What do Picasso, a French telephone operator, and the British navy have in common?
Each used cubist-painting techniques to make objects in a field of vision appear to be equal in distance with their background. In doing so, they forever changed how people perceive space and also invented camouflage in the process.
While the Picasso made his breakthrough to Cubism in 1907, it wasn't until 1914 that Guirand de Scevola conceived of camouflage. Working as a telephone operator for a French artillery unit, de Scevola (a painter himself) realized that there was a way to conceal artillery guns using a net splashed with earth colors in a cubist manner. Quickly adopted by the French army, it took three more years for the British navy to devise a way of painting the sides of ships with geometric patterns to make them more difficult for German u-boat captains to judge a ship's distance and speed when looking at it through a periscope.
As Stephen Kern points out in The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, this example is not only intellectually interesting, but yields a deep insight into the nature of societal change. "In cultural histories the causal arrow usually runs from technology to culture. In the case of cubism and camouflage, however, it went the other way, from cubist art to war technology."
I am now entering the third year of researching and writing my book on Neurotechnology and Society. Having spent the first year exploring the underlying technologies and last year envisioning the political and economic impacts of neurotechnology, the end is in view.
My primary focus is now on art and culture. As the above example highlights -- even though technology is a primary initiator of change, it also operates within the walls of political and cultural contexts not completely of its making. Given this fact, I am sure that the thoughts uncovered over the next few months will provide further evidence of our emerging neurosociety.
I look forward to sharing my journey and complete vision with you in 2004.
Arnold Kling's latest article, Biotech Ends and Means, thoughtfully criticizes the President's Council on Bioethics report, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, for skirting the real issue:
"Do concerns over biotechnology scenarios warrant a worldwide totalitarian dictatorship?" If so he asks, "Will we curb freedom at the level of research, the level of development and marketing, at the level of consumption, or at all three?"
Kling's opinion is clear. "As concerned as I am about where biotech is taking us, I would rather take my chances on muddling through those issues than endure the heavy-handed centralized control that I believe would be needed to slow the biotech revolution....Such a dictatorship would be more dystopian than any of the scenarios that technology might create." I completely agree, but for me this begs the question....
Would it even be possible to control the actions of 6.5 billion people?
Widely diverging opinions and policies already exist with respect to biotechnology. While Germany and France categorically banned human genetic engineering in 1997, labeling it “an attack on human dignity and a violation of our right to an unaltered gene pool,” this research continues elsewhere. And even though the U.N. has debated banning reproductive cloning, how would their decision be enforced?
A recent C.I.A. report, The Darker Side of Bioweapons, highlights the perils of the biotech revolution, "The evolving bioscience knowledge base, coupled with its dual-use nature and the fact that most is publicly available via electronic means making it very hard to track" (and control). Biotechnology represents the most asymmetric toolset ever devised. As Kling himself has written, it will only take a single, well organized group of terrorists to unleash a bioweapon of catastrophic proportions.
Today's industrial-style geopolitical control structure is still grappling with the changes brought forth by the information technology revolution. This does not bode well for any efforts that might be put forward to reprimand countries or groups that pursue "banned" biotech research.
Our extensive global connectedness has created new problems for modern humans. While many people question the uneven distribution of power that exists in today’s world, others are disillusioned by the happiness that wealth was supposed to bring. In every culture, feelings of uncertainty, depression, anger, and resentment have surfaced on a vast scale.
Having spent thousands of years improving our control over the physical environment, we now need new tools to address the mental stress that arises from living in a highly connected urbanized world. It is for this reason that I am so interested in neurotechnology's potential.
While Kling describes commentators like myself (Reason's Ron Bailey and Aubrey de Grey included) as optimists who look at advancing technologies as opportunities rather than threats, I suggest (at least for myself), that new tools represent our best hope in a world seemingly out of control. Only by understanding the emotional basis of our actions will we have a reasonable chance of not destroying ourselves.
What humanity needs is an emotional revolution. New tools should be developed that allow each of us to actually feel, not just hear, the breadth of emotions that we all experience throughout our daily lives. For example, a relative emotional sharing solution that would allow people to share and experience the pain and happiness of another's existence might give rise to a more empathetic global society. If we could feel, share and understand each other at that level, we might just successfully enter the 22nd century as a human family.
--Thank you for continued interest in Brain Waves. I'll be taking a short blogging holiday as I spend the next two weeks with family and friends celebrating our fortunate lives. Until next year....
U.C. Berkeley economic historian Brad Delong proposed a techno-economic framework to try and understand how nanotechnology will impact the economy and society: (his full post)
"Let me simply assert that a fruitful way to analyze the social and economic impact of every technological revolution that has taken place over the past two and a half centuries is to seek the answers to four different questions, and then to draw out the implications of those answers:
1) What commodities--what goods and services--become extraordinarily cheap as a result of the technological revolution?
2) What human activities--what jobs and skills--become key bottlenecks, and thus become remarkably valuable and well-paid?
3) What risks blindside the society as the technology spreads?
4) What risks do people guard against that turn out not to be risks at all?
These are the four questions."(sound familiar?)
Since I posted a comment on his site last night, hundreds of you have come to learn more about our emerging neurosociety, so I thought I'd share my thoughts again, this time with links.
