Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/1161
17 WWW.HPLusmAGAzINe.COm Would you become suspicious if your husband or wife didn't want to do a telepathy-chip mind-meld after coming home late Friday night? For now, many of our best insights into brain function have come from studies placing electrodes deep inside the brain. Dr. rodrigo Quiroga and his colleagues have made great progress toward understanding how memories of faces, objects, animals and scenes are stored in sparse neural subnetworks in the region of the brain called the medial temporal lobe. understanding how the brain stores complex information is step one toward fi guring out how to read this information into a computer. And in time, even more fascinating possibilities may be realized. Consider the "telepathy chip" — a neural implant that allows the wearer to project their thoughts or feelings to others, and receive thoughts or feelings from others. There seems no in-principle reason why this can't be done, but it raises a huge number of questions philosophically, technically, psychologically and socially. It's not clear what percentage of a person's thoughts and feelings would actually be comprehensible to another person — in many cases, you might send your thoughts to someone else only to fi nd them interpreted as 90% gobbledygook mixed up with concepts and images that are recognizable to the receiver. It's also not too hard to envision some of the social and economic pressures that might arise surrounding telepathy chips. Would you become suspicious if your husband or wife didn't want to do a telepathy-chip mind-meld after coming home late Friday night? might you become suspicious of a potential romantic partner who wouldn't let you peek into his or her mind? What's she trying to hide? Teams of individuals linked via telepathy chips might achieve far greater effi ciency at some sorts of work than any group of detached individuals with similar skill could. Computer programming comes to mind, where the hardest part of the job is often understanding what other people were thinking when they wrote the code that you have to deal with. social subgroups rejecting telepathy chips could become isolated, backwards communities similar to the Amish today (who, it must be noted, don't mind their backwardness and isolation at all). ultimately, telepathy chips and related BCI devices could lead to the emergence of new forms of intelligence, "mindplexes" composed of independent human minds, yet also possessing a coherent self and consciousness at the higher level of the telepathically-interlinked human group. AI systems could potentially join these mindplexes, reading from telepathy chips and projecting into the user's minds not just answers to questions, but also original ideas conceived by the AIs that they believe could benefi t the humans. Humans who reject telepathic interplay with AIs could be at a signifi cant disadvantage both socially and economically. Nearly any job requiring insight and creativity would benefi t from a stream of "push technology" input from a savvy AI. And wouldn't your date with Jane tonight go better if your natural charming personality were enhanced by a stream of witty anecdotes and sensitive, empathic statements supplied by an AI who has studied Jane's profi le and history in the context of its comprehensive knowledge of human relationships? Potentially all this could lead to the emergence of a global brain spanning human and artifi cial intelligence. BCI is early-stage now, and we don't know where it will lead exactly, but the near-term possibilities are dramatically fascinating and the longer-term ones truly profound. Ben Goertzel is the CeO of AI companies Novamente and Biomind, a math Ph.D., writer, philosopher, musician, and all-around futurist maniac. Nanoparticles to aid brain imaging http://www.physorg.com/news78678220.html Nanotube scaffolds for Neural Implants http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/17525/?a=f Invariant Visual representation by single Neurons in the Brain http://www.vis.caltech.edu/~rodri/papers/nature03687.pdf Neural Impulse Actuator http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=neural+impulse+actuator&u m=1&ie=uTF-8&ei=nL3nsYX4Op-OtgPhxK3hAQ&sa=X&oi=video_result_ group&resnum=7&ct=title# emotiv systems http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/neuro/epoc-neuroheadset resOurCes