Recently my Transhumanist Collective post was linked by an interesting-looking new blog, future fragments. The premise of the site is that it’s already in the future, around 2030, and it’s looking back. The title of the post in question is, “Transhumanist “Tower of Bable” Is A Reality”, and it announces the creation of a literal hivemind consisting of the transhumanist community! Here’s the beginning:

Getting minds to link and work together are the topics for discussion at a meeting of scientists taking place in the virtual world of Next Life today where they have unveiled details of a complex neural network that has been developed together with some of the world’s biggest corporations and most powerful countries.

Called the “Tower of Babel” after the biblical myth, it is their attempt to build technologically enhanced minds that allows a completely telepathic connection - just by installing some software (called “neuro-software”) in your brain.

Rather than just simply creating a brain to machine interface, which allowed a user to connect to an external machine with a type of physical computer, the team of scientists and transhumanists have developed what’s being dubbed the “iBrain”, the world”s first true “neural net” - an internet of minds. They’re hoping to use neuro-software - software-type applications built from neurons and tiny machines built from atoms and molecules, called nanomachines - to enhance and replace our normal brain functions. Think of it as your brain with an upgrade.

Being funded in conjunction with Dream, the giant trans-national media company, and a joint US-Indian-Chinese partnership between DARPA (the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency), ITRI (the Indian Transhumanist Research Institute), and CADO (Chinese Human Advancement Organisation), they brought together the best and brightest of the worldwide Transhumanist Collective in order to bring this vision about, and today’s conference demonstrates their success: all the scientists, located in different parts of the world, took part using the new technology.

“It’s amazing,” said Dr. Brett Stott, a spokesman for the collective. “Our new individual and collective brain power far exceeds anything nature could have ever dreamed of.”

The Transhumanist Collective was initially just a term given to a loose group of media organizations, non-profit groups and individuals dedicated to transhumanism, that is the use of technology and science to enhance human evolution. Many of them became the founding members of the organization when it was officially formed in 2010. Since then, they became a lot more focused, similar to the computer hobbyists of the 1970’s, working on artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and biotechnology, all of them dedicated to bringing about the so-called “Singularity” where artificial intelligence and technology becomes more powerful than normal human abilities, and allow humans to evolve into what some see as a new life form.

Interesting! Officially formed in 2010, huh? There is actually already an alliance for transhumanists in general: the World Transhumanist Association, which works out quite well. It was formed in 1998. (If you’re not yet a member, you should join!)

Creating Brain-to-Brain Interfaces (BBI) is an interesting technological prospect, and like all powerful technologies, potentially very dangerous. Nature didn’t design our brains to be linked together like daisy chains. In fact, it designed us to lie and keep secrets from each other, even if we don’t even know we’re doing it! 99% of the populace out there is incapable about thinking about the prospect and its consequences of BBI in a mature way, because their views on the matter have been irreversibly colored by Star Trek. I haven’t read “Society of Mind” by Marvin Minsky, but I understand that it’s about his cognitive theory that views the mind as the intelligent outcome of an aggregation of unintelligent agents - not about connecting human brains up with one another neurologically. “Metaman”, by Greg Stock, another book I haven’t read, presumably explores the issue in depth. Regardless of the pertinence or impertinence of these books to the real future technological prospect, BBI, they all will inevitably influence the way both academic and popular audiences approach the issue.

Like many other important issues within transhumanism, this one has been given deep consideration by the guru-like Eliezer Yudkowsky. His 2003 talk, “Predicting the Future” strongly features BBI and also the phenomenon of generalizing from fictional evidence. He cites Spider Robinson, an author that writes stories where computer-mediated telepathy leads to pleasant outcomes, but cautions us that this is not evidence for or against the actual impact that BBI could have, because it, like Star Trek, is entirely fictional. Made-up stories are not evidence.

The tendency to generalize from fictional evidence is so amazingly powerful, that I almost - but not quite - am in favor of the idea of all serious futurists throwing all their science fiction - books, DVDs, magazines - into the furnace. But judging from personal experience, and responses to my recent Accelerando critique, many transhumanist-oriented individuals really really enjoy their science fiction, and many were introduced to transhumanist concepts through that medium. (I myself was introduced to transhumanism in 1996 by the non-fiction writings of Ed Regis and Dr. Drexler, and later Dr. More and of course Ray.) Science fiction can be wonderfully inspiring and bring the possibilities of the future and future lifestyles home in a more personal way. There’s just one problem - it’s all made up. It was Dr. Vinge who made the landmark observation that there’s a point at which you just can’t write about the future - the point at which at future involves minds genuinely smarter than ourselves. And a successful BBI system would, almost by definition, be smarter than both individual humans and previous human aggregations. Hence, its arrival would constitute a full-fledged Singularity.

