April 20, 2000
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Cogs in the Machine
Opinion
What is The Matrix? I visit The Matrix every day between classes. I sit in the computer lab, and I see the Hotelies come in wearing black, assuming their places in the rows of consoles. After a minute, their hands become blurs on the keyboards, and slowly form a seamless connection. The glow of the computer screen envelopes their faces and information emanates from behind the glass to behind their eyes. Their arms and hands become wire for thoughts, which flow downward to be fed into the network at large.
So is The Matrix possible? To imagine connecting a brain to a machine, when we barely have functioning ATM's does seem a little optimistic.
At the same time, many labs have now mastered the technique of connecting brain cells directly to electrical wires, which can then receive their signals and send artificial pulses to control these cells. Earlier this semester I got to see a lobster brain connected to a computer so accurately that the researchers could hit a button and make the animal start eating.
Coinciding with these advances, people at places like the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility are learning how to build machines the size of molecules. This technology will quite literally provide the scaffolding from which neuroengineering will be able to take off.
Dear people can now buy an implant for their ear that records speech with a microphone and etches the interpretation directly onto the brain's auditory nerve. Likewise, artificial insertions for blind people have been underway for over a decade now. How much longer before we attempt similar enhancements to help victims of cerebral palsy, dyslexia, or even amnesia? Why not mental hard drives to help us remember things, or software that we can "install" in ourselves to learn a language? What if we could check e-mail while we walk?
The truth is that the lure of such advancements will make it impossible for us to resist them when they become available. And the forces that will drive them forward are not only clinical, but more importantly entrepreneurial and military.
Entrepreneurially, it is clear that the rise of e-commerce will speed things up. IBM's new motto is "Forging a faster company." Compaq's website reads, 'Compete at Internet-speed…" With all of the competitive pressure that comes from a world where trillions of dollars circle the globe daily, there is a great deal of powerful entities searching for ways to move even faster.
Militarily, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has declared the synthesis of brain and machines as one of their primary objectives, in the interest of building better warriors. This is a very wealthy and powerful agency to have promoting any new technology.
In other words, the sciences needed to enact this transition are already in the making, and it is time to consider what the new world could be like.
First of all, would these advances even mark a major shift in civilization? Our doctors already put human hearts under the control of a computer with every pacemaker they install. We've been hooking glasses onto our heads since the time of Benjamin Franklin - does this give us an un-human experience? We remove entire chunks of people's minds in order to alleviate epilepsy. And body-enhancing components have already been embedded in our knees, hands, hearts, kidneys, and ovaries - is the brain truly a different kind of organ?
If it does become possible to enhance the structure of our own minds, there will be many forces ready to suck the technology into society. People will simply want to work faster, understand organic chemistry, integrate soldiers with planes, or just be better than the Japanese. Or why not just a silicon soma that would sense our sadness and secrete serotonin to all the right synapses to soothe us?
This evolution almost seems inevitable. And it would be subtle - did any of us ever make the conscious decision that one day we'd be spending this much time in front of a computer screen?
So then the ethical questions begin. Would this be designer drugs for the rich, with the poor left at a cerebral disadvantage? Can we add as many modifications as we like, or is there some level at which you stop being fundamentally human? We've always taken satisfaction in seeing ourselves as a final product of evolution…
I watch the people on the sidewalks of Manhattan. Their cellphones and Palm Pilots are open as they stroll along, though the wires that connect them are invisible. But when I squint I swear I see a hundred little fiber optic lines, hanging down from a satellite hub that orbits the Earth. Their heads are not connected, directly, but they clutch the link to their ear and mouth. Sometimes I think this is just a stage we're going through. But other times I feel a momentum building towards a new direction, and then I wonder where we're going.
Nathan Wilson is a graduate student in the College of Engineering. The North Façade appears every Monday.
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