Since the industrial revolution there has been a relatively consistent pattern of 50-year waves of techno-economic change. We are currently nearing the end of the fifth wave, the information technology wave, while a sixth wave is emerging for us all to contemplate.
Each wave consists of a new group of technologies that make it possible to solve problems once thought intractable. The water mechanization wave (1770-1830) in England transformed productivity by replacing handcrafted production with water-powered “machine-o-facture.” The second wave (1820-1880), powered by a massive iron railroad build-out, accelerated the distribution of goods and services to distant markets. The electrification wave (1870-1920) provided the foundation for modern cities. The development of skyscrapers, electric lifts, light bulbs, telephones and subways were all a result of the new electricity infrastructure. The fourth wave (1910-1970) ushered in mass assembly and the motorization of the industrial economy, making the inexpensive transportation of goods and services available to the masses.
The most recent wave, the information technology wave (1960-2020), has made it possible to collect, analyze and disseminate data, transforming our ability to track and respond to an ever changing world. Driven by the microprocessors capacity to compute and communicate data at increasingly exponential rates, the current wave is the primary generator of economic and social change today.
Techno-economic waves have pervasive effects throughout the economy and society. New low-cost inputs create new product sectors. They shift competitive behavior across the economy, as older sectors reinterpret how they create value. New low cost inputs become driving sectors in their own right (e.g. canals, coal, electricity, oil, microchips, biochips). When combined with complementary technologies, each new low cost input stimulates the development of new sectors (e.g. cotton textiles, railroads, electric products, automobiles, computers, bio-education). Technological waves, because they embody a major jump up in productivity, open up an unusually wide range of investment and profit opportunities, leading to sustained rates of economic growth.
Here is my bet:
The nascent neurotechnology wave (2010-2060) is being accelerated by the development of biochips and brain imaging technologies that make neurological analysis inexpensive and pervasive. Biochips that can perform the basic bio-analysis functions (genomic, proteomic, biosimulation, and microfluidics) at a low cost will transform biological analysis and production in a very similar fashion as the microprocessor did for data.
Nano-imaging techniques will also play a vital role in making the analysis of neuro-molecular level events possible. When data from advanced biochips and brain imaging are combined they will accelerate the development of neurotechnology, the set of tools that can influence the human central nervous system, especially the brain. Neurotechnology will be used for therapeutic ends and to enhance human emotional, cognitive and sensory system performance.
The diffusion of the neurotechnology wave will lead to a restructuring of major portions of the economy. Individuals and organizations will respond by creating new:
·Product mixes that take advantage of advanced biochips and brain imaging. For example, neuroceuticals that are based on information about an individual’s genetic and neural organization will make it possible to influence and enhance all aspects of mental health, like emotional, cognitive and sensory capabilities.
·Forms of competitive advantage. For example, innovation is a complex mental function wherein cognitive assessment and emotional compassion combine to accelerate the creation of new knowledge. Individuals that utilize neuroceuticals (say to Forecast Emotions) will become more productive and creative will attain neurocompetitive advantage.
·Patterns in the location of production. For example, India and China will contain regional clusters of neurotechnology firms as political and cultural views on human testing create the necessary conditions for technological experimentation and development
·Infrastructures through significant capital investment. Infrastructures include both tangible infrastructures for their manufacture and distribution and intangible infrastructures, in the form of education and training systems, prevailing management styles, and legal and political frameworks at the regional, national, and global levels.
By viewing recent history as a series of techno-economic waves ushered in by a new low cost input, we can see that sustained investment in the NBIC technologies will lead to substantial economic, political and social change. Neurotechnology has the potential to create new industries, reinvigorate others, develop new forms of social and political organization, and make possible different modes of artistic expression.
In its wake neurotechnology will give rise to a new type of human society, a post-industrial, post-informational one, a neurosociety.
Yesterday I met with fellow Corante blogger Renee Hopkins in SF. She reminded me what a macro-scale disruption neurotechnology represents. I recommend reading her most recent thoughts on innovation and disruption at Idea Flow.
It's All Relative -- IS Chapter Two
Here's another one of those counterintuitive statements that, once you think about it, seems perfectly obvious -- "Few technologies or business ideas are intrinsically sustaining or disruptive in character. Rather, their disruptive impact must be molded into strategy as managers shape the idea into a plan and then implement it." Those who would argue for a process view of innovation already undestand this. Innovation is relative to the context in which it occurs.
And even the type of innovation is contextually relative -- "an idea that is disruptive for one business may be sustaining to another."
This chapter also introduces a third contextual dimension to the disruptive innovation model introduced in Dilemma. In this dimension lie the contexts of consumption and competition that give rise to two different kinds of disruptions -- new-market disruptions in which the new technology, service, or product is aimed at introducing new people into the market, and low-end disruptions that attack the least-profitable and most overserved customers.
I still love the endnotes in this book. Check this out from page 70, in a long note pointing out how wrong people were who complained that Dilemma was flawed because sometimes an industry leader manages to avoid being killed by a disruptive competitor. The authors' response: "When we see an airplane fly, it does not disprove the law of gravity."
