‘iHuman: Blurring Lines Between Mind and Machine’ — The Royal Society (2019)

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Humans are a tool-making, tool-using species by nature. This leads transhumanists to ask, quite reasonably, if there’s an essential difference between a spear-throwing caveman and a jacked-in cyborg controlling a drone swarm with her brain.

In iHuman: Blurring the lines between mind and machine, Royal Society scholars note that in ancient Rome, a physician would slap an electric ray on a patient’s dome to treat headaches. The implication is that today’s transcranial magnetic stimulation isn’t really new, so why stop now?

Out of all the documents in this collection, the Royal Society of London shows the most enthusiasm for merging the embodied soul with god-machines:

Linking human brains to computers using the power of artificial intelligence could enable people to merge the decision-making capacity and emotional intelligence of humans with the big data processing power of computers, creating a new and collaborative form of intelligence.

People could become telepathic to some degree, able to converse not only without speaking but without words – through access to each other’s thoughts at a conceptual level. This could enable unprecedented collaboration with colleagues and deeper conversations with friends.

The authors warn about possible dangers and abuses, but overall, their reservations seem obligatory. These are ivory tower brainiacs, and nothing gets the intelligentsia’s mojo rising like the promise of unlimited intelligence:

Efforts to enhance memory, learning, decision-making and attention may also provide new solutions. Today’s basic, cheap headsets are likely to be supplanted by more advanced enhancement technologies, possibly including platforms such as multiple micro-implants. Animal tests have already shown ways to create memories, control motion by human thought or embed learning.

Electromagnetic brainwashing may seem unnatural, you pitiful caveman, but if you think about it real hard—until your head explodes—it’s obviously part of natural human progression.

Just as Neanderthals were no match for Homo sapiens, we humans should tremble before the power of The Machine:

“Brains are flexible, imprecise, error-prone and slow; computers are inflexible, precise, deterministic and fast.” …

Creating interfaces that allow us to link the sophistication of human thought with the processing power of AI could open the way to game-changing applications.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Back here on Earth, a more practical justification for establishing total technocracy in the West is to keep pace with China:

The ability to read mood from brain signals is already reportedly being used by Chinese companies to monitor employees for signs of anger, anxiety or depression, via devices fitted to safety helmets and caps. According to media reports, companies involved say they are using the data to help workers, but critics say the technology invades privacy.

Those concerns notwithstanding, if the CCP is turning their population into a digitally enhanced superorganism, we should probably do the same:

People who work in hazardous environments could optimise their performance by training in immersive simulations, and in the service sector, people who have caring needs could be empowered to live more independently if they were enabled to command robots using brain signals while having their mood monitored remotely.

So high-steel riggers will train in virtual reality, and caregivers will don electro-helmets to tend to the elderly. No one can accuse the Royal Society of romantacizing the value of a hard day’s work—especially dangerous or dirty jobs. It’s just another problem to be solved by experts.

Which brings us back to the US military-industrial complex:

Interface technology will also inevitably be studied for potential military applications, such as augmenting decision-making, physique, and motivation. … The US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has set out an aspiration to create a non-invasive neural interface for possibilities such as “immersive training, new forms of interaction with AI systems, improved situational awareness and intelligence analysis, and distributed task management”.

It may seem cruel, but this techno arms race may require turning human beings into radio-controlled super soldiers:

In research, sharks, beetles and pigeons have been implanted with devices that can control their movements. Other technologies could provide personnel with infrared sensing capabilities to detect other people in darkness—or enable their actions to be stimulated by a remote controller.

Whether one fixates on the threat of international rivals or artificial superintelligence, a primary incentive for becoming a cyborg is evolutionary competition. In a shifting landscape, organisms must adapt and overcome.

If your enemies build a superior warship, you’d better do the same. And if your enemies create a Super Computer God and connect their brains to this entity, by God, you’d better do the same.

Whaddaya got to lose?

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From: “BEYOND THE GREAT RESET – 10 Official Documents On Human-Machine Hybrids”

READ PART 1 - HERE

READ PART 2 - HERE