Note from Michael Kelly:

Does this leading edge product help improve motor skills by enhancing neuroplasticity?  This is a charming, well-produced video report, in a series called Future You.

–M.K.

TRANSCRIPT

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

If you want to get good at something, whether it’s piano or golf, we know what works – practice. Do something over and over and over, and your brain eventually masters that activity. But what if your brain could be so ready to learn that you didn’t have to practice something so many times to master it? Some top athletes are training with headsets that are supposed to stimulate their brain cells, make their brains more ready to learn so practice is more effective. NPR’s Elise Hu has been trying it out as part of our video series on how emerging technologies may shape our future. It is called Future You With Elise Hu. And she spoke with Steve.

STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: Hi there.

ELISE HU, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning.

INSKEEP: OK, so I watched your video, and you’ve got this thing on. And it looks like one of those old-timey, like, 1990s big, old stereo headsets. What is it really?

HU: That’s right. It’s a headset that looks like headphones like Beats by Dre, but it’s actually a brain-stimulating device that can zap you with tiny currents, so you don’t feel anything. The electrical charge is super low…

INSKEEP: But you’re getting shocked.

HU: Yes (laughter). You are supposed to wear it for about 20 minutes before you practice this golf swing or squats or lunges, any repetitive activity that you could get better at over time. And what it’s doing is it’s priming your brain before you do that activity. So to try it out here at NPR West, I decided to learn something I’ve never done before – vertical jump.

OK, so then…

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Get comfortable and then just jump straight up. Boom, there it is.

NATE ROTT, BYLINE: Nice.

HU: OK.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: So you’re looking at 14 inches on the dot.

ROTT: Wow.

HU: OK, 14 inches.

ROTT: That’s more than a foot.

HU: So I needed to actually train on jumping over four to six weeks while wearing this headset. And then NPR reporter Nate Rott did not get a headset. And we trained together.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

HU: Oh, that was much longer than mine. Jeez.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Seventeen inches.

ROTT: Got three inches on you.

HU: Oh, my gosh. So he’s already…

So this isn’t…

INSKEEP: He’s the control group, like the placebo. OK, fine.

HU: This isn’t exactly a perfect science experiment, but we wanted to try this to see if I could improve better than he did. So for another month after this, I used this headset before working out. Nate then worked out with me, but he didn’t get a headset.

INSKEEP: OK, so what’s the big thing you’re trying to get at by testing your vertical jump?

HU: So the entire video series Future You is about exploring where new technologies are going to take us by 2050. And in this case, what we’re looking at is electrical stimulation for your brain. The technical term is called transcranial direct-current stimulation. We are still waiting for more of a body of clinical data on this. We do know that one DARPA-funded study showed as much as a 40% improvement in performance in primates.

INSKEEP: DARPA – that’s the Pentagon science guys.

HU: That’s right. They are testing this on the military. The one I used actually does have a contract with the DoD. It’s from a company called Halo. And I asked the founder of the company where he thinks this might lead us a few decades into the future. He’s a Stanford trained MD named Dr. Dan Chao.

DAN CHAO: Like, could we be more attentive and focused as a society? You know, advance ourselves, advance humanity – that’s a good thing.

HU: So you’re expecting kind of a super cognition – right? – like advanced memory capabilities, advanced focus capabilities.

CHAO: Advanced focus and – like, I would use it when I needed to get meaningful work done. If I could have had a neuro stimulator to help me with focus, I would’ve been a better student.

HU: If humans can be upgraded this much, then are we creating different classes of humans? Or even with athletes, there’s asterisks by those who used steroids.

CHAO: There’s legal performance enhancement that’s all around us, like drinking coffee. It’s been identified by the World Anti-Doping Association as performance enhancing, yet it’s legal. What WADA considers illegal is things that are unsafe to the health of the athlete and against the spirit of the sport. I would argue it isn’t.

INSKEEP: OK, it’s said for the moment it’s cool for athletes to use this as they train, which brings us back to your vertical jump, Elise. How’d you do?

