The SciFi implications of a medical breakthrough

Published on June 24, 2005 By PJ_ In Medical Technology

Everyone's seen it in science fiction already, but now it's for real. There's a guy who has a prosthetic arm that he controls with his thoughts. It's hooked up to his nerves, so he can control it the way you normally control an arm, and it even transmits sensations back to him, which his brain interprets as coming from his arm (which, after all, they do)!

This reminds me of a discussion I had last year with a fellow student about what constitutes a cyborg. I think they've definitely crossed the line with this guy. And it's just the beginning, as the last major paragraph in the article indicates. The next step, of course, is legs that work similarly. Then we'll have wheelchairs controlled with a brain/machine interface, and ways to type messages with your thoughts.

Are you starting to get excited about the possibilities of medical research? Then I guess now's a good time to plug Karen's Walk.

Anyway, the wheelchair thing got me thinking. That's not like an arm or a leg. It's not replacing something that you would normally control the same way; it's adding a new piece of hardware entirely. And yet, I don't doubt that the human brain is flexible enough to learn to handle the new hardware. You could have people rolling around with wheels where most of us have legs, and with sufficient technological advances, it could even seem natural to them. And what's the logical extension? You could make all sorts of machines designed to work with a human brain interface. My first thought was a space ship that you fly with your mind, because that's just the SciFi fan in me. But a car that you drive with your mind isn't at all unreasonable. It would even make it easier to teach driving, because if the car's sensors and controls are designed to use electronic signals to communicate with the brain anyway, there's no reason you could't replace the car with a virtual reality simulation and have almost exactly the same experience.

And now let's completely divorce ourselves from reality for a minute. If all this works the way I think it could, we may one day reach a point where human brains don't need bodies anymore. You could have your brain put into a humanlike robot, which would have easily replaceable parts, and live for as long as your brain itself can hold out. Brains could be put into machines that were completely un-humanlike, and the person would actually be the machine.

In fact, (and now I'm going into the realm of things that probably should never be done), what would happen if you took the brain from a newborn human, who hasn't yet learned to control its human body, and put it into a machine. It would learn about the world solely from it's man-made machine sensors. Communicate with its output and motor devices. Would such a creature be human at all, or an actual sentient machine?

That's the kind of AI that takes over the world, right there. No artificial intelligence program that humans design is going to have any interest in dominating, because the humans who create it just wouldn't give it one. But if you transplant an organic intelligence into a man-made machine, the organic intelligence will have the will to dominate, because that's what caused it to grow into existence in the first place.

I guess that's a legitimate sciencey reason not to do something like that. The reason I was originally thinking of was just some vague thoughts about freedom of choice and perverting the natural order, which were probably grounded in religion of some sort. Of course choice would be impossible in something like that, because if the your brain had developed enough for you to make rational decisions then it would already be too late to go the other way.

Comments

scatter629

on Jun 26, 2005

"what would happen if you took the brain from a newborn human, who hasn't yet learned to control its human body, and put it into a machine. It would learn about the world solely from it's man-made machine sensors. Communicate with its output and motor devices. Would such a creature be human at all, or an actual sentient machine?" -PJ

First of all, the brain would die because it wouldn't be oxygenated from the perfusion it normally receives with an intact circulatory system attached to a pumping live heart and an actively expanding and deflating lung which takes care of the gas exchange all needed by the brain. Besides, a newborn human brain takes about 2 more years to mature in a process called myelinization before it could be fully functional. So it's not that simple. Detaching the brain from the skull would rip apart the cranial nerves needed for appreciation of much of the sensory input already built-in for the brain (hearing , seeing,smelling, tasting, feeling in the facial area, etc.), as well as some motor nerves for eye movements, swallowing, respiration and heart conduction.

If you took the entire mature head from the lower neck level, leave its vascular attachments to a heart-lung machine and a dialysis machine, it could be a possibility to build robotic attachments, but a difficult one.

PJ_

on Jun 27, 2005

Well, I did say we had to completely divorce ourselves from reality first.

So let's say that in our little scifi world we've figured out to transfer brains intact from one body to another (where "body" is defined loosely), as well as keep it alive and functional in an artificial environment. And while we're at it, we might as well say we've devised a better interface between neurons and computer circuitry. The baby starts off not being very good at moving its various appendages, but gradually gets the hang of it until after I while it can do things as complicated as walking without even thinking about it. So what if you took the baby brain and hooked it up to, say, a car (which we'll call NightRider)? The areas that control automatic stuff like breathing and heartbeat don't need to be hooked up to anything, because NightRider's new car-body is already equipped with all the life-support things the brain needs. Then connect the nerves that send signals to the various controllable muscles and connect them to the wheels, the brakes, and all the other car parts that you want to be controllable. Now instead of flailing around and eventually learning to walk, NightRider is rolling around and eventually learns how to drive.

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