Throughout history we've used our minds to build and improve things, but soon we'll
be able to build things that improve our minds.
We've been trying to come up with ways to enhance the human mind for at least as long
as humanity has had a concept for intelligence, and in all that time we haven't had a lot
of success doing it.
We have had no shortage of potions and concoctions meant to enhance the mind, and some like coffee
at least partially work.
We've no shortage of drugs that alter the mind either.
Yet for all that it has been a popular notion in fiction, even before we had science fiction,
the science of it has eluded us.
That's changing, and becoming an emerging reality with the technologies on the horizon
and companies like Elon Musk's Neuralink pushing to bring mind augmentation from fiction
to fact.
We have seen it more and more in science fiction too, with authors attempting to paint a portrait
of what a future would be like where mind augmentation was common.
My own favorite for this is the Revelation Space series, by Alastair Reynolds.
With possible exception of Isaac Asimov there is no author who has more heavily influenced
me and this channel, so I'm proud to announce it as our SFIA October Book of the Month,
sponsored by Audible.
You can grab a great audio version of Revelation Space by using my link Audible.com/Isaac,
or click on the link in the description below.
That gets you a free audio book and a 30 day free trial of Audible.
We've been exploring the concept of artificial intelligence recently and will continue to
do so in the coming months, discussing both creating human level artificial intelligence
and superhuman level.
Yet, we shouldn't overlook the possibility that even as we are making machines smarter
than humans, we might be able to make smarter humans too.
This is an enormous topic, both the means to potentially do it, and the types of ways
to do it.
Let's explore some of the boundaries of mind augmentation.
We'll begin with nootropic drugs.
These are marketed as "smart drugs" or "cognitive enhancers".
Mostly, these tend to be stimulants, but can also involve depressants or attention focusers.
The general idea is to make use of a stimulant to increase mental arousal to increase performance.
The trouble is that increasing arousal beyond a certain point actually decreases performance.
The trick is to keep the mind in its highest performing state, basically the performance
Goldilocks zone of the mind, by playing with the arousal levels.
I mention this way to achieve mind augmentation because it exists today and it is estimated
that sales of nootropic supplements exceeds $1 billion a year, so it is being taken seriously
by many folks.
The trouble is getting into the Goldilocks zone and staying there.
Different tasks require different levels of arousal for optimal performance.
Intellectually demanding tasks generally need a lower level of arousal, which helps with
concentration.
In contrast, tasks demanding staying power may be performed better with higher levels
of arousal.
We don't tend to have only one type of task in our day and moving into a different task
can take you out of the Goldilocks zone.
Another problem is that the drugs themselves take time to be processed by the body and
reach the brain, different drugs have different release rates and staying in the Goldilocks
zone is more of an art form than a science.
The final big elephant in the room is that there are side effects.
Some of the drugs can be habit-forming or affect blood pressure, sexual function, sleep
and mood.
There are many nootropic drugs and the effects, especially long term effects, of specific
drugs alone and in combination is often not well understood.
Having said that, the nootropic group of drugs includes caffeine and nicotine.
As you know, I consider the coffee machine to be one of our best inventions.
Nootropic drugs also include some outlawed or tightly controlled drugs, like amphetamines.
The use of nootropic drugs is controversial and so is its status as a mind augmentation.
Improving performance through the use of drugs might not actually be mind augmentation because
all you have done is to make use of the mind's own ability to perform by adjusting arousal.
Beyond nootropic drugs, we enter a more murky world of future possibilities.
These include neurosurgery, advanced education methods and cybernetic implants.
As to intelligence enhancement, we could have increases to general intelligence or a massive
increase to one type, such as making someone a savant, maybe even an autistic savant, if
that increase came by diverting other parts of the mind to assist.
We might speed up how fast an individual thinks or give them implants that helped with some
task or even network minds together, if we develop a Brain-Machine Interface with enough
bandwidth.
That last one, in its more extreme form, is called a Hive Mind and we'll look at that
in a month or so, and it could be everything from a limited network like any human community
is, up to some connection so extreme, that it replaces the individual components with
a single new entity, in much the same way you and I are people, and our kidneys, livers,
and stomachs are not.
One of the methods to augment a mind is presumably hooking it up to computers, directly interfaced
into the head or just wirelessly interfacing with them.
