For example, there are over 100 compounds in clinical development right now focused on treating some form of memory loss. And we expect a small handful of these over the next decade to improve memory in normal humans. So you can imagine the inherent coercive force that will emerge as those treatments become developed. Imagine a 65-year-old programmer living in San Francisco and she’s competing with a 25-year-old in Mumbai, India. Neither one knows whether the other is using one of these cognitive-enabling drugs.
And it’s not just drugs; there are neurodevices in development that will be able to improve memory and speed learning. What we’re going to see is what I call “neuro competition.” This is the next form of competition that individuals and businesses and nations will adapt to gain competitive advantage –- except this will be a neuro advantage. Just as companies today compete for a competitive advantage in information technology –- whether it’s the latest social software, the latest IT backbone, the latest servers, or the latest customer relationship management systems –- they will use neurotechnologies to improve their competitive positioning.
The following speech by Karl Schroeder is an excellent summation of the future we’ve been documenting here, the world that lies just around the corner:
iPhone developers and users excited by the prospect of augmented reality apps, which overlay information and controls on top of real-world objects seen through a camera, have been told to sit tight until the next release of the iPhone OS exits beta.
Although iPhone 3.1 has so far only been known to expose some video camera controls for developers, third-party producer Acrossair was told by Apple that the future release would be needed for its Nearest Tube and future Nearest Subway apps to work properly.
The apps are already highly dependent on the built-in compass and autofocusing camera of the iPhone 3GS, both of which are needed to alternately recognize the direction the iPhone is facing as well as to get a detailed enough look at a subject to tag it with information. As a demonstration of the technology, Acrossair’s software can show the subway stops visible in a particular direction and their distance relative to the user.
Acrossair’s app looks very cool. If progress continues linearly, we’re really never going to get lost again.
In his article for The Atlantic, Get Smarter, Jamais Cascio points out that only by embracing all forms of intelligence augementation might we have a chance of surviving, and ultimately taming, an increasingly hostile future.
By 2030, then, we’ll likely have grown accustomed to (and perhaps even complacent about) a world where sophisticated foresight, detailed analysis and insight, and augmented awareness are commonplace. We’ll have developed a better capacity to manage both partial attention and laser-like focus, and be able to slip between the two with ease—perhaps by popping the right pill, or eating the right snack. Sometimes, our augmentation assistants will handle basic interactions on our behalf; that’s okay, though, because we’ll increasingly see those assistants as extensions of ourselves.
The amount of data we’ll have at our fingertips will be staggering, but we’ll finally have gotten over the notion that accumulated information alone is a hallmark of intelligence. The power of all of this knowledge will come from its ability to inform difficult decisions, and to support complex analysis. Most professions will likely use simulation and modeling in their day-to-day work, from political decisions to hairstyle options. In a world of augmented intelligence, we will have a far greater appreciation of the consequences of our actions.
…
Coping with the various world-historical dangers we face will require the greatest possible insight, creativity, and innovation. Our ability to build the future that we want—not just a future we can survive—depends on our capacity to understand the complex relationships of the world’s systems, to take advantage of the diversity of knowledge and experience our civilization embodies, and to fully appreciate the implications of our choices. Such an ability is increasingly within our grasp. The Nöocene awaits.
…given the amount of money and research hours being spent on developing drugs to treat cognitive decline, Provigil and Adderall are likely to be joined by a bigger pharmacopoeia.
Among the drugs in the pipeline are ampakines, which target a type of glutamate receptor in the brain; it is hoped that they may stem the memory loss associated with diseases like Alzheimer’s. But ampakines may also give healthy people a palpable cognitive boost.
A 2007 study of sixteen healthy elderly volunteers found that five hundred milligrams of one particular ampakine “unequivocally” improved short-term memory, though it appeared to detract from episodic memory—the recall of past events.
Another class of drugs, cholinesterase inhibitors, which are already being used with some success to treat Alzheimer’s patients, have also shown promise as neuroenhancers.
In one study, the drug donepezil strengthened the performance of pilots on flight simulators; in another, of thirty healthy young male volunteers, it improved verbal and visual episodic memory.
Several pharmaceutical companies are working on drugs that target nicotine receptors in the brain, in the hope that they can replicate the cognitive uptick that smokers get from cigarettes.
