[This is a talk I was going to give at Slush but had to change my travel plans.]
A 12 minute talk should be plenty to address this simple question. Just kidding. This is one of the profound questions that humanity has grappled with for a long time. Here are three artistic takes throughout history. The first is a biological take on being human. This plate from ancient Greece shows centaurs who are half human and half horse. Mythology is full of human animal hybrids. The centaur myth is likely to have arisen in civilizations that were invaded by other cultures that had domesticated horses. Let’s fast forward to the industrial age and a mechanical take on being human. There is a great story from the mid 1800s by Edgar Allan Poe called “The Man That Was Used Up.” It is about a general who has a secret. Spoiler alert: he turns out to be mostly assembled of prosthetic parts which have to be put together every morning. And finally here is a recent take, a still from Star Trek The Next Generation. In this scene “7 of 9,″ a human who has been augmented to become part of the Borg explains why the Borg are superior to humans. But in the series humans defeat the Borg. So throughout history we have worried about being less than human through the metaphor of the time: biology, mechanics, computers.
Now this talk is part of the Human Augmentation track, so let’s take a look at augmentation, starting with the body. As it turns out, I have a small augmentation in the form of a dental implant. And that is a type of augmentation of the body that is very old. Here is a picture of dental implants from more than 1,000 years ago. Here is another very common type of human augmentation: glasses. Now you might say. Gee Albert, you don’t understand augmentation. Dental implants and glasses just give you back some functionality that you lost. But once you take that seemingly small step it is rapidly possible to expand on capabilities. For instance, instead of just vision, you can now have night vision. Now you might say: yes that augments your capabilities but it is not “augmentation” because the night vision glasses are external and not fused into the body. But that is a somewhat misleading distinction. Here is a picture of a defibrillator. It is an external way of restarting a human’s heart. And here is an x-ray image of a pace maker. Some pacemakers just keep the heart beating regularly, but others also act as a defibrillator. In both cases we have fundamentally augmented what is possible for a human. So: humans have augmented the body for a long time, we will continue to do so going forward and whether or not the augmentation is physically implanted is at best a secondary consideration.
Let’s shift to considering augmentation of the mind. This too is something humans have done for a very long time. The abacus, for example, was invented several thousand years ago to augment our ability to compute with large numbers. Here is a more recent augmentation: the ability to get to places without having to read and interpret a map. And of course more recently we have package that into our phones. Again you might say: but Albert, these are not augmentations because they are external to the body. Just as with the example of the defibrillator this seems like an artificial distinction. And furthermore many of us are so close to our phones that when we misplace it we feel like a part of us is missing. This morning on the way here I shared a cab with an entrepreneur who for a moment thought they had left their phone at the hotel and they were super agitated by that. If we are honest with ourselves, I think many of us feel the same way. So yes, if you want to be a stickler you might say that it’s only augmentation if it is directly connected to the mind Matrix style. And if that’s really what you are looking for, we are well on our way. Not just with companies such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Brian Johnson’s Kernel. But we are doing it today already with Cochlear implants. These have external signal processors that then connect directly to the acoustic nerve. So we are basically pretty close to a direct brain connection. Again though the key point is that we have been augmenting our minds for a long time and we still consider ourselves human.
So what then is critical to our humanity? It is not the shape of our body, nor the specific way in which our brain works. Those are not what makes humans human. What then is it? In my book World After Capital I argue that it is knowledge. In this world only we humans have knowledge, by which I mean externalized recordings such as books or music or art. I can read a book today or see a piece of art created by another human hundreds or even thousands of years ago and in a totally different part of the world. We share lots of things with other species, such as emotions, some form of speech and consciousness, whatever exactly that turn out to be. But knowledge is distinctly human. No other species has it.
Knowledge comes from the knowledge loop. We learn something, we use that to create something new and we share that with the world. That loop has been active for thousands of years. We each get to participate in this loop. And we get to do so freely. That turns out to be the crucial feature of what it means to be human: we reap the collective benefit of the knowledge loop but we participate in it freely as individuals. That is the big difference between us and the Borg. And that is also what we need to keep in mind when working on augmentation. We must be careful to assure that it increases, rather than limits, our freedom to participate in the knowledge loop.
And there is real risk here. Think about a brain link for example. It could give you much more direct access to the knowledge loop but it could also be used to prevent you from participating it. I recommend Ramez Naan’s Nexus, Crux, Apex series that deals with exactly this set of questions. Like all technology, human augmentation can be used for good and for bad. Let’s all try to work hard to use it for good.