Links to Innovator's Solution resources
Her chapter 1 thoughts. And for those who are interested in placing a bet on innovation, MIT Technology Review just launched an Innovation Prediction game. Good luck!
As the information technology wave continues its impressive course of capturing and displaying complex information, we are quickly reaching a time where socially filtered, instant information will arrive to each of us in real-time. Recent advances in wearable computers, like glasses that can boost memory by up to 50%, are just one of many innovations to come.
Obtaining information will no longer be our primary constraint as a global civilization. Instead, knowing how, when, why, and for what purpose to use information will be. To be able to absorb, reflect and effectively use instant information, individuals will need to develop new social capabilities.
Social processes like consensus building, value orientation and developmental conversations will require professionals to help individuals live and work in an always-on, always-available world. This will create a tremendous need for social facilitators (today's teachers, managers, psychologists, and psychiatrists are some examples) to help people learn the social interaction skills needed to live and work productively.
Emotional efficiency will become a primary focus in this new era. With 5 of the 10 leading causes of disability being mental problems, there is plenty of space for improvement. Neurotechnology will play an important role in defining mental illnesses while neuroceuticals will be part of the toolset that people use compete in an ever more emotional acute world.
After all, the end game is not just better information, but communication that is relevantly directed, truthfully understood and consciously co-created.
Few social thinkers have richly described the future as well as Daniel Bell who in 1973 wrote The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society: A Venture into Social Forecasting. As today’s Henry Ford professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Bell’s work is not only inspiring, but also shows that thoughtful qualitative analysis can prove very illuminating when trying to peer into the unknown future.
Unlike Bell, who “resisted the urge” to define this new era, hence the name “Post-Industrial” rather than “Information Age” or “Knowledge Era,” I found it very necessary to coin the term "neurosociety" which could act as reference point to help orient discussions about our common future.
Some aspects of a neurosociety include:
1. Pervasive use of neuroceuticals
2. Neurocompetitive advantage as best practice
3. New sectors like: neuroceuticals, neuroeducation and biotainment
In Second that Emotion, economic commentator James Glassman discusses how several mutual funds are using techniques pioneered by behavioral economists to help take into account emotions in financial markets.
Behavioral economists have shown that, under some circumstances, people aren't rational actors in their economic decision-making; they are influenced heavily by their emotions. So as Glassman put it, "How do you fight emotional, irrational responses to financial stimuli?"
One answer he gives is "mean reversion." But with emerging neurotechnology the answer could be quite different. For instance, traders could be given emotional forecasting feedback and neuroceutical tools to adjust their perception of future events.
Here is a simplistic thought experiment on how neurotechnology might play a role:
1. Reduce overestimation with real-time impact bias feedback: The gap between what we predict and what we ultimately experience is the ''impact bias'' -- ''impact'' meaning the errors we make in estimating both the intensity and duration of our emotions and ''bias'' our tendency to err.
To predict correctly how they will feel about their decision some time after it occurs, people need to know: the acceleration of their initial emotional reaction, the peak level of intensity of their reaction and the rate of deceleration. People almost always overestimate the rate of acceleration, overestimate the peak level of intensity and underestimate the rate of deceleration of the pleasure that their decisions gave them.
As George Lowenstein, an expert in emotional forecasting points out, ''If you had a deep understanding of the impact bias and you acted on it...you would tend to invest your resources in the things that would make you happy." In short, financial traders would perhaps make decisions that were more in-line with longer-term satisfaction and financial returns.
2. Reduce empathy gap by stabilizing emotional states: The "empathy gap" is the difference between how we behave in "hot'' states (those of anxiety, courage, fear, and the like) and ''cold'' states of rational calm. Our empathy gap impacts our thoughts and behaviors to the point where we cannot seem to predict how we will behave in a hot state when we are in a cold state.
Emoticeuticals that would be triggered when a trader was in a particular "hot" state that could remind them of the consequences of making a trade when they are in a particular state. The baseline for the trigger might be a complex of multiple "hot" states that the trader would determine was most appropriate for them based on their trading history and when they have made poor decisions.
Clearly the above example is simplistic. It is a thought experiment on how financial trading might be impacted by neurotechnology. More to follow.
As neurotechnology advances and brain imaging technology becomes more precise, all aspects of business, including the art of marketing, will be reinvented.
This week's NYTimes Magazine article There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex highlights how one neuromarketing firm, BrightHouse, is pushing the boundaries of understanding how and why people buy different products. As the article explains, "marketers in the United States spent more than $1 billion last year on focus groups, the results of which guided about $120 billion in advertising. But focus groups are plagued by a basic flaw of human psychology: people often do not know their own minds."
Neuromarketing has a long road to travel though as neuroeconomist Kevin McCabe wisely suggests, "While the first step is to look for reward processing in the brain, it is not the last step since demand itself is an emergent mental construct involving cognition, emotion, and motivation."
Moreover, neuromarketing has some interesting philosophical and ethical implications that will surely emerge as more light is shined on this emerging discipline. But with billions of dollars at stake, the search will surely continue as businesses search for the brain's buy button.
So which do you really want, Coke or Pepsi?