Hensch and his collaborators have now found that basket-cell development is controlled by a protein called Otx2. Overexpressing this protein can trigger a critical period of plasticity, while removing Otx2 halts it. While the findings are specific to the visual system, Hensch notes that different sensory systems also possess basket cells, and those might function the same way.
A second mechanism for manipulating neural plasticity in adults is blocking inhibitory molecules that the nervous system produces to stop neural growth. “The nervous system is hostile to growing new axons [the long neural projections that connect cells], which is why recovery after spinal-cord injury is so challenging,” says Hensch.
Myelin cells, which form an insulating layer around axons, secrete some of these inhibitory molecules. By experimenting with certain drugs that loosen myelin, Hensch and his collaborators found they could make the normally stable visual system of adult rodents become plastic again, allowing amblyopic rodents to recover. (However, the drug used in the study is toxic, making it unlikely to be a useful therapy.)
This megasupercomputer is the Cloud of all clouds, the largest possible inclusion of communicating chips. It is a vast machine of extraordinary dimensions. It is comprised of quadrillion chips, and consumes 5% of the planet’s electricity. It is not owned by any one corporation or nation (yet), nor is it really governed by humans at all. Several corporations run the larger sub clouds, and one of them, Google, dominates the user interface to the One Machine at the moment.
…
Manufactured intelligence is a new commodity in the world. Until now all useable intelligence came in the package of humans – and all their troubles. El Goog and the One Machine offer intelligence without human troubles. In the beginning this intelligence is transhuman rather than non-human intelligence. It is the smartness derived from the wisdom of human crowds, but as it continues to develop this smartness transcends a human type of thinking. Humans will eagerly pay for El Goog intelligence. It is a different kind of intelligence. It is not artificial – i.e. a mechanical — because it is extracted from billions of humans working within the One Machine. It is a hybrid intelligence, half humanity, half computer chip. Therefore it is probably more useful to us. We don’t know what the limits are to its value. How much would you pay for a portable genius who knew all there was known?
They call “Esozone: the other tomorrow” a festival, but don’t expect corn dogs and Ferris wheels. Fringe thinkers, visionary artists and occult musicians from around the world will gather at Watershed, a rambling, ramshackle building near Sellwood for a weekend of … well … the inexplicable.
Noah Mickens, who will take part in the festivities, defines it this way: “Esozone is an exhibition of scientists, philosophers, magicians and performance artists, gathered together by a subculture of young radicals who don’t recognize the distinction between the four.”
Esozone: the Other Tomorrow opens Friday in Portland, Oregon. Where else can you participate in a “show and tell” of Mad Science and Occult Technology one day and discuss 2012 or hear Hecate perform the next? It promises to be an interesting event.
Also: I note because people keep asking me, I won’t be there to cover the event, sadly. But I’m sure there will be at least a few of our readers there.
Forget about HAL-like robots enslaving humankind a few decades from now, the takeover is already underway. The agents of this unwelcome revolution aren’t strong AIs, but “bots”– autonomous programs that have insinuated themselves into the internet and thus into every corner of our lives. Apply for a mortgage lately? A bot determined your FICA score and thus whether you got the loan. Call 411? A bot gave you the number and connected the call. Highway-bots collect your tolls, read your license plate and report you if you have an outstanding violation.
Bots are proliferating because they are so very useful. Businesses rely on them to automate essential processes, and of course bots running on zombie computers are responsible for the tsunami of spam and malware plaguing Internet users worldwide. At current growth rates, bots will be the majority users of the Net by 2010.
Here’s the full lecture, a meaty hour of knowledge (plus QnA) - so grab a coffee and sit down, ears ready or copy it to your mp3 player of choice. I really think this is one not to miss!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
All that being said, I’m not really sure I agree with the solution he proposes, to:
…build a new Internet hard-coded with democratic values. Start with an encrypted Darknet into which only verifiably human users can enter. Create augmented reality tools to identify bots in the physical world. Enlist the aid of a few tame bots to help forge a symbiotic relationship with narrow AI.
But there is definitely a lot to think and talk about, before we lose the reins altogether on our society!
“This is like having a personal assistant for your memory,” said Dr. Yaakov Navon, the lead researcher and image processing expert from IBM’s Haifa Research Lab. “Our daily routines are overflowing with situations where we gain new information through meetings, advertisements, conferences, events, surfing the web, or even window shopping. Instead of going home and using a general web search to find that information, PENSIEVE helps the brain recall those everyday things you might normally forget.”
