The Pentagon's Push to Program Soldiers' Brains

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 15, 2018 at 7:42:41 PM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Pentagon's Push to Program Soldiers' Brains
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The Pentagon’s Push to Program Soldiers’ Brains
> The military wants future super-soldiers to control robots with their thoughts.
> By MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS
> Nov 2018 Issue
> <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/the-pentagon-wants-to-weaponize-the-brain-what-could-go-wrong/570841/>
>
> I. Who Could Object?
>
> “Tonight I would like to share with you an idea that I am extremely passionate about,” the young man said. His long 
> black hair was swept back like a rock star’s, or a gangster’s. “Think about this,” he continued. “Throughout all 
> human history, the way that we have expressed our intent, the way we have expressed our goals, the way we have 
> expressed our desires, has been limited by our bodies.” When he inhaled, his rib cage expanded and filled out the 
> fabric of his shirt. Gesturing toward his body, he said, “We are born into this world with this. Whatever nature or 
> luck has given us.”
>
> His speech then took a turn: “Now, we’ve had a lot of interesting tools over the years, but fundamentally the way 
> that we work with those tools is through our bodies.” Then a further turn: “Here’s a situation that I know all of you 
> know very well—your frustration with your smartphones, right? This is another tool, right? And we are still 
> communicating with these tools through our bodies.”
>
> And then it made a leap: “I would claim to you that these tools are not so smart. And maybe one of the reasons why 
> they’re not so smart is because they’re not connected to our brains. Maybe if we could hook those devices into our 
> brains, they could have some idea of what our goals are, what our intent is, and what our frustration is.”
>
> So began “Beyond Bionics,” a talk by Justin C. Sanchez, then an associate professor of biomedical engineering and 
> neuroscience at the University of Miami, and a faculty member of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. He was speaking 
> at a tedx conference in Florida in 2012. What lies beyond bionics? Sanchez described his work as trying to 
> “understand the neural code,” which would involve putting “very fine microwire electrodes”—the diameter of a human 
> hair—“into the brain.” When we do that, he said, we would be able to “listen in to the music of the brain” and 
> “listen in to what somebody’s motor intent might be” and get a glimpse of “your goals and your rewards” and then 
> “start to understand how the brain encodes behavior.”
>
> He explained, “With all of this knowledge, what we’re trying to do is build new medical devices, new implantable 
> chips for the body that can be encoded or programmed with all of these different aspects. Now, you may be wondering, 
> what are we going to do with those chips? Well, the first recipients of these kinds of technologies will be the 
> paralyzed. It would make me so happy by the end of my career if I could help get somebody out of their wheelchair.”
>
> Sanchez went on, “The people that we are trying to help should never be imprisoned by their bodies. And today we can 
> design technologies that can help liberate them from that. I’m truly inspired by that. It drives me every day when I 
> wake up and get out of bed. Thank you so much.” He blew a kiss to the audience.
>
> A year later, Justin Sanchez went to work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s R&D 
> department. At DARPA, he now oversees all research on the healing and enhancement of the human mind and body. And his 
> ambition involves more than helping get disabled people out of their wheelchair—much more.
>
> DARPA has dreamed for decades of merging human beings and machines. Some years ago, when the prospect of 
> mind-controlled weapons became a public-relations liability for the agency, officials resorted to characteristic 
> ingenuity. They recast the stated purpose of their neurotechnology research to focus ostensibly on the narrow goal of 
> healing injury and curing illness. The work wasn’t about weaponry or warfare, agency officials claimed. It was about 
> therapy and health care. Who could object? But even if this claim were true, such changes would have extensive 
> ethical, social, and metaphysical implications. Within decades, neurotechnology could cause social disruption on a 
> scale that would make smartphones and the internet look like gentle ripples on the pond of history.
>
> Most unsettling, neurotechnology confounds age-old answers to this question: What is a human being?
>
> II. High Risk, High Reward
>
> In his 1958 State of the Union address, President Dwight Eisenhower declared that the United States of America “must 
> be forward-looking in our research and development to anticipate the unimagined weapons of the future.” A few weeks 
> later, his administration created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a bureaucratically independent body that 
> reported to the secretary of defense. This move had been prompted by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite. The 
> agency’s original remit was to hasten America’s entry into space.
>
> During the next few years, arpa’s mission grew to encompass research into “man-computer symbiosis” and a classified 
> program of experiments in mind control that was code-named Project Pandora. There were bizarre efforts that involved 
> trying to move objects at a distance by means of thought alone. In 1972, with an increment of candor, the word 
> Defense was added to the name, and the agency became DARPA. Pursuing its mission, DARPA funded researchers who helped 
> invent technologies that changed the nature of battle (stealth aircraft, drones) and shaped daily life for billions 
> (voice-recognition technology, GPS devices). Its best-known creation is the internet.
>
> The agency’s penchant for what it calls “high-risk, high-reward” research ensured that it would also fund a cavalcade 
> of folly. Project Seesaw, a quintessential Cold War boondoggle, envisioned a “particle-beam weapon” that could be 
> deployed in the event of a Soviet attack. The idea was to set off a series of nuclear explosions beneath the Great 
> Lakes, creating a giant underground chamber. Then the lakes would be drained, in a period of 15 minutes, to generate 
> the electricity needed to set off a particle beam. The beam would accelerate through tunnels hundreds of miles long 
> (also carved out by underground nuclear explosions) in order to muster enough force to shoot up into the atmosphere 
> and knock incoming Soviet missiles out of the sky. During the Vietnam War, DARPA tried to build a Cybernetic 
> Anthropomorphous Machine, a jungle vehicle that officials called a “mechanical elephant.”
>
> [snip]
>
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> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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