Last year, the American DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) announced that it seeks to find non-invasive ways “to achieve high levels of communication between brain and mechanical systems without surgery.” The sought techniques should “allow precise, high-quality connections to specific neurons or groups of neurons.”
The agency aims to create mind-controlled weapons, as explained in two recent press releases.
According to a bulletin issued on May 20, 2019, DARPA will fund six companies to proceed with the N3 project:
Battelle Memorial Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Rice University, and Teledyne Scientific are multidisciplinary teams leading the development of high-resolution, bidirectional brain-machine interaction for use by capable-bodied soldiers. These wearable devices will essentially enable the development of national security applications such as controlling cyber defense systems and swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles, or creating teams with multi-role computer systems during complex missions…
When this four-year research program was announced last year, in the press release darpa chose to mention all the positive aspects of using brain-machine interaction:
Over the past two decades, international bio-medical research has increasingly demonstrated complex methods that allow an individual’s brain to communicate with a device, enabling innovations aimed at improving quality of life, such as accessing computers and the internet, and more recently controlling a prosthetic limb. DARPA is at the forefront of this research.
The latest advancement in brain-machine communication systems employs non-invasive techniques that enable precise, high-quality connections to specific neurons or groups of neurons. These techniques have helped patients with brain injuries or other illnesses.
It sounds very noble… until you get to the next paragraph:
However, these techniques are not suitable for physically healthy individuals. DARPA now aims to create high-quality communication without surgery, in its new Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program
If you didn’t shiver at this excerpt, continue:
“DARPA created the N3 program to open a path toward creating a safe, portable neural interface system suitable for controlling and being controlled by multiple points in the brain simultaneously,” said Dr. Al Emondi, manager of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office. “High-resolution, non-invasive neurotechnology is not yet within our grasp, but thanks to recent advances in biomedical engineering, neuroscience, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology, we now believe we can achieve our goals.”
DARPA wants to create brain-machine interaction of equivalent quality to electrode implantation but without requiring surgical intervention – and it wants this technology FAST:
Simply by wearing a helmet or a head system, soldiers will be able to consciously control command / control centers without touching a keyboard; they will be able to direct drones with their thoughts; even to sense malicious intrusions into security networks.
The DARPA spokesperson declined to comment on the funding amount, but two of the groups that won the related competition reported the impressive amounts of $19.48 million and $18 million. An IEEE Spectrum report provides additional details about the program:
Specifically, the program seeks technologies that will be able to read and write to brain cells within only 50 milliseconds, and will be able to interface with at least 16 distinct points in the brain within a cubic millimeter of it (a space that includes thousands of neurons).
This four-year program will be carried out in three phases, as Emondi said. In the current first phase, the teams have one year to achieve reading (recording) and writing on brain tissue through the skull. The teams that succeed in this will proceed to the second phase. In the next 18 months, these teams must develop functional devices and test them on animals. Whichever team successfully passes this phase as well will proceed to phase 3 – testing their device on humans.
Is there any issue?
DARPA’s press releases for the N3 project are vague, and its research is classified. However, in November 2018, The Atlantic published an eye-opening report on DARPA. Here are some concerning excerpts:
DARPA has been dreaming for decades about merging human beings and machines. A few years ago, when the prospect of thought-controlled weapons became a “sensitive” topic in the agency’s public relations, officials reacted with characteristic ingenuity. They redefined the stated goals of their neurotechnology research, saying they focus on the narrow goal of accident relief and disease treatment. The research was not about weapons and war, said agency officials. Only therapies and healthcare. Who would object? But even if those statements were sincere, such developments could have extensive moral, social, and ideological implications. Within a few decades, neurotechnologies could cause social upheaval on such a scale that smartphones and the internet would seem like innocent ripples in the lake of history.
However, DARPA’s work on repairing bodies with problems was simply a step on a road that was going elsewhere. The agency had always had a broader goal, and in a 2015 presentation, a manager (who had transferred from Silicon Valley) described this mission: “to free the mind from the constraints of even a healthy body.” The goal is to make human beings something other than what we are, with powers beyond those with which we are born and beyond those we can manage organically.
Human enhancement became one of the service’s priorities. “Soldiers without physical, psychological, or conscientious limitations will be the key to survival and operational dominance in the future,” predicted Michael Goldbatt, who was director of science and technology at McDonald before jumping to DARPA in 1999. To increase humanity’s ability to “control its own evolution,” Goldbatt presented a list of programs with names that seemed like they had been copied from video games or science fiction movies: Metabolic Dominance, Battle Persistence, Sustained Performance, Enhanced Consciousness, Soldier Performance Optimization, Brain-Machine Interface.
The programs of this period, as Annie Jacobsen described in her 2015 book “The Pentagon’s Brain,” often veered into the realm of paranoid science. The Persistent Suppression of Sleep project attempted to create a soldier who could remain combat-ready 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and who could go without sleep for an entire week. (“The measure of success,” declared a DARPA official about these programs, “is that the international Olympic committee bans everything we do”). Jacobsen argued that DARPA’s neurotechnology research, including work on artificial limbs and brain-machine interfaces, is not what it appears to be: “It seems that DARPA’s primary goal is to build better hands and arms for robots rather than for humans.”
DARPA has been trying to create robotic supersoldiers for decades, as Daisy Luther observes in “Robotic Revelation: With Artificial Intelligence We Summon the Devil”:
For years now, DARPA has invested billions in building exoskeletons for infantry. This wearable robotic system gives soldiers the ability to carry heavier loads, run faster, and jump over larger obstacles. Try to imagine how you would deal with an enemy (or a rogue soldier) who essentially has superpowers.
However, it is not only DARPA that is conducting such research for merging the mind with machines. Various companies and neuro-engineers (including Facebook and Elon Musk’s Neuralink company) are developing brain-computer interaction technologies.
[ Dagny Taggart, from The Organic Prepper blog ]translation: Ziggy Stardust
part of the tribute: neuroengineering: the gears of mechanical consciousness
cyborg #15 – 6/2019