Natural Born Cyborgs

Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence

Andy Clark, Beav 202.4834 CLA 2003, Oxford University Press

Clark's principal thesis is that human beings are not merely tool-using but mind+tool merging - we co-adapt to the tools we make to co-adapt with. We have been "cyborgs" since we picked up the first stick to extend our reach, or the spoke the first words to project our minds into others.

Tools, text, and timekeeping redefine the boundaries of our plastic brains and selves. Many powerful ideas and stirring phrases.

• 003 naked Cyborg, electronic virgin (no implants), human-technology symbionts
• 004 hybridization: speech, counting, writing, printing, digital, mindware upgrades
• 004 biological skinbag, fortress of skin and skull
• 005 brain expert for: pattern recognition, perception, physical control
  • not good for planning and intricate derivations of consequences
• 005 tools are integral parts of problem solving systems
• 006 math with paper, external symbolic resource

• 007 "we are creatures whose minds are special because they are tailor made for mergers and coalitions.

• 009 Kanny = "extension of the hand" for young Finns

• 010 loss of laptop cyborg mild stroke

• 011 mind-body-scaffolding

• 026 western prejudice: mind deeply special and distinct from nature
• 028 Nonpenetrative cyborg technology - fluid integration and personal transformation, transparent
  • pen, hands, hippocampus, ventral cochlear nucleus ... tools, or merged being?
• 031 ... unusual degree of cortical plasticity ... extended childhood
• 033 most "thought" unconscios
• 037 "opaque" and "transparent" technologies

• quotes Donald Norman "The Invisible Computer" 1999

• 041 "have the time" == can consult my watch (transparent, easy), but not "have the word" == can consult my dictionary (opaque, distracting)

• 043 brain as insulated engine of mind and reason is spirit-stuff in modern dress

  • frontier is not the skin
• 049 marble message machine: marbles in exit track = messages, return erasure, in pocket is private
• 051 tangible user interface - like paper, not screen
  • Yo-Yo Ma - Gershenfeld electronic bow for cello
• 052 U Central Florida overlay knee-joint model on leg

• 053 traversable interface between real and virtual

  • mixed reality play for children

• 069 think through the interface - which coadapts with user

• 060 Experiment 1 nose experimenter taps own nose and strokes subject's nose synchronized, randomly

  • after one minute half subjects feel illusion of their nose extending two feet in front
  • Exp2 tap subject's hand under table, tap desktop, ditto illusion. Hammer on desktop, galvanic skin response jumps
  • Exp3 tapdummy hand

  • Ramachandran and Blekeslee: Phantoms of the Brain 1998 p58

• 062 Monkey visual receptive fields grow to accommodate tool
• 064 Card trick, make your card of 6 disappear (all cards replaced by 5)
• 065 eye track, replace text with gibberish outside visual field
• 066 stranger asking questions replaced behind door, half of people notice

• 068 visual brain opportunistic depends on nature holding still

• 072 left parietal "general sense of number" 9 is closer to 10 than 5, left frontal "rote arithmetic" 7x7=49
• 073 phonetic loop short term memory, 7 items western, 10 items Cantonese (shorter number words)
• 075 good at frisbee (patterns, spatial), bad at logic (200 digit numbers)
• 080 adoption of text, external memory for developing ideas from half-baked
• 084 deaf children with cochlear implants recover auditory cortex rapidly
• 085 newborn infants vision highly restricted, 40x less resolution than adults, a year to develop
• 086 no "fixed human nature", intermingled with culture and physical objects - external scaffoldings (pen and paper)

  • Warwick U. under-25s thumbs most dexterous digits - explosively opportunistic

• 4r26 M. Goodale, "Where Does Vision End and Action Begin?" Current Biology R489-R491 (1998): 491.

• 089 Brian Cantrell Smith, "Distance is what there is no action at"
• 090 Dennett: tank and brain controlling robot
• 091 Miguel Nicolelis @ Duke, owl monket with 96 frontal cortex electrodes controls robot arm at MIT

• 3r42 P. Griffiths and R. Gray, "Developmental Systems and Evolutionary Explanation," Journal of Philosophy 91:6 (1994):277-305.

• 093 Africa cam: http://www.africam.com

• 094 upside-down flip goggles - a few days to adapt, intermittent use adapts both ways
• 098 Moonrock gathering robot performs details from high-level instructions
• 099 ABS braking feels like direct control - extension of reflexes
• 101 Tichener circles - conscious mind sees different circles, grasp reflexes not fooled (more ancient system)
• 101 V1 early vision to IT intertemporal cortex, recognition classification reasonint
• 102 V1 to PP (poteriar parietal) movement
• 102 moonrock robot - like our body-control reflexes
• 102 Ramachandran "the Zombie in the brain", mass of automatic subsystems

• 105 basic feeling of presence is always some kind of illusion, proper telepresense is quite similar

• 105 less reliable correlations hinders brain construction of body image
• 106 remote text editing, comm disruption creates "alienation"

• 106 Neural motor emulator models external kinetics

  • 4r34 M. Kawato et al "A Hierarchical Neural Network Model for the Control and Learning of Voluntary Movement' Biological Cybernetics 57 (1987): 169-85.

  • 4r34 P. Dean, J. Mayhew, and P. Langdon, "Learning and Maintaining Saccadic Accuracy," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 6 (1994): 117-38.

  • 4r34 R. Grush, "The Architecture of Representation," Philosphical Psychology 10:1(1997): 5-25.

