The breakthrough innovation development of the year so far is the White House’s upcoming plan to map the entire human brain. By essentially enabling us to reverse-engineer the human brain, the Brain Activity Map proposed by scientists such as Harvard's George Church will forever change the way we think about artificial intelligence and potentially open up the door to new cures for mental illnesses. However, many of these developments may be a decade away -- or even several decades away. What’s less understood are all the myriad of ways that our brains are being augmented right now, today, in subtle ways that we may not even realize.
Slowly but surely, we’re moving our individual brains into the cloud, enabling us to know more, experience more and remember more -- all the while believing that it is our individual brain that is responsible for amazing feats of cognitive ability. On a daily basis, we're tapping into the accumulated knowledge of thousands - if not millions - of others with a simple tap or swipe on our mobile devices. Think about it – every day, each of us carries around in our pockets more computing power and access to more information than was available to our nation's scientists at NASA during the peak years of the lunar space program. And, as the amount of information on the Internet continues to grow exponentially, so does our access to this information.
The youngest generation, which grew up with all this technology, already recognizes this. They know that they do not actually have to learn anything - they just have to know where to find it in the cloud. Google, far from making us stupid, is actually making us smarter than ever imagined. This is especially true now that we've added geolocation tools to our mobile devices. Take, Google Maps, for example. In an interview with The Atlantic, Google's Michael Jones explained that Google Search and Google Maps may be worth an extra 20 points on your IQ:
"For instance, right now people walk around looking at directions on phones. In the future, the phone will signal you -- go left or straight ahead -- in words or sounds in your ear, or visually through your glasses, so you can just look where you're going and walk. It'll be like you're a local everywhere you go. You'll know your way through the back alleys and hutongs of Beijing, you'll know your way all around Paris even if you've never been before. Signs will seem to translate themselves for you. This kind of extra-smartness is coming to people. Effectively, people are about 20 IQ points smarter now because of Google Search and Maps. They don't give Google credit for it, which is fine; they think they're smarter, because they can rely on these tools. It's one reason they get so upset if the tools are inaccurate or let them down. They feel like a fifth of their brain has been taken out."
Google is already looking into ways that it can make its Android devices smarter by actually mimicking the structure and function of the human brain. When that happens, you will think of your mobile phone not just as a browser, but also as an adjunct brain available upon demand. That’s just the beginning, however. As Ray Kurzweil has explained before to believers in the Singularity, the future human of the mid-21st century will be a hybrid between man and machine, where the human-computer interface is largely invisible. The gap between animate and inanimate knowlege will be unrecognizable. Right now, every time you deal with a typical computer interface – like a screen or keyboard – you know that you are dealing with a computer. In the future, that won’t be the case. You will ask your friend a question, and you will have absolutely no idea where your friend got the answer. Nor will you care. Hewlett-Packard is already working on a personal avatar interface for the cloud -- a concierge that you can access at any time, across any platform or any device.
The really radical view of brain augmentation, however, does not come from the world of Silicon Valley - it comes from the world of chemistry, which is giving us an entirely new generation of designer DNA drugs. Just as athletes now rely on performance-enhancing drugs to achieve incredible new feats (yes, Mr. Armstrong, I'm talking to you) - everyday people may one day use designer drugs to enhance memory and cognitive ability. In Chapter 5 of their TED book Homo Evolutis, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans suggest several ways that that we may use drugs to change the chemistry of our brains in the pursuit of peak performance. When combined with breakthroughs in genetic engineering, we may even be on the cusp of creating a new species of human with vastly improved powers of cognition, learning and memory.
What it all means, of course, is that the Singularity may not be a single event, as we typically think of it. It will not be a Rapture of the Nerds, where we remind Siri to wake us up early to witness the blinding light of the Singularity during which we are all transformed into gods. Instead, the future augmentation of our brains will be much more gradual and nuanced. Once we started to consider our mobile devices to be extensions of our physical bodies - carrying them around with us wherever we go and imbuing them with characteristics such as personality - we set into motion a complex chain reaction of events that made the future hybrid of man and machine a certainty. 20 points on your IQ was just the start.
From the article: "The youngest generation, which grew up with all this technology, already recognizes this. They know that they do not actually have to learn anything - they just have to know where to find it in the cloud."
Oh, how I hope that this was meant ironically. How I fear that it wasn't.
In 1934, TS Eliot, wrote in the chorus of "The Rock" (a few years pre-Internet):
The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.
---
As true a taxonomy of information heirarchies today as it was then, I'm afraid. After thirty years working online, I can't say I've changed a whit of my notions at base of how we should be thinking of this in relation to human nature, although the effect on human culture is profound. The two are quite separate.
If you need Googlemaps to find out where you are, you are already lost; and you would not be lost if you had bothered to follow street signs and carry a map with you. But such people often don't know *how* to read street signs or a map or a compass. They can only shuffle from point to point like a dog finding its way home, staring at the directional markers on their handheld toys. This is not brain augmentation, it's shrinkage.
I wouldn't know how to grow a wheat or corn crop, or slaughter and prepare a cow for meat. Has my brain shrunk because I am dependent on the supermarket for food? Am I any less of a human being? Is the self-sufficient hermit the pinnacle of evolution?
"Prepare a cow for meat"?! Are you trying to say ... butcher? Slaughter? Not only can you not DO it, you don't even know what to CALL it. That's why you can't work in the abattoir. And by the same token, people who are unable to read street signs and maps should not be permitted to wander about unchaperoned.
Yes, "butcher". I couldn't think of the right term; I thought it was something more obscure.
In any case it only proves my point. I don't even know what to call "preparing a cow for meat", yet I would say with some certainty that I am at least reasonably intelligent, and I don't feel any less so despite my lack of knowledge re: bovine anatomy.
It isn't stupid or ignorant to forego mundane tasks by choice, and it's normal for that knowledge to be gradually phased out of our society.
How many people would know which mushrooms are edible if they were stranded in a forest? Should they "not be permitted to eat unchaperoned"? How many could operate a fabric loom? Should they "not be allowed to clothe themselves unchaperoned"? It would be utterly pointless for the average person today to learn those things - they are at best artisanal skills, archaisms.
Perhaps committing a city's layout to memory will become equally archaic. Why waste effort doing that if you don't have to? It serves no inherent purpose. There is very little cultural or artistic value in that knowledge, just as there is very little practical value in knowing how to store carrots in a cellar when you know your house has a refrigerator.
Contrast this with activities that have a greater value than their practicality, like gardening or painting. People don't garden because they HAVE to - it's a hobby. They don't stop painting after they have bought an inkjet printer, because painting offers its own merits.
Memorising a city's layout does not share those characteristics; it is neither a hobby nor an artistic endeavour. It serves no purpose beyond its practical applications. It's like vacuum cleaning or washing dishes, which are also being replaced by robots. Is anyone lamenting the loss of knowledge of how to remove dried egg by hand with maximum efficiency? No.
You are free to fill your time with as much rote learning as you wish, but do not call the rest of us "stupid" for wanting to do something more interesting with our time.
Seems to me you are championing a sort of TV- dinner triumphalism. ("It's new! It's cool! It's convenient!") Thus people get used to eating crap food, they accept crap food as standard, they forget how to cook, they get crap bodies; and worst of all, they get crap brains: they lose all those interrelated skills, social benefits, sense of discrimination, and overall keenness of mind and neural connections that come from a daily practice in traditional cuisine.
Knowing how to read a street sign, or a map, or memorizing the nine-times-table: these are basic skills that have stood the test of time. They are far more valuable than knowing how to play solitaire on your GameBoy while you walk into me on Sixth Avenue. When the satellites all go down, the power goes off, and the batteries run out (and they will, they will; and they'll be off a long, long time) the basic-skills people will manage nicely and the sidewalk-bumper will swiftly die out.
I am not sure it is accurate to say that "the breakthrough innovation development of the year so far is the White House’s upcoming plan to map the entire human brain." The White House reported ts intention to fund the work that has already been in development for some years. The work itself, as I see it, is the breakthrough innovation. Sure, funding by the federal government is great, although private funding will also contribute (perhaps more so) to the cause.
Should we encourage this sort of rather artificial augmentation? With so much emphasis on 'no calculator' or 'no performance enhancing drugs,' would increasing our brainpower by these outside means be considered just as, well, degrading our true abilities?
Every man is unique so his experiences are also unique ,in which environment he was bring up how he build up his experiencesin his brain on that base he brain work.How can you draw a conclusion from building a artificial brain.America is very famous for shallow thinking that why they are spending so much money to know the secrete of brain.
As someone who has been following this for many years, the sudden swell in chatter about the singularity in the past year is interesting. What does it mean?
I think it will be a feedback loop - the more people talk about it, the more they will want it, more time will be spent trying to reach it, more discoveries will be made, more people will talk about it... ad singularitam.
The knowledge and folly of the world are contained within the internet today. We carry it in pocket, purse or car, or mobile access to it anyway.
It hasn’t made us any wiser though, to have these tidbits at our beck and call. If anything, it’s dumbed us down. Y’ know? The viral memes we tweet are all banal.
They’re picked up and reported on as news and entertainment dubbed “reality,” instantly dictating cultural views worldwide, while lowering mentality.
Though topics travel the globe without lag, too many schnooks can spoil the hash-tag.
Marvel Comics' New Mutants had a telepathic character whose knowledge and language skills were borrowed from other people. In Poul Anderson's "Brain Wave", a space wave augmented everyone's intelligence. In "Flowers for Algernon", a retarded man received a treatment that temporarily normalized him. All the augmentations in these examples were temporary. When their outside support structures were removed, the characters were helpless. If we don't ensure that our offloaded intelligence is maintained, we will be in the same situation, acquiring a pandemic Alzheimer's when the machine stops. It could be by solar flares knocking out our satellite synapses, or just eventually forgetting the magic is an illusion that needs techs to fix it when it breaks down. We're going to need orders of cyberpriests or technowizards to keep the knowledge alive. We better start now.
No doubt we are all becoming more clever, smarter and so on, for some of us it seems hard to be convinced, as we look at animal habitats threatened by Mans ever expanding population, some say lets kill off the pandas as they are no longer cost effective, the alliance to making military equipment to successfully kill more people, as we build on arable land, and inhabit a planet we are informed of global warming, the pokies,space craft to tell us the surface of Mars is eventually inhabitable, the list is formidable, of minuses, its all too hard to believe, as being creditable.
Duh, I think the Internet has been killing READING, and people are getting DUMBER, myself excluded, because I use it to do MORE READING by IGNORING a lot of the time-wasting info. on it.
The proof of the pudding is HISTORY, which can ONLY be mastered via massive reading. I did it, and so far NOBODY has come close to catching me, despite giving away free COURSES on the Historyscoper, most of which people simply can't handle because it requires too much you know what.
Kurzweil and co. are NUTS when they dream about "artificial intelligence", or uploading their minds into the Cloud. Silicon brains have ZERO IQ, i.e., semantic awareness, witness the monstrosity created by IBM that won Jeopardy despite not knowing the difference between the U.S. and Canada.
If silicon brains could "evolve", they would have done it long ago and spawned JEHOVAH, and we'd be all DEAD because we're all SINNERS :)
The human brain is going to rule for a long long time, long after Kurzweil is forgotten except by history buffs :)
And to think that if not for the aquired and accumulated knowledge of certain individuals, nearly all of us would still think the earth was flat and the sun followed a path across the daytime sky.
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