What is a cybernetic brain? Cybernetics is the study of the structure of regulatory systems, and is related to information theory, control theory and systems theory. In general a cybernetic brain is considered to be one that has been enhanced by the addition of electronic and robotic technologies.
Flickr photo by Anders Sandberg
Imagine you call a friend and start talking to him. As the discussion progresses you mention some historical event and he immediately has all sorts of additional information about it that you didn’t know. In fact, soon you are asking him about many different things, and he always has an answer. He even knows what average annual rainfall amount for Berlin. Does he really have that much knowledge and perfect recall as well?
Actually this imagined scenario is becoming common, All that it requires is that your friend is sitting in front of his computer and has a fast internet service. By the time you finish asking a question he can have the answer in front of him. In this sense we already have a cybernetic brain based on the feedback between the internet and our brains.
The bioethicist Kyle Munkittrick speculates on something more advanced than this in a recent article in Discover Magazine;
“Imagine you know everything on Wikipedia, in the Oxford English Dictionary, and the contents of every book in digital form. When someone asks you what you did twenty years ago, on demand you recall with perfect accuracy every sensation and thought from that moment. Sifting and parsing all of this information is effortless and unconscious. Any fact, instant of time, skill, technique, or data point that you’ve experienced or can access on the internet is in your mind.
Cybernetic brains might make that possible. As computing power and storage continue to plod along their 18-month doubling cycle, there is no reason to believe we won’t at least have cybernetic sub-brains within the coming century. We already offload a tremendous amount of information and communication to our computers and smartphones. Why not make the process more integrated? Of course, what I’m engaging in right now is rampant speculation. But a neuro-computer interface is a possibility. More than that: cyber-brains may be necessary.”
Munkittrick goes on to explain the basic idea of such an enhanced brain, and suggests that the first major step will be a a neural external hard drive. As he point out, with writing we have been externalizing the storage of information for thousands of years. The big challenge is to make it possible to internalize it again–without going online.
His ideas are fascinating, although to some extent I’m not sure that the distinction between a true wear-it-on-your-head cybernetic brain device and what we have now is all that different in principle. We are very attached to our devices already, to the point where, for example, a friend of mine did a Google search using his cell phone while we were in the bottom of a steep canyon, more than a mile from the nearest dirt road. On top of 14,000-foot mountains here in Colorado I regularly find people chatting on their phones as well. We have the ability to carry the information contained in a million books to any part of the world with us.
Perhaps a true cyber brain would allow better storage and retrieval of memories. That might be worth something.
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