How Scientists are Working to Create Cyborg Humans with Super Intelligence

Hannah Osborne
Newsweek
Originally posted on June 14, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

There are three main approaches to doing this. The first involves recording information from the brain, decoding it via a computer or machine interface, and then utilizing the information for a purpose.

The second is to influence the brain by stimulating it pharmacologically or electrically: “So you can stimulate the brain to produce artificial sensations, like the sensation of touch, or vision for the blind,” he says. “Or you could stimulate certain areas to improve their functions—like improved memory, attention. You can even connect two brains together—one brain will stimulate the other—like where scientists transferred memories of one rat to another.”

The final approach is defined as “futuristic.” This would include humans becoming cyborgs, for example, and would raise the ethical and philosophical questions that will need to be addressed before scientists merge man and machine.

Lebedev said these ethical concerns could become real in the next 10 years, but the current technology poses no serious threat.

The article is here.

Do You Want to Be a Cyborg?

Agata Sagan and Peter Singer
Project Syndicate
Originally posted May 17, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

In the United States, Europe, and most other countries with advanced biomedical research, strict regulations on the use of human subjects would make it extremely difficult to get permission to carry out experiments aimed at enhancing our cognitive abilities by linking our brains to computers. US regulations drove Phil Kennedy, a pioneer in the use of computers to enable paralyzed patients to communicate by thought alone, to have electrodes implanted in his own brain in order to make further scientific progress. Even then, he had to go to Belize, in Central America, to find a surgeon willing to perform the operation. In the United Kingdom, cyborg advocate Kevin Warwick and his wife had data arrays implanted in their arms to show that direct communication between the nervous systems of separate human beings is possible.

Musk has suggested that the regulations governing the use of human subjects in research could change. That may take some time. Meanwhile freewheeling enthusiasts are going ahead anyway. Tim Cannon doesn’t have the scientific or medical qualifications of Phil Kennedy or Kevin Warwick, but that hasn’t stopped him from co-founding a Pittsburgh company that implants bionic devices, often after he has first tried them out on himself. His attitude is, as he said at an event billed as “The world’s first cyborg-fair,” held in Düsseldorf in 2015, “Let’s just do it and really go for it.”

People at the Düsseldorf cyborg-fair had magnets, radio frequency identification chips, and other devices implanted in their fingers or arms. The surgery is often carried out by tattooists and sometimes veterinarians, because qualified physicians and surgeons are reluctant to operate on healthy people.

The article is here.

AI will make life meaningless, Elon Musk warns

Zoe Nauman
The Sun
Originally published February 17, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

“I think some kind of universal income will be necessary.”

“The harder challenge is how do people then have meaning – because a lot of people derive their meaning from their employment.”

“If you are not needed, if there is not a need for your labor. What’s the meaning?”

“Do you have meaning, are you useless? That is a much harder problem to deal with.”

The article is here.