The advent of sophisticated neuroweapons that can be used for mind control, coercive truth detection or to erase memories are on the horizon. Whether they are used for national defense or for offensive purposes, national governments are spending billions of dollars each year to improve soldier performance.
In the October Global Futures Report, The Institute for Global Futures described neurowarfare as follows:
Shape shifting realities, contextual synthetic intelligence, mind morphing...if none of this sounds familiar, that's okay as NeuroWar has not been invented ---maybe. NeuroWar, the use of advanced neuroscience technology for defense is in it's embryonic stages.
What do you think about the prospect of neurowarfare?
Yesterday I had lunch with Sam Barondes, author of Better than Prozac, Mood Genes and Molecules and Mental Illness near his home in sunny Sausalito.
I was fortunate enough to meet Sam along with Sol Snyder at the 2003 Staglin Family Music Festival for Mental Health a few weeks ago. Given Sam's fifty plus years of biopsychiatric research, he quickly appreciated the neurosociety concept. At the same time, he challenged my assumptions about the potential to develop neuroceuticals at the level of specificity that I am suggesting will be possible in the coming decades. Unable to counter Sam's depth of knowledge in psychopharmacology, I turned to history to help support my case.
Using several examples from previous techno-economic waves, I shared that most leaders at the cutting edge of their disciplines have not been able to conceive how far their particular discipline would advance in the decades to follow.
In particular, I mentioned that the case of computer scientists in the 1960s who couldn't see a way, or even a reason why, there would be computers in every home, car and telephone just a few decades later. This sparked an example from his own past about the many conversations he had with his friend, mentor and later Nobel Laureate, Marshall Nirenberg, at the NIH during the 1950s about how they could not conceive of how people would ever be able to read the genetic code. Yet with "Poly U" they did!
Sam is having a birthday party for an old post-doc of his today (to whom he gave E.O. Wilson's original Sociobiology several decades ago). After that he is off to Singapore to celebrate the opening of the Biopolis Centre (see photos) and then to the Society for Neuroscience conference in New Orleans. I look forward to sharing more of my future conversations with Sam around our emerging neurosociety.
When I started writing my forthcoming book on our emerging neurosociety several years ago, my working title and focus for the project was -- The Emotional Revolution. Human emotions are extremely complex and depending on who is doing the talking there still exists broad contention about what constitutes emotions.
Human emotions have been honed over millions of years by natural selection to be trigger-happy. Although deeply engrained emotions like fear, anxiety and anger were critical survival behaviors for our ancestors, many human emotions, at least the severity to which they are felt and expressed, no longer provide the same advantages. Instead, they actually get in the way of cooperative efforts to solve problems.
Emotional control, not cognitive enhancement, will be the area where neurotechnology will make the most decisive impact on productivity and society in the coming years. Whether one agrees with the philosopher Thomas Hobbes that our “future hunger” for pleasure drives our decisions or with the political economist John Locke that it is our “uneasiness” with painful circumstances that spurs humans to action, it is clear that pain, pleasure, and every emotion in between, influence our daily decisions.
In his forthcoming book, Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer elegantly describes the historical shift from an earth-centric view of reality to a brain-centered one:
"Today the brain is the center of our existence. Its neurochemistry encodes our selves. Our memories, emotions, and reasoning are mapped across its anatomy. But this was not always the case. In the early 1600s, the brain was considered little more than a bowl full of curds, an unsuitable organ for the work of the soul.
By 1670 the brain had taken center stage. Soul Made Flesh looks at those remarkable decades in which the Neurocentric Age--our own--was born. It was a time of unimaginable turbulence, full of bloody civil wars, religious strife, plagues, fires--and of scientific revolution. The cosmos was changing from an Earth-centered cluster of heavenly orbs to an abyss of stars. Alchemy was giving way to modern chemistry. And the human body was no longer made of the four humours, transformed into an earthen machine. In Oxford, a league of natural philosophers dared to take the scientific revolution to the soul itself. Making the first accurate maps of the brain, they forged the science of neurology--even giving it its name."
Carl's impeccable research and humble prose bring one back to an era where humanity began our long trek towards our emerging neurosociety.
Note: As the thousands of you who have been coming to Brain Waves can see, I've moved over to Moveable Type publishing system which now has comments and a categorization of previous posts. Please continue to take advantage of these features to accelerate the social discussion of the perils and promise that neurotechnology holds for humanity. Thanks to Hylton and Glenn for making the MT move worth the wait.
Scientific American's September special issue "Better Brains" provides some important detail on several aspects of our emerging neurosociety. Here I've highlighted each article's key point and put a link to a Brain Waves post where I came to similar conclusions.
Interesting crossover to say the least. In my forthcoming book -- Brain Wave: Our Emerging Neurosociety, I build on these issues to weave the future of business, geopolitics and culture in a world driven by neurotechnology.
A bit from my forthcoming book...Brain Wave: Our Emerging Neurosociety
People do a very poor job of predicting the future. Take Lord Kelvin, the physicist and president of the British Royal Society, who in 1895 insisted, “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” Or Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corporation who in 1977 proclaimed, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”
Inventors also don’t usually understand the potential of their technologies. “The phonograph…is not of commercial value,” Thomas Edison declared after he had invented it in 1880. And it’s not just inventors or high tech executives that get it wrong. People who are supposed to be on the cutting edge of cultural consciousness predict just as poorly, as a Decca Recording Company executive showed in 1962 after turning down the Beatles, “We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.”