• 106 damage causes jerkiness and oscillations

  • 4r35 Thatch et al., "The Cerebellum and the Adaptive Coordination of Movement," Annual Review of Neuroscience 15 (1992): 403-42.

• prediction superimposed over transmission from robot in space

  • 4r36 W. Kim and A. Bejczy, "Demonstration of a High-Fidelity Predictive/Preview Display Technique for Telerobotic Servicing in Space," IEEE Trans. Robotics and Automation 9:5 (1993): 698-702.

• 106 a sense of unfolding and potential intervention

• 110 shoes, not crutches
• 111 telepresence, VR, and telerobotics can be tranformitive if it expands our sense of body and action
  • the brain is plastic enough to learn new kinds of feedback and action

Brainfart Imagine a trained language of electric stimulus and movement - a human operator and a human remote. Propiocetion-like sensors on the operator, tingle stimulators on the remote. Predictive-adaptive to copensate for "double delay". This could be used for amusement, emergency first responder, training. Also, tingling to distract from muscle pain associated with exercise. For L.Bell?

• 112 Datamitt (1993) - hand squeeze in New York felt in California

• 113 ProPs (Canny and Poulos at UCB) - personal roving presence devices - goal: new kind of embodied person

• 114 failed technologies are "loud, abrasive barriers"between us and our worlds
• 115 Stelarc (Oz) third hand, controlled by leg muscles ... writing with 3 hands
• 121 Roy Bakay at Emory, stroke victim controls cursor with two glass cone neural implants. Cones coated with neurotrophic chemicals extracted from patient's knee, prompting nerve growth, helping cortical neurons grow into cones and connect to electrodes.

  • 5r13 Duncan Graham-Rowe, "Think and It's Done," New Scientist, October 17, 1998.

• 124 Dobelle Eye to array of 68 electrodes implanted into visual cortex of blind 62yo male
  • like back and tongue displays
• 126 British DERA (Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, Cognitive Cockpit
• 127 Kevin Warwick (UK) implanted arm electrodes to and from computer

• 130 Dennett Elbow Room (1984) "I am the sum total of the parts I control directly"

• 133 "neurally stored information is fluently accessable" by many routes in many sutuations

• 135 Kevin Kelly Out of Control "co-control" soft self-management

• 140 Carolyn Baum, Wash.U.St.Louis, Alzheimers sufferers living alone in homes full of cognitive props, tools, and aids.
  • memory centers with stored notes and agendas, photos of families and friends with names and relationships
  • labels and pictures on doors, open storage of pots, pans, and checkbooks in plain view
  • memory books for new events, meetings, plans
  • neurotypicals use pens, papers, etc. because slightly "Alzheimic"
• 141 The forceful relocation from functional home to hospital/center inflicts new brain damage on top of old.
• 141 we have Pleistocene biases, but we are unusually open to deep reconfiguration
• 144 slugs and slime trails - slime is salt and glycoprotein pathway marker and nutrient for algae growth, 70% of metabolic energy
• 145 people leave electronic trails that tell similar others what combinations to buy, better than misleading "categories"

• 147 Neil Gershenfeld's 1999 When Things Start to Think

• 148 Los Alamos Distributed Knowledge Systems Project Principia Cybernetica Web

• 150 Jon Kleinberg "Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment" estimate "authority" from hyperlinks

• 158 disfunctional communal narrowing of attention, runaway positive feedback from initial bad choices
• 161 linux
• 167 in 1999, 70% of the world's population had never made a phone call, in 2004 10% of world has easy internet access
• 169 MIT Courseware, World Health Organization provides top 1000 journals to world's 65 poorest countries

• 170 Jeffrey Rosen "The Eroded Self", New York Times Magazine, April 30, 2000. Unblocked intrusions lower expectations and weaken the law.

• 171 Scott McNealy of SUN "You already have zero privacy; get over it." News conference about Jini for the fully networked home, Ubiquitous Computing

• 176 Generating messages has become relatively cheaper than reading them.
• 177 Donald Knuth stopped having an email address on January 1, 1990
  • new business etiquette: sparse messages, when action required, only to those who need to know
• 178 John Pickering - learning agents can shape and isolate us
  • spell checkers can dumb down our vocabulary
• 180 Kirstie Bellman: play-bots for children can relieve busy parents
  • interactive toy that teaches sharing, better behavior with real playmates

• 181 Steve Talbot Nature Institute NETFUTURE

  • example: email and connection tools enable unwanted disconnection (moving employees to remote offices, for example)
• 182 narrowing focus, while physical bookstores lead us to neighbors
• 183 White supremacy Goes High Tech: i.e. fake African-Americans call for pedophelia
  • People pose as different genders, ages, etc.
• 184 chatbots to spam, CAPTCHA (from Carnegie Mellon)

• 186 Afghan-American Tamin Ansary 9/12/2001 letter.

• 187 Slashdot Rob Malda, moderation chosen for broadening and quality

• 189 Human brains are incomplete cognitive systems

• 190 U.Warwick: heavy internet surfers more likely members of community groups, less passive TV.
• 191 Moravec, minds ("mere jelly") preserved electronically. Clark minds are biobrain, body and tools.
• 193 Free users from box on tabletop, probable cellphone endpoint is implants, "telepathy".

• 195 "world, technology, and culture that will build the kinds of people we choose to be.

• 197 William Burroughs "We're here to go" Dead City Records, 1990

• 198 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post-Human (UChicago Press 1999).