Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (21 page)

Several groups are exploring ways to assist the blind by creating artificial vision, connecting a camera to the human brain. One method is to directly insert the silicon chip into the retina of the person and attach the chip to the retina’s neurons. Another is to connect the chip to a special cable that is connected to the back of the skull, where the brain processes vision. These groups, for the first time in history, have been able to restore a degree of sight to the blind. Patients have been able to see up to 50 pixels lighting up before them. Eventually, scientists should be able to scale this up so that they can see thousands of pixels.

The patients can see fireworks, the outlines of their hands, shining objects and lights, the presence of cars and people, and the borders of objects. “At Little League games, I can see where the catcher, batter, and umpire are,” says Linda Morfoot, one of the test subjects.

So far, thirty patients have had artificial retinas with up to sixty electrodes. But the Department of Energy’s Artificial Retina Project, based at the University of Southern California, is already planning a new system with more than 200 electrodes. A 1,000-electrode device is also being studied (but if too many electrodes are packed onto the chip, it could cause overheating of the retina). In this system, a miniature camera mounted on a blind person’s eyeglasses takes pictures and sends them wirelessly to a microprocessor, worn on a belt, that relays the information to the chip placed directly on the retina. This chip sends tiny pulses directly into the retinal nerves that are still active, thereby bypassing defective retinal cells.

STAR WARS
ROBOTIC HAND

Using mechanical enhancements, one can also duplicate the feats of science fiction, including the robotic hand of
Star Wars
and the X-ray vision of Superman. In
The Empire Strikes Back,
Luke Skywalker has his hand chopped off by a lightsaber wielded by the evil Darth Vader, his father. No problem. Scientists in this faraway galaxy quickly create a new mechanical hand, complete with fingers that can touch and feel.

This may sound like science fiction, yet it is already here. A significant advance was made by scientists in Italy and Sweden, who have actually made a robotic hand that can “feel.” One subject, Robin Ekenstam, a twenty-two-year-old who had his right hand amputated to remove a cancerous tumor, can now control the motion of his mechanical fingers and feel the response. Doctors connected the nerves in Ekenstam’s arm to the chips contained in his mechanical hand so that he can control the finger movements with his brain. The artificial “smart hand” has four motors and forty sensors. The motion of his mechanical fingers is then relayed to his brain so he has feedback. In this way, he is able to control and also “feel” the motion of his hand. Since feedback is one of the essential features of body motion, this could revolutionize the way we treat amputees with prosthetic limbs.

Ekenstam says, “It’s great. I have a feeling that I have not had for a long time. Now I am getting sensation back. If I grab something tightly, then I can feel it in the fingertips, which is strange, since I don’t have them anymore.”

One of the researchers, Christian Cipriani of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, says, “First, the brain controls the mechanical hand without any muscle contractions. Second, the hand will be able to give feedback to the patient so he will be able to feel. Just like a real hand.”

This development is significant because it means that one day humans may effortlessly control mechanical limbs as if they were flesh and bone. Instead of tediously learning how to move arms and legs of metal, people will treat these mechanical appendages as if they were real, feeling every nuance of the limbs’ movements via electronic feedback mechanisms.

This is also evidence of a theory that says the brain is extremely plastic, not fixed, and constantly rewires itself as it learns new tasks and adjusts to new situations. Hence, the brain will be adaptable enough to accommodate any new appendage or sense organ. They may be attached to the brain at different locations, and the brain simply “learns” to control this new attachment. If so, then the brain might be viewed as a modular device, able to plug in and then control different appendages and sensors from different devices. This type of behavior might be expected if our brain is a neural network of some sort that makes new connections and neural pathways each time it learns a new task, whatever that task might be.

Rodney Brooks writes, “Over the next ten to twenty years, there will be a cultural shift, in which we will adopt robotic technology, silicon, and steel into our bodies to improve what we can do and understand the world.” When Brooks analyzes the progress made at Brown University and Duke University in hooking up the brain directly to a computer or a mechanical arm, he concludes, “We may all be able to have a wireless Internet connection installed directly into our brains.”

In the next stage, he sees merging silicon and living cells not just to cure the ailments of the body but to slowly enhance our capabilities. For example, if today’s cochlear and retinal implants can restore hearing and vision, tomorrow’s may also give us superhuman abilities. We would be able to hear sounds that only dogs can hear, or see UV, infrared, and X-rays.

It might be possible to increase our intelligence as well. Brooks cites research in which extra layers of neurons were added to the brain of a rat at a critical time in its development. Remarkably, the cognitive abilities of these rats were increased. He envisions a time in the near future when the human brain’s intelligence might also be improved by a similar process. In a later chapter, we will see that biologists have already isolated a gene in rats that the media has dubbed the “smart mouse gene.” With the addition of this gene, enhanced mice have much greater memory and learning abilities.

And by midcentury, Brooks envisions a time when seemingly fanciful enhancements of the body might be possible, giving us abilities far beyond those of the ordinary human. “Fifty years from now, we can expect to see radical alterations of human bodies through genetic modification.” When you also add electronic enhancements, “the human menagerie will expand in ways unimaginable to us today …. We will no longer find ourselves confined by Darwinian evolution,” he says.

But anything, of course, can be taken too far. How far should we go in merging with our robot creations before some people rebel and find it repulsive?

One way in which to merge with robots, but without altering the human body, is to create surrogates or avatars. In the movie
Surrogates,
starring Bruce Willis, in the year 2017 scientists have discovered a way for people to control robots as if they were inside them, so that we can live our lives in perfect bodies. The robot responds to every command, and the person also sees and feels everything the robot sees and feels. While our mortal bodies decay and wither, we can control the motions of our robot surrogate, which has superhuman powers and is perfectly shaped. The movie gets complicated because people prefer to live out their lives as beautiful, handsome, and superpowerful robots, abandoning their rotting bodies, which are conveniently hidden away. The entire human race, in effect, willingly becomes robotic rather than face reality.

