‘Natural-Born Cyborgs’: The Path to Augmentation
/By Dan Forbush
I was a serious runner in my teens. To suffer an injury that prevented my daily workout was a grievous matter. Whatever the injury, I usually was still able to ride a bike, so for my daily aerobic challenge I’d climb onto my ten-speed Raleigh and set off on the backroads out of Potsdam to far-flung northern New York places like Parishville, Colton, and Hannawa Falls. The terrain is remarkably flat in the St. Lawrence Valley. Lots of farmland and open fields.
AnDY clark is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex
I liked my 1960s Raleigh, but it was a technological Neanderthal compared to my 21st century electrically powered Trek. I have four choices in the strength with which it augments me. When I approach a steep hill, I slam it from “eco” to “turbo,” and feeling a bit like Superman, soar right up it.
But that’s not all. My Trek has fancy gadgetry of which I could only have dreamed a half-century ago. I have five readouts from which to choose, telling me speed, maximum speed, calorie burn, power, distance, time-elapsed, and battery power remaining. It even tells me the percentage of battery power that remains on my iPhone, which sits in a sturdy clamp beside it on the handlebars. Andy Clark would call it my “extended mind” and he would call me a “natural-born cyborg” in my use of it, a “cognitive hybrid” who repeatedly occupies “regions of design space radically different from those of our biological forebears.”
Powered by the A11 Bionic chip with a six-core CPU, the mind that sits on my handlebars performs 600 billion operations per second in serving up a range of data feeds, including a GPS-manufactured map, updates from the Weather Channel, news alerts from the New York Times, and an infinitude of songs, podcasts, videos, and audiobooks. This mind also will shoot a picture or video of anything that captures my interest. If some emergency befalls me, it will provide a direct phone connection to anyone I wish and even issue a medical alert.
My 86 billion neurons are capable of ten quadrillion operations per second, so I possess more complex and nuanced cognitive functions as perception, decision-making, and motor control. But my iPhone extends my mental capabilities far beyond their natural limits — as does yours.
”Pretty soon,” Clark writes, “we shall be cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds are spread across biological brains and non-biological circuitry.”
From iPhones, we’re moving into “smart caps” and “smart helmets.” These are fine, but for a high-speed connection between brains and computers, we’ll need implants like Telepathy, the device Elon Musk’s Neuralink already is implanting in humans.
RAY KURZWEIL IS one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions.
Let’s remember that our iPhones also offer generative AI apps and, as Apple recently announced, will soon be suffused by “Apple Intelligence,” the “personal intelligence system that puts generative models at the core of iPhone, iPad, and Mac.”
The “extended minds” of our computers rapidly are becoming more human-like. The trend is exponential, says Ray Kurzweil, a Unitarian Universalist recognized today as one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists.
As brain/computer interfaces become faster, we’ll be augmented by “hybrid thinking,” he says. He thinks we’ll achieve super-inteliigence around 2045. That will mark a key milestone in the coming of the “Singularity,” the moment when the boundaries between human and machine intelligence blur, leading to unprecedented advancements and transformations in technology, society, and human capabilities.
“People will still look like humans, with normal human skin,” Kurzweil says in this interview in Wired. “But they will be a combination of the brains we're born with, as well as the brains that computers have, and they will be much smarter … We'll all have superhumans within our brains.”
It’s against this backdrop that the co-authors of Darwin’s Edge bring this tale with AI and Faith to the New York State Summer Writers Institute, which starts Sunday, June 23. On Sunday, June 30, we’ll bring it to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Saratoga Springs and Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Boca Raton.
As AI and brain/computer interfaces develop, they raise profound ethical questions. By thinking ahead, we can develop frameworks to ensure these technologies are used responsibly and ethically. By scripting into the story’s lead role a Unitarian Universalist minister, we create a 2043 Analog into whose shoes we may step in contemplating Sarina Rao’s invitation to become a ThinkPal Volunteer, demonstrating the power of the Thalamitic Integration (TI) to the American people as we approach the Presidential Election of 2044 and our opportunity to put Henry Van Buren in the White House.
AI for UUS will hold its first organizational meeting this tuesday, june 25, the day penguin random house will publish ray kurzweil’s the singularity is nearer: when we merge with ai.
Van Buren stands for all of the ideals and values that Rev. Pete favors. And Rev. Pete has always been fascinated by the intertwining of technology and evolution, pondering where AI is leading us and why.
Week by week, we’ll take you thought this narrative, now that Darwin’s Edge has received FDA’s green light to proceed with testing ThinkPal in seven human subjects. We join the story on Tuesday, October 6, the day FDA acts on ThinkPal and Van Buren, as Chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, holds the first hearing on building the National Brain/Computer Interface.
This scenario may be fiction, but if Kurzweil is right, we can be certain that something like the NB/CI is coming. We’ll need a regulatory body to oversee the development of this remarkable new communications platform that supports the direct connection of human minds to AI clouds and to one another. How should this transformation to unfold? How in particular should Unitarian Universalists feel about it? And what should we start doing about it now?
These are important questions we’ll be posing to experts on AI and the Human at the same time we consult with them and ChatGPT, Gemini and Midjourney in crafting our 20 weekly Darwin’s Edge episodes between now and Election Day.
All UUs who are interested in bringing the “AI conversation” into their congregations are invited to join us for an informal conversation in Zoom that we’ve set for this Tuesday, June 25, at 10:30 a.m. EDT. That’s the date Penguin Random Books will publish Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. That timing just feels right. Click here to join our first meeting: AI for UUs.
In the meantime, we invite you to scroll to the bottom of our opening scene and you’ll find the story unfolding a participatory way. Tell us your hopes, fears, and questions about AI and our Large Language Models will write them in.