HU: So not scientific but after about a month of training with the headset…

(Laughter).

…I was able to increase my vertical jump by 11%.

INSKEEP: Is that good? I don’t know.

HU: Well, it was pretty surprising, even for me.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: You got some ups.

ROTT: Serious ups.

INSKEEP: How’d Nate do? – the control group.

HU: Nate Rott only increased his vertical jump by 8%. So I like to think I won.

INSKEEP: Well, Elise, thanks very much for the insights – really appreciate it.

HU: You’re welcome.

INSKEEP: Now all of this is on video. You can see it for yourself. The series is called Future You With Elise Hu. It rhymes.

HU: It rhymes.

INSKEEP: And you can find it at npr.org/futureyou.

(SOUNDBITE OF SKINNY WILLIAMS AND STEPHEN GOODSON’S “POP STAR EXPLOSION”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

MoonWobble July-2019

Click Zoom for a closer look.  Maximum peak is July 10, 2019

(Submitted by Rick Thomas, H.W., M.)

Illustration © Jaime Raposo 2019. To see more art, please visit jaimeraposo.com

Paul Conrad Samuelsson takes the perspective of the computer for a change.

Debate about cutting-edge technological advancements is philosophy à la mode. At the forefront is artificial intelligence, which looks set to become the greatest technological leap in history. No one can comprehend the extent of its possible uses; but among the feats already carried out by merely semi-intelligent software are beating the world’s best human players at chess, diagnosing cancer patients more reliably than trained oncologists, writing music that listeners can’t distinguish from the human-composed, and reading and commenting on extensive legal contracts in seconds. The potential applications of AI are so astounding that it seems we’ll be in a position to outsource all manual work, creative problem-solving, even intellectual labour, in less than a century. It is the greatest promise of our time.

Yet, when the great techno-cultural icons of our time get on stages around the world to discuss AI, the picture is not always optimistic. AI poses some truly enigmatic concerns. Some of the more existential problems have taken centre-stage, concerning the direct risk to humanity of the literally inconceivable potential of self-developing artificial intelligence. Sam Harris, Elon Musk, Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom all warn of the risk that an AI which can improve itself could come to annihilate modern society as the consequence of a poorly-stated program or neglectful management. For instance, given some task to fulfill, the AI might work out that the easiest way to complete it is to turn the entire planet into a research lab, removing all functions not related to the goal, including all biological life – and doing this with all the emotional investment of a construction crew removing ant hills to make way for a new highway.

The prospect of mass annihilation at the hands of superpowerful computers is terrifying, all the more so for originating in something as human as faulty programming or sloppy routines. A multitude of movies and books depict menacing cyberantagonists creating hopeless dystopias, and this may strike you as the greatest moral risk we face in continuing to develop artificial intelligence. I happen to think that this is not the case, and that our new technology might yield even worse states of affairs. The greatest ethical risks in fact concern not what artificial intelligences might do to us, but what we might do to them. If we develop machines with consciousness, with the ability both to think and to feel, then this will necessitate an ethics for AI, as opposed to one merely of AI. Eventually, we will have to start doing right by our computer programs, who will soon fulfill whatever criteria are required to be considered moral subjects.

There are extensive arguments readily available for a positive answer to the question of whether computers could actually become conscious, which I can only summarize here. Basically, neuroscience seems to suggest that our entire conscious experience originates from our neural activity. This is not the same as a materialist reduction of the mental to the physical, but rather the assertion that whatever consciousness is, its origin is physical, in the brain and central nervous system. Those who argue against even the theoretical possibility of digital consciousness seem to disregard the fact that human consciousness somehow arises from configurations of unconscious atoms. Moreover, it seems that human neurological processes can be described in terms of neural networks – which can already be emulated in computers to the extent of allowing them to recognize pictures or play complicated games. These artificial networks are still comparatively primitive; but eventually – perhaps soon – they will surpass our own neural nets in capacity, creativity, scope and efficiency. So although the ability of computers to feel and suffer seems far off, it is getting nearer all the time.

