BRAIN IMPLANTS: What next for neurotechnology?

[Music] devices that are implanted into your brain and making new medical treatments possible and one day could perhaps redefine what it means actually to be human what are the dangers welcome to round table [Music] I left me David Foster imagine a world where you could communicate with others via your thoughts or download a new skill straight into your brain well that world isn't as far away as you might imagine say scientists and they want an investigation into the risks and the opportunities devices implanted in the brain could bring untold medical and technological changes to society neural implants are already used to tackle conditions like strokes and epilepsy scientists say these devices could help to treat dementia Alzheimer's and even enable paralyzed people to walk within a few decades but tech experts predict brain implants may one day allow us to add new capabilities - such as telepathic communication large tech firms have expressed an interest in joining this neural Revolution Elon Musk's company neural Inc aims to start human trials in 2020 to insert ultrafine electrodes into the brain to help people with paralysis communicate via a computer or phone but ethicists are worried that corporations and governments may access our deepest thoughts and feelings the Royal Society in the UK has called for a national investigation into emerging neural interface technologies campaigners hope to establish safeguards so as technology uncovers new possibilities it develops in a safe and ethical way we have Neil harpists and back with us described as the world's first legally recognised cyborg you can see that thing on the top of his head it's a device connected to his brain to help him perceive colors and light he is in fact colour blind Ross Dawson joins us to from Sydney a futurist who investigates advanced human technologies and with me in the studio Stephen Rainey a research fellow in neuro ethics at Oxford University a Steven this raises an awful lot ethical points will come to those in just a moment but never since you were last on roundtable and you told us about the colors that you can see that the the lights that you can perceive and you've come up with something else that's going to go around the side of your head tell us about that yeah I'm interested in sensing time we all have a sense of time but we don't have an organ for the sense of time so it's gonna be an inner crown around the head it will be a point of heat that will slowly go around the head and it will take 24 hours to the complete circle around the head so this new organ will allow me to feel the 24 hour cycle of the rotation of the planet as a body part so the aim is to see you be in the long-term when my brain gets used to the 24-hour cycle if we can create time illusions so if I want the situation to last longer I make the point of heat go a bit slower or a bit faster so that maybe we can play with perception of time do you think that's going to be possible that you could slow things down so much that a minute could last for 24 hours I think it's possible because in in the same way that we can create optical illusions because we have an organ for our sense of sight if we have an organ for our sense of time we should be able to create time illusions and when you're looking at an optical illusion even if you know that you're looking at an optical illusion your brain is fooled by the optical illusion so I think that I can actually create time illusions if I have an organ for the sense of time okay process cavity is this sort of thing that you're thinking about as well well of course this Lee it is it's a little bit of a different veer to the ways in which we interface with the world but back the very distinguished hypnotherapist Milton Erickson you looked a lot at time distortion so this is where we are looking at what is what we uncovering the potential of the human brain and one of the ways we can do that is start to of course tap directly we can augment it with building empting ways but I think we've just and more broadly we are just we are very far from uncovering the potential of our mind and I think time illusions time distortion are some of the things which were played with very little but where we have had some some foundations of success so I think more broadly if you look at how do we augment our human capabilities and that's both within our existing mind but as well as augmenting it by for example interfacing with computers being able to add new senses as Neil is doing and exploring your way so I think this is all about human augmentation augmenting our cognition and you know I think what Neil's describing is you know one of the many paths that we can take to do that yeah and this is this is presumably just for the interest in finding out what these possibilities are but when it comes to the practicalities I've made notes of helping the paralyzed to walk sharing your thoughts with somebody else making prosthetics easily controllable by the brain is this where it could benefit humanity or on on a ground floor level there are many people today who can be vastly aided by these new neural interfaces and of course those who do not have full you know the traditional capabilities we have in terms of physical movement can use their brains to more directly control the world around and that's a very obvious interfaces there's many other medical applications beyond that you know one of the the real things say many people want to augment their capabilities for enhanced performance to be better at their work to be able to achieve more in their art whatever it may be so from this base of being able to aid those who are not normally ADA normally abled we can now look to say anybody can choose to augment themselves in different ways and this is of course where some of the ethical issues start this is where we're going now we'll talk about the practical side of this both with you Neal and with you Ross as we go throughout the program and throw your thoughts in at any time you care to but but Stephen one of the concerns is who are the right candidates for this yeah I mean talking about augment augmentation of abilities is one thing but because we have so many opportunities to help people who are profoundly disabled a lot of the ethical issues that we have now is about how to pick those people how to develop which technologies and which directions because you have to remember that for a lot of these technologies like BC is their brink of your