…By simply typing the person’s name into PENSIEVE, you can recall when and where you met them, and any related information garnered at that time. You could even browse forwards or backwards in time to find out what events transpired before or after the initial meeting.
Another use of this technology is in reconstructing and sharing an experience or memory. If enough media-rich data was collected about a particular event, it can be used to build a more complex visual associative representation of the experience.
“This is where the real power of collaboration kicks in,” said Eran Belinsky, research team leader and a specialist in collaboration. “You can recall the name of the person you met right before you entered a meeting by traversing a timeline of your experiences, or share a business trip with colleagues by creating a mashup that shows a map with an animation of your trail and the pictures you took in every location.”
This is the corporate future and it is only just starting to get messy. Let us just say I would be very careful now about using any company property for personal reasons.
Obviously this is awesome technology for personal use though, but I would want to be controlling the database. In a secure location. (According to CSI) Police already take people’s mobile phones in the event of emergency or tragedy. Would you want to hand over an indexed/tagged, searchable lifestream?
That being said, how rad would it be if it pulled-in CCTV images of you walking around?
Philip K Dick :- becoming more a prophet of the modern condition every second.
Broadcast in October, 2006, so it lacks for some of the even crazier theories and realities we’ve seen since then, Human v2.0 is still an interesting watch; building quickly from basic neuroscience and Moore’s Law, through to remote-controlled rats, and wiretapping a monkey’s brain to control a robot arm and beyond - and then peppering it with quotes from the Unabomber’s Manifesto to remind the audience that not everyone is pro-Change.
Now if they had just questioned whether a mind can be uploaded a little more often, the show would not date quite so bad. Like those shows from the 1970s with quotes from Marvin Minksy about how machine vision is a sure thing within ten years.
Australian scientists have discovered that stem cells found in the back of a patient’s nose can produce the chemical which is missing in people with Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s disease occurs when the brain cells that produce the chemical dopamine stop working.
Without dopamine, nerve cells cannot function, leading to muscle problems.
Researchers from Griffith University and the University of Queensland harvested adult stem cells from the noses of Parkinson’s disease patients.
They found that once the nose cells were cultured and infused into animals with Parkinson’s disease, the cells began to produce dopamine.
Professor Peter Silburn from the University of Queensland said it was an important breakthrough, as the cells could be easily harvested from patients.
That is correct. In your nose. Which skips the whole fetal stem-cell debate.
Now, one has to think this can not be limited to just curing Parkinson’s either. Will the near future see us also popping into a clinic every few years for a quick scrap of the nose and coming back for a brain-boost a few weeks later?
Drugs that encourage the growth of new neurons in the brain are now headed for clinical trials. The drugs, which have already shown success in alleviating symptoms of depression and boosting memory in animal models, are being developed by BrainCells, a San Diego-based start-up that screens drugs for their brain-growing power.
…
In the last ten years, scientists have discovered that new neurons are born in the adult brain and that increases or decreases in this cell growth, known as neurogenesis, may be involved in myriad brain diseases, including depression, schizophrenia and stroke. Subsequent research has shown that existing drugs, including Prozac and other antidepressants, boost neurogenesis. In fact, that property may be an integral component of the drugs’ effectiveness–for example; some experiments suggest that new cell growth in the hippocampus is necessary for antidepressants to work.
…
Clinical trials of the company’s lead candidate, known as BCI-540, began earlier this year. The drug, originally developed for Alzheimer’s disease, boosts brain cell growth by 20 percent.
…
Drugs that boost brain cell growth may also aid cognition. Previous research has shown that neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a brain area integral to learning and memory, is important for maintaining plasticity in that part of the brain, which in turn is linked to memory function. “With aging, there’s a decrease in neurogenesis,” says Kriegstein. “The hypothesis is that if you could boost neurogenesis to compensate for that age-related decline, you might maintain functional levels.”
BrainCells is also testing a compound, known as BCI-632, for its cognitive enhancing properties. “It’s the most neurogenic compound we’ve seen,” says Schoeneck. While the compound hasn’t yet been tested in humans, it appears to boost at least one type of memory in rodents. The company aims to begin clinical trials next year.
Novel drug combinations may also have neurogenesis-boosting power. For example, researchers at Brain cells have found that a respiratory drug and a cardiovascular drug, both already on the market, seem to dramatically boost brain cell growth in cellular tests.
