This
is certainly encouraging news for the millions of people
around the world who have lost the use of hands, arms or
legs due to disease, accident or conflict. Sophisticated
cybernetic limbs will undoubtedly be initially very
expensive, but advances in microprocessor, software and
material sciences will over time drive down the costs of
everything but the surgery; those who receive these
artificial limbs later will also benefit from the years of
"beta testing" by the early recipients. It may be a decade
or two before who have lost limbs due to land mines could
gain the benefit of this technology, but the University of
Pittsburgh research suggests that such a day will
come.

This is also another step forward in the ongoing process
of figuring out how to use digital technology to augment
human abilities.

This is not the only research on how to make machines
"listen" to nerve signals. And while the point of the
research is (quite appropriately) figuring out ways to
assist the disabled, the history of adaptive technology
shows that

augmentation for therapy usually leads to augmentation for
enhancement.

For now, most complex augmentations remain external.
Internal augmentations have largely been limited to
therapeutic fixes for serious problems: pacemakers, pins in
the hip, cochlear implants, etc.. Internal augmentations for
enhancement are usually for social reasons (cosmetic
surgeries) or art, and these nearly always have a visible
external manifestation. The advent of successful
neural-digital technologies suggests the day is near when
internal augmentations for enhancement may not be visible on
the outside. There's a reason why much of this

research is funded by DARPA; this technology could be
useful to people seeking not just to repair what they've
lost, but to enhance what they already have.

Augmentation for enhancement is not new, even if this
particular form has so far only appeared in science fiction.
We use enhancement technology all the time: PDAs and mobile
phone address books to enhance our memories, letting us
remember thousands of names and numbers; bicycles and
automobiles to enhance our mobility, letting us travel far
faster than anyone on foot; the Internet to enhance what we
know, letting us access in an instant abundant knowledge and
myriad discoveries; television to enhance the distance at
which we can see, letting us witness changes half a planet
away; and on and on. We usually don't think of these as
augmentation technologies, but that's what they are. They
make it possible for people to do things which would
otherwise not be possible for an individual not so
augmented. We don't think of them as augmentations because
"everyone" has them, and we're on more or less even footing.

MIT Architecture and Media professor William Mitchell, in


Me++, even argues that the city, as a human
construct, is itself a kind of cybernetic enhancement:

So I am not Vitruvian man, enclosed
within a single perfect circle, looking out at the world
from my personal perspective coordinates and,
simultaneously, providing the measure of all things. Nor
am I, as architectural phenomenologists would have it,
an autonomous, self-sufficient, biologically embodied
subject encountering, objectifying, and responding to my
immediate environment. I construct, and I am
constructed, in a mutually recursive process that
continually engages my fluid, permeable boundaries and
my endlessly ramifying networks. I am a spatially
extended cyborg. (p. 39)

I'd take this even further. The city is an augmentation
not just of individuals, but of society: it is a construct
which allows groups of people to do things which simply not
be possible as gatherer-hunter nomads. Cities allowed more
people to work together, to differentiate labor and amass
never before seen levels of power (and knowledge, and
wealth, and religion, and social dislocation, and
stratification, and centralization...). Urbanization was
humankind's first Singularity.

Augmentation and enhancements of our abilities, then, is
in reality a fundamental part of who we are, and as old as
urban society itself. As we develop new technological
augmentations for therapeutic use, then, we should be clear
that they will be used, to whatever degree possible,
as augmentations for enhancement, as well. We will soon live
in a world which will include the possibility of digital
augmentations of the body (and, eventually, of the brain).
What might such a world look like?

Several scenarios come to mind:

Gentle Touch of Metal: Technology for
controlling artificial limbs progresses faster than
technology for interacting with computers. Few people
actively seek out digital-neural augmentations, and they
spread slowly into the non-disabled populace, mostly via
military recipients. Being able to control vehicles and
equipment as if they were extensions of the body proves
useful, but not revolutionary. Nobody wants to go
through brain surgery any more than they have to, so
actual physical augmentations tend to be for interfaces
rather than computing hardware itself, which is still
changing quickly. As the jobs which can take advantage
of the interfaces tend to be "physical" (albeit
well-paid), there isn't strong competitive pressure to
undergo augmentation.

One result of this world is that the physically
disabled come to be well-represented in professions
(such as dock workers or construction) where the
machine-control augmentation is most advantageous.

 

Behind the Curve: Technology for interacting
with computers advances as fast or faster than that for
controlling artificial limbs. Augmentation spreads
slowly into society at large at first; as the
ex-military types with "head jacks" increasingly
demonstrate uncanny abilities to manipulate information,
more cutting-edge business types look into getting
interfaces installed, too. Different societies react to
the practice in different ways, and in countries where
there is a general taboo against augmentation there is
also great anxiety over being competitive
internationally with less-restrained nations. The
enhancements are initially interfaces, as in Gentle
Touch, but as the bandwidth potential of a system
implanted directly into the brain could exceed that of
an external device on a cable, the more adventurous (or
desperate) go under the knife again and again as new
generations of computers come out.

One result of this world is that research into
computer viruses leading to cognitive impairment becomes
commonplace in the espionage services and the less
ethical companies; such viruses escape into the wild
all-too-often, leading to periodic clampdowns on the
technology.

 

Squishy Bits: Advances in digital-neural
augmentation come more slowly than initially hoped for
given the early successes. Getting the brain to do more
than move a mouse pointer on screen or robotic arm
around in a jerky, drunken fashion proves a terrific
challenge. As a result, advances in other fields --
biotechnology and nanotechnology, especially -- catch up
with and exceed the capabilities of machine
augmentation.

Meat-jet-printed limbs grown to spec and made of the
recipient's own DNA are far more natural than robotic
arms, and nanomedicine allows delicate brain surgery to
fix neurological disorders, instead of using computer
interfaces as clumsy compensation.

One result of this world is that the augmentation and
enhancement question turns to making humans far
healthier than normal -- longer-lived, stronger, more
fit... this is the world James Hughes expects to see.

Of these three, the last feels the most likely. As much
as the University of Pittsburgh announcement (as well as the
Cyberkinetics work, and others) demonstrates that
digital-neural augmentation has promise, the brain is a far
too complex organ to make more sophisticated results in any
way easy. I would expect research along these lines to move
more slowly with each advance. The biotechnological path --
growing healthy or replacement parts -- seems like an
outcome more likely to succeed (and be broadly acceptable)
in a shorter period of time.

Human society is augmented society. Commonplace forms of
augmentation and enhancement would have seemed just as
bizarre to our great-great grandparents as brain-controlled
robotic arms do to many of us. The question isn't whether we
will use new augmentation technologies for enhancement. The
question is whether we will use them ethically, safely and
responsibly.