13 ms·

Why I’m turning my son into a cyborg

94 points by ycnews 7y ago

michaereyess 7y ago
tl:dr : Do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less? The more different you are, the more valuable you become. My particular area of research and development is cognitive neuroprosthetics: devices that directly interface with the brain to improve our memory, attention, emotion, and much more. How can we respect someone's humanness while also giving them the choice to become more like the majority of humans? In a world that values difference, untypical humans paired with neuroprosthetics might become even more powerful than fully abled ones. If these kinds of augmentations can lift them above the crowd, soon everyone will want to be more than human. It's seductively easy to imagine a world in which we're a little smarter or a bit more creative, in which our kids have the latest advantage.
- onemoresoop 7y ago
  > Do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less? Theres a line to be drawn here and it depends on the functionality of the implant. Implants that restore normal function versus implants that do something else which healthy humans could not achieve without.
  - klodolph 7y ago
    Why are you choosing to draw the line there? I don't understand the rationale for that choice.
    - merpnderp 7y ago
      I took it as humans are incredibly complex things with properties ranging along curves. What happens when one of these properties gets pushed out far beyond the previous maximum of its curve? What happens when people can stay hyperfocused for 12 hours straight? Their IQ's jump 100 points on average? Will they look upon normal people like we look upon cattle (historically, slavery is the normal state of mankind)? When people can turn on and off their modes, will they pick their favorite mode and never turn it off? Yes, it is certainly useful to differentiate between normal ranged human properties, and those so far exceeding the norms we have zero evidence on what to expect.
      - klodolph 7y ago
        If we expect "superhumans" to look at us like cattle, does this reflect the idea that we look at "subhumans" like cattle? Isn't that just projecting our own moral failings onto other people? (So far the evidence seems to point towards the notion that you can't increase human performance by pushing along a single axis. We are near a local optimum in a massive, multidimensional space. Pushing too much in any one direction will move us farther from the local optimum.)
        AstralStorm 7y ago
        The counterpoint is that superpowers do not come bundled with superior morality, but the consequences are magnified. We're facing this everyday with rich and powerful making likely bad choices, for themselves and for others. Why would any other kind of superhuman be different? The question is only of magnitude - what could one person do? How would they do it? What would be the cost or benefit?
    - dllthomas 7y ago
      By one definition, the rationale seems reasonably straight forward. We imagine some Platonic ideal human, or perhaps some range. It seems reasonable to say that moving toward that is becoming "more human", away is becoming "less human". This doesn't directly imply that interventions that make someone "less human" should be avoided.
      - klodolph 7y ago
        > It seems reasonable to say that moving toward that is becoming "more human", away is becoming "less human". That's not a rationale, that's just a criterion. My question is, "What is the rationale for avoiding these types of changes?"
        dllthomas 7y ago
        It's a rationale for the belief, which is what I thought you were asking about. It's not a rationale for avoiding the changes, but I don't see that advocated as such in this thread.
  - apt-get 7y ago
    > Implants that restore normal function versus implants that do something else which healthy humans could not achieve without. Where is that limit achieved? In the case of prosthetic limbs, should we seek to achieve perfect organic behavior replicability, or is anything further than that inhuman in some arcane way? Oscar Pistorius, AKA Blade Runner, earned Olympic medals despite having prosthetic legs. Is he advantaged or disadvantaged compared to other participants? The anime series Texhnolyze touches heavily upon this subject, amongst others.
- mapcars 7y ago
  >Do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less? Most people don't even know what human means, this idea of superpowers affecting your humanity just means you didn't grow beyond comic book stories. >The more different you are, the more valuable you become. Only in blind people's eyes who can not even see that every atom in this Universe is unique. How can you be more (or less) different than that? >How can we respect someone's humanness while also giving them the choice to become more like the majority of humans? There is no majority, only individuals. It's just an image in your mind if you travel around the world a bit you will see how limited this is. >In a world that values difference Maybe it's time to stop calling your neighborhood a world? :) >It's seductively easy to imagine a world in which we're a little smarter or a bit more creative, in which our kids have the latest advantage Kids have an advantage in every generation. The question is how being a little smarter or creative is going to make you happier? The story tries to connect this to being different, "above the crowd". But if everyone is above the crowd then there is no crowd and nobody will look up to your difference. It's a dead-end in many ways, but peace, happiness, joy, bliss - it is all real and they have nothing to do with how others look on you.