I really want to know that last part - which pre-existing medz do I combo up to keep my brain young? The rest I can wait for - clinical trials being there for a reason and all.
Fluid intelligence…draws on the ability to understand relationships between various concepts, independent of any previous knowledge or skills, to solve new problems. The research shows that this part of intelligence can be improved through memory training.
[The researchers…] reasoned that just as crystallized intelligence relies on long-term memory, fluid intelligence relies on short-term memory, or “working memory,” as it is more accurately called. This is the same type of memory people use to remember a phone number or an e-mail address for a short time, but beyond that, working memory refers to the ability to both manipulate and use information briefly stored in the mind in the face of distraction.
Researchers gathered four groups of volunteers and trained their working memories using a complex training task called “dual n-back training,” which presented both auditory and visual cues that participants had to temporarily store and recall.
The results were surprising. While the control groups made gains, presumably because they had practice with the fluid intelligence tests, the trained groups improved considerably more than the control groups. Further, the longer the participants trained, the larger were their intelligence gains.
Want to test it out? Here are two Dual N-Back tools developed off the original paper:
Another day, another edifying lecture. This one’s a little longer, and might seem a bit repetitive if you have already watched the earlier Spime lectures (see below), so keep skipping in to about half way if you get bored; that’s where the real meat is. But personally, I need multiple viewings of most of Sterling’s lectures, to absorb it all.
Here is Sterling working his way up to basically condemning much of current interface design:
While that’s digesting, let’s pause for a little AC Clarke quote:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
OK, now cometh the rant.
You know what I want? I want to buy something and it just works. None of the RTFM bizzo. No looking up obscure error message in forums, paging through, searching for a clue. No “oh, that’s fixed in the next version” bullshit. Just do what it says on the label already!
But our current technological society is feature obsessed. Everything is “now with extra this and that”. It’s one of the engines of capitalism. Built-in obsolescence. Buy, consume, upgrade. But don’t ever expect it to just work, no questions asked. Hell, I still haven’t explored the full feature set of my futurephone, it’s no wonder Mr Joe Public is confused.
And where does the Cognitive Overload spill onto? US! It’s the alpha-testers, braving the products of tomorrow today that get all the phone calls. “Yes, dude, I’ll swing by and fix your iPod/Windows Installation/Robot Butler”. But for how long can we be bothered to do this? Something has got to give!
Now, don’t worry, I am not talking about stopping Progress. I am talking about real progress. Let’s quit dumping feature-incomplete and bug-filled software and hardware onto an unwilling market and convincing people they have to have it.
In fact, why should we continue to be unpaid support for so many products. Would it be that hard to identify the real powerusers/early-adopters, and treat them as the beta testers they really are, rewarding them with new Shiny for their efforts? Paying through the nose for barely functioning Shiny is just masochistic.
Now look into the near-future. A robot-assisted future is being built for the Greying Nations. Design will never be more imperative for this to work. You can’t get the almost-senile to read a manual.
We need to re-orient our thinking. Stop testing if products break, and start testing if it breaks us. That it works should be secondary. Firstly, it should afford users finding the feature in the first place.
And how do we start fixing Cognitive Overload? By harnessing the power of the Cognitive Surplus to find better solutions to all our problems.
Now think about this: as we use the Cognitive Surplus to reduce the Cognitive Overload of our tools, we further increase the Surplus! Just as we do by helping our brethren level-up and join in the fun. This is the best kind of Network Effect!
Now, don’t get me wrong. None of this means my love affair with the Shiny is about to end; especially in the area of the futurephone. Just that I want the other 95% of my devices to do be practically magical.
Let’s stop settling for the Future as it has been handed to us so far, and start daring to dream of a better one!
“Twenty percent of scientists admit to using performance-enhancing prescription drugs for non-medical reasons, according to a survey released Wednesday by Nature, Britain’s top science journal.” “Like the rise in cosmetic surgery, use of cognitive enhancers is likely to increase as bioethical and psychological concerns are overcome,” opined Nature in a commentary.
In the survey, 80 percent of all the scientists — even those who did not use these drugs — defended the right of “healthy humans” to take them as work boosters, and more than half said their use should not be restricted, even for university entrance exams. “
This brings me to the question of the day, ladies and gentlegrinders: What Nootropics do you take? I want to hear about what Smart Drugs, you, the Grinding audience regularly use or have experimented with. I’m prepping some Nootropic information for Grinding and while websites and Erowid and my slightly out-of-date personal experimentation is all well and good, too many people are just trying to sell you something when they talk about Smart Drugs, these days nothing beats real live information from active participants.
