Scientists 'Inject' Information into Monkeys’ Brains
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The brain can learn to recognize signals from cochlear implants and other neuroprosthetics, and this study shows that monkeys can also learn to recognize signals from deeper implants. Note that previous studies have suggested that the premotor cortex has a role in associating stimuli and movements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premotor_cortex#PMDr(F7)
The researchers speculate that the stimulation "may have evoked somatosensory and/or visual percepts, desires to move particular body parts, or other internal urges or thoughts, any of which the monkeys could have used as instructions".
They don't report testing whether the learned associations persist, although that would certainly be interesting.
They injected stimuli for some sensation, and monkeys learned how to interpret it.
So, what they did is they gave monkeys spidey senses, which they could trigger. And would make equally catchy title.
Imho the future will surprise the shit out of us, despite our ability to anticipate some of the advances... The order shit will happen in will surprise everyone and lead to really unexpected events.
Hopefully we can handle at least some of the things right and steer stuff towards a "successful merge" ( https://medium.com/wordsthatmatter/merge-now-430c6d89d1fe )
That's kind of of the problem, you;re limited by the speed of though when coding. For most things I can type waaaay faster than I can think (a faster keyboard wouldn't help, just as neural output interface wouldn't help much either), and information can be displayed on a computer screen waaay faster than I can read it (so a higher bandwith neural input interface wouldn't help either).
What would truly help would need to be much more complex than that, like something that takes input from something, processes it, then spits the output to other part of the brain, hopefully in a way synced with current visual perception. Or takes input from one part of the brain, processes it through some algorithm, then spits output to another one.
My point is that there's a lot to be gained... but I don't think that trivial implementations of BCIs would bring much gain to highly thinking-limited tasks, so the first generation of them would not be of much use to philosophers, software engineers or mathematicians. Probably the first iterations will help most people fighter/drone-pilots or surgeons, who are truly limited by interfaces-bottlenecks, not thinking bottlenecks.
Though that would soon turn into the mother of all "technical" debt issues...
So that "miracle" interface would give you, like, what, a 4x increase on 10%, that's like a +4% productivity, in its first iteration, coupled with costs and risks that would make it a really tough sell. We're going to need to go pretty far with the nano stuff to get a good (cost~risk)/(bandwith~latency) out of it. Hopefully there are people working on it and people pouring money into it...
That means for a job that takes 10 + 90 units of time, the 10 section would be done in 2.5, for a total effort of 92.5 instead of 100. That's an improvement of 100/92.5 - 1 = ~8.1% in productivity.
Which is not a good target.
It's what everyone will want though. Because a) find me a more generally scoped killer app in any class (translation: literally infinite VC money), and b) it'll be what the media focuses on because of the obvious controversy.
And there will be tons of controversy. I picked up these tidbits years ago and have no sources, but I'm confident I'm quoting these correctly at least:
- Experimental direct electrical stimulation to the pleasure center of the brain produced a response where the subject didn't want the stimulation to stop, and classed it as surpassing all other experiences
- When monkeys were provided with a button that stimulated the sexually-related centers of the brain, all they did all day was push the button; the button had to be removed so they would eat and function normally
So, unfortunately, the target the world will want to hit is several leagues beyond safe.
The future will be fun...
We certainly do live in interesting times.
Totalitarian control over thoughts, here we go...
Also, explosions can be good, too. The Nobel prize wasn't named after a terrorist :)
It wont happen. Someone will try it. What does saying "dont look here" do?
For instance, deontologists like Kant would not care about the outcome to determine whether an action is right or wrong. "Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law"
Utilitarianists such as Mill would seek to maximize utility and would very much factor in the end result.
I'm not namedropping for the sake of namedropping, and I don't know why you'd say philosophers are only relevant in theater.
We're discussing ethics and failing to understand the contributions of philosophy in that context is a major mistake (your reasoning is primarily utilitarianist and I'm not saying that's wrong, just what it is. Utilitarianism is very widely used in modern societies).
