Are we wired?
At the recent Facebook F8 Developer Conference, one of the most sought after conferences to attend for technologists, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed everyone’s wild speculations about what the social media giant was up to. His latest pursuit became crystal clear after the job postings on Machine Learning and AI were misleading people to believe that the company might simply be ramping their efforts in developing a better news feed experience or compete with Snapchat’s filters. But it wasn’t until job postings started sounding odd that people began to doubt whether Facebook was still a social networking company. Applicants were strangely hired for a strict two-year duration for a technical project. One job posting for a Brain-Computer Interface Engineer was expected to have worked in “neuro-imaging” and “electrophysiological” data, if that made any sense. The same project was looking for a haptics specialist that could help create immersive and realistic touch interactions, sounding almost as if Facebook wanted its own Subpac haptic vest product for immersive audio which would make sense for its Oculus product. To tech insiders, these job positions mean so much more. “One day, I believe we’ll be able to send rich full thoughts to each other directly using technology. You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it to.” The ambitious 33-year old CEO revealed his thoughts early this year. The science fiction ambition might sound light years away, but should one look closely at Building 8, the mysterious agency Facebook set up for its ambitious endeavors, it doesn’t sound far away in reality.
Working with Mark Zuckerberg is famed technologist Regina Dugan, who made her mark in the early days of the internet age for being Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director and once headed Google’s experimental Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) Group. Well-known for her aggressive two-year project implementation timeline, where projects need to be executed within a span of two years, one might recall Dugan’s failure in materializing Project Ara’s modular smartphone product for Google, a historical note resembling the once promised Aramis in Paris, France, or the personal rapid transit system that was way ahead of its time. Still, while Project Ara may be too late for her time, Dugan’s biggest contributions included nearly all major products people use today, from Google Street View to Wikipedia. As Facebook’s own DARPA, Building 8 is tasked to drive innovation in “augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, connectivity, and other important breakthrough areas.”
Such breakthroughs only accomplish the fact that technology temporarily served as a conduit for us to rediscover communication one era after another.
It is no surprise that Facebook wanted to take in the reins of becoming the augmented reality leader. But as augmented reality’s technology very much needs rapid development and lags virtual reality, for Dugan, it all comes back to the brain as a natural interface in executing commands. Dugan revealed at the F8 Developer Conference that Building 8 has been working on an important project designed to let people type using their thoughts. In collaboration with Stanford University’s research team, the “brain click” is designed to let people complete tasks using their brain signals. This effectively removes people’s transactional behavior of pulling the status bar and dismissing notifications from the smartphone. Through “brain click”, the brain acting as the input device removes the barrier for people with disabilities and creates an equal interface that everyone can participate in. Beyond the brain click, Dugan is taking the natural interface further in using a human skin as communication, conveying vibrations that would correspond as words and phrases. Together, these techniques inspired by the Braille and Todoma method developed for the blind and deaf create a powerful tandem that takes communication beyond what people are accustomed to.
To a lay person, these technologies being developed by Building 8 sound farfetched and only existed in science fiction. To someone well-versed in machine learning, the sophistication in Westworld creates a debate as to when such technology can materialize in society. Perhaps, to Katherine Hayles, author of How We Became Posthuman, she believes technologies such as these are shaped by literature, and not the other way around. But it is not a debate of whether technology is feasible or not feasible at a given time. Such breakthroughs only accomplish the fact that technology temporarily served as a conduit for us to rediscover communication one era after another.
“We become posthuman because we think like posthuman,” Hayles wrote. Is there room to consider that we are indeed posthuman, and with Hayles using the prefix “post”, we can no longer revert to our original prostheses? Did we only become posthuman after the advent of such technologies where we can effectively channel our emotions and thoughts in communication apps, without as much as saying a word? A person can disembody herself and channel her own hesitancy in replying to a message to a recipient through a “typing” indicator, a common feature in many chat apps. The recipient, anxious, awaits the message in response, that which never came. In the same way, a person’s attitude towards a viral post embodies in the form of a “like” button in Facebook. One can adopt a different personality, an alter-ego only he knows himself, embodied in a Twitter handle. The Posthuman view offers smartphones and mobile apps as the instantiation of thought or information that we can encapsulate ourselves in it.
In the words of Dugan, “I think that thing that is so interesting to me is how inherently wired we are to language and communication… We’re just wired for it.” If Dugan and Hayles were to meet face to face, such innocent statement would create a buzz for post humanists. This bold declaration offers not the historical view that Hayles so meticulously provided through her study of interviews with proponents in the Macy Conference, but an admission that we have, since at the beginning of time, are already posthuman. Establishing this statement that we are already wired to hear or feel each other’s thoughts through our skin and brain signals is an astounding discovery that we no longer need technology and that removing technology as prostheses would erase the stresses of auto-amputation to the environment and society that Marshall McLuhan cautioned. Technology as barrier would cease to exist and we can finally consider Donna Haraway’s solution to post-gender world — Cyborg. The world with Building 8’s innovations now sound like the ideal world, one without boundaries. But is there some truth to Dugan’s words? Are we inherently wired to communicate through our original prostheses?
