From the Atlantic online:
The conspiracy geeks and Area 51 obsessives are right—the U.S. government is heavily invested in research projects that brush the borders of science fiction. But many of those ventures aren’t top secret, so long as you’re willing to wade through the latest budget statement for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which contains funding estimates for various projects, including some distinctly sinister-sounding ones. The spookiest of these is probably the “Brain Machine Interface Program,” which promises to “create new technologies for augmenting human performance through the ability to access neural codes in the brain in real time and integrate them into peripheral device or system operations.” In other words, if the project pans out (a rather large “if,” to be sure), the soldier of the future will be a functional telepath, controlling equipment from a distance and perhaps even communicating “brain-to-brain” with his fellow soldiers. This may sound implausible, but an article about the project in the journal Nature reports that experiments on rats and monkeys have already yielded remarkable results: electrodes were implanted in the animals’ motor cortexes, and when neurons in that region of the brain fired in certain patterns, the electrodes successfully transmitted a signal to operate a simple lever or robot arm. Meanwhile, neuroscientists in another part of the same program are attempting to transmit sounds and images directly into the brain’s auditory cortex, and a third group is aiming to discover whether parts of the human brain can be replaced by silicon microchips. Such “memory implants” could enable the military to insert combat experience into a soldier’s head—creating, with the other projects, the possibility that a fighter pilot could “upload” his training and then fly a plane from the ground, all the while following orders beamed from headquarters directly to his brain.
As Dan put it, “Pretty neat stuff.” It’s true; there’s nothing like the fulfillment of the Terminator-Matrix prophecies to get you up in the morning. I, for one, welcome our new cyberdeathmachine overlords and look forward to my grandchildren’s eventual enslavement. Computers are far better than people, and it’s high time we let them assimilate us.
But seriously, Marzipan. This is not the first serious attempt at crazy neural link cybernetics, nor is it that impressive yet, compared to some recent successes. Nevertheless, dipping into the DoD’s bottomless cash pit is certain to bear fruit eventually. I’m generally in support of anything DARPA wants to spend money on; they gave us the internet, and that puts them up there with Prometheus in my book. I mean, their biggest waste of funds so far was the Star Wars program, and that involved space lasers, so it was still pretty cool.
evan :: Oct.09.2003 ::
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