David Stonehouse Technology

The Cyborg Evolution

By David Stonehouse

Kevin Warwick imagines a day when humans will speak to each other not in words but in thought. A time when people will be able to upgrade their own intelligence and even take vacations in faraway lands just by downloading them directly to their brains.

To Warwick, this is no science-fiction fantasy. This is the reality of the not-too-distant future - a time when humans have brain implants connecting them to the vastly superior intellectual powers of computers.

He believes this cyborg evolution is inevitable and vital to our very survival as a species.

"If we don't, the alternative is to have intelligent machines running everything. I don't really fancy that," the scientist says in a phone interview from his home near London. "But this alternative, I see as quite a positive alternative: humans staying in control of what is going on, even though we have to become cyborgs to do it."

His is not a lone voice in the wilderness.

The renowned Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking also believes humans need an upgrade.

"In contrast with our intellect, computers double their performance every 18 months," Hawking told the German news magazine Focus in 2001." So the danger is real that they could develop intelligence and take over the world. We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it."

Warwick, a cybernetics professor at the University of Reading in England, is involved in ambitious and dangerous experiments in the quest to meld man and machine.

In March 2002, an electrode was implanted in his wrist in order to read the electrical signals pulsing through his nerves and report the information to a computer, thus providing a link between the machine and his nervous system.

The surgery was a success, although it could have proved fatal if the glass enclosing the electrodes broke inside his body. The implant collected the signals pulsing through nerves and transmitted them back to his computer. The computer stored the transmissions but also, on occasion, replayed them - sending signals directly into his central nervous system.

Then the following June, his wife Irena set out to join him. An electrode was placed in her arm, then she was rushed to a lab at the university where husband and wife both connected the wires running from their arms to computers. A quick test showed the computers were picking up the signals pulsing from their nervous systems. Warwick could hardly breath as he was blindfolded and the computers were linked together. This is when he would find out if his idea would fly: would they be able to telegraph messages between their nervous systems?

He felt a sudden shock down his left index finger. He was startled, surprised. "Yes," he shouted. The pulses kept coming, one after another. Others in the lab broke out in a chorus of cheers. Every time Irena closed her hand, he would feel a charge. Her nervous system was talking to his - the first-ever such link. Warwick was elated: his idea worked. It confirmed that his dream of direct thought communication between humans could indeed become real one day. It also gave hope to his vision of creating a substitute nervous system for people who are paralysed.

The first time he tried something like this was more than two years before, when a different silicon chip was implanted in his arm. This experiment was less ambitious, but proved a chip inside the body could send signals. It sent out radio waves alerting computers at the cybernetics department to his actions and whereabouts. As he walked through the main doors of the building, the computer welcomed him with a polite hello. As he neared his lab, it opened the door and turned on the lights.

When that first implant was taken out nine days later, he felt strange, oddly upset. He missed it. It felt like a friend had died. It was something he had not at all expected: he had grown emotionally attached. The husband-and-wife implants from this year's experiments have been removed now, but Warwick makes it clear that these most recent experiments are just the beginning. If electric signals coursing through our bodies can be shared, he believes it is just a matter of time before we can command computers with nothing but our thoughts, before our brains meld with the power of future-generation PCs, before we start
thinking to each other instead of speaking.

He imagines a future experiment: he is in London, his wife in New York. With her brain link on, her portable computer records a thought conversation, sends it over the internet to his computer, which in turn dispatches it to his brain. Her thoughts pop into his head.

"The direction I am interested in ultimately is linking up to the human brain: can we give people extra memory? Can we allow people to communicate just by thinking to each other? My goal in life is to bring about thought communication between people. That's what I would like to achieve."

He is convinced thought communication will be reality within the next two decades. It may seem far fetched, but we are closer than you might think.

Scientists are making significant breakthroughs in getting computers to interpret thought. In March 2002, the journal Nature detailed the work of scientists at Brown University in Rhode Island who implanted electrodes in the brains of monkeys that allowed the primates to move a computer cursor just by thinking about it.

As surprising and revolutionary as this seems, scientists have had some success with humans.

