Silicon Valley Wants Inside Your Head—Literally

A recent article in the engineering professional's magazine IEEE Spectrum reveals that several powerful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are sponsoring initiatives to breach the barrier separating our brains from the rest of the world.  They all fall into the category of "brain-computer interfaces" or BCIs. 

For example, Facebook wants to develop a noninvasive (meaning you don't need surgery to wear it) system that would let you type five times faster on your smart phone than you do now.  A former Facebook executive named Mary Lou Jepsen is trying to develop an MRI-type device that will "interpret the patterns of neural activity associated with thoughts"—mind-reading, in other words.  Elon Musk, true to form, has thrown caution to the winds with his program to implant a sensor in your brain, bypassing the old-fashioned eyes, ears, and fingers and mainlining the Internet straight to your hippocampus, or wherever the thing will be attached. 

There are two things I'd like to say about these projects.  One is technical, and the other is moral.

The technical aspects of BCI projects are daunting, to say the least.  While some research has been done already into ways of communicating with the brains of people with "locked-in" syndrome (e. g. sufferers from Lou Gehrig's disease who can no longer move any voluntary muscles), progress has been slow and the systems have been customized to each individual.  The brain is the final frontier of biology, in that it is the most complex organ known and probably the one we know the least about in comparison to what there is to know—which, in a sense, is all human knowledge, since all human knowledge is, materially speaking, contained in brains.  The self-reflexive nature of brain research makes me wonder if there isn't something analogous to Gödel's incompleteness theorems at work in the brain's attempt to understand how the brain works. 

Mathematician Kurt Gödel showed in 1931 that every mathematical system of a certain complexity is bound to have statements in it that cannot be either proved or disproved without going outside the system.  The brain analogy of this is that the brain may not be able to understand exhaustively everything about itself. 

Whether or not that is the case is a purely speculative question at this point—just the kind of issue that the Silicon Valley types are not interested in.  They want to do something with the brain, not understand it, and their research is way toward the development end of R&D, with explicit timelines and the whole apparatus of high-tech development programs favored by those with essentially infinite amounts of cash.

What a contrast it is to the way some wealthy corporations used to behave.  Physicist Mark P. Mills points out in a recent article in the journal New Atlantis that U. S. corporations spend only about 7% of their total R&D money on basic research, which the government's Office of Management and Budget defines as "study directed toward fuller knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena and of observable facts without specific applications toward processes or products in mind."  Mills makes the telling point that while the basic-research labs of the old pre-breakup Bell System and IBM can count thirteen Nobel Prizes to their credit, the free-spirited pursuit of knowledge wherever it leads is no longer in favor in the U. S. corporate world.  Though the lag between a discovery and the awarding of a Nobel Prize can often be decades, Mills looks in vain for any comparable scientific achievements from the tightly-application-focused "moon-shot" projects currently favored by Silicon Valley.

The technical point here is that those pursuing BCIs may have bitten off more than they can chew, and the nature of the problem might require a longer-term, less focused perspective.  Even if the goal of brain-computer interfaces is worthy of pursuit, we may be in for a long marathon instead of a sprint.

Now for the moral issue.  Is it right to read another person's mind?  Especially if they are not fully aware of what is involved in the process?  Ah, the corporations say, we would never do such a thing without your consent.  Yes, I reply, the same kind of consent I give whenever I load a new piece of software on my computer and lie that I have read and understood eight pages of legal gobbledegook when I click the button that will let me load the software. 

We have already been trained to allow snooping at a scale that twenty years ago would have been regarded as outrageous.  Everyone who gets online has probably had the experience of doing a web search for a consumer item in one place, only to find ads for it popping up later during a completely unrelated activity.  A combination of cookies and data-sharing among Internet companies on a grand scale means that privacy, at least when it comes to things you search for online, is mostly a thing of the past. 

Should we let the greedy hands of the Internet reach into the last remaining sanctuary of privacy, the human mind itself?  I am reminded in this connection of a passage in one of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  In it one of the English children transported to Narnia is named Lucy, and at one point she is alone in a magician's house, perusing a great book of magic.  She comes upon a spell "which would let you know what your friends thought about you."  She says the magic words, and a kind of television process shows her two friends of hers in a train.  She hears them talking about her, and not in a nice way, either. 

A bit later, Aslan the Lion appears, and says to her, "Child. . . I think you have been eavesdropping."  When she replies that she didn't think it counted as eavesdropping if it was magic, he replies "Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way."  I don't know how popular the Chronicles are in Silicon Valley, but it's just possible that a moral lesson a child could understand needs to be taught to some of our most powerful technical leaders.

