I gave the opening talk at TEDxManchester yesterday. It was a cracking event with a great range of speakers, covering everything from parenting in war zones, to freestyle dance, to online dating and musical coding.

Normally when I do a talk like TEDx I post my full script afterwards. But the reality is that my script for this talk ended up quite some way from the words I actually said. In this case the script was really just the bones of a talk against which I planned the slide deck. What I actually said when I got on stage added a lot more detail that only really fell into place during the couple of days before.

So rather than posting my script to accompany the slide deck, I thought I’d post a summary and a few interesting quotes from my research material. You can see the full slide deck here: TEDxManchester — You Are All Bionic Now

Navigate with arrow keys (or just scroll on devices that don’t support the javascript behind it). And read on for the thoughts behind it.

We Are All Bionic Now

The central argument of my talk was that we are all bionic now. All cyborgs enhanced by the power of pocket and remote computers to which we have happily outsourced the augmentation of our mental functions. Satnav for our sense of direction. Shared photo and video stores for memories. Calendars and digital assistants. Search engines increasing our knowledge and aiding our recall.

Because our mental image of a cyborg has been defined as the direct interface of man and machine at a physical level — the Terminator, the CyberMen, the Borg — we have missed the fact that technology has overcome the issues that obliged this physical melding when the term ‘cyborg’ was first created back in the Cold War. We now have very high performance interfaces to and between our machines. Not only can they accept rich data from a range of inputs, but they can use their processing power to make assumptions to fill in the blanks. And when they need more power they can access it on demand over fast Internet connections.

Today you no longer need to have a chip in your head or your brain directly connected to mechanical body parts in order to be a cyborg.

And that’s good because the challenges we are facing now are very different to the ones that scientists faced back in the Cold War. In a stable, developed economy like the UK our challenges are much more mental than physical. The places we need augmentation are not primarily in lifting heavy objects or surviving harsh extra-terrestrial environments. Or for that matter, war zones (though this issue drives the continued research of more physical cyborg applications).

We use our cyborg powers today to filter the morass of content that comes our way. To navigate a world that is changing ever faster. And to inform and enrich ourselves with knowledge and media, for pleasure or to help us tackle the challenges of our work.

The next step is for portions of our personality to break off from the physical whole and become semi-autonomous in the cloud and in other devices. In a total reverse of the original idea of a human brain in a robot body, fragments of human thoughts, experiences, preferences and needs will be encapsulated in code and allowed to roam across the Internet doing our bidding.

A limited micro-clone of you will be in your self-driving car, remembering your address, preferences and even preferred driving style.

Another micro-clone will handle mundane shopping tasks, ensuring that not only do you never run out of toilet paper, but that when your preferred brand isn’t available you get the next best thing based on an understanding of you.

Perhaps there should have been a moral debate about whether we want to be cyborgs. But the reality is that we are now. The question we have to address is how far we want it to go. And what we will all do with our cyborg powers.

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Research

I found these excerpts from academic papers/books looking at the subject of cyborgs really useful — and fascinating,

“The use of the term ‘cyborg ‘ to describe a human-machine amalgam originated during the Cold War. It was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in Astronautics (1960) for their imagined man-machine bybrid who could survive in extraterrestrial environments. NASA, which needed an enhanced man for space exploration, sponsored their work. According to the original conception, the cybernetic organisms would remain human in a Cartesian sense; their bodies (like machines) would be altered, whilst their minds could continue their scientific research.”
TechnoFeminism, By Judy Wajcman 2004

“By including gender [in the Turing Test], Turing implied that renegotiating the boundary between human and machine would involve more than transforming the question of “who can think” into “what can think”. It would also necessarily bring into question other characteristics of the liberal subject, for it made the crucial move of distinguishing between the enacted body, present in the flesh on one side of the computer screen, and the represented body, produced through the verbal and semiotic markers constituting it in an in electronic environment. This construction necessarily makes the subject into a cyborg, for the enacted and represented bodies are brought into conjunction through the technology that connects them.”
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, N Katherine Hayles, 1999

“I believe that these figures embody the libidinal-political dynamics of the consumerist ethos to which young peoplehave been systematically habituated during the contemporary period. …the Cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its juvenescent flesh.”
Rob Latham, Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs and the Culture of Consumption, 2002

At the How To Change the World conference this week we heard from a range of speakers who talked in one way or another about the control we will soon have over our own physical development. It included the application of stem cells and other techniques in the regeneration of human tissue and organs — even to defeat ageing. And the use of psychedelic drugs to consciously expand our own thinking and change our brain plasticity to enhance learning. The options are many.