In Atlanta, researchers at Emory University have helped a man severely disabled by a stroke communicate by having his brainwaves power a computer cursor. Three years ago, a neurosurgeon implanted a pair of glass-encased electrodes in Vietnam veteran John Ray's brain. The implant eavesdropped on his brain activity and, together with sensors taped to the shoulder and above the eyebrow reading the electrical activity of muscle contractions, allowed him to slowly spell out words with the power of thought.

Scientists in Australia have developed a "mind switch" which allows people to activate electrical devices - turn on a light, power up a radio - by thinking. At a demonstration in England last year, its developers showed how electrodes attached to the outside of the skull monitor brain activity and turn on the appliances when the voltage of the signals reaches certain levels.

Ashley Craig, a neuroscientist at the University of Technology, Sydney, who helped develop the switch, says it is able to control any electrical device. Disabled patients have been able to turn on the television and even switch channels. Like other research looking at harnessing the power of the brain, his experiments are aimed at improving the lives of the disabled.

In Canada, a team at the University of Victoria is working on a device that it hoped would allow teenager Claire Minkley to use a computer by brainwaves.

A rare affliction has left the 18-year-old in a wheelchair, unable to speak and with little control over her muscles. Though incredibly smart, most of her thoughts and feelings are locked inside her head - she communicates only by pointing to letters and blocks on a board. The team began working on a system of electrodes attached to headgear she could wear so that a computer could interpret brain signals and translate them into words.

A pioneer in this area of research is John Chapin, director of the Center for Neurorobotics and Neuroengineering at the State University of New York. His focus is on having the brain instruct robotic limbs so that people who are paralysed can one day regain function of their arms or legs. He is hoping to devise a system that will allow limbs not only to respond to thought commands, but to send sensory information back to the brain - restoring the feeling of touch.

He agrees that it will be possible - at least in theory - for the human brain and computers to link on a wide scale, that the technology will grow beyond helping people with disabilities.

"That being the case, whether or not it can ever really be done ethically or technologically is a totally different story," he says, wondering aloud how the brain would have to be wired up to talk to the computer. "How many electrodes do you need? You might need tens of thousands. You'd almost have to wait for some sort of non-invasive technique to become available to do that."

Michael Arbib, an expert in both computers and brain function, also wonders about the practicality.

"Will people want to have chips planted in their heads, just to have the higher bandwidth? I don't know," says Arbib, a professor of computer science and neuroscience at the University of Southern California and the author of more than 20 books, including Computers and the Cybernetic Society.

"That's why you've got ethical discussions. But we do accept a lot of intrusions now - first we had glasses, then we had contact lenses, now we're having surgery on the lens of the eye itself."

So, why not brain implants?

Arbib believes it is possible for the brain to drive technology, that someday we may indeed be able to drive just by thinking. "The question is, in the long run, is it really worthwhile monitoring the brain and having to develop special skills to come up with the right thought patterns for all these different machines? Or is it easier to simply come up with voice control and have you simply say what you want?"

Kevin Warwick concedes some people think he is crazy, but that hardly dampens his drive. He thinks of others who have achieved what was once thought impossible, such as the American aviator Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 was first to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.

He has spent his adult life devoted to researching artificial intelligence and robotics.

When he casts his mind to the decades to come, he envisions a society where humans wire themselves with extra brain power by co-opting the computer, and take on new senses such as X-ray vision or ultrasound radar just by adopting the technological wizardry.

He sees a time when medicine is electronic - pain relievers, anti-depressants and the like are pieces of software you download onto the brain. Indeed, he has already had inquiries wondering if it would be possible to program a virtual high - instead of snorting cocaine, call up the program.

From there, it's easy to imagine immersing yourself in the adventure of an exotic vacation without leaving the living room. Connect a computer to a your brain port and let it feed you the experience instead, or perhaps let it transport you to a different reality much as Keanu Reeves's character experienced in The Matrix.

While Warwick worries that machines may conquer man if we don't become part machine, he is not concerned that computers will end up taking over if we do team up with them.

"The new system that we move to is essentially an intelligent machine network that has human nodes connected to it. I see it as if you are not connected to the network - if you are not a cyborg - you're not part of it at all."

He sees an era ending and feels "a little bit nostalgic for humans". He also sees a new one dawning where there must be progress or we could very well be doomed to a future where humans are inferior - and robots
rule.

"We can't say it is not possible. For me, this is an alternative: if you can't beat them, join them."