conjectures 7y ago
> When he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I hacked his insulin pump and built an AI that learned to match his insulin to his emotions and activities. Wow, hope there're no bugs in that one. I'd hate for the kid to be weeping over Titanic and get od'd with insulin.
- Konnstann 7y ago
  I work in Biotech and every time I read one of these articles/posts about how somebody hacked their insulin pump people start asking why there aren't already affordable closed-loop pumps on the market if people are hacking their own with raspberry pis and the like, and they clearly don't understand the regulatory process or the level of clinical testing that's needed to validate something that, if it malfunctions at night, can kill you.
  - 0xDEFC0DE 7y ago
    To be fair that same process allowed hackable (malicious or not) devices out into the world https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20190628/fda-recalls-insulin-pump-over-security-concerns https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20190628/fda-recalls-ins...
    - Konnstann 7y ago
      Believe me I'm not saying the FDA is some perfect organization that can do no wrong but they do exist for a reason. There definitely needs to be more scrutiny as tech (read:computers/AI) start making their way into therapeutic devices.
  - dlphn___xyz 7y ago
    this implies that if a medical device (or pharma) passes through the regulatory process it will never malfunction which is absolutely not true.
    - merpnderp 7y ago
      It doesn't imply it will never malfunction. It implies it went through a scientifically rigorous process to minimize the chances it will malfunction.
bad_good_guy 7y ago
The story about the insulin pump seems rather unethical, almost as if she is performing research on a human child when they are not of the age to consent, and would be biased toward consent due to parental influence.
- manmal 7y ago
  It's not that easy. Bad compliance will lead to an early death in diabetics. And kids are VERY bad at compliance. Most parents who can afford it nowadays get an insulin pump for their kids. And they are so ridiculously complicated to operate, and one single lapse can be dangerous. You're always doing math in the back your head, considering what you've eaten (or will eat), whether you will do sports, etc.. A custom firmware with auto-dosing can be a real life changer, and saver. Source: A friend of mine is part of a insulin pump hacking community
  - the_seraphim 7y ago
    could connect a sensor to some kind of excreta to get a blood sugar level? maybe an implantable sensor with blood flow?
    - manmal 7y ago
      Yes that's what those systems do.
  - galangalalgol 7y ago
    a friend with type 1 told me about a mesh ball containing pancreatic tissue that has pores big enough for insulin but too small for the immune response to get to I am destroy it. sounded fascinating. I've been wondering if a closed loop thyroid pump that dumps t4 and t3 based on tsh and reverse t3 levels could be made, or a mesh ball to keep hashimotos away from some thyroid tissue, then ablate the original.
  - alexk7 7y ago
    Thank you for that comment. Don't get me started on "compliance". Even if you are following 100% the diet and rules (which is impossible, we are humans), type 1 diabetes is HARD. We need all the help we can get! A closed-loop system improved my quality of life a lot. I would be healthier now if this stuff was available when I was a kid.
madenine 7y ago
Cool stuff, but did anyone else feel like they were reading an advertorial for the author? Managed to pack most of their CV in there.
- 0_gravitas 7y ago
  I mean isnt that one of the main reasons of a tech blog nowadays?
- merpnderp 7y ago
  What's the difference between this person going on a philosophical exploration of biohacking and AI versus some drunk at the bar? Their CV.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    I guess also not doing it while inebriated. that's probably a plus.
  - tempodox 7y ago
    There are literally millions of people with a CV that you could find drunk in a bar.
- astura 7y ago
  Blogs nowadays are more about self-promotion than anything else.
- muh_gradle 7y ago
  Dr. Ming clearly enjoys talking about herself.
- faissaloo 7y ago
  No, I just think she's extremely enthusiastic about the things she does in a way that strikes me as being almost autistic.
gnode 7y ago
> Imagine these advantages not being subtly embedded in the life experience of well-off Westerners, but being directly for sale—and turned up to 11. Intergenerational social and economic mobility would disappear. [...] augmentation could also become a tool to entrench inequality even more firmly. I disagree with this argument that commercial performance enhancement will destroy social mobility. The effect would be strongly dependent on the economics of such a market. Conversely, an efficient market in a new technology can be democratising. If hypothetically an inexpensive brain-computer interface could give a person access to information in a way which substitutes conventional education, then this could negate the preexisting socioeconomic divide which education creates. Particularly conventional education is unavoidably expensive because it involves labour on at least the part of the student, whereas the cost of a neuroprosthetic device, as with other electronic technology is diminishable.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Gpetrium 7y ago