interfaces there are very invasive so it means brain surgery it means putting things inside someone's head and so in order to get even those very fundamental questions right about who's the right candidate it have become very important you know 20 plus years ago I did a story for another network about a brain implant for a Parkinson patient and he demonstrated to me that if he pressed the baby was like this his hand was going like this seriously and he pressed a button on another machine and it was difficult for him to do so and pretty much immediately it stopped yeah you don't hear very much about these things anymore I know it still exists but why aren't they widespread common yeah this is deep brain stimulation is the technique for Parkinson's and partly why you don't hear so much about it is that it's not it's not very well understood other than it works so it's kind of a tricky one to recommend the ethical issues around it become we have an ethical duty to do these things because we know they work almost you need to protect someone from the debilitating illnesses but the exact mechanisms of how that worker are still slightly mysterious and so although it works there's a question about how do we choose who's got a condition severe enough to use these technologies and also which other conditions you may want to throw a question at Neil I mean I will for now and that is we're talking about some of these things has been quite invasive is that a problem for you no I think it's an activity that has a risk but we are there are many activities that have risks like sports have risks there are many cultural events that have risks and this is an action that has some risk but I think the results can be so much more interesting than the fear of the problems that these may cause that to me the risk is not as important as the exploration and to explore what happens when you add a new sense into your body Ross you were gonna say something then what was that well if we're looking at the sense of augmentation I think there are two lines one is those who are not normally able to be able to assist them in terms of just illnesses or you know being able to do the things that most people can but going beyond that in terms of this idea of enhancement I two layers are in terms of access and in choice so access is as we just heard you know this Steve and say who do we give these things to and this could be in terms of cost so is it only those who are wealthy or is only those people who are chosen by panels we would get access to these things so these technologies will everybody in the world equitably have access to these if they choose but the second layer around that is that of choice where Neil is one of ya it's the kind of person we say yes I'd like to experiment I'd like to explore it like trying to use things these giving more things but there are other people who will be either afraid or cautious and there's a whole array of reasons which could be religious reasons they could be just this fear they could be saying that you know I want to be the way that I was born I don't want to change myself so I actually believe in the long term we will start to seize a divide in human society between those who choose to take some of these technologies to enhance or augment or make themselves different and some people who for a whole variety of reasons what reasons will say no I do not want to do that or I'm afraid or it's it's just something I don't want to do so if this is something which I absolutely need to be looking for as we as the technologies evolve I do think there's another and dimension besides the idea of access and choice and that's the nature of the enhancement itself so what is what is enhancement it's a question needs to come before we make the technology so for instance if I had an implant to enhance my memory what would that mean what I want to remember everything what I want to remember what I remember now but in more detail what I want to lose the ability to forget these are other questions which come in really are that needs to come in really early in the technology development stage so that rather than just having a choice of whether I want this enhancement or not there's some sort of question about what it means to be enhanced in that in that first place so it's pretty clear in the cases of you know disability where a tremor can be stopped by an implant but when you get into more nuanced things about how does memory work what what is memory play a role in in the human experience for example these are really quite tricky questions and to us and just simply say that there's a choice to be made at some point when the technology is available is too late I think that's an ethical question and I don't know whether either of you two either in Barcelona or Sydney would like to answer that one before I come up with a question well I absolutely this in terms of the ethics of new technologies these are things that we need to be considering has Steve said before we develop them and at the moment there we are getting very limited engagement in a lot of these implications of emerging technologies in terms of people just think is this right to do I do I think this is a good thing that's something which I want this is something which other people have access to so the fact of the increased debate of this program today I think is a wonderful thing in terms of being able to engage people and starting to think more about these issues because not something of course was just ethicists on panels should be thinking about this is for all of us to start to engage with understanding what the possibilities might be and how we respond to them and we know you're nodding because that thing on the top of your head nearly took your teeth out yeah I think that in the future it will be seen as ethical that the more we design ourselves the better it will be for ourselves and for the planet and for other species because we have been a species that for thousands of years have been designing the planet and changing the planet in order to live better and I think this is wrong we should start designing ourselves and changing ourselves in order to live better as I was trying to say before if we all had night vision cities would be dark so we wouldn't have to spend energy creating artificial light when it's dark we would be able to see if we had night vision so this would be much better for the planet because we will be spending so much energy creating artificial light or if we could control our