Such an augmentation could be so integral to you that you considered it part of your
mind, or it might be clearly separate from your mind, but still be part of you, same
as your hands or eyes.
Or it could be more separate yet, just a tool or garment, like your shoes, or a screwdriver.
There's a fair number of examples of this in fiction, but I'm fond of the term E-Butler,
from Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga, which is a fairly smart but not sentient computer
assistant most folks have among their mental implants.
It's clever enough to help with tons of tasks so it's somewhere between a personal
secretary and a smartphone, and it is in your head and it is customized to you.
It could just as easily also be a separate entity entirely, an artificial intelligence.
If I gave you a mental implant that allowed you to access the contents of an entire encyclopedia
most would say that was mind augmentation, but then again maybe not as mere knowledge
is not intelligence.
We probably would consider it augmentation if it was integrated thoroughly enough into
the brain that you could shuffle through the contents of it as casually as we can shuffle
through our memories of some topic or skill we have and allow us to apply that knowledge
easily.
Analogies between computers and brains are tricky, but are common because it's about
our only option.
Where a computer ends is hard to define, you could limit it just to the processor but you
can have more than one of those, or maybe just the stuff on the motherboard, or just
inside the case, like the skull, the hard drive counts but then an external hard drive
would not.
What about the monitor and other peripherals like the keyboard and mouse?
Our brain is a bit like that.
The skull, like the computer case, isn't an entirely arbitrary boundary, but is also
not an ideal one, and the mind is even hazier than the brain.
Sticking an implant in there isn't automatically making it part of your mind anymore than if
I stick a needle in there, and if we removed part of your brain and stuck in some support
system connected by wires to the stuff still in your skull, we would say that's still
your mind.
Something like modifying our spinal cords to accelerate our reflexes through reflex
conditioning or actively tapping into the motoneurons and interneurons might be considered
mind augmentation, even though our brain has nothing to do with it, or simply body modification,
again where you draw the boundaries is a gray area.
Obviously enhancing your memory would count as augmenting the mind, and if you record
everything you experience with cameras and a decent indexing system you can achieve fairly
similar results.
Again, there's a hazy boundary between a useful tool and an actual mental augmentation.
As to memory enhancement, that comes in a lot of forms too.
Better storage of course, a bigger hard drive as it were, faster recall, better search and
indexing methods, higher resolution of those images or sounds or smells you remember, stronger
association of various relevant memories, and so on.
Try to remember the last time you took a test on paper.
Might have been yesterday, much of my audience is in college, but it might have been a lot
longer.
The last one I can remember was my ASVAB to join the military 14 years ago.
It's easier to recall in some respects since that's an important one not a quick pop
quiz for an elective course.
What was the topic?
Decent chance you can remember that.
Did you use a pen or a pencil?
If a pen, what color was it?
If a pencil, was it the wooden kind with an eraser stub or a mechanical one?
Was the eraser worn down?
Did you have a coffee or soda at hand?
A bottle of water?
A backpack?
I can remember those mostly because that is what came to mind to ask about.
Thinking on the event I remember being irritated by not having my normal mechanical pencil
and the eraser being worn down, being irked not having a coffee to sip.
The more I think on it the more I remember but at the same time the more my mind wanders
to parallel, associated events.
Thinking about the entire process of memory reminds us of all the various important aspects
and components of it that exceed a simple recording of a video.
It would be awesome to have a far better memory, one that let someone ask you what kind of
birthday cake you had for your 10th birthday and just be able to give the answer as quickly
and casually as if they asked us when our birthday was.
You could recall not just the information, but maybe even be able to relive the event
like you were there.
It would be potentially dangerous too.
Not only could you get stuck dwelling on pleasant events of the past but you could get stuck
reliving traumatic or negative events.
That raises the entire issue of removing bad memories or implanting fake positive memories,
another popular one in science fiction that we see in films like Total Recall.
And a proper memory of an event isn't just the visual or audio component, it's the
smells, the textures, the actual emotions going on.
Such things tend to dim with time, but imagine if every time you saw a blue sedan, you remember
vividly the time you crashed your blue sedan and were stuck in it for twenty agonizing
minutes till the firemen cut you free.
That would be awful, so would freshly remembering the loss of a grandparent, or a friend, or
a pet, like it happened yesterday.