Even as teams of highly educated professionals we often miss the mark. “A severe depression like that of 1920-1921 is outside the range of probability,” stated the Harvard Economic Society on November 16th 1929, just weeks before the Great Depression began. Not even the computer scientists working on the Internet in the early 1970s could imagine that it would become a medium of global commerce by the end of the century.
If forecasting a specific event or new technology is difficult, then how is it possible to try to predict where human society will go next?
By Pat Kane
[As promised, Pat Kane, author of the forthcoming book "The Play Ethic: Living Creatively in the New Century (MacMillan 2004), is guest-blogging on Brain Waves this week as Zack Lynch begins the heavy lifting of writing a book of his own.]
It’s a delight to be in this space, as I’ve been an admirer of Zack’s diligent and intelligent blogging for a while now. But it’s perhaps best to start by explaining why a social commentator and musician/consultant/activist like myself, with at best a fan-boy enthusiasm for the Third Culture crossover between humanities and science - is interested in the issue of "neurosociety" (never mind neuro-sociology).
Zack's entry on the neurophysiology of laughter and humour was the main point of contact with my own interest, expressed in my website and forthcoming book The Play Ethic. The title started out as a kind of pun on Max Weber's notion of the Protestant Work Ethic, but has expanded into a multidisciplinary passion for understanding human play in all its forms, traditions and conditions.
One of the reasons I turn to cutting edge mind-science - and admittedly to its more dynamical and emergent than determinist models - is that I'm always trying to unsettle the reductive model of human nature and its capacities implied by the "work ethic", particularly as deployed by opportunist politicians and other neo-Puritan miserables. To be "at play and in play" is not only to have a mentality that is far more suited to a knowledge-intensive information economy: but it's also to deliberately embrace the essential abundance of human consciousness.
The "ethics" of play then become an answer to the old question stated in the 1968 edition of the Whole Earth Review: "We are gods, and we might as well get good at it." This is a world which is ever more constitutively "open" and up for grabs - whether in terms of what Zack calls the "nano-bio-info-cogno" realm of transformative technosciences, or the extreme fluidity of our globalised markets and cultures. Can we become "ethical players" of all these possibilities - rather than cynical manipulators of them, or defeated and angry victims?
So one reason for me to be interested in Zack's agenda is precisely in the area of the cognitive capacity and emotional evolution of the ethical player. (The wisdom contained in the "technologies of self" we often call spiritual traditions - see Francisco Varela and Erik Davis - is another agenda worth exploring). To cope with this carnival universe that we've made, is it enough - as the some evolutionary psychologists would tell you - to rely on the old hominid responses: that repetoire of savannah inheritances, tragic and comic, that have become a consoling pop-science myth for so many people?
Or can we begin to explore, as so much of Zack's linking does, the scary but exciting area of neurosocial innovation? Might carefully-calibrated drugs open new doors of perception, enabling players to participate in all the ramifying games and strategies of information societies, rather than recoil from its chaos and complexity? Certainly, in a society where play became a mainstream rather than a marginal practice, the inhibitions on pursuing cognitive and somatic enhancement would be much reduced, particularly in terms of research investment. (In one of my own specialist areas - music - the relationship between craft, technology, innovation, consciousness and, er, "neuroceuticals" (well, that's one word for them) has long been explored in practice: I hope to pick that up, among other themes, over the next few days).
Any comments and questions, I'd be very happy to receive them.
Last time I wrote on neurowarfare it created quite a response from across the planet. To remind you, I write on neurowarfare to accelerate the conversation about their use and to highlight that like all technological advances, neurotechnology will also be twisted for the purposes of national defense and warfare.
Although this week's Science magazine does not come out and say it, a team of researchers have made a fundamental advance in neurowarfare technology by figuring out how to make non-lethal opiates.
Opiates are powerful painkillers, but they come with some baggage: a troubling tendency to depress breathing. By giving an experimental drug along with a narcotic, a team of researchers eliminated the opiate's potentially lethal side effect while preserving its ability to blunt pain. The result could have far-reaching clinical implications for anesthesia and the treatment of acute and chronic pain. (oh, and warfare)
Like morphine and other narcotics, a painkiller called fentanyl disrupts nerve cells deep in the brain that register pain as well as another subset that governs breathing rhythm. Well-controlled doses of the drug can work wonders, but overexposure can be disastrous: In October 2002, 129 people died in a Moscow theater when authorities subdued hostage-takers there by pumping what many believe was fentanyl into the building.
I wonder if the defense departments across the planet have assimilated what has happened here: the development of non-lethal sleeping agents. Clearly, the Russians haven't been researching this area too deeply. Who else hasn't?
Pat Kane, author of the forthcoming book The Play Ethic: Living Creatively in the New Century (MacMillan, 2004) has some interesting thoughts today on the future of parenthood:
The Potter books give us all a chance to examine what our relationship with childhood and our children actually is these days. The Play Ethic is interested in “kidult” media – whether Disney theme-parks, or cross-generational toys, or “Graystation” computer games – because they represent a zone within Western family life which is historically unprecedented: parents and children as conscious participants in self-definition, using games and stories and playful objects.