own temperature we wouldn't have to use heaters when it's cold or air conditionings when it's hot we would be able to control our own temperature in change instead of changing the temperature of the planet let me ask you a practical question I'm gonna throw this out there yesterday morning I woke out to find a message on my phone saying somebody in China was trying to get into my system thankfully I was able to stop that from happening but Neil what about somebody trying to get into you hack your head well this happened once so through all these years someone without permission sent colours to my head so I was physically hacked once but I actually liked it so it wasn't a bad experience someone sent colours to my head but there are no laws regulating what happens if someone hacks you physically so we need cyborg laws we need new regulations that consider citizens that our technology also in my case if someone pulls the antenna now it would be considered damage to the property but this should be considered physical aggression because this is a body part so there are certain laws that need to be updated can I just ask you something on a simple personal practical level you describe it as a body part but do you unscrew it and put it next to the bed at night do you have to take it off can you take it off it's osteo integrated it goes right inside the occipital bones so it's it cannot be detached its osoo integrated but it also has bluetooth I understand and one of the concerns is overheating isn't it well yeah there's a few that again this is where technical questions become ethical questions so if you have an implant or something in your head the more processing power you give it the more say battery life you want to give it there are questions that arise about hate and there's very little known about actually what the limits are for what your brain can take for that so I think at the moment in European legislation is like 4 degrees or something like that is the most the temperature fluctuation a device can add but there's little known about that and that raises questions about ethics about how secure you can make a device so for instance if you add layers of security then you're making the device do more work so it's going to hate more on the other hand you might you want to have the device as accessible as possible so if you're outside of where you're normally are and something goes wrong with your device you want people to be able to access it medics or technicians but by the same token then it's quite open to people who want to well if sending colors might be enjoyable but if you have a deep brain stimulator and someone decides to send a jolt of electricity into your brain that's probably less comfortable and I read that certain military organizations were looking into this as well well the DARPA the American military search group obviously very interested in ways to keep human beings awake for instance for very long periods of time and direct brain to brain communication is something they're very interested in so the idea would be that you would have an implant that would read your your language intentions and transmit them straight away to someone else without the need for intervening technology do you think we are actually simply augmenting the capabilities we already have when you talk about sometimes you say I can read somebody's mind I know what they're thinking and sometimes when it soon comes on the radio you think you're actually getting radio waves in your head because you've already been humming it are we already transmitting those thoughts out there to other people and all you're doing is capturing them in some way well that's a really interesting point about language specifically so about communication communication is more than just the words that you say so it so I work in a project that's trying to make a prosthetic device to help people who've been disabled in terms of language to restore communication to them but if you have to think about questions they're about not just the words you use in sentences but the way you say them how they're received by an audience so yeah that stuff is really hard to capture in technology and that's one of the things that we think about as an ethical issue for specifically a neuro linguistic and you're a prosthetic for a language it's not just the case that you read bits of the brain that produce words and then try and mimic those words because that might not be enough there's things like ambiguity come into play and conventions and things to do with interpersonal relations as you say communication is more than just the things you hear how long before we can actually say that we have got telepathy and it's trois this is for you and it's telepathy that's been if devolved if you like from sort of a technical end rather than just an evolutionary end well we have had very simplistic telepathy already performed where one person has and they essentially control someone else's well that's not control has directed input into other people's brains to play a simple video game and have actually more recently had a where three people together have had direct to brain brain to communication so so that is basically telepathy but though very simple levels so in terms of the pace of development of this as said as Stephen was suggesting this there's a boundaries are we looking to communicate language which is then the crystallization of our thoughts there are ways to be able to sense or perceive images which are being created in our brains and then to be able to communicate those so you know this is now just a journey and in terms of some for example having a device or some kind of interface where we can think of another person can get a pretty good sense of our thoughts it's it you know within a decade or so we will start to have things which I think we can fairly describe that probably in fairly controlled environment such as laboratories but we are now leads me to worry about manipulation because a somebody could put something into your head either telepathically or by physically inserting it when you perhaps didn't want it then they could transpose their own motives their own mores their morals into you and you could perhaps become just somebody else's device and you could be manipulated to evil and any any kind of ends there is a technology called optogenetics which is actually shown that we can't control the brains of mice so we can choose what it is they do and I suppose to a degree on what they can think and there's