Mind augmentations can come with some serious downsides, even ignoring the side effects
they could have.
A positive might come at the price of a negative, but sometimes having a new skill or talent
can come with negatives.
Learn a lot of science and some science fiction isn't as fun to watch anymore.
Get better hearing and a street musician striking some off chords might grate on you like nails
on a chalkboard, so that you might want to be able to dial down or switch off some augmentation.
More importantly though, the brain isn't a processor with carefully designed software.
We talk about the architecture of the human mind like we do software architecture, but
that's a dubious term.
Your brain certainly has structure to it, but in the same way a forest or jungle does.
Much like how an ecosystem can have massive changes from mild tweaks, the human mind and
personality might be very sensitive to small changes.
So early augmentation probably wants to avoid messing much with the architecture of our
minds.
You can go for non-mind augmentation, like just hijacking the optic nerve to send information
through as a visual input, and some others to serve as an output, both to other devices
that do some work.
You could go the neural lace route perhaps, something that doesn't alter thinking but
pretty much is a net of detectors woven throughout the mind to read your thoughts, send that
data for processing, and send it back as an input.
Another option is to augment reflexes using the comparatively much simpler neural pathways
in the spinal cord.
Or bypass the spinal cord completely, as is currently being developed for people with
spinal injuries.
As to making someone smarter without messing with that architecture, two of the methods
are just making it bigger or speeding it up.
We see both examples in books by Alastair Reynolds though one is in a sequel to the
book of the month and the other is in a standalone novel.
For the former, speeding it up, you could potentially replace all the slow signal transmission
lines in the brain, which move anywhere from walking speed to bullet speed, with stuff
that moves at the speed of light.
We talked about that option more in the Transhumanism and Cyborg episodes, so I won't repeat it
now, but this is what gets classified as Speed Intelligence, one of the three types of Super
Intelligence identified by Nick Bostrom in his book Super-Intelligence.
The other two types being Networked Intelligence, which we'll look at more in the Hive Minds
episode, and Quality Intelligence, which is a hazy concept but basically the reason why
you are better at many tasks than a room full of monkeys, even though they've got more
combined brain matter than you do.
Another author, my friend Dennis E. Taylor, calls accelerating thought speed "frame-jacking"
in his "We are Bob" novels, and I like the term so I'll borrow it for the notion
of speeding your thoughts up but not constantly, just as much as is needed at that time.
This is essentially how fast you are experience time.
Frame-jacking would tend to drive you nuts if you were always existing at a time rate
where seconds seemed to take hours to pass.
So while you might be comfortable running a bit faster than normal all the time, you
probably won't want to speed up very fast for more than short periods.
Also, by and large you'd expect everyone else to have this and for a new standard pace
to develop.
This is clearly beneficial too.
Being able to crank people's brains up to run a million times faster obviously helps
with scientific research a lot and you have way less accidents if folks can respond almost
instantly to them.
But it would start messing with our concept of time a lot too.
Someone tells you they were born in 1980 and another tells you they were born in 1987,
and you know one is 7 years younger than the other person.
But the fellow born in 1987 might have experienced a couple centuries of thought last year.
These are the same kinds of issues we experience with relativistic travel, where time genuinely
slows down for the traveler, or freezing people in sci fi.
You could have someone who went around on a spaceship that hugged the speed of light,
so whole decades might pass during their journey while they only experienced a year or so,
and they could be engaging in interstellar trade for centuries but only feel like they
have been in the business for a few years.
Or they might accelerate their consciousness, frame-jack, to experience the same amount
of time as passed in the outside world or even more of it.
It's a neat trick for growing soldiers too.
Scifi loves to have tank grown super-soldiers you can pump out in months from some cloning
vat but tends to ignore that they aren't getting much training in that time.
Fully grown or not, a two-month old is a two-month old.
They aren't even talking and walking.
If you can speed up their thoughts though, you can teach them faster, or just take regular
people and hand them some books on the topic and tell them to read them now.
Obviously it needs to be an electronic book or better some virtual simulation with hands-on
training, but now they suddenly know the skill.
Doesn't feel like it to them though, because they did actually spend the time to learn
it.
You might expect everybody with this option would go and try to learn everything, but
first off, most people do have a plenty of free time and still don't hit the books
to learn skills they don't particularly need at the moment.