Should one examine Dugan’s statement just as Hayles did in a historical timeline, discoveries surrounding it offer an eerie reality that indeed, we are wired to communicate without words. Reports as far back as 1996 reveal that scientists believe that everyone can read minds, but only have yet to prove it. In 1996, experiments on a monkey’s brain, a long-disputed fact that monkeys closely resembled the homo sapiens in anatomy, allowed scientists to discover that the subject’s clusters of neurons reacted to another monkey present in the room. Calling it “mirror neurons”, the cells represented and reflected emotions and sensations felt by the monkey. “Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person’s mental shoes,” Marco Laboconi, a neuroscientist at University of California Los Angeles, revealed in the 1996 study. If that were the case, the mind is an empathy engine, where we essentially are already mind readers. Through empathy, people’s feelings and emotions resonate within us without spoken words as we put ourselves in the shoes of others. Modern researchers at University of Washington were able to create a simple Q&A game that would be played using only the mind. The game resulted to another breakthrough, a simple demonstration that brain-to-brain interface indeed works and even in real time.
Humans constantly communicate in non-verbal communication. Crossing arms convey the message of close mindedness that eventually translates into spoken words, should one easily read between the lines. Unable to meet another’s eye suggest that one feels conscious over a matter, whether guilt, shame or discomfort. But to neuroscientists, it is the mind that speaks volumes. Humans have an innate ability to feel each other’s emotions even though they are separated by distance, as illustrated in the previous example of communication over chat apps. Even without evidence, we experience our minds conjuring the image of a person we are talking about. Suddenly out of thin air, he enters the room like a simulation. While this example illustrates more of a simulation theory, it suggests that somehow the mind can summon another mind like a network in a Cyborgian level and control the original prostheses. Carl Jung notably calls this concept “synchronicity”, where meaningful coincidences are governed by “Unus mundus, an underlying order and structure to reality, a network that connects everything and everyone.” Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist and a faculty at University of Virginia, through his research subdivided coincidences further into three categories: environment-environment interactions, mind-environment interactions and mind-mind interactions. Beitman calls mind-mind interactions as something that our mind bleeds information out into the world. We think of a song and we immediately hear it in someone else’s stereo. Arnold Zwicky, a Stanford University professor, calls it “frequency illusion”, which is more mystical in a sense, but most have shunned to call it “premonition”. Close to empathy, frequency illusion is described as the feeling of pain or emotion of someone else at a distance”.
To romanticize the idea, “The eyes are the windows to the soul.” Two individuals who are connected in deeper level of psyche have no need for spoken words to convey each other’s thoughts and emotions. In her book In a Queer Time and Place, Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Judith Halberstam spoke of the gaze that Lana Tisdale gave to Brandon Teena’s unveiling in Boys Don’t Cry, a gaze that produced an “alternate vision of possible time, space and embodiment.” In that scene where Lana Tisdale positions herself dominant over Brandon Teena after the latter’s unveiling of sexual orientation and gazes at her as an equal female, the audience empathizes Lana’s acceptance of Brandon’s situation, the illusion later shattered in the same scene when Lana tells Brandon, “You’re so pretty”. The level of connection pales into significance should one consider context in communication. If a barista asks a customer “Would you like it brewed?” and the customer replies with “Two sugars and one cream”, there is an understanding between two individuals in unspoken terms. It goes beyond assumptions, the truth behind communication in natural setting that we may be in Dugan’s words, “wired for it.”
“Communication technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools redrafting our bodies,” Haraway wrote. The “brain click” would certainly redraft our bodies towards what the technology dictates us, no different from how mobile apps today are designed.
Given that we are indeed wired more than we know, imagine that Building 8’s ambitious “brain click” and “hearing the skin” will manifest in the next five years or so. People no longer need smartphones to call someone. Our skin tingles as we are being watched by a random stranger across the street, though no words are spoken. A Calvin Klein advertisement changes its brand model to someone we feel more comfortable seeing in lingerie. Our opinions no longer need a voice. Society reassembles itself to accommodate billions at a given time. The world is set for another wave of dystopia. Do such advancements in communication technologies and biotechnologies that meld the machine and organism convey the Cyborgian equality Haraway wishes? Does that remove the blurriness between machine and organism and achieving fluidity that transcends boundaries? While users have a choice in choosing what thoughts to emit outward through the “brain click”, we fail to achieve another wave of Cyborg equality that this piece of technology supposedly brings us. Perhaps, there is no better way to reinforce it but through Yann LeCunn, Facebook’s Chief of Artificial Intelligence. His vision? For computers to automatically spy on humans. Like Facebook Live, there are unseen repercussions that go out of control.
Sources:
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999)
Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”, 1984.
Andrea Sotcco, Chantel S. Prat, Darby M. Losey, Jeneva A. Cronin, Joseph Wu, Justin A. Abernathy, Rajesh P. N. Rao, “Playing 20 Questions with the Mind: Collaborative Problem Solving by Humans Using a Brain-to-Brain Interface” (2015), accessed April 20, 2017, dot: 10.1371/0137303
Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press: 2005)
