Technocreep (17 page)

Kevin Warwick, the RFID pioneer, has also embarked on other groundbreaking biohacking adventures, for instance creating a mechanical hand that responds to impulses from nerves in his own arm. He also claims to have conducted “the first purely electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans.”

In a speech at a computer conference, Warwick told a somewhat racy story about the time he was on one side of the Atlantic and his wife was on the other, along with the robotic hand. Details of what ensued are probably best left to the imagination. However, he was certainly a pioneer in a whole new field of computer applications with a tantalizing name—teledildonics. Warwick's gutsy work went a long way to preparing us for the idea that technology can, and perhaps should, be used to take us beyond the human body that we arrived in.

Personalized medicine, diagnosis and treatment tailored to a ­specific individual, is widely regarded as the “next big thing” in health care. In 2009, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Michael O. Leavitt, gave a techno-optimistic appraisal of modern medicine in the foreword for
Genomic and Personal Medicine
, a textbook on the human genome: “As diseases come to be understood at a new level, we should be able to better achieve the right diagnosis and the right treatment for each person without the trial-and-error process that has long characterized medical treatment.”
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Popular books followed, such as one by Kevin Davies that starts with the story of Dr. Jeffrey Gulcher, founder of deCODEme, the pioneer in direct-to-consumer DNA testing that started selling its reports for $1000 in 2007.
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Running Gulcher's own cheek swab produced some predictable results such as a tendency to baldness, which was already evident on his head. But, Davies writes, “a handful of those DNA markers suggested that Gulcher had double the average lifetime risk for type two diabetes and prostate cancer.”

Sure enough, a biopsy revealed prostate cancer at grade six on the Gleason scale. Gulcher credits his company's test with saving his own life.

By the time the 2013 edition of
Genomic and Personal Medicine
came out, Leavitt's essay was replaced by the writing of Dr. Eric D. Green, Director of the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute.

Green showed much more restraint, noting that in health care delivery “the actual implementation of genomic and personalized medicine … is associated with myriad nuances and complexities that will take many years to appreciate fully and to address adequately.”

Despite the subtleties of personalized medicine, people are already making important health care decisions based on genetic test results. Dr. Jay Orringer, Angelina Jolie's Beverly Hills plastic ­surgeon, trumpeted that her decision to opt for a preventive mastectomy “has already begun to save lives,” by inspiring women to get tested for a genetic predisposition to breast cancer.
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Personalized genetic medicine is not as simple as “you have this gene, so do this.” For example, it has been discovered that some people are much more sensitive than others to blood thinning drugs, and also process them differently. There are apparently genetic markers (polymorphisms in CYP2C9 and VKORC1) associated with these differences. The correct dosage of blood thinning drugs is important since doctors must tread the line between using too little, which can allow blood clots, or too much, which can cause internal bleeding. It is also complicated by differences among the races.

Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and seventeen other hospitals tried using this genetic information to improve dosage calculation in over a thousand patients during their first four weeks of therapy. They concluded that having the genetic information was no better overall than the old way, and the outcome was actually worse for one subgroup (African American patients).

Our ability to measure and change our bodies using technological advances has outstripped our ability to reflect on the repercussions of what is actually happening. We have seen this before with reproductive technologies, such as the ability to screen embryos for
in vitro
fertilization: it was not long before some parents were asking doctors to select for a preferred gender at the embryo stage. Many found this to be a creepy form of tampering with nature. The ethics committee of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists wrestled with this issue and decided that sex selection was acceptable to avoid having a child with a sex-linked genetic disease. However, they expressed opposition to “meeting other requests for sex selection, such as the belief that offspring of a certain sex are inherently more valuable.”
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Our incomplete understanding of science and technology, ­coupled with our human desire to “do something,” can lead us down some very dangerous pathways.

At the 2011 DEF CON hacker conference, I covered a press conference called by Jerome Radcliffe, a security researcher who is also diabetic. He uses an insulin pump. At the conference, he ­demonstrated how easy it would be to hack the device, with possibly fatal consequences. He did leave out a few key details in the interest of preserving his own life.
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Members of the non-technical press focused on the alarming and sinister aspects of this story, such as “a stranger wandering a hospital or sitting behind a target on an airplane would be close enough (to take control of an insulin pump).”
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Yet there is a deeper, and in some ways creepier, aspect to what Radcliffe discovered and disclosed to the world. Devices that are supposed to save us can injure us in the wrong hands. If manufacturers continue to eschew encryption, and the devices leak data, highly personal information about us can travel to places it should not go.

Radcliffe's hypothetical attack on his insulin pump could have been thwarted, or at least made more challenging, by the use of encryption to protect the data going into and out of the device. However, encryption uses processing power that shortens battery life. The good intention of giving the user the longest period between replacements works against the goal of enhanced security. As technology moves deeper into our bodies, we will need to make decisions about trade-offs like this.

Barnaby Jack, a noted security researcher whose ideas about hacking cardiac pacemakers inspired a plot twist in the TV series
Homeland
, planned to present ground-breaking research about medical device vulnerabilities at the Black Hat 2013 conference. He was scheduled to tell thousands of people how to use “a common bedside transmitter to scan for, and interrogate individual medical implants.”
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Days before his scheduled presentation, Jack was found dead in his San Francisco apartment, in a death ruled as accidental due to “acute mixed drug intoxication.”
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Conspiracy theorists continue to suggest that he was murdered for what he knew, and was about to reveal.
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Formerly the domain of advanced researchers with well-funded labs, a product based on the NeuroSky biosensor now can be ordered by anyone on the Internet.
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Billed as a research-grade EEG (electroencephalogram), the brainwave analyzer connects to your head with no drilling or other unpleasantness, and allows you to track your Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Theta waves using a “non-invasive single dry sensor that reads brainwave impulses (not thoughts).”