We're also debating science. Who do you think developed ideas of scientific processes; what knowledge is and how we attain it?
> Will n scientists deciding not to look into something prevent it's discovery?
If getting to a discovery requires unreasonably horrible actions I hope it'll at least be delayed until such time it can be made without such horrible actions. Many have suffered throughout history in the name of scientific progress.
Plenty of ethics are implemented in science already. That's a good and ever-evolving thing.
This (what GP and this story is about) is voluntary. Like letting a primitive android into your house so you can order pizza, or carrying around a sophisticated connected computer that informs you. The next step is always tighter integration. Pretending that an ethical review board is going to prevent "closed source humans" is not going to work.
People understanding it is the only way I can see to prevent it (it's already the status quo). I'm honestly looking for suggestions.
How can a monkey give consent?
I also don’t believe a human can, because we look at that nice doctor who is offering sincere advice and think “they have my best interests at heart”. We certainly don’t make rational judgments of probability, because if we as a species could do that, lotteries would not exist.
Turn to philosophy or religion for morals.
Science is a human endeavor, and thus is affected by understood norms, like any other human endeavor.
If a morality fails in the forest and nobody has language to describe it… is morality the equivalent of “sound is a pressure wave”, or the equivalent of “sounds is an auditory experience”?
Moral codes have changed wildly over the years (and by place in any year). Slavery was “fine”, until it wasn’t. The death penalty is a thing in some places today, but seen as repugnant in others. Shellfish were forbidden, until someone had a vision of god berating them for turning it down. Bestiality was legal in half of Europe twenty years ago, but not today. Weed and gay marriage were unbelievable twenty years ago, but are increasingly acceptable today.
I’m vegetarian (trying to be vegan) just in case animals have that hard to describe thing commonly called consciousness or self-awareness or personhood, but I don’t have enough certainty to condemn anyone who thinks I’m being silly by worrying about that. Heck, I don’t even have a concrete definition of the thing I worry animals might have in order to test against.
What is morality? Really?
(This is a more serious answer than it reads.)
- murder is wrong, because any given human wants to live (self-preservation drive), and also usually wants people they care about to live (them dying causes feelings of hurt)
- theft is wrong, because if you take something from me that I need, or feel connection to, I feel hurt
- etc.
Our social drive ensures that if you generalize things like these into more abstract code and enforce it, less of those bad things happen.
This - both dislike for things that tend to be a part of pretty much all moral codes, and the tendency to create those codes - seems to be built into our brain's firmware. Under this reductive view, the only actual claim morality has to universality is that all of us have pretty much the same hardware/firmware, and thus share the same basic moral principles. That is, hypothetical sentient aliens from outer space would likely have a different moral code due to the different process through which their brain-equivalent appeared.
Counter point: Different people mean different things by the word “murder”. Does abortion count? I’d say no, but plenty of people disagree with me, violently. Does the death penalty count? I’d say yes, but again, plenty disagree violently. Does it count if you kill foreigners after invading their land? Does it count if you kill a chimp? If you euthanise a dog? A hamster? If you kill a prawn for dinner? People disagree on all of these.
Or “theft”: is taxation theft? Or is avoiding taxation theft?
I find changes in morality as somewhat analogous to changes in language. They are both messy, ambiguous, chaotic, emergent processes that don't result in a single output.
Cultures have had varying definitions of all kinds of things, above and beyond morality. Energy, death, malaise, sun, blood, calx, gravity, atom, motion, heat, mind, vacuum, malaria. But we tend to say it makes more sense that those are real things, and they are not just the cultural beliefs about those things, or that the varying cultural beliefs prove that there is no underlying real thing.
