Threat to the Future of Humanity Became Apparent in 1999 From Advances in Human Brain Sciences

The advances in some areas of the human brain sciences and the possible threats for the future became apparent to Ellen M. McGee and Gerald Q. Maguire already in 1999. They talked about ear- and eye implants but also about more advanced implants and sensors in the environment able to spy on the human being and to control behavior and the human mind. The same ethical questions arising then are still very important today.

Since 1999, the progress in the implant technology happened very fast. It is possible today to connect a human brain to a computer, creating today’s cyborgs.

Technical innovation, scientists claim, are neither good nor bad, but how it is used and the moral and ethical consequences arising from the use of the technology in unethical ways. Today, the technology and its applications are still completely or partially unregulated. There is really not much for laws that admit to the use of this technology, nor that recognize or regulate how and to what extent human brain functions can or cannot be used, leaving a very open and huge range of possibilities for anyone that has its hands on this technology to use it – even when tested on people with more common place implants, like cochlear implants or pacemakers.

Because the brain chips are such a huge research area right now and because so many different kinds have been developed, it is important that we formulate strategies and directions that might be able to at least diminish some of the consequences of this technology and eliminate abuses. Implanting this technology in the human body without knowledge or consent must be prohibited, and at the absolute least, it must become widespread common knowledge that this is happening to people and law enforcement should have the technological means to be able to deal with it in the proper way.

This technology will become widespread enough to be used in normal medicine in the form of nanotechnology or in vaccinations against viruses of any kind. The human being subjected to this must be informed and humanity must know what the technology is capable of doing.

Paradoxically enough, the brain implant technology is getting too little or no attention or ethical debate. At the same time, the potential of this technology to affect human beings and change them is huge. The threat of the implantation technology is in fact, greater than genetic changes or enhancements.

Genetic changes are very much limited to human biology. Creating human-machine hybrids doesn’t have the same limitations. A computer connected to a human brain can share information at a distance. The potential for computer chips implanted into the human brain to change humanity is far greater.


ELLEN M. McGEE and GERALD Q. MAGUIRE (2007). Becoming Borg to Become Immortal: Regulating Brain Implant Technologies. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 16 , pp 291-302 doi:10.1017/S0963180107070326



Original: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1017164

Brain Research at Stanford: The Law

The H+ shift of Google (Part 4/4: Transhumanist shift)

As shown during the three last blog’s article (part 1 on Health, part 2 on Artificial Intelligence, part 3 on Robotics), Google is emancipating from its original core business.

Before 2013, all purchases of Google were intended to develop and optimize services directly related to Internet (its core business), either in the domain of pictures, or data processing, web analytics, map software, ads, blogging…

But till 2013, Google seems to have completely changed its purchasing policy, and companies bought by Google are now related to various domains in addition to robotics, such as neural networks (DNNResearch), natural language understanding (Wavii), renewable energy  (Makani Power), wearable computing (WIMM Labs), movement/facial recognition (Flutter, Viewdle), home automation (Nest Labs), etc…

Larry Page himself, one of the cofounders of Google with Sergey Brin, declared in its Google+ Page: “So you’re probably thinking wow!  That’s a lot different from what Google does today.  And you’re right.  But […] there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives.  So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses.  And please remember that new investments like this are very small by comparison to our core business.”

Google’s business is in mutation: this company is not focused on the IT domain only but also in the promising field of NBIC. The Nanotechnologies (N), Biology (B), Information technologies (I) and Cognitive sciences (artificial intelligence and brain-related sciences) (C) are improving and converging, in a sense that discoveries in a domain are serving the others domains, and this synergy allow fantastic advances.

Thanks to huge profits coming from its internet core business in which they are worldwide leaders, this war treasure allows Google to develop with strength many different activities which are all related to a transhumanism ideology.

As seen in part 1, transhumanism (often abbreviated as H+ or h+, as for Human+) is an international cultural and intellectual movement with the goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, psychological and perhaps emotional capacities and capabilities, and thus reducing diseases and extending human life. Transhumanists do not consider diseases and death to be a fatality, and they believe that human beings should use all possible solutions offered by sciences and technologies to improve themselves.