The Mindwave comes with applications to help you focus, meditate, and do math in your head. Hobbyists have already had a field day with this device, rigging up brain-controlled robots, computers, and the ever-popular mind-controlled garage door opener. More adventurous types are using it to track lucid dreaming, where, as blogger Brian Benchoff put it, “you take control of your dreams and become a god.”
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One practitioner of this art claims he can communicate from inside his dreams by blinking in Morse code.

An even more powerful product is Myndplay, which allows users to engage with video and actually affect the outcome. The creators envision a movie theater full of people wearing their sensors; their hive mind will alter the plot in real time. In a promotional video for this product, a narrator with a British accent assures us that the audience will finally have power over creative works: “they choose the direction, they decide the outcome, whether they want to or not. Their minds will determine what happens.”
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If you just want the world to know something about your state of mental arousal, you can purchase some Necomimi Brainwave Controlled cat ears. They stand up when you concentrate and lie down when you relax. And sometimes they just wiggle ­suggestively. This is what happens when a girl in the promotional video spies an attractive young man. He ignores her, and the ears flop down.
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Devices like these can certainly provide insights into what is going on inside our heads. However, we generally assume that what got into our minds is the result of real things we have experienced and real thoughts we have had. That assumption is starting to develop cracks.

There are some needlessly frightened mice running around at the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics. Researchers there have made the rodents afraid of getting an electric shock. However, they had never actually experienced the shock. It was put there by interfering with cells in the hippocampus.

This study sheds light into how we build up memories in groups of neurons, called engram-bearing cells, and how easily they can be tampered with. As the researchers, led by Steve Ramirez, reported, “Our data demonstrate that it is possible to generate an internally represented and behaviorally expressed fear memory via artificial means.”
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According to a press release accompanying the study, such research is vitally important because “almost three-quarters of the first 250 people to be exonerated by DNA evidence in the U.S. were victims of faulty eyewitness testimony.”

It is also important because DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects folks who gave us the Internet, are keenly interested in false memory, under the euphemism of “narrative networks.”
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It fits well with what appears to be DARPA's somewhat creepy new slogan, expressed on its home page: “Creating and Preventing Strategic Surprise.”

Has this federal agency suddenly decided to study
Harry Potter
or
Fifty Shades of Grey
? Actually, they are much more interested in how people become convinced to join terrorist cells. They awarded a research contract worth about $7 million to a group led by Charles River Analytics of Cambridge, MA. In a news release, Charles River noted that as part of this project, they will be developing a piece of software poetically named “SONNET, or Studies to Operationalize Neuro-Narratology for Effective Tools.”
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They also noted that “Charles River will conduct neurological studies to understand what makes a story compelling, and develop tools to sense and forecast people's reactions,” echoing a previous DARPA project where the brains of college students were monitored with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to try to predict what they would find funny in a TV sitcom.

Reading somebody's fMRI is still a somewhat cumbersome and invasive process, and not likely to be done at a distance any time soon, though conspiracy theorists claim the CIA does it all the time. A brain pattern called P300 is a lot easier to capture, and is definitely being used in military and intelligence settings. P300 is a ­measurable electronic event, called an “evoked potential” that occurs about 300 milliseconds after a stimulus, and is associated with recognizing this stimulus. The U.S. military believes that determining evoked potential will be very useful in helping soldiers rapidly recognize ­dangerous situations. They are using this approach in a set of smart binoculars called Sentinel (SystEm for Notification of Threats Inspired by Neurally Enabled Learning). Through what is being called a “brain-machine interface,” these “cognito-neuro” binoculars tap into the unconscious ability of the soldier to identify threats, and appears to speed up the process by about thirty percent.
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The Jasons, a group of top scientists that advises the U.S. military on technology matters, has expressed some concern about this type of technology, noting “potential for abuses in carrying out such research, as well as serious concerns about where remediation leaves off and changing natural humanity begins.”
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And of course, if militarized brain technology falls into the wrong hands, as it certainly will, it can be used against us.

On a more peaceful front, investigators at Glasgow University have been able to use fMRI technology to decode the brainwaves of people who viewed images of “happy and fearful faces,” looking for differences. They learned what every portrait artist knows, that the eyes and mouth are important indicators. Despite the early stages of this work, the end goal is to form a “scientific” opinion about what someone is thinking.
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Some have suggested that in the future people may leave their memories, transferred onto suitable media, for their heirs or for researchers. Your estate might even get a tax receipt. The tax deduction might even be determined by how interesting your life has been. There's a “profession of the future”—digital life appraiser.

We already have a good if creepy idea what your physical body is worth. A science blogger with too much time on his hands recently quantified the amounts of various chemicals in the average human body and linked them to market prices. He claims that a typical result for your component chemicals is approximately $1985.77.

To allow for fluctuations in the value of your 140 grams of potassium and 780 grams of phosphorous, he has posted his Excel spreadsheet online so you can calculate your own value. This of course assumes you could extract and purify all the elements in your body and sell them at market rates.
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