  If hypothetically, a brain-computer interface were to exist, it would likely reach individuals that are well-off first. As the base solution becomes more widely available to the mass, enhancements to speed, quality of information capture, processing and others would help create tiers to the product, some of which would only be available for the right price. Coupling access to information devices with real experience (which often involves spending resources), it means that there would continue to be gaps in social mobility further exacerbated by people's means to acquire the tech necessary to break through their socioeconomic status.
  - gnode 7y ago
    In order to have a positive effect, a technology only needs to be less discriminatory than the technology it replaces. I chose the example of education because it is very expensive and discriminatory today; a technology which replaces the need for tuition could still be expensive and improve social mobility. > If hypothetically, a brain-computer interface were to exist, it would likely reach individuals that are well-off first. While often true for technology generally, medical technology has special considerations. Rather than simply reaching the well-off first, performance enhancing neurological implants are likely to reach the disabled first, where it is deemed ethically more acceptable, as has been the case so far. Due to public healthcare, health insurance, and research contribution, patients' wealth is not always crucial here. It may be the case that costs reduce greatly before non-medical uses become acceptable. In the case of BCIs, the acceptability of their non-medically necessary use cases would likely depend of the technology's maturity. The extent to which market differentiation is possible is not yet clear for such technology, particularly if the market is competitive. Tiering is typically based on either having a unique product (e.g. nobody else can make an equivalent) which can be artificially crippled, or natural differences in production quality (e.g. only some cores of this processor work).
onetimemanytime 7y ago
>>When he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I hacked his insulin pump and built an AI that learned to match his insulin to his emotions and activities. I’ve also explored neurotechnologies to augment human sight, hearing, memory, creativity, and emotions. Tiger moms might obsess over the “right” prep schools and extracurriculars for their child, but I say why leave their intellect up to chance? At some point you cross the line and the state intervenes. Why isn't he turning HIMSELF into a cyborg but his son?
- daenney 7y ago
  She. Herself. It's written by a woman. See the name of the author of the article, the picture, the fact that she refers to herself as a mother and a ton of other clues. As to why she's turning her son into a cyborg, that's pretty well explained in the article, though one might disagree with the fact that she's doing this at all.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  > Why isn't he turning HIMSELF into a cyborg but his son? It'd be a little silly to install an insulin pump on someone without diabetes.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Not as silly as some other things - it is anabolic. It would be more interesting to install an adrenaline or steroid (testosterone, cortisone, gonadotropin and inhibitors) pump on a healthy person, but harder still to figure out how and if it works.
woliveirajr 7y ago
And won't this make the kid's body, probably unconsciously, generate feelings just to get another dose of insulin? Injecting insulin according to the emotions might give bad clues on how you "should" feel in each situation.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  It's insulin, not morphine. The body doesn't crave higher and higher doses of it.
  - woliveirajr 7y ago
    I don't mean addicted. Anyone who has ever gone from sugar highs and lows, or has experienced how your body reacts from a single candy when your glucose is low, or even how it reacts when you were in need and took an insulin shot... Knows that you can feel it. And if you can feel it, your body can learn to modulate your mood and feelings to get (or to avoid) another dose.
sidlls 7y ago
This person is playing a dangerous game and using her autistic child as an experimental toy. She's overconfident and certainly does not understand all the ramifications of what she's doing.
- cabaalis 7y ago
  Hacking the operation of an insulin pump for your child seems so insanely dangerous I could not even conceive of attempting it. The other things she talks about, such as helping autistic people recognize emotions, could be enormously beneficial and much less potentially harmful. My understand of part of the autism spectrum is difficulty empathizing, not being able to understand cues of emotion. I have the benefit of being able to understand pretty well that words I've just spoken or actions I've taken have hurt somebody's feelings. If an AI can flash up an image of "this person is now sad" right after someone lacking that ability has done or said something, they have the opportunity to apologize or say it differently. That could greatly improve their social interactions and personal happiness.