the the ramifications these kinds of technologies are indeed terrifying so this comes back to I suppose that earlier discussion around what are the securities what are the parameters which we set these things up and the fact that there can be these things can be used misused does not mean that we just never cross the boundaries and don't use them but it does mean that again this idea of you know ethics first against security is first in being able to be absolutely clear as to the degree that we can on what are the potential implications the the misuses the the ways in which things can be accessed and be able to design systems from the ground up and and so you know taking a knowledge analogy with the Internet of Things well it's just things yeah the reality is this got these amazing proliferation of senses out there where as an afterthought sometimes added some security as opposed to design them from the very outset the saying this must be secured we cannot have it any other way and be able to build our technologies that way no manipulation we're talking about here either either for your own motives whether they be good or bad or or mischievously and people would be affecting your personality you are no longer the person you were but if you are the one that is designing this new sense and new organ then you can design it in a way that it's really difficult for others to access it so I think it's essential that we should be part of the creation of these new organs and if you if you're gonna have something implanted in you I think you should be part of the creation of this because then you can be sure what you are implanting in yourselves because if you go somewhere I can imagine in the future people may be buying organs or buying senses without really knowing how these organs or sensors work I think this this is the danger but if you are part of the creation of it then you can design it in a way that it protects you much more than maps protects you personally but protects humanity the Royal Society is calling from investigation into this both of the benefits and the possible downside as well it could be we could be creating a monster yeah I think it's important to well there's at least two things that should be part of technology development to try and mitigate the worst possibilities one is to be very grounded in the reality of what's possible but the other is to be and so some people call it science science fiction prototyping is where you kind of look slightly near future just take a few iterations ahead of where we are and try and use the ground where we are now to guide us in where we can reflect on what might happen given what we already have and if we can do that successfully then we can anticipate the worst possibilities is there one thing is just gonna be for all of you so one thing that if this could only be used for good reasons you you would like to have as an additional part of you in this manner a neural implant quite like the idea of a memory implant but I would need to be really on round table trt world my name is David Foster okay I'm with you now in the sense of like a pen and a pen and paper that you could internalize almost you know sort of make your memory I can see problems with that already will be too that's the problem so something you won't forget bad things exactly you do want to forget and you don't necessarily your identity sometimes bind up with remembering things a certain way and emphasizing certain things in a memory not photorealism Ross your thoughts on well at the moment one of my particular interest is the relationship between AI and humans and make this a complementary relationship so I believe very much in the potential for you know I described is higher-order cognition where we can use cognitive offloading this idea that we take part of our cognition and we offload it to machines that you know can do things which machines can do but humans can't so we can focus on higher-level cognition such as synthesis you know systemic thinking and other higher-order perspectives so if we can start to build you know essentially well-trained machine learning algorithms that focus on for example pattern detection and I can integrate that directly into my mind this would assist me and my job which i think is almost everybody's job which is sensing what is changing in the world and how it is that we should respond okay very quickly you're working on time a week we can't short there here it's if we're pretty much out of time we can't lengthen it rather tell me what your ideal is I wouldn't be interested in merging with intelligence I do I wouldn't like technology to give me intelligence or knowledge or abilities I'm interested in technology open opening up my senses and then through these new sensors gain knowledge or not Neil you are also an artist as well as somebody who says they are the world's first cyborg answer me there oh ok ok you are an artist so you're described as an artist as well as an artist yes how do I know that what you tell me isn't just out of an elaborate artistic plan to convince me that what you're saying is actually happening because that's what artists do isn't it well there's a images of my surgery I give talks about it and I actually show the surgery so that people see that it happened because yeah there's many people that think that this could not be true but there's no way I can prove it I mean I can show the surgery but that's the maximum I can do this you can also with listen to the colors in my head with one of those microphones and then you can hear those I've seen I've seen you thank you very much indeed that was just in case people were wondering what the future holds come back and show us how the time moves around your head on another game good to happen Neal Russ thank you very much indeed Stephen we appreciate your your time and your concerns and the work that you're doing the Royal Society will one day I tell us what its major concerns are after me David Foster from I guess thank you very much for watching this edition of round table we hope to have you company next time but only time will tell for now goodbye [Music]

Channel: Roundtable

Views: 9,896

Rating: 4.7090907 out of 5

Keywords: Brain Implant, Brain Implant Elon Musk, Brain Implant for Blind, Transhumanists, David Foster, Neil Harbisson, Cybernetics, Vegetarians, Biomedical Cybernetics, Cyborgs, Articles, TRT, TRT World, TRT News

Id: rwMuuyNypMs

Length: 26min 14sec (1574 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 25 2019