There is significant bias for the position that significant human brain enhancement, regardless of the means, will come before AI of human-surpassing intelligence. The reasons for bias are obvious - we as humans like control, we want control of our future, we’re biased against anything mechanical or machinelike, and it’s fun to fantasize about us personally taking advantage of the technology. We’d rather boost our intelligence “ourselves” rather than “relying upon” a “paternalistic god figure” to do it for us. All these tendencies translate to more attention and optimism surrounding IA (intelligence augmentation) progress, including predictions that it will arrive sooner - when in reality its arrival time will be contingent on a complex brew of regulatory, theoretical, and technical challenges whose ease or difficulty is orthogonal to our hopeful anticipations. Ditto with AI, of course, but because the notion of true AI is so fundamentally new relative to the idea of humans getting smarter, it has less (though still substantial) psychological baggage. The Web 2.0 crowd, in particular, seems quite enamored with the idea of boosting our intelligence through increased interconnectedness rather than centrally optimized solutions, as if every boost in interconnectedness is necessarily an improvement in quality of thought.

In IA, there’s a fundamental problem: aside from crude drug use and basic neurosurgery, we have absolutely zero experience when it comes to human neurological modification. None. This shouldn’t be a trial-and-error procedure - if you mess around with someone’s brain, even if it’s your own, without knowing precisely what you’re doing, then you could end up dead, insane, or worse. Our brain is probably the most complex mechanism in the universe today, and while I don’t doubt that we’ll eventually understand it completely, today our knowledge is extremely limited. To make matters worse, our conceptions of psychology are extremely prone to bias - because, in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (EEA), the most adaptively relevant objects around were always other humans, that careless puppetmaster, Old Man Evolution, set up our mental wiring to be preoccupied with adaptively salient psychological patterns, while ignoring the remainder. An embarrassing case in point: the fundamental attribution error, which, in my mind, rivals confirmation bias as the #1 wrench in our cognitive gears.

By 2010, we will have headphones and wireless receivers small and comfortable enough to fit invisibly into our ears. We already have technology that can extrapolate speech simply by measuring the movements of the jaw. In time, soldiers will have access to this technology, and will be able to communicate silently to each other across distances of kilometers, simply by “mouthing” the words to be said. But this is nothing relative to communication on the neurological level.

Brain-interfaced humans could become superintelligent. Not just superintelligent as in having quick access to one another’s thoughts, emotional perceptions, past knowledge and future expectations, but being fundamentally capable of imagining new concepts, learning new conceptual frameworks, engaging in pattern recognition, and communicating nuances and insights that standard-issue lilim can only fantasize (poorly) about. A huge new jump unlike anything else before. Values, assumptions, and patterns that have held since the dawn of our species could be summarily jettisoned over a period of weeks or months. I’m not saying that all of society would be instantly sucked into the new BBI phenomenon, but it very well could be, and the changes could just as well seem awkward and scary as enlightening or beautiful.

It all depends on the dynamics and design of the first successful Brain-to-Brain Interface. We’re fond of using the Internet as a metaphor for future human-to-human mental linkages, but anytime you’re examining something genuinely new, metaphorical thinking should be discarded. Internet use is external to the neural envelope of human cognition - I can turn around and stare at the wall, and my mind gets a cognitive degaussing - I’m “grounded” because I can change my perceptual bitstream back to normality. Interface implants would be permanent and all-encompassing of our perceptual and mental worlds. The concepts of privacy or solitary calmness would be similarly eliminated for the augmentee, though he or she would likely get used to it, redefining their concept of identity to encompass brain brothers and sisters rather than just the individual. This will lead to non-conventional identities that are distributed across thousands of kilometers rather than just sitting on top of a relatively stationary calcite totem pole.

Depending on how the interface is designed, low-level conceptual and perceptual processing could be modified profoundly. We are accustomed to the notion of a monolithic executive, but in a collective mind, any number of voting schemes or methodological protocols could be used to assign executive power. In visual cortex, successive processing layers determine salient features like lines and edges, then relay them to the next stage, and ultimately to the forebrain, where the information can be combined with other perceptions and used as feedstock for outputting motor response, abstract thought, fueling the internal monologue, etc. But if I am combined with another human being with a complete visual cortex, why do I need to devote my neurons to the redundant busywork of building a retinotopic map from binary rod/cone activation patterns? If I am in spatial proximity to my mind brother, double-processing is not necessary, and my neurons could be devoted to entirely new types of visual analysis, or radically increasing the granularity of current analysis. For example, I could train my neurons to process information concerning only objects incoming from the upper-right field of view at a 45 degree angle, moving faster than a certain velocity. Or I could devote attention to other traditionally nonsalient aspects of visual processing, like emotionally neutral faces rather than emotionally agitated faces. It all depends on the design of the system, the flexibility of my neurons, and the training sets used to develop the skills.

My example is merely a visual one, but what happens if you use the power of two minds to process emotions and more complex abstract thoughts? The possibilities are expansive, as well as potentially worrisome. A groupmind would not necessarily hold the same values as the species it came from. It would be a totally new species, outside of the domain of all past life as well as human society, and no kitchy name like “Homo collectivus” can possibly capture the massive mental and physical transformations it would entail. I suggest that we tread this ground carefully, and consider building a mind without evolutionary bias - an AI - before we attempt to aggregate our delicate, notoriously flaw-prone homonid cognitive machinery. Like Bryan Caplan’s irrational voters, our imperfections could easily compound, rather than cancelling each other out.