There’s a lot of anguished talk about the “kidult”, mostly on the side of those who have a vested interest in the restoration of a certain hyper-rationalist version of adult authority (which is usually part of a recoil from a whole range of other social and cultural complexities). For what it’s worth, I think it’s a promising field for change – particularly for men. Many might be willing to embrace a more “ludic” and playful identity – whether as singletons or as fathers - as a positive and creative option, rather than something second-best to work culture.
Looking forward, there is an interesting set of questions that revolve around how neuroceuticals will influence family relationships. Will parents who use emoticeuticals to reduce anger and anxiety at work also choose to use these new tools to help them parent with more empathetically? Could tools be developed that help stressed out parents/adults become more "kidult"? Would these new tools be a positive force for change in family relations or might they represent the beginning of new perceptual facade that will compound family social problems?
Sharing emotions in cyberspace is about to become a lot easier, and with this humans are taking one more step towards what Manuel Castells calls a world of real virtuality.
"Real virtuality is a system in which reality itself is entirely captured, fully immersed in virtual image setting, in the world of make believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience."
The advance is covered by Steven Johnson in his new Discover article on the creation of There's emotion-supporting virtual chat environment.
"As the psychologist Paul Ekman has shown, we are endowed with an extraordinarily nuanced set of facial expressions that convey our inner emotional states, along with even more nuanced perceptual skills for decoding those expressions."
"There.com's prototype version offers more than 100 different emotional states to choose from—everything from surprise to anger—and it plans to release 10 new emotions per quarter."
Insightfully, Johnson also warns of the downside of virtual emotions:
"We are exploring a comparable threshold point in our perceptual systems today—only this time, the illusion at stake is that of emotion."
As information technology continues to advance rapidly, it will be interesting to see the role that emerging neurotechnologies might play in the sharing of emotions within real virtuality. Indeed, it looks like we are quickly moving towards DARPA's emotional future.
If Venice Beach is the world's body sculpting capital and Thailand is the leading center for aesthetic plastic surgery then New York City is emerging as the world's center for mind styling. Mind styling is the practice of using psychopharmaceuticals to enhance one's perspective. Partially driven by the trauma of September 11th, usage of psychopharmaceuticals by New Yorkers has surged relative to the rest of the US: The increased abundance of these drugs to treat mental illnesses has lead to broad experimentation for enhancement purposes. This increase has also decreased the social stigma attached to these mood-improving (not to mention sex-life-improving) drugs. As a recent New Yorker Magazine cover story describes, "When you relinquish the idea that your moods and weirdnesses are a constant, not to be messed with, any mental unpleasantness becomes fair game for treatment with a touch of this, a milligram of that." But the creative usage of psychopharmaceuticals—the cocktail party as pill bazaar—is very problematic. These drugs are not designed for enhancement purposes and the side effects can be severe, if not deadly in some cases. Clearly there is a desire for tools to enhance mental performance (cognition, emotions and sensations) but today it remains illegal to research, develop or market pharmaceuticals for any "non-medical" purpose. As advances in brain imaging and biochips continue to expand our understanding of mental health, neurotechnology will make possible to develop neuroceuticals that can safely and effectively enhance human mental performance. Until then, users beware.
Just as people experience physical pain differently, so too do people experience emotional pain differently. Relative physical pain indexes are now proven enough to show that different people feel physical pain very differently.
Neurotechnoloy will enable a similiar relative understanding of individual differences in mental health. A Relative Emotional Gauge (REG) would help people better empathize with each other or understand the depth of their depression or height of their joy relative to other people's experiences.
So how happy are you today? I'm an 8!
I spent the past five days in the ultimate playground for neurons. Whether you're looking to excite your senses (sights, sounds, smells), emotions (love, joy, sadness), or your more cerebral side (facts, learning, business), NYC has it all.
NYC's greatest asset is its people. Conversations are smart, witty and high value. In a city of 8 million people they have to be. This trip I had the opportunity to have some exceptional conversations with many insightful people, here are a few:
Since its emergence in November SARS has appeared in over 28 countries and has killed over 750 people. Although the vast majority of infections have been in China and Hong Kong, Canada's continuing outbreaks point out that we may be in for a very difficult fight. SARS has a death rate of 5-15% depending on age, with people older than 60 taking the brunt of the toll so far.
What would happen if quarantines don't work and it takes several years to develop an effective vaccine? What if SARS leveraged our six degrees? How might this impact our daily lives?
One report suggests that if SARS spreads unchecked it will rapidly impact many of the poorest nations because of inadequate facilities for monitoring and control. Hundreds of thousands would become infected, resulting in a global pandemic similar to spread of flu each year, infecting perhaps 2-10% of the global population and resulting in up to 30 million deaths.
In another report, Dr. Patrick Dixon, a fellow at the Centre for Management Development at London Business School and a recognized expert on AIDS, takes a rather pessimistic view toward SARS. "While not inevitable, there is a 25% chance of a worldwide SARS pandemic. To give a number to this, he estimates that if current trends continue, it would mean 1 billion SARS cases around the globe within the next 14 months."