So Grinders! I want to hear about your Nootropic experiences for good or ill. The results (with credit where it is due) will help me get a better picture of what the state of the field actually is, right now. Feel free to reply here or email me at zerosociety@grinding.be — I’ll keep you anonymous if that’s what you want.
Because I want to know what works, and there’s no better way to figure that out than to ask those who are getting the results.
In a concrete basement at the University of Sydney, I sat in a chair waiting to have my brain altered by an electromagnetic pulse. My forehead was connected, by a series of electrodes, to a machine that looked something like an old-fashioned beauty-salon hair dryer and was sunnily described to me as a ”Danish-made transcranial magnetic stimulator.”
While currently, you’re most likely to hear about Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in the context of its being a trendy new cure for depression, there are other experimental uses for the technique that haven’t gotten as much air time of late.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (or TMS for short) describes a handful of methods for exciting neuron activity in the brain with rapid alternating electromagnetic fields. TMS has been reported to be effective in assisting with healing stroke damage, Aphasia, Parkinson’s Disease, Migraines and Clinical depression. While it’s not an FDA approved technique for treating depression in the united states, it’s legal for use in cases of drug-resistant depression in Canada and there’s at least one clinic in Costa Rica targeting US Depression sufferers.
However, TMS also has some less-widely researched side effects, most importantly: the “Savant Effect”. This might be old news in some circles, but as the therapeutic uses of TMS and the stimulation of focused Autism get more air-time, I figured now would be as good a time as any to check in on this Grind.
You may have read recently about how researchers have recently made great strides in “turning on” and “turning off” Autism in mice — the research into the possible enhancement qualities of TMS shares the same roots. In 1999 Dr. Allen Snyder published a paper entitled “Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental Processing? The Mind’s Secret Arithmetic” which explored the questions of how Autistic children really process information — especially mathematical information.
From there, Snyder began experimenting with TMS, in an effort to “enhance the brain by shutting off certain parts of it.”
To prove his point, he hooks me up to the Medtronic Mag Pro again and asks me to read the following lines:
A bird in the hand
is worth two in the
the bush
”A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” I say.
”Again,” Snyder says, and smiles.
So once more: ”A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” He makes me repeat it five or six times, slowing me down until he has me reading each word with aching slowness.
Then he switches on the machine. He is trying to suppress those parts of my brain responsible for thinking contextually, for making connections. Without them, I will be able to see things more as an autistic might.
After five minutes of electric pulses, I read the card again. Only then do I see — instantly — that the card contains an extra ”the.”
On my own, I had been looking for patterns, trying to coax the words on the page into a coherent, familiar whole. But ”on the machine,” he says, ”you start seeing what’s actually there, not what you think is there.”
Snyder’s theories are bolstered by the documented cases in which sudden brain damage has produced savant abilities almost overnight. He cites the case of Orlando Serrell, a 10-year-old street kid who was hit on the head and immediately began doing calendrical calculations of baffling complexity. Snyder argues that we all have Serrell’s powers. ”We remember virtually everything, but we recall very little,” Snyder explains. ”Now isn’t that strange? Everything is in there” — he taps the side of his head. ”Buried deep in all our brains are phenomenal abilities, which we lose for some reason as we develop into ‘normal’ conceptual creatures. But what if we could reawaken them?”
After spending a little time with Persinger, you get accustomed to the fact that his most polite phrases demand pursuit. Affect gene expression? It sounds so simple, but what he’s really talking about is stringing together a number of different electromagnetic fields to prompt a complicated chemical reaction on the genetic level - for example, directing the body’s natural self-healing instincts.
“We want to enhance what the brain does to help heal the body,” Persinger explains. “Among more sensitive individuals, tests show that their skin will turn red if they believe a hot nickel has been placed on their hand. That’s a powerful psychosomatic effect of the brain on the body. Suppose we could make it more precise?”
For the most part, my thoughts on the enhancile and Grinding applications of TMS can be summed up by Snyder’s quote from the NYT article:
”More important than that, we can change our own intelligence in unexpected ways. Why would we not want to explore that?”
(Yes, I’m cheating a bit here, Warren posted this last year. But, it’s definitely worth re-watching IMO. Also, click through to the GoogleVideo page if you want the full-screen version)