Second, this is one pathway to extreme life extension, you only live maybe a century of
real time but experience thousands of years of subjective time, and while we are keeping
to a basic human mental architecture, even if we can extend their useful memory so their
brain doesn't fill up or overwrite old memories, there's a cost to life.
Firstly, you probably want to get paid more for an hour spent frame-jacking than at normal
speed, since you are experiencing it, so our ideas about being paid by the hour changes.
Living 20,000 subjective years when you are physically 20 might seem like a gradual change
made to your mind over subjective years spent reading stuff while you sat down on the couch
for a few minutes, but to everyone else it won't be the least bit gradual.
Do you think if we stuck you in a slow time pocket for a century in a library to read,
you would emerge the same person as far as your friends were concerned?
All that new knowledge, probably even talking differently?
How do you feel about the spouse you married and haven't really talked to from your perspective
in a decade?
How do they feel about you?
Understanding that, you might get very touchy about frame-jacking a lot.
So speed intelligence is a promising path to mind augmentation but not without its problems.
The nicer path when you just want it for learning is to copy all the information over, but the
brain, and anything functioning on the neural network concept, is not particularly suited
to copy and paste.
There's a big difference between photographing a book page and actually learning its contents,
absorbing it and doing all the new wiring and indexing so you can recall and utilize
it.
The last aspect though returns to the continuity of identity issue.
With something like speed intelligence you are just being changed gradually, from your
own perspective, but suddenly spiking someone's intelligence up 20 IQ points probably changes
them profoundly, and pumping them up to hundreds of times smarter than the normal person ought
to change their psychology more than going from standard primate to human.
A lot of people might not like that, even if they wanted to be that smart, because they
might seriously doubt they were that smart, that we instead have an entirely new entity
and they ceased to exist.
Folks also sometimes kick around the notion, usually in terms of the Fermi Paradox, that
what we consider intelligence is sort of a form of insanity.
We don't know that getting a bit smarter might not be a very bad thing.
People worry about civilizations being too dumb to survive or getting dumber and dying
off.
But getting smarter might get you too.
You could potentially have a civilization fall apart simply because its members were
so smart they were constantly being overwhelmed by existential crises.
They might get depressed or conclude free will and existence were logically impossible
or pointless, but were too smart to ignore it or rationalize a way around it, and just
sit down and shut off.
A popular notion is that civilizations run on a lot of stupidity and it would seem like
if it were actually true then one with a lot of mind augmentation might fall apart.
Personally, I don't see it that way.
But then if I didn't think making people smarter was almost always a good thing I wouldn't
spend so much time learning myself or teaching, so I might be biased, and education itself
is the oldest method of mind augmentation and has a very good track record for performance.
I think we will see mind augmentation of various types and levels start showing up in the next
few decades and I would expect it to have positive effects overall.
Another example of augmentation is just making the brain bigger, but keeping the same overall
architecture.
It has the downside of slowing things down.
And we get an example of that from the House of Suns where the protagonist spends a decade
talking to a human giant with a massive head who is incredibly smart but slow.
It takes hours for them to send around all the mental signals between all those many
neurons which are far apart and formulate a simple thought but it's not a very simple
thought either.
It has to go slow too because every time you fire a neuron you generate heat and your radiating
surface is not scaling up with volume and quantity.
Double a skull's diameter and you get eight times the volume and neurons but only four
times the radiating surface.
Now, we don't have a lot of technical detail yet on how we can achieve mind augmentation,
but whatever way we do that, that last point brings us to the familiar territory of having
to deal with the laws of thermodynamics.
We get an example of folks who have had cooling fins installed to help dissipate heat from
thinking faster in another of Alastair Reynold's novels.
You can see why I like him for this topic.
When we talk about really speeding up intelligence a lot that heat issue is a big one, though
come to think of it restrictions on technology imposed by heat and thermodynamics is probably
one of the most common obstacles I point out on this channel, probably because it gets
ignored in science fiction so much.
We do have super computers these days finally powerful enough that they process as fast
as our estimates for the human mind, which is still several million times faster than
your typical home computer.
These things are gluttons for power and every watt of energy they use has to emit as heat.
Your brain uses and gives off heat on par with an energy saving light bulb, about 20
Watts.