Whether through biology or technology — and frankly the boundaries between the two are blurry, given the importance of quantum physics in both — we are now in control of our own evolution. Natural selection is no longer the force it was. What traits we want to select, we have to choose, or even design. At the conference, Professor Julian Savulescu termed this ‘evolution under reason’, but you could equally call it ‘rational selection’ or ‘engineered evolution’.

This throws up a number of ethical dilemmas, particularly around the prospects for inequality, as today’s debate around gene editing is highlighting.

Assuming we can address those to the satisfaction of most — at least the rational portion — the prospects are rather exciting.

I’ve always been rather squeamish about human modification. Tattoos and piercings are not for me. And no, I’m not interested in the spam adverts for other forms of male enhancement. But there are certainly aspects of my abilities over which I would like greater control. Particularly the mental ones.

Here are three examples that are top of my wishlist.

Focus

Like most people there are particular times of the day when I am at my best. The exact hours change between summer and winter but it’s always first thing in the morning. It’s not always possible, or desirable to be at my desk by 7. And if I miss my window, which may only be three or four hours at most, then my day can be deeply unproductive. I might still plough through some expenses or achieve the rare feat of clearing my inbox, but I likely won’t create anything, and that’s largely what I get paid for.

There are other periods in the day when I get bursts of creativity, but these are less predictable. Even the usual methods of seeking distraction, or inspiration, or just letting my brain freewheel on a walk, often don’t give me more than a few minutes of renewed focus.

But what if I could turn this mind state on and off. With a switch or a pill? What could I achieve then?

There are a few options here today for this. I could try drugs like Adderall and Ritalin, but these are both illegal without prescription and have serious potential side effects. Similar drugs pop up as ‘legal highs’ but these carry all the same risks and more. If I were going to pop a pill I’d want it to be very well tested and regulated.

I could also try Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation or tDCS, an increasing popular alternative to drugs for DIY brain hackers. But again the science on this is in its early days. While there are enthusiastic proponents, my natural scepticism leads me to want some solid trials before I start to experiment.

The answers aren’t there yet, but there are clear opportunities.

More RAM

Computers have a neat way to deal with a shortage of short-term memory. They dump a chunk of it into long-term memory and then retrieve it when it’s needed.

Humans do something similar. Some can do this with their own minds, with pretty reliable recall. I am not one of those people. Instead I rely on tools: notebooks, apps, my calendar, photos.

I once tried to replicate the computer’s process more precisely. I maintained what I grandly called a ‘livepad’. A single cloud-stored document, always open, on which I could record notes, ideas, my todo list, unfinished blog posts. It worked for a while but my limited interface to it (the keyboard), unreliable connectivity, and simple lack of discipline meant that I dropped it after a while.

Imagine something similar, with a better interface, and a level of intelligence to it. A place where you could record ideas that could be replayed back to you at the right time. The added intelligence in the pad may even help you to find coherence and commonality in those ideas, as well as assisting you with more mundane tasks, like remembering where to be and when.

High Bandwidth Interface

I think in words, more than pictures. Language is my preferred interface, and the way that I record and share language most frequently is via the keyboard.

The keyboard has proven to have incredible longevity. It is perhaps three hundred years old, based on the earliest patents. But it has limitations. I can only communicate words with it (for the most part). It is not that fast — certainly not in my hands.

I could try to learn to touch type, but even then I am limited to a relatively cumbersome interface. I can’t capture my thoughts on the move (though I do a decent job of writing blogs with my thumb while travelling on packed Tube trains). I could use a voice interface, but this isn’t exactly private and could be very annoying for those around me: I talk loud.

Instead I want the words to flow straight from my brain to the page, or the storage system.

This is some way off unfortunately. Though we are reaching the point where we can control artificial limbs with thoughts, the understanding of the brain on which this incredible achievement is based remains limited. For all our comprehension it is still largely a black box to us.

Evolution in Our Control

These are examples of what we might be able to add to human physiology in the years ahead. Even the drugs could be added to new glands as they are in Iain M Banks’ Culture novels. But they are elective and trivial compared to some of the choices we will have to make soon. We will have the capability to eliminate some genetically-carried diseases by selectively editing people’s genomes.

With that sort of power in our hands, we all need to think about the implications*.

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* If you want to make a start, you could do worse than to watch this video from Professor Julian Savulescu: