A Machine Mind-Meld Might Be In Your Future
The New York Times published an article in their “Bits” section about the state of the art in machine-brain interfaces. This technology may be more advanced than you realize. The impetus for the article came from the announcement a couple of weeks ago by MIT scientists that they had successfully implanted a memory in a mouse. Specifically, they had caused the mouse to feel fear about a location that he had no reason to fear. Other experiments have enabled animals to share information through brain interfaces; and what really made me sit up and take notice was the reference to an announcement last week by a Harvard team that a human was able to control a rat’s tail by thought alone. (What’s going on in Boston this summer?) And if you’re imagining implanted wires running from the man’s brain to the rodent’s, fear not. The human’s thoughts are read by electroencephalography and the rat’s brain is manipulated by ultra-sound. I’m over-simplifying a little, but there’s no surgery of any sort required.
What was science fiction of the most fanciful kind is not only conceivable but attracting grant money. So how do we get from here to offering to teach people Spanish – or nuclear physics, or origami – in one short office appointment? Firstly, overcome all the ethical objections and social taboos (and the regulatory apparatus that will appear, enshrined in law, once the concept becomes attainable) associated with having one humans thoughts inserted into the mind of another. One would also have to be absolutely confident that the technology used didn’t transfer anything but the specific skill and memories sought, both for concerns of mental hygiene and the privacy of the donor. Given the complexity of human learning and thought processes, that would probably be enormously hard to do for all but the most trivial concepts.
But setting all that aside, there are some challenging business issues.
- – One would need to select experts who are willing to sell their hard-won expertise. For the sake of having an unassailable product, these would have to be recognized authorities, definers of the discipline’s canon and untainted by unorthodox opinions.
- – Offering their expertise as a packaged product for download to another’s brain would render the possessors of the skill unable to profit from it in the future, since anyone who wants it could buy the recording. In the case of a commodity skill like a language this wouldn’t be a problem since the holder reaps no benefit from exclusivity; but for the “world’s leading expert” category, one would need to offer a very tempting sum or perhaps a licensing arrangement.
- – One would need a way to prevent pirating. Once the skill set is in my brain, what is to prevent me from simply downloading a new recording and re-selling that?
Given the social and ethical problems I’ve glossed over, I’m tempted to say “not in our lifetimes”, but I tend to be wrong about things like this. We may be tackling these practical problems sooner than you think.
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