There's a common and unfortunate conflation between (a) whatever societies happen to believe and (b) what morality actually is (if anything), in a normative sense. Sometimes it's referred to as the normative/descriptive divide. Saying "well gee, societies had different beliefs about right and wrong" doesn't necessarily establish anything about morality itself, it's just a descriptive approach to morality, which is one thing. It may just be that morality is normative, and our investigation of morality, our understanding of the natural world, and our societal willingness to face up to certain moral challenges (such as treating races equally or caring about animals) is something that changes over time, while morality stays the same.
But to start from some irrefutable core tenets, generally creates only poor or no science. The main requirement of science is that in face of evidence, one must be ready to accept facts as they are.
So, one can and should have a moral discussion on what research is to be done, but should not say "That's not science! It's immoral!".
For example, if I was fervent believer that god had created nature heterosexual I might fervently deny the observed results that lesbian bonobo chimpanzees or gay mallards exist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals because that would be an "immoral" discovery.
And who should be the arbiter of what constitutes a “moral and ethical attitude”? You?
I try to behave morally and ethically as I understand them but grow suspicious when others start bringing these things up.
Similarly, being able to do moral value comparisons doesn't imply you'll find human lives inferior.
The question is, how much moral value you want to grant to a life of a monkey (not ape in this case). Most people wouldn't give it anything close to human-life level, at which point we're potentially open for experiments like these.
Assuming they're not doing it just for the kicks, but actually trying to make helpful discoveries about brains, the moral calculus will favour this experiment.
And if you do think a monkey's life is as important as human life, then well... you'll find many other more important moral violations to solve that have nothing to do with scientific experiments.
Without animal research I probably would have never been born, having been wiped out by some plague centuries ago.
This done a) to increase knowledge and b) because that knowledge might eventually help humans.(just like you have in your life used multiple medical solutions which originated in animal research). Now you can argue that you don't care about this, which is your good right, but making it sound like they do it just for the sake of it is factually wrong.
Who gives them the right to destroy the brain of an ape for dubious activities.
It's a monkey, and 'destroy' is such an exaggeration it makes me think you don't actually know the hardware used for these experiments work. These electrode tips are in the micrometer scale and while I don't know the exact amount of neurons actually damaged it is a fraction of te total amount in that given region of the brain.
Whether your extension is morally problematic depends entirely on your moral framework. Modified trolley problems are a good way to examine this: Given a chance to save N people by killing 1, what would N need to be before you'd take that chance? Most people would be outraged at N=5 or maybe even N=100. I think a significant portion would accept at N=100,000.
I greatly appreciate how much scientists try to reduce suffering when they perform these experiments - you should really look in to what the approval process is for experimentation here in the US, and the extent that any given animal can be experimented on.
But when it comes down to it, my family is not vegan, we eat meat, we rescue animals (four cats so far), we donate to the Humane Society, and we're THRILLED scientists experimented on animals to learn how to save our daughter. Some day illness could rob her of sight or hearing, and some day these experiments could lead to restoring her senses. This is not a difficult equation for me.
I absolutely will agree that science needs moral and ethical oversight, but this is far from "just trying out what seems to be possible." And I personally think they should have permission to experiment like this on the brain of an ape, and I do not consider these activities dubious.
So, perhaps your arguments will work on other people. But probably not on anyone like me who has had their child's life so dramatically improved by science just like this.
"you" just "imagine"
Like "you" made it and had top-to-bottom control if it's makeup. Does it come with encrypted microcode updates? The NYT keeps writing better distillations of itself; clinging the idea that they [frame] tomorrow.
https://i.imgur.com/VUdcIou.jpg
I should stop, it's just for stroke patients and people who need it anyway. Why worry? Litho masks are a trade secret. Only technophobes want disabled people to have outdated chips.
We can't even hold people who start wars of aggression accountable, we'd rather destroy food to keep prices up than feed the world, but brain/machine interfaces? That's all for helping people. Yeah, right. People who believe that have lost the plot on such a fundamental level that you don't even have to criticize them for them to be offended; you just have to not fall for it to have their insecurity come gushing.