  - inimino 7y ago
    > I could not even conceive of attempting it. Someone had to write the software that runs on her kid's insulin pump. If you could make it better and had the resources to do it right, you'd probably find it less insanely dangerous and more like the obvious way to approach the problem.
  - craftinator 7y ago
    I'd feel more comfortable with my software running the pump than someone else's, especially given the UI of most insulin pumps I've seen. They make it easy it get it wrong.
- thrav 7y ago
  She demonstrated a bit of a misunderstanding of ADHD and the impact it has on people. Interestingly, if her working memory device is as good as she says, it may have serious potential as a non-chemical treatment for ADHD.
- 7y ago
jonstaab 7y ago
This kind of thing makes me intensely uncomfortable, given that Wendell Berry is basically my spirit animal. But her points are really compelling. What's the difference between repairing damage (cochlear implants) and enhancing a healthy body? I love her rule: "You should not only be better when you’re using it, you should be better when you turn it off." Also (for the christians out there), as someone who believes in the Fall of Man, we are all broken in some way, so every enhancement that brings us closer to the way we were created (in God's image) is actually damage repair, even brain implants to bring us closer to health and holiness. My only doubt is whether we have the wisdom to pull off a work that seems to belong to God.
- faissaloo 7y ago
  Muslim here, I've been thinking about something like what you're talking about, right now my best answer is that we would have to define some threshold for what constitutes a gross imperfection. I think most people can agree that the replacing of a damaged organ or limb is fine, so we could go from there and progressively discuss more minor imperfections until its something the overwhelming majority of people have.
roribob 7y ago
It's time for humans to disappear from the world stage. The lack of self replication means that in the future more and more robots will be needed to care for the aging populations. Humans are already incapable of building robots without machines. The only value humans will provide is by giving them orders through programming them. General AI will never arrive but we will only ever need a million or two robotics developers the same way we only need a few million software developers.
inimino 7y ago
I find the top-level comments here on the whole shockingly negative, uninformed, wildly speculative, and even downright spiteful. From the snide "hope there's no bugs" Titanic joke about an insulin pump -- This is a real mom and a real kid you're talking about. You think you're the first person in the room who's read about the Therac-25?? Do you think a snide joke implying catastrophic consequences is appropriate in this context!? To the apophatic "almost as if she is performing research on a human child when they are not of the age to consent" which raises missing the point nearly to the form of art... almost as if you had memorized a handbook of research ethics guidelines but yet somehow completely forgotten why we do research in the first place and what technology is even good for! Then we have the comments whining about the author mentioning other work she's done (like having built this stuff for much of her professional career is somehow irrelevant to having thoughts on what the risks and opportunities are?) as though it were pure self-promotion. And the funny-if-not-sad, "Why isn't he turning HIMSELF into a cyborg but his son?", missing both the author's gender and her point. If you'd glanced at the byline or even the author bio before commenting, you could hardly have missed that the author is a woman, not any kind of a "HIMSELF". And maybe, just maybe, if you had read the article just a little more carefully, it would have occurred to you that she is turning her son into a cyborg and not herself because her son is the one who has autism. > I don’t want to “cure” someone of themselves. Especially not my son. I want them to be able to share that self with the world. There is fascinating, thoughtful stuff here touching technology, medicine, science, religion, parenting, and ethics, and there are discussions we could be having around these issues, but first we have to actually engage with what's being said.
- joyeuse6701 7y ago
  To me (not having read the article) the click bait title sets the tone for the discussion, which makes it acceptable for jokes, despite the underlying seriousness of the topic.
  - inimino 7y ago
    Well perhaps that's the problem. I read a thoughtful if high-level piece about a technologist wrestling with difficult issues while trying to help her son, and came back to see a bunch of jokes based on the provocative title (which is typically picked by an editor not the author) rather than on the article.
e2le 7y ago
After reading this and researching the state of open source diabetes care, it's quite disappointing to see there isn't any work being done on open hardware insulin pumps and instead are relying on insecure old existing pumps to make this work.

