With
the advances in modern technology, all kinds of new connections are being
created between humans and robots. The
most ideal one, certainly by the standards of the transhumanists, is to become
a cyborg, a human-robot. But some recent
work by researchers at M.I.T. and Boston University is creating a much more
subtle bond between these two complex behavioral entities. Using EEG’s, they are working on ways to have
a human be able to correct the actions of a robot by simply thinking the
correction that has to be done. And
we’re not even talking about fully conscious thinking, where a person would
formally think out what has to be corrected through verbal commands. We are talking about minimally aware
pre-conscious thinking. This allows for
the creation of a seamless interaction between human and robot. Or more precisely, the robot becomes an
extension of the human.
It
would appear that eventually a person will be able to sit in his armchair and
even if he is tired, he will be able to think about all the processes of
housework and cooking and have those processes carried out by robots, without
ever having to tire himself out by thinking about these matters very clearly. The world of process can go on moving around
him, while he just sits in his armchair in a daze.
But
there may be other results from this harnessing of human thought to
technological activity. What if people
become impatient with the unpredictable flow of the human narrative. In normal human narrative, there is
frequently an interweaving among the different separate actions being carried
out by physically adjacent people, and in this interaction with other people,
each person is not only the creator of his own organic imprints, which he
leaves on other people as well as on himself, but also the recipient of the
organic imprints from the people with whom he is engaged and with whom he is
interacting. With brain-controlled
robots, the flow of influence and control is one way. The imprints a person leaves are clean,
defined, discrete imprints, free from the admixture of the recipients imprints
on the person while the person is leaving his imprints and thus free from the
influence of a recipient’s imprints while the person is leaving his imprints. Robot process becomes seen as a more effective
activity than human narrative in achieving one’s immediate human goals and
ultimately one’s long-term life purposes, because, as the agent, a person can
control it in a cleaner manner.
And
yet one is not always going to have the opportunity to carry out his life
activities free from the participation and even the interference of other human
beings. So some human beings may
experience, in their impatience to exert a total control over their field of
experience and ultimately their objective external world reality, a blurring in
their minds between robots and other humans.
Techniques for brain control over robots may be extended to other
humans, particularly with the insertion of little chips in the brains of these
humans who can then be controlled like robots.
They can be manipulated to function sort of like servant cyborgs.
Some
people will say that these ideas represent fantastic speculation, but this
column has often pointed out that flowing blendable continual mental stimulation
cannot be easily contained and that powerful techniques developed in
conjunction with modern technology can easily leach out of their original
intended purposes into other areas where the techniques can produce great
potential harm. The tendency for modern technological
techniques to morph, to mutate, to blur is always present. As a result, it is very easy to imagine that
techniques developed to be used in connection to robots can easily blur into
use with the main complex behavioral entity competing with robots – namely
human beings. And the experience of such
total control over these organic complex behavioral entities can give humans a
feeling of being all powerful like God, and therefore immortal and not subject
to the organic perishability to which all human beings, at least at present,
must eventually succumb.
There
is still another danger that we have to worry about as human beings in
conjunction with the development of powers in the human brain to directly
control robots. As robots evolve and
develop more and more complex internal workings to be able to handle more and
more diverse and intricate processes, it might become possible for the robot
equivalent of a brain to send back code to human brains to carry out processes
or parts of processes in the service of the purposes for which the robot has
been programmed. In other words, the human
brain could be leaving itself vulnerable to having roles reversed in relation
to the robot or robots that supposedly is or are serving it. It wouldn’t necessarily require a dominating
robot sense of self for this role reversal to occur. It would simply require that the robot be of
sufficient complexity as a behavioral entity to be able to continue with
whatever complex activities for which it has been programmed, and to enlist the
support of the human to carry out its preprogrammed goals through the pathways
that have been established to connect the robot and the human brain.
Does
this also sound fantastic? There is the
notion of the technological singularity that there will come a point soon where
technology, evolving faster and faster, will provide the foundation for
creating machines that are smarter than humans.
If and when the singularity occurs, it would not be too difficult to
imagine opportunities for the master-servant relationship between human and
robot to be reversed. Particularly given
the fact that pathways of control between human and robot already exist. Being aware of this risk, as I assume all
scientists today are, why are some of them playing with fire by setting up
these pathways between humans and robots?
Are they purposely trying to create the conditions for the enslavement
of the human race?
(c) 2017 Laurence Mesirow
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