UC Berkeley's SARS expert Alison Galvani shares the following: "Though SARS has a low mortality rate, it seems to have a high rate of secondary infections, which is what really determines how damaging a pathogen will be," she says. "People should remember that the Spanish influenza in 1918 had a similar mortality rate but a high rate of secondary infections, and it killed 20 million people." She notes, too, that the Spanish influenza pandemic occurred when mobility was much more restricted and the world's population was about half that of today. On the other hand, she says, current public health measures are much better than they were 85 years ago. "The size of the epidemic will depend on how effective control efforts are," she adds.
Note: I am not an alarmist. However in researching this blog I found very little information regarding the societal implications that a SARS pandemic would unleash or how we'd respond to it. This in itself should cause concern.
This week's Economist cover story highlights how much humans love to look and feel good. Just a small cottage industry in the early 1900s, today's global beauty industry has blossomed into a $160 billion flower.
Driving the beauty market is the largest concentration of wealth on the planet. Aging American baby boomers, 78 million strong and getting older, are not only purchasing more cosmetic products, but are also seeking out whole new types of physical enhancement, including cosmetic surgery on a vast scale.
Although individual opinions differ about the substance of style, there is no denying that our senses and sense of style influence everything from individual self-perception to the laws we are governed by.
To explore how human sensory systems influence society, the Gruter Institute is hosting a small conference in two weeks where I look forward to discussing how enhancing human mental health with neuroceuticals will impact how society operates.
I'm honored to spend several days exploring this and other related issues with:
Neuroceuticals that enable humans to enhance their mental well-being will influence not only the expression of individual style, but also the greater political economic environment we will inhabit.
From the people who brought us the Internet, here is one of DARPA's latest proposals.
DARPA SB032-038 TITLE: Integrated System for Emotional State Recognition for the Enhancement of Human Performance and Detection of Criminal Intent.
OBJECTIVE: Develop a non invasive emotion recognition system for the detection and categorization of the emotional/stress state of the subject. The system should be suitable for deployment in military/operational environments or in environments in which discrete observation of potential enemy threats is desired.
Can you recognize deceit? (take the test)
DESCRIPTION: Humans communicate both intentionally and unintentionally through a variety of emotional expressions. These expressions are most easily observed in the speech patterns, facial expressions, and body language of the individual. From these expressions we naturally draw inferences about an individual's hostile or friendly intent, or their level of stress, fatigue, or confusion. In many circumstances, however, it is difficult or impossible for human observers to make the necessary observations of another's emotional expressions and make reliable assessments of the individual's future actions or capabilities. The observer's own emotional or psychological states can affect such judgments, or the individual of interest may be in an operational environment that is not conducive to direct observation by others. In addition, there is information available on the emotional or stress state of the individual that has not yet been explored or exploited; examples of this include thermal imaging of the human face and body and detection of chemosignals (e.g. pheromones, volatile steroids).
Automated emotion detection systems could perform such assessments around the clock and free from personal bias. Such systems could be used to assess fitness for duty, integrated into closed loop systems regulating user vigilance and workload, or used to detect the sinister intent of individuals and prompt pre-emptive interdictions. These systems could unobtrusively monitor individuals within military operational environments or crowded civilian settings by relying on passive detection of the emotional aspects of speech, face, and gesture patterns and other novel measurements.
The current effort would build upon existing technologies and incorporate novel remote sensing technologies to develop systems capable of detecting, categorizing, and responding to the emotional information encoded in humanspeech, facial expressions, gestures and other emitted signals. Key emotional/cognitive states detected should include, but need not be limited to, anger, drowsiness, anxiety, fear, confusion, disorientation, and frustration. The necessary systems must be capable of functioning in crowded civilian and/or military/operational environments characterized by high background noise and multiple speech sources and should be sufficiently rugged, light weight, and unobtrusive to function in military/operational environments. (More)
Bill McKibben's brave new book, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age explores (excerpt) how human genetic technologies will soon give scientists the ability to re-engineer our children, undermining our common humanity, and leading to a 'posthuman' future.
The human germ-line engineering debate continues to capture the popular imagination, sitting at the core of bioethics debates, while neurotechnology quickly slips into existence.
It is my firm belief that neurotechnology's ability to provide tools that can temporarily influence human emotional, cognitive and sensory states via neuroceuticals will have more profound implications for humanity, in a much nearer time frame, than genetic engineering for several reasons:
Humans will perform germ-line engineering on other organisms on vast scale, but human germ-line engineering won't become widely accepted until significant experimentation with less permanent tools helps people learn exactly what traits they would want their progeny to exhibit.
Moreover, as neurotechnology becomes more precise and flexible, it may indeed turn out that humans will choose neurotechnology over genetic engineering to enhance themselves and their offspring. Instead of debating the bioethics of germ-line engineering, we really should be focusing on the neuroethics of neurotechnology.
America's brightest bioscience researchers are shutting down their labs and moving to "friendlier" grounds. In a small effort to slow this talent outflow, Stanford recently launched the Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine with a $12 million private donation. Because the work is funded with private money it is not against federal rulings prohibiting stem cell research.
This is a nice gesture, but it fails to recognize what the Guardian points out, "that creationists, pro-lifers and conservatives now pose a serious threat to research and science teaching in the US."