94 points by ycnews 7y ago

tl:dr : Do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less? The more different you are, the more valuable you become. My particular area of research and development is cognitive neuroprosthetics: devices that directly interface with the brain to improve our memory, attention, emotion, and much more. How can we respect someone's humanness while also giving them the choice to become more like the majority of humans? In a world that values difference, untypical humans paired with neuroprosthetics might become even more powerful than fully abled ones. If these kinds of augmentations can lift them above the crowd, soon everyone will want to be more than human. It's seductively easy to imagine a world in which we're a little smarter or a bit more creative, in which our kids have the latest advantage.

onemoresoop 7y ago
> Do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less? Theres a line to be drawn here and it depends on the functionality of the implant. Implants that restore normal function versus implants that do something else which healthy humans could not achieve without.
- klodolph 7y ago
  Why are you choosing to draw the line there? I don't understand the rationale for that choice.
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    I took it as humans are incredibly complex things with properties ranging along curves. What happens when one of these properties gets pushed out far beyond the previous maximum of its curve? What happens when people can stay hyperfocused for 12 hours straight? Their IQ's jump 100 points on average? Will they look upon normal people like we look upon cattle (historically, slavery is the normal state of mankind)? When people can turn on and off their modes, will they pick their favorite mode and never turn it off? Yes, it is certainly useful to differentiate between normal ranged human properties, and those so far exceeding the norms we have zero evidence on what to expect.
    - klodolph 7y ago
      If we expect "superhumans" to look at us like cattle, does this reflect the idea that we look at "subhumans" like cattle? Isn't that just projecting our own moral failings onto other people? (So far the evidence seems to point towards the notion that you can't increase human performance by pushing along a single axis. We are near a local optimum in a massive, multidimensional space. Pushing too much in any one direction will move us farther from the local optimum.)
      - AstralStorm 7y ago
        The counterpoint is that superpowers do not come bundled with superior morality, but the consequences are magnified. We're facing this everyday with rich and powerful making likely bad choices, for themselves and for others. Why would any other kind of superhuman be different? The question is only of magnitude - what could one person do? How would they do it? What would be the cost or benefit?
  - dllthomas 7y ago
    By one definition, the rationale seems reasonably straight forward. We imagine some Platonic ideal human, or perhaps some range. It seems reasonable to say that moving toward that is becoming "more human", away is becoming "less human". This doesn't directly imply that interventions that make someone "less human" should be avoided.
    - klodolph 7y ago
      > It seems reasonable to say that moving toward that is becoming "more human", away is becoming "less human". That's not a rationale, that's just a criterion. My question is, "What is the rationale for avoiding these types of changes?"
      - dllthomas 7y ago
        It's a rationale for the belief, which is what I thought you were asking about. It's not a rationale for avoiding the changes, but I don't see that advocated as such in this thread.
- apt-get 7y ago
  > Implants that restore normal function versus implants that do something else which healthy humans could not achieve without. Where is that limit achieved? In the case of prosthetic limbs, should we seek to achieve perfect organic behavior replicability, or is anything further than that inhuman in some arcane way? Oscar Pistorius, AKA Blade Runner, earned Olympic medals despite having prosthetic legs. Is he advantaged or disadvantaged compared to other participants? The anime series Texhnolyze touches heavily upon this subject, amongst others.
mapcars 7y ago
>Do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less? Most people don't even know what human means, this idea of superpowers affecting your humanity just means you didn't grow beyond comic book stories. >The more different you are, the more valuable you become. Only in blind people's eyes who can not even see that every atom in this Universe is unique. How can you be more (or less) different than that? >How can we respect someone's humanness while also giving them the choice to become more like the majority of humans? There is no majority, only individuals. It's just an image in your mind if you travel around the world a bit you will see how limited this is. >In a world that values difference Maybe it's time to stop calling your neighborhood a world? :) >It's seductively easy to imagine a world in which we're a little smarter or a bit more creative, in which our kids have the latest advantage Kids have an advantage in every generation. The question is how being a little smarter or creative is going to make you happier? The story tries to connect this to being different, "above the crowd". But if everyone is above the crowd then there is no crowd and nobody will look up to your difference. It's a dead-end in many ways, but peace, happiness, joy, bliss - it is all real and they have nothing to do with how others look on you.