Sources:  The IEEE Spectrum article "Silicon Valley's Latest Craze:  Brain Tech" by Eliza Strickland appeared on pp. 8-9 of the July 2017 print issue.  The Spring 2017 edition of The New Atlantis carried Mark P. Mills' article "Making Technological Miracles" on pp. 37-55.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory.  Lucy's exploit with magic is found on pp. 131-135 of the Macmillan paperback edition of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, originally copyrighted 1952.

The Worth of Work

Most professional engineers work for pay, and that leads to an interesting question:  which is more important, the work or the pay you get for it?  I bring up that question after reading an essay on work by the well-known medievalist C. S. Lewis. 

In the essay, Lewis distinguished between two types of work.  The first type is work that is worth doing for its own sake.  Some professions are automatically included in this classification:  teachers (Lewis was a professor at Oxford), doctors, pastors, and other members of the helping professions, for instance.  As long as members of these groups do their work faithfully and competently, they should have no problem looking themselves in the mirror and saying, “I’m glad I do what I do, because it makes the world a better place.”  There are other types of work that can fit into this first category, and I’ll get to those in a minute.

The second kind of work is done merely to get a paycheck.  The thing you do for the paycheck is almost irrelevant:  it is simply a means to the end of getting money.  Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong about earning money.  In a fallen world, money and economics are inescapable aspects of existence.  But if you make money your No. 1 priority and aren’t too particular about how you get it, you can end up doing things that, at best, are unnecessary for the world’s betterment, and at worst, positively harm others.  Scam operators, burglars, and drug dealers all get money, but the legal system has objections to their methods.

Where do engineers fit into all this?  There is no easy general answer to that question.  I think the question of pay is high on the list of most young engineering graduates early in their careers.  It’s the first thing they often mention when you ask them what they’ll do after graduation:  “go out and earn some bucks!”  But with their special expertise and competencies in design, engineers at least have a chance to wind up doing the first kind of job:  one that is intrinsically worth doing on its own merits, regardless of the pay scale. 

Besides engineering tasks that serve the obvious helping professions, I think a wide variety of other kinds of engineering jobs are worth doing on their own.  What if the thing you help create doesn’t directly help people, in the sense of medical treatments and so on, but is a thing of beauty—an artistic creation that helps others see the world in a way they had not seen it before?  Take, for example, the platoons of engineers needed to make an animated film these days, the kind that takes the natural world seriously and attempts to portray it the way it really looks and acts. 

If you peruse the output of the Association of Computing Machinery’s annual SIGGRAPH conferences (many examples of which are on YouTube), you will find an amazing array of animations of everything from hair blowing in the wind, to cannonballs blasting through realistic curtains, to ribbons tying themselves into realistic knots.  These things wind up in almost unnoticeable corners of animated films, but they add realism and depth as the engineers behind the scenes overcome the challenges of using great but limited computing power to portray the way physical objects really interact with each other.  The audience gets to see only those simulations that worked.  The ones that blow up or produce screen confetti end up on the digital cutting-room floor, and serve as stepping stones along the way to success. 

A less straightforward example of engineering that is worth doing is the work of engineers who create machines that do work formerly done by people.  The chairman of Foxconn, the company that makes iPhones and employs over a million people worldwide, says that he wants to replace as many of his workers as he can with robots.  Three-dimensional printers that turn CAD drawings into working machines with moving parts are on the market now—my school is thinking of buying one, so you know they can’t be that expensive.  The story of technological unemployment is at least as old as the Industrial Revolution, but signs are that it’s going to be a huge factor in the worldwide economy in the next few years.   And engineers are behind all the technology that will let Foxconn run with more robots than people, if that ever comes to pass.

Does this mean that engineers will eventually work themselves out of a job, like the mythical snake that started eating its own tail until it disappeared?  Some people think so.  A group calling itself the Transhumanists believe computers will soon become smarter than people and basically take over the world, leaving behind the old-fashioned “meat-cage” models of people who are based in natural biology.

Those of us with a Christian worldview know this isn’t possible, however, because machines don’t have spirits.  You could in principle have a world full of machines busily making other machines and exchanging bits and so on, but without humans there would be no spirit and no life.  There might be a great deal going on in that world, but without anyone to see it, it would be a dead world, as dead as the moon. 

The thing called a human being is an amalgam of spirit and matter, and exists because of love.  To the extent we recognize that fact, we are guided into the right occupation and work for the right reasons.  To the extent we forget it, we play into the hands of those for whom money is everything, and for whom love is simply another overhead expense to be eliminated.

Sources:  C. S. Lewis’s essay “Good Work and Good Works” appears as chapter 5 in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1959).  I learned of Foxconn’s plans and interesting facts on 3-D printing from an article by Michael Ventura that appeared in the online edition of the Austin Chronicle on Jan. 25, 2013 at http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2013-01-25/letters-at-3am-what-are-human-beings-for/.