As the biosciences rapidly advance, many long-held sacred beliefs are being challenged. Neurotechnology and the battle for your mind will only accentuate differences in religious driven legislation.
Certain regions will choose not to take advantage of new knowledge, holding their respective moral ground. Other geographies will go the other direction and become mecca's of bioscience exploration and development.
I'm still working through the logic behind my thinking, but it seems to me that monotheistic-based societies will likely have a harder time politically sorting through where they stand on these issues, slowing overall bioscience development in those regions.
Regions that are predominately polytheistic-based should have an easier time exploring the augmentation of the "natural" world. Dana Blankenhorn seems to agree that if this holds some truth, look for places like Japan, China and India to become bioscience hotbeds with elaborately supported government funded research.
On a positive note, it is good to see that today there is a U.S Senate hearing on brain science (thanks Sarah).
What does it mean to be human? Francis Fukuyama in Our PostHuman Future claims it's Factor X.
"That is, Factor X cannot be reduced to the possession of moral choice, or reason, or language, or sociability, or sentience, or emotions, or consciousness, or any other quality that has been put forth as a ground for human dignity. It is all of these qualities coming together in a human whole that make up Factor X. Every member of the human species possesses a genetic endowment that allows him or her to become a whole human being, an endowment that distinguishes a human in essence from other types of creatures."
I'm not sure I completely agree with this definition, but it is good enough for this discussion.
As neurotechnology advances, a new set of tools will emerge that will help humans to better control our emotional, cognitive and sensory states. As these tools begin to influence social interaction, are we really becoming something else, say...posthuman, or are we actually becoming something else....more human?
Human gets my vote. By providing entirely new ways to accentuate and differentiate those qualities that each of us chooses to decide what makes us human, neuroceuticals will provide humans the ability to experience life unconstrained from their evolutionarily determined neural chemistry.
Emotions, whether you acknowledge it or not, drive most of our decisions. Fear and anger easily bump conscious thoughts out of our awareness. Wishing that anxiety or depression would go away just doesn’t work.
By referring to our common future as a "Human Future," rather than our "PostHuman Future" it might be possible to extend the community of interest that would participate in the relevant and important discussions that will shape the boundaries of choice for years to come.
Chemical and biological weapons treaties rightly ban deadly agents like VX, mustard gas and anthrax. These same treaties also ban any research on non-lethal agents, a consequence that governments might want to consider reviewing.
The cost of the Iraq War and reconstruction will easily top $500B. This fiscal cost does not even begin to address the mental and physical toll on civilians, soldiers and families. If the goal is regime change, not mass killing and destruction, shouldn't coalition forces use every resource at their disposal to achieve this goal? What would happen if research money flowed into developing effective sleeping agents, instead of targeted bombs that kill?
A 24 hour sleep-inducing fog over Baghdad could save countless lives and save hundreds of billions of dollars. Think about it. Put Baghdad to sleep. Storm the city, deal with radically less resistance, tie soldier's up, and walk out the Iraqi regime relatively unharmed (and I do mean for both sides). A valuable side effect of this strategy would be that Iraqi troops, who might have gas masks to protect themselves but who are also embedding themselves throughout the civilian population, would stand out among sleeping Iraqi civilians. Obviously, this is a ridiculously simplified example, but point is there.
This type of scenario won't happen in this war, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't in the future. Unfortunately, this scenario is not even being discussed or considered. Last year the Rand Corporation delivered a 2015 technology forecast to the National Intelligence Council which informs the US military and government agencies on emerging technologies. A glaring omission in this report was any mention of developments occurring in neurotechnology.
The development of non-lethal weapons is far less advanced than lethal weapons as was seen last October when Russian special forces used "sleeping agents" to quell a terrorist attack. War is horrible, but wouldn't it be a step in the right direction if we began to see the proliferation of non-lethal weapons instead of the deadly weapons used today?
Clearly what I am proposing will cause alarm, but a significant public conversation around this subject might yield some important insights and potentially save countless lives in the years to come.
The average U.S. soldier outside of Iraq today carries 160 lbs of gear. DARPA, the open government agency that brought us the Internet and is now gestating bleeding-edge research to enhance solider performance, is trying to change this through a program called "Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation."
Just as Arpanet was once a government-only technology, many of the neurotechnology breakthroughs being developed by DARPA today will in time find their way into everyday use.
Other programs worth checking out: Augmented Cognition, Metabolic Dominance, Continuous Assisted Performance, and Persistence in Combat.
Neurotechnology is the set of tools that influence the human central nervous system, especially the brain, to achieve a desired effect. The Economist defines neurotechnology as any "technology that makes it possible to manipulate the brain."
Instruments and techniques that are used to in developing neurotechnology include -- brain imaging systems (fMRI, PET, EEG), biochips (DNA microarrays, protein chips, RNA chips), genetic engineering techniques, cellular implantation, electronic stimulation
Products of neurotechnology include -- pharmaceuticals (psychopharmaceuticals), psychological conditioning, neurofeedback, magnetic stimulation
Technological trends making neurotechnology possible -- nanotechnology, information technology, biotechnology, neuroscience
