit of all but the Mule chose the evil way. With the ability to modify the emotions of humans, he conquered civilised beings, laying waste to the hopes of those who hoped for a better future. Today, with the release of a wearable computer called Google Glass, we are a small step closer to realising the dreams and terrors of Asimov’s universe. A soon-to-be-released Japanese competitor is actually called Telepathy One, hinting this is only a beginning.

Asimov was both a humanitarian and a scientific rationalist. Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, he reflected both belief in the power of democracies to prevail and despair over the ability of organised barbarity to make a comeback. One of his favourite themes was a form of telepathy — sensing the emotions and thoughts of others — or what he called “mentalics”.

Mental interaction free of the mists of misunderstanding is certainly desirable. But it could break us if it fell under the control of sinister forces. Asimov warned that no sensible decisions could be taken about our future without thinking in imaginary sciencefiction terms.

This applied equally to statesmen, businesspeople and everyone else.

So what can we imagine about the future of communication via mobile minicomputers? Are we looking forward to a utopia of perfect harmony or a dystopia in which the state, big business and digital mafia control our minds?

Both Google Glass and its upstart rival are worn like glasses with a tiny screen over the eye carrying constant online information. If all goes well with handy apps to attract users, they will tap into a vast commercial market for mobile technologies.

The aim is to put us in instant touch with each other wherever we happen to be. On a spoken command from the user, Google Glass starts working online. While the device has data-capacity limitations at present, these will soon be overcome.

The value of future sales is virtually incalculable. The International Telecommunications Union said in 2011 that about 87% of the world’s population had access to cellphones. Another projection, by Portio Research in the UK, suggests that by the end of 2016, there will be 9-billion subscribers — at least equal to or more than the total number of people on the planet.

Cellphones have reached poor people everywhere because of economies of scale and the portability of knowledge. Cellphones are the office of Africa, business on the hoof. As computers become tinier, they are fuelling a revolution in chip devices as an essential appendage to our brains.

For years, medical technologists have been working on the brain computer interface (BCI) to restore limb and speech functions to stroke victims. A skull-mounted electroencephalogram uses nodes over points in the brain to stimulate the nervous system. Researchers at Wits University rerouted signals from the brain to a prosthetic hand that could be worn by amputees and victims of strokes and spinal injuries. Used this way, the BCI technology is an output medium, allowing a person to control an external device. The converse process of receiving messages into the brain is also being explored.

Emerging from Stanford University a decade ago, optogenetics sought breakthroughs for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, addiction and depression. Brain probes made of plastic use light as the stimulus to deliver genes that wake up dormant cells. Now the journal, Lab on a Chip, reports that researchers in Germany and Switzerland have simplified the procedure to trigger precise mental responses

The combination of input-output stimuli opens up possibilities for wireless communication from one brain to another.

That would be the beginning of true telepathy. The present generation of mobile smartphones and now Google Glass use wireless to transmit information to devices, not to the brain itself. The little glass screen is an internet terminal sharing whatever is in the online “cloud”, from personal messages to news and web pages. Direct brain stimulation will occur when neuroscientists work out how to implant efficient electrodes safely in our grey matter. Widespread adoption and commercialisation could not be far off.

We are witnessing the closing of the divide between living organisms and machines — a scenario long predicted by fiction writers and futurists. Chip maker Intel has unveiled an experimental brain-like microprocessor and the company says it hopes to drive computers with brain waves instead of a mouse.

It is hard to imagine living without cellphones and digital media.

Computer-augmented living has become part of our virtual nature. Pure research, the profit motive, and the spirit of innovation come together in this push for intelligent human recreation. The potential for improving our quality of life through communication and learning is enormous. Yet so is the threat of surveillance by outside agencies.

Secret videoing and invasion of privacy concerns have bugged Google Glass since the beginning. Spying by individuals is only an aspect of the much wider prospect that all of us could be watched incessantly via the brainwaves we emit.

It seems fairly likely that the information age will lead us towards the mentalic realm envisaged by Asimov. Although he was clear about the progressive mission of science to transform and improve the human condition, he had the gravest doubts about our underlying human nature. Any belief, no matter how crazy, would draw followers to defend it to the death and murder others in the process. This dual view of our future has shaped the popular imagination, breeding fears of technological innovation.

The science of bioinformatics stands at the crossroads between information theory and biological evolution. Here, the notion that everything is information — our DNA is a code — holds sway over the older idea that data are merely something we generate as a by-product of what we do and think.

If everything is information, nothing exists that cannot be altered with new codes. The universe and everything in it is open to number-crunching and the revision of reality. So we confront the not-so-imaginary possibility that we can remake ourselves as cyberbeings.

Those who exercise control over information could be the wise guardians of Plato’s ideal republic. Or they could be Hitlers or Mafiosi. Only if the body politic insists on transparency, along with ethical and legal protocols of information exchange, can we assert democratic controls.

In a telepathic future we could all, in theory, know what others are really thinking and share in development. On the other hand, the means could be found to turn this openness into a closed system of surveillance and propaganda. Our access to free information is paramount because it is the very stuff of which we are born and made.

Asimov recognised the central dilemma of technology: does it serve good or ill? Can Google avoid being evil?

Addison is a freelance writer and media trainer.