Assuming, then, that we can come to create consciousness digitally, it ought to be obvious that the suffering of AI is potentially indefinitely more horrendous than even the worst imaginable human suffering. We stand in a position to develop the means for creating amounts of pain which vastly outweigh any previously seen in the history of human or animal suffering. The obstacles to creating biological suffering are demanding – the number of possible biological beings is relatively low, their upkeep is high, and they are prone to becoming desensitized to painful stimuli. In the digital world, when simulated consciousnesses can be programmed in computers to be subject to whatever laws we wish, these limitations disappear.

The consequences are not fully comprehendible, but let me sketch an image of what could be possible. Someone could, for example, digitally recreate a concentration camp, fill it with sentient, suffering AI, and let it run on a loop forever. It may even be possible to turn up the speed of the suffering, so that a thousand reiterations of the camp are completed every second. From the perspective of the AI, this will feel no different from what was felt by those who suffered through the real thing. Then the programmers use the copy-and-paste function on their computer, and double it all again… So the reason that pain-disposed AI is the greatest ethical challenge of our time is that it could so easily be caused to suffer. Picture a bored teenager finding bootlegged AI software online and using it to double the amount of pain ever suffered in the history of the world – all in one afternoon, and from the comfort of a couch.

If this description does not stir you, it may be because the concept of a trillion subjects suffering limitlessly inside a computer is so abstract to us that it does not entice our empathy. But this itself shows us that the idea of the suffering of a sentient program is not necessarily sufficient to give rise to empathy in us – making every person a potential monster from the perspective of the computer.

Perhaps this development seems exorbitantly unlikely, merely a perverse philosophical thought experiment. This would be a failure of imagination on your part. Artificial consciousness will be a desirable development to many, and will have enough applications to warrant significant investment. Financially, AI has already proven to be profitable. That we will make computers properly conscious is already foreshadowed by software which engages directly with us, as smartphone companions and chatbots. Whether by morbid curiosity or by financial incentive, applications of digital sentience will become increasingly widespread. Some people will want to upload their own minds to the Cloud or make backup copies on hard-drives; others will want effortless interesting adventures and interactions. The technology will become available, and sooner or later artificial consciousnesses will be made that are able to suffer, perhaps in order to ensure authenticity or self-correction.

If there are such things as cultural and moral progress, they pale in comparison to the technological explosion that humanity has experienced in the last ten thousand years, faster still in the last century. The advancement of invention is palpable, high-speed and tremendously useful to everyone – few people feel they need further motivation to embrace ever newer and more audacious gadgets, software, and weapons. Yet, as the story progresses, our inventions become more powerful and thereby riskier. So far, the potential mishaps have been manageable. Our historical nuclear disasters have been survivable because of their relative small scale. Artificial intelligence is an invention which promises to be far more destructive if misused. We have the existential risks to humanity which have already been raised by the authors mentioned above. Now we have also seen that there are consequences even more problematic than nuclear holocaust, as weird as that may seem.

Artificial intelligence has for decades been the greatest hope for transcendence and fulfilment in the secularised West. Chasing the unyielding dream of perfecting the world, convinced that we are entitled to anything for which we strive, as so often before, we put ourselves beyond morality. But now we’re claiming our reward at potential costs so terrifyingly great for others that they resemble Dante’s Inferno or Memling’s Final Judgement, perhaps as just the first monument of the forthcoming Homo deus.

© Paul Conrad Samuelsson 2019

Paul is a student in philosophy at Stockholm University and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet.

(philosophynow.org)

Daniel Mackler
Published on Jun 5, 2019

My Website: http://wildtruth.net
My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielmackler

Our relationship with our inner self is the fundamental thing that can change the world.

How do you take charge of your life? Let’s explore!!! Come to Heather’s Sunday Meeting June 9 at 11:00 am Pacific time.

COMPUTER LINK: https://zoom.us/j/848372474

One tap mobile+16699006833,,848372474# US (San Jose)
+19292056099,,848372474# US (New York)

Heather Williams, H.W.,M.