Google is becoming one of the main architects of the NBIC revolution and actively supports transhumanism revolution. Some of the most famous Google members are openly and actively promoting this movement, such as Vinton Cerf (Chief Internet Evangelist), or Raymond C. Kurzweil (appointed Director of Engineering at Google in 2012, and active member of Singularity University).

By applying Transhumanist ideology as an industrial dogma, Google today is a precursor to a strong trend: The underlying idea of Google is that each individual is an information system, or an ecosystem, of personal data. The advancements of Google are such in the field of IT that Google believes we can improve human beings through technical and technological ways, up to reducing death.

Beyond this Transhumanist ideology –whatever anyone can think of it–working in reducing death is the perfect way to answer to a global common fantasy, and for Google, to capture as large as the whole of humanity market.

This is the ultimate horizon and the ambition of Google in the coming years.

The H+ shift of Google (Part 3/4: Robotics)

After years of acquiring companies mainly in the IT domain, Google focused in recent months on robotics domain.

Google has indeed bought the eight major companies in the robotics domain in the world:

• Schaft Inc. (build humanoid robot),


• Industrial Perception inc. (use computer vision to better understand what they are looking at and handle non-standard situations),


• Redwood Robototics and Mekka Robotics (make humanoid bots and robotic arms),


• Holomni (make sophisticated wheels),


• Bot & Dolly and Autofuss (make immersive visuals for movies such as Gravity, and use of assembly line robots).


• The last one was on December 2013: Boston Dynamics, which is known for its robots such as BigDog, a rough-terrain robot that walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads, the 29 mile-per-hour fastest legged Cheetah, and an agile anthropomorphic robot known as Atlas.

The engineer at the head of this newly created Robotics Division of Google is M.Andy Rubin, the man who built Google’s Android software.

By adding proprietary solutions already owned by Google today to its recent acquisitions, this company could create robots able to interact with humans and react to the real world ecosystem in a few months.

And it is obvious that huge synergies exist between health, artificial intelligence and robotics domains.

To echo all these future projects, Google recently decided to rent a huge military zone of 350.000m² belonging to US Navy, Hangar-One of Mosffett Federal, near Silicon Valley, which is composed of three warehouses and two roads, to have space to test all its future aerospace and robotics projects.

The H+ shift of Google (Part 2/4: Artificial intelligence)

This blog post is the second of a four parts article. Please read the first previous blog article.

Google has been hiring leading researchers in the artificial intelligence space for years (Research at Google), including:

• Ray Kurzweil: Google’s Director of Engineering in 2012 (helping the company improve the accuracy of its search results), and co-founder of Singularity University. (See here for what he says about having our brains hooked up.)


• Sebastian Thrun: Google VP and Fellow,  led development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and worked on probabilistic programming techniques in robotics, with applications including robotic mapping,


• Peter Norvig: Google Director of Research -formerly Director of Search Quality-,


• Geoffrey Hinton: Google Distinguished Researcher,  a computer scientist and psychologist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks.


• Or Jeffrey Dean: Google Senior Fellow in the Knowledge Group, working in Deep Learning techniques, and who is going to work closely with a newly acquired “mysterious” company called DeepMind Technologies.

Even if very little information is available on DeepMind Technologies activities, this is a cutting edge artificial intelligence company which combines the best techniques from machine learning (Deep learning) and neuroscience systems to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms.

This company might be a huge help in the first primary goal of Google, by enhancing the capabilities of the world famous Google Search engine. The technologies behind search engines has evolved during years: by starting with keywords, then understanding synonyms of keywords as well, a new algorithm was quietly launched in September 2013 called Hummingbird, which was able to analyze queries semantically, trying to understand what the queries were really looking for. It is much more efficient for queries in natural language (conversational search), which is  one of the main missions of Ray C. Kurzweil: “My mission at Google is to develop natural language understanding with a team and in collaboration with other researchers at Google”, wired.

