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The cyborg revolution heralds age of superhuman
It’s the internet’s equivalent of a note posted in a newsagent’s window. The website has a single page. No fancy videos or graphics. No colours even. Just black and white text offering jobs to “exceptional engineers and scientists”. The task at hand: “Developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.”
This is Neuralink – a company that wants to blend man and machine, and so make cyborgs. Its founder, almost inevitably, is Elon Musk.
Why does Musk want to make cyborgs? For the same reason he wants to make electric cars and colonise Mars: to save mankind. He believes that artificial intelligence (AI) will soon outstrip us and that, as a result, AI will treat humanity, at best, like a pet. So, thinking big as usual, he decided that we mortals should develope “brain-machine interfaces” (BMIs) to meld seamlessly with AI, and so become superintelligent too. If you can’t beat ‘em...
Naturally, it sounds mad. But Musk has form in making mad work, revolutionising both the car and space industries in a single decade. And BMIs are already improving human capabilities. Professor Jose Millan, chair in Brain-Machine Interface at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), leads research that allows tetraplegics to control wheelchairs with their thoughts.
He says that, for healthy people, BMIs can be used “as a second level of cognition”. Last year, with Nissan, he unveiled technology that allows a smart car to read a driver’s brain signals to anticipate and improve actions like braking.
“With a BCI you have additional information,” he says. And though he warns of the ethical dilemmas attached, he has no doubt: “Enhancement is coming.”
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week, there was plenty of evidence on show that the cyborg revolution is indeed underway – and about to become big business which aims to improve both body and mind. “A few years ago exoskeletons were something from sci-fi,” says Millan.
“Now they are at the CES. This is moving very, very, very fast.” Today, the global market in “human augmentation” is worth just $600m (£467m). That is predicted to grow to $3bn by 2023, the bleeding edge of a medical market in bionic replacement limbs and organs itself predicted to be worth $28bn by the same year. So just what is the cyborg tech available now, and what can it do?
Exoskeletons
Exoskeletons were once the stuff of Hollywood fantasies and military research projects, now they can help you ski. Roam is a company in San Francisco which wants to make thigh-burn disappear with its Elevate, which skiers in Lake Tahoe can try out from February. The company has just secured $12m in funding. Other leading names include Ekso which claims is simply wants to “amplify a person’s natural” strength, flexibility, or endurance, and SuitX. Costs range from the thousands of dollars to the hundreds of thousands. At CES, South Korean giant LG demonstrated an updated version of its own tech – the Cloi Bot.
Hearing
Augmented Hearing takes the concept of noise-cancelling headphones and runs with it, selectively turning up or down the volume of ambient noise and allowing you to focus your hearing forward on an interlocutor, say, while tuning out the jabbering neighbour at your side. Some buds add language translation too. All the very biggest tech companies – Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft – are investing considerable time an effort in the sector, not least because in-ear computers (“hearables” in the jargon) will have a prime spot next to your brain – perfect to deliver information, but also advertising. Many predict we will all soon be wearing them permanently.
Sight
Augmented Vision tech is getting smaller and better looking, moving on from the much-derided Google Glass. Now smart glasses like Focals, by North ($999), actually look like glasses and not wonky lab projects. They can give you a heads-up display featuring weather info or text messages. And full Augmented Reality (AR) glasses are coming. One of the hottest sectors in tech right now, AR overlays dynamic information on the world around the user, in products like the Microsoft Hololens and Magic Leap One. The Vuzix Blade (£999) and Nreal Light ($1,000) drew crowds at CES last week by being lighter and cooler than the opposition.
Prosthetics
So far, cyborg tech is limited to what you can strap on. Powered exoskeletons, microchip enabled hearing buds or glasses augment our capacities, but do not replace them. Current prosthetic limbs or cochlear or retinal implants for the disabled, deaf or blind are still generally pale imitations of the real thing. But that is changing.
True body-part upgrades will require two things – BMIs that allow the brain both to control prosthetics and receive information back from them. BMIs today are good at this first part, bad at the second. The loop needs to be completed. Last week the only company authorised to insert retinal prosthetics in America, Second Sight, announced a $40m rights issue to develop its bionic eye, which has restored sight to some blind people.
With improved BMIs researchers are already talking about bionic eyes that could increase the spectrum of visible light. Indeed, a British prosthetics company, Open Bionics, happily embraces the idea that prosthetic limbs might soon bestow “superpowers” upon their users. It’s flagship product is the Hero Arm, a 3-D printed arm which costs just a few thousand pounds, and consciously apes comic-book styling, while boasting of great strength and control.
Co-founder Samantha Payne says the Hero Arm can pick up a marble or a heavy shopping bag. “Already you could make a prosthetic that’s better than nature at just one function, say, crushing with extreme force,” she says. “But nature put a lot of functions in a small package.” Open Bionics is creating a lot of excitement in the race to emulate that. Last week it raised £4.6m from investors to crack the US market.
Conclusion
For all the excitement, James Young offers caution. Young, 28, lost his left leg below the knee, and left arm below the shoulder in an accident in 2012. “There are two parts to bionics,” he says. “The control interface and the hardware itself.” Neither has the sophistication he wants. Yet.
Both Payne and Young are excited about a process known as TMR, which locates muscle controlling nerves in the body. Surgery called osseointegration can then fit a titanium stud to those nerves. The stud pokes through the skin, which could be connected to any prosthetic you like. “Just like a photographer changing lenses on a camera,” says Young. “That would be really awesome.” And of course such add-ons, tailored to specific needs, wouldn’t necessarily be limited to the limb-different.
One man is convinced that this future is not far off. Hugh Herr heads the Biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab and since a climbing accident wears two bionic feet. He works on closing the gap between brain and prosthetic, with what he calls NeuroEmbodied Design.
“I believe the reach of NeuroEmbodied Design will extend far beyond limb replacement and will carry humanity into realms that fundamentally redefine human potential,” he said in a lecture six months ago.
“In this 21st century, designers will extend the nervous system into powerfully strong exoskeletons that humans can control and feel with their minds. Muscles within the body can be reconfigured for the control of powerful motors, and to feel and sense exoskeletal movements, augmenting humans’ strength, jumping height and running speed.
"Humans may also extend their bodies into non-anthropomorphic structures, such as wings, controlling and feeling each wing movement within the nervous system. In this 21st century, I believe humans will become superheroes.”