by Benjamin C. Kinney
In our latest blog post, Benjamin C. Kinney discusses the history and potential implications of neurotechnology on human life. You can read his latest story, “For Every Bee, a Hive” in our [January/February issue, on sale now!].
“For Every Bee, a Hive” isn’t just a story about space-crew found families and AI swarms. It’s also a story about neurotechnology—its promises, its perils, and how we might build it into a human-centered future.
(This post contains no spoilers, nor does it expect you to have read the story.)
Neurotechnology has many promises, and the most exciting of them is human enhancement: the creation of cyborgs, the improvement of human mental capabilities. It’s the motivation for Elon Musk’s company Neuralink (for better or worse), but he came up with neither the science nor the idea. The first human implanted brain-computer interface succeeded in 2004, and humans have been enhancing themselves with technology since the first knapped stone axes. Neurotechnological enhancement is just one more step in a long journey.
(This is a topic close to my heart and expertise because I earned my Neuroscience PhD in the lab that did the 2004 work, though I wasn’t directly involved in the human implant project.)
I like to describe the long journey of human enhancement with the words I put in the mouth of Tamar, protagonist of “For Every Bee, a Hive:” “The free humans had survived all these centuries by adapting. By taking new technologies into themselves and becoming what they needed to be.”
If self-enhancement is a classic human tool, that comes with its downsides. Human tools are often dangerous ones, and we don’t always find the right balance between danger and benefit. If we forge ahead thoughtlessly with neurotechnology, it could become another form of eugenics.
To enhance humankind, first you must define “enhancement.” You must label some human qualities as superior, and others as inferior. Some of those choices seem easy: we’d all like to be faster, stronger, our weaknesses removed. But you won’t get far without making value judgments. Would you like to be smarter, healthier, more beautiful? Those are slippery terms, with no single objective definition. If you try to write one, you’ll end up categorizing people as inferior. More subtly, you’ll also end up categorizing perfectly valuable characteristics as inferior. For example, “intelligence” is not one capacity, but a constellation of capacities; if you select for a single endpoint, you end up with less of it.
The first human implanted brain-computer interface succeeded in 2004, and humans have been enhancing themselves with technology since the first knapped stone axes. Neurotechnological enhancement is just one more step in a long journey.
A truly human-centered vision of “enhancement” needs to encompass the full range of human diversity, both in people and in potential. Maybe the best way to get there is to avoid thinking about it as “enhancement” at all.
What if, instead of making humans better (or different), we could increase their reach? Bring more parts of the universe into the scope of things that humans can handle with the capacities they have?
To that end, I present a vision of human-centered neurotechnology. It means using cyborg technology not to enhance or supplant human cognition, but to support it by helping humans do more of what they do best. My proposal for human-centered neurotechnology owes a great debt to this article about how we offload cognition into four “extraneuronal resources:” technology, the body, physical space, and social interaction.
The human brain is an evolved organ, with specific strengths and functions, not an all-purpose computer. As a result, human beings are, in their individual combinations: spatial thinkers, social thinkers, and people who reach their best ideas by the interplay between concrete action and abstraction.
In “For Every Bee, a Hive,” Tamar’s implants build on all of these in the following ways:
- Improve interoceptive awareness of embodied cognition. If you ever wished you’d listened to your ‘gut feeling,’ this system will bring that embodied knowledge to your conscious attention for you to understand and reflect on.
- Provide interactive kinesthetic experiences of abstract concepts. If you’ve ever worked through a problem by laying out a model or creating a murder-board of movable sticky notes, this implant will help you do that anywhere.
- Introduce a “detachment gain” by moving ideas into space where you can observe them with your senses. Create a map, write a flowchart, turn words into an image.
- Unburden the mind from boring challenges like memorization. This one is familiar to all of us: who memorizes phone numbers anymore?
- Provide distributed memory and argumentative reasoning via shared-access mental space for social error-checking and discussion. Sometimes the only way to check whether an idea makes sense is to explain it to someone else.
These are just examples, from a single short story. But I suggest that a concept like this might be necessary for any science fictional society—or real future society—that wants to improve human capabilities without flattening the diversity of human minds.
Human-centered neurotechnology recruits non-brain resources to support and deploy the embodied, social cognition that human brains do best. It’s not about thinking better or faster or differently, it’s about bringing more of the world in touch with the minds we have.
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