But beyond the will to provide a new generation of search engines able to understand better users and anticipate all their desires and requests, Google’s investments in this area prove that this company wants to offer more and more powerful artificial intelligence technology capabilities to integrate it in their current and future products.

Google and NASA have recently joined forces to launch the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab that will allow researchers at the two organizations to research artificial intelligence using a quantum computer. The lab will use a “D-Wave 2” computer, the world first computer able to manipulate 512-Quantum bits (or Qbits, the quantum analogue of the classical bit), particularly efficient to solve what are known as combinatorial optimization problems, which turn up in everything from genome sequence analysis and protein folding, to risk analysis. And a member of the Google Quantum AI Lab team wrote a paper on Nature on how Quantum computers are going to boost Artificial Intelligence. In addition, Google is also looking to build an artificial brain, aka “The Google Brain”.

Evolution of Artificial Intelligence technologies at Google is a real hot topic, and it will help to operate autonomous cars, improve medical examinations, make reactive robots with human behavior, or fight against death by understanding how our cells and organs function.

The H+ shift of Google (Part 1/4)

Transhumanism (often abbreviated as H+ or h+, as for Human+) is an international cultural and intellectual movement with the goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities, and thus reducing diseases and extending human life.

Transhumanists do not consider diseases and death to be a fatality, and they believe that human beings should use all possible solutions offered by sciences and technologies to improve themselves.

Google is becoming one of the main architects of this movement and actively supports transhumanism revolution.Some of the most famous Google members are openly and actively promoting this movement, such as Vinton Cerf (Google Chief Internet Evangelist), or Raymond C. Kurzweil (appointed Director of Engineering at Google in 2012, and active member of Singularity University). (See here for what Ray Kurzweil said about hooking people's brains up to computers.) 

At birth, the main goal of Google was to make available to the world all possible knowledge, by providing  a lot of different ways to do: its search engine, but also google books, google code, google map, google earth, google translate… and many others.

In less than two decades, Google has become ubiquitous in everyone’s life: every day Google answers more than one billion questions from people around the globe in 181 countries and 146 languages.

To grow rapidly, Google has done for 17 years many buyouts of companies, sizes and of different types, either to swallow up competitors, or to obtain some techniques and technologies internally.

This has helped to extend its empire, and this acquisition policy continues today with great success: In 2014, Google has surpassed Exxon company (king of oil), and is now the second market capitalization in the world, behind Apple, with 53.000 employees, and available cash of $55 billion. Google is investing today in many different markets, hoping to build on that or those that will be highly profitable in 2020.

But recently, Google’s ambition changed, and this company is now going slowly towards the merchant control of life in various ways.

HEALTH DOMAIN

Health domain is today a burgeoning market, but it is becoming increasingly digital and already generates gigabytes of data per patient. Google was already able for some years to detect an epidemic before State Medical networks, by analyzing user’s queries on the names of viruses, and correlating data with geographic origin of requests (Google Flu). This could be an extraordinary tool in epidemiology, prevention, and analysis of emerging trends and new diseases, if Google offered this opportunity to the medical community.

The interest of Google in Health domain is now even more official: Google has created a subsidiary specifically dedicated to health, named Calico (California Life Company) in September 2013, with M. Art Levinson, chairman and former CEO of Genentech (a pioneer of biotechnologies) and Chairman of Apple, as Chief Executive Officer and founding investor. The avowed aim of Calico is to increase human life expectancy from ten to twenty years by 2035. To succeed, this will require, amongst other things, massive computing power that can support its parent Google.

Google invests and also anticipates the needs in other nearby areas: DNA sequencing (subsidiary 23andMe, headed by Sergey Brin’s wife, one of the cofounder of Google), but also technological innovation internal to Google via its Google X Lab, such as connected contact lenses, equipped with a microchip to measure glucose (238 millions of people are diabetics worldwide and World Health Organization predict 438 millions diabetics in 2030).

For Google, the life domain has become one of the future new growths in the coming years:  The “death of the death” is an ancient dream becoming a major issue for Google, and for the first time in the history of humanity, a company has enough firepower to work efficiently on this subject, by creating new technologies, and working on a lot of different research topics.