In the movie
Avatar,
this is taken one step further. Instead of living our lives as perfect robots, in the year 2154 we might be able to live as alien beings. In the movie, our bodies are placed in pods, which then allow us to control the motion of specially cloned alien bodies. In a sense, we are given entirely new bodies to live on a new planet. In this way, we can better communicate with a native alien population on other planets. The movie plot thickens when one worker decides to abandon his humanity and live out his life as an alien, protecting them from mercenaries.

These surrogates and avatars are not possible today but may be possible in the future.

Recently, ASIMO has been programmed with a new idea: remote sensing. At Kyoto University, humans have been trained to control the mechanical motion of robots by using brain sensors. For example, by putting on an EEG helmet, students can move the arms and legs of ASIMO by simply thinking. So far, four distinct motions of the arms and head are possible. This may open the door to another realm of AI: robots controlled by the mind.

Although this is a crude demonstration of mind over matter, in the coming decades it should be possible to increase the set of motions we can control in a robot, and also to get feedback, so we can “feel” with our new robotic hands. Goggles or contact lenses would allow us to see what the robots see, so we might eventually have full control over the body’s motions.

This may also help alleviate the immigration problem for Japan. Workers may be located in different countries, yet control robots thousands of miles away by donning brain sensors. So not only can the Internet carry the thoughts of white-collar workers, it might also carry the thoughts of blue-collar workers and translate them into physical motion. This might mean that robots will become an integral part of any nation grappling with exploding health costs and a shortage of workers.

Controlling robots by remote sensing may also have applications elsewhere. In any dangerous environment (for example, underwater, near high-voltage lines, in fires), robots controlled by human thoughts may be used in rescue missions. Or undersea robots may be connected directly to humans, so that humans can control many swimming robots by thoughts alone. Since the surrogate would have superpowers, it would be able to chase criminals (unless the criminals also have superpowered surrogates). One would have all the advantages of merging with robots without changing our bodies at all.

Such an arrangement might actually prove useful for space exploration, when we have to manage a permanent moon base. Our surrogates may perform all the dangerous tasks of maintaining the moon base, while the astronauts are safely back on earth. The astronauts would have the superstrength and superpowers of the robots while exploring a hazardous alien landscape. (This would not work if the astronauts are on the earth controlling surrogates on Mars, however, since radio signals take up to 40 minutes to go from the earth to Mars and back. But it would work if the astronauts were sitting safely in a permanent base on Mars while the surrogates went out and performed dangerous tasks on the Martian surface.)

HOW FAR THE MERGER WITH ROBOTS?

Robot pioneer Hans Moravec takes this several steps further and imagines an extreme version of this: we become the very robots that we have built. He explained to me how we might merge with our robot creations by undergoing a brain operation that replaces each neuron of our brain with a transistor inside a robot. The operation starts when we lie beside a robot body without a brain. A robotic surgeon takes every cluster of gray matter in our brain, duplicates it transistor by transistor, connects the neurons to the transistors, and puts the transistors into the empty robot skull. As each cluster of neurons is duplicated in the robot, it is discarded. We are fully conscious as this delicate operation takes place. Part of our brain is inside our old body, but the other part is now made of transistors inside our new robot body. After the operation is over, our brain has been entirely transferred into the body of a robot. Not only do we have a robotic body, we have also the benefits of a robot: immortality in superhuman bodies that are perfect in appearance. This will not be possible in the twenty-first century, but becomes an option in the twenty-second.

In the ultimate scenario, we discard our clumsy bodies entirely and eventually evolve into pure software programs that encode our personalities. We “download” our entire personalities into a computer. If someone presses a button with your name on it, then the computer behaves as if you are inside its memory, since it has encoded all your personality quirks inside its circuits. We become immortal, but spend our time trapped inside a computer, interacting with other “people” (that is, other software programs) in some gigantic cyberspace/virtual reality. Our bodily existence will be discarded, replaced by the motion of electrons in this gigantic computer. In this picture, our ultimate destiny is to wind up as lines of code in this vast computer program, with all the apparent sensations of physical bodies dancing in a virtual paradise. We will share deep thoughts with other lines of computer code, living out this grand illusion. We have great, heroic exploits conquering new worlds, oblivious to the fact that we are just electrons dancing inside some computer. Until, of course, someone hits the off button.

But one problem with pushing these scenarios too far is the Cave Man Principle. As we mentioned earlier, the architecture of our brains is that of a primitive hunter-gatherer who emerged from Africa more than 100,000 years ago. Our deepest desires, our appetites, our wants were all forged in the grasslands of Africa as we evaded predators, hunted for game, foraged in the forests, looked for mates, and entertained ourselves at the campfire.

One of our prime directives, buried deep in the fabric of our thoughts, is to look good, especially to the opposite sex and our peers. An enormous fraction of our disposable income, after entertainment, is devoted to our appearance. That is why we have had the explosive growth in plastic surgery, Botox, grooming products, sophisticated clothing, as well as learning new dance steps, muscle building, buying the latest music, and keeping fit. If you add all this up, it becomes a huge portion of consumer spending, which in turn generates a large fraction of the U.S. economy.

This means that, even with the ability to create perfect bodies that are nearly immortal, we will probably resist the desire for robotic bodies if we look like a clumsy robot with implants dangling out of our heads. No one wants to look like a refugee from a science fiction movie. If we have enhanced bodies, they must make us attractive to the opposite sex and enhance our reputation among our peers, or we will reject them. What teenager wants to be enhanced but look uncool?