A good supercomputer produces thousands of times more heat to do way less.
Even overcoming the scaling issue and being able to create a computer that would fit into
the skull alongside the brain would not solve the heat issue, and it gets worse.
Recent research on thermal regulation of the brain has shown that a change in temperature
of only a couple of degrees has a very detrimental effect on our ability to think.
A mobile phone consumes about 5 Watts of power.
It is really dumb in comparison with a super-computer, but even at that low power level, that's
a quarter of our brain's usual heat output.
We have to be very careful not to overstep our body's ability to dissipate that heat.
This is interesting because while we can doubtless keep improving how much energy we need to
spend per calculation, and thus decrease the heat we need to get rid of, it does indicate
something about the speed intelligence approach.
I mentioned earlier frame-jacking in the "We are Bob" novels.
The higher your frame-jack the more heat you are going to produce and so the shorter a
period of time you can do it if it is beyond your regular heat dissipation level.
Whatever that is, even if your computers or artificial brain is so efficient it can run
a million times faster than a human brain constantly, you can presumably briefly push
it higher than that.
Not only is speed intelligence probably the easiest path to pursue for major mind augmentation
– certainly conceptually the easiest to explain – but that these relative bursts
of speed, frame-jacking, would be a major aspect of that.
One potential solution to the thermodynamics problem is to move the bulk of the processing
outside of the skull.
This could be moved to a chip embedded elsewhere in the body, or carried around on a pocket
sized computer, or even off site, that you talked to over a network.
This does raise the issue of communications outages where it is completely removed from
the body and still imposes some limitations on heat dissipation when it is housed elsewhere
on the body.
Current performance gaming computer rigs and supercomputers have moved to liquid cooling
solutions because heat can be removed from the hot areas of the computer much more easily
than radiating or even convecting that heat away close to those hot areas.
The human body is already set up to be a liquid cooled radiator of heat and we could increase
the flow of blood to the brain or other parts of the body and use other parts of our body
to dump out the excess heat through sweating and opening the blood vessels under the skin.
This means that mind augmentation could become a combination of brain and physiological augmentation
where the two are inextricably linked.
The more heat that can be dissipated by passing more blood through the skull and other implanted
areas, the longer the person can be frame-jacked and the faster they can think.
Whatever system we ultimately adopt for mind augmentation will need to address not only
the interface with the mind but also its physiological, social, and thermodynamic consequences.
We have only touched on some of the concepts for mind augmentation and not a lot of the
mechanics, those are still emerging and we are still novices when it comes to understanding
brains, thought, and cognition.
You can explore a lot more of the concepts in our book of the Month, Revelation Space.
Though I'm not so much recommending the book as the entire series, Reynolds explores
Transhumanism, Artificial Intelligence, Mind Uploading, and aspects of consciousness and
identity better than any other sci fi author I can think of and he writes almost all of
his work under very hard science.
No faster than light travel or magic handwave technology.
He proves that you don't have to diminish the science part of science fiction to write
a good story.
He's also a particularly good read for channel regulars too because he actually includes
a lot of the other concepts we discuss like megastructures, it's not jumping around
from one generic, single-biome planet to another.
I particularly recommend the audiobooks too, as the narration happens to be done by my
favorite narrator, John Lee, and his voice is very well suited to the book in terms of
immersing you into the novel with his tone.
I tend to listen to audiobooks almost all day as they leave the hands and eyes free
for other tasks like when you're driving.
With Audible you can transform your commute and make traffic an escape you look forward
too!
They have an unbeatable selection of best sellers, mysteries, and sci-fi books like
the series I'm recommending this month, which happens to be all three.
Revelation Space is available on Audible, and you can pick up a free copy today - just
use my link, audible.com/isaac, or click on the link in the description below, to get
a FREE audiobook and 30 day trial, That's audible dot com slash I_S_A_A_C.
I'm certain you will enjoy that story, but if not, you can swap it out for free for any
other book at anytime and it's yours to keep whether you stay subscribed to Audible
or not.
Next week we will be exploring the themes of digital mind transfer and uploading in
our Halloween special, Digital Death.
After that we will be looking at Interplanetary Trade, and we'll discuss some of the common
concepts from science fiction and try to see how realistic those are and what the future
of trade will be.
For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,
and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button, and share it with others.
Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week.
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