conjectures 7y ago

> When he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I hacked his insulin pump and built an AI that learned to match his insulin to his emotions and activities. Wow, hope there're no bugs in that one. I'd hate for the kid to be weeping over Titanic and get od'd with insulin.

Konnstann 7y ago
I work in Biotech and every time I read one of these articles/posts about how somebody hacked their insulin pump people start asking why there aren't already affordable closed-loop pumps on the market if people are hacking their own with raspberry pis and the like, and they clearly don't understand the regulatory process or the level of clinical testing that's needed to validate something that, if it malfunctions at night, can kill you.
- 0xDEFC0DE 7y ago
  To be fair that same process allowed hackable (malicious or not) devices out into the world https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20190628/fda-recalls-insulin-pump-over-security-concerns https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20190628/fda-recalls-ins...
  - Konnstann 7y ago
    Believe me I'm not saying the FDA is some perfect organization that can do no wrong but they do exist for a reason. There definitely needs to be more scrutiny as tech (read:computers/AI) start making their way into therapeutic devices.
- dlphn___xyz 7y ago
  this implies that if a medical device (or pharma) passes through the regulatory process it will never malfunction which is absolutely not true.
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    It doesn't imply it will never malfunction. It implies it went through a scientifically rigorous process to minimize the chances it will malfunction.

bad_good_guy 7y ago

The story about the insulin pump seems rather unethical, almost as if she is performing research on a human child when they are not of the age to consent, and would be biased toward consent due to parental influence.

manmal 7y ago
It's not that easy. Bad compliance will lead to an early death in diabetics. And kids are VERY bad at compliance. Most parents who can afford it nowadays get an insulin pump for their kids. And they are so ridiculously complicated to operate, and one single lapse can be dangerous. You're always doing math in the back your head, considering what you've eaten (or will eat), whether you will do sports, etc.. A custom firmware with auto-dosing can be a real life changer, and saver. Source: A friend of mine is part of a insulin pump hacking community
- the_seraphim 7y ago
  could connect a sensor to some kind of excreta to get a blood sugar level? maybe an implantable sensor with blood flow?
  - manmal 7y ago
    Yes that's what those systems do.
- galangalalgol 7y ago
  a friend with type 1 told me about a mesh ball containing pancreatic tissue that has pores big enough for insulin but too small for the immune response to get to I am destroy it. sounded fascinating. I've been wondering if a closed loop thyroid pump that dumps t4 and t3 based on tsh and reverse t3 levels could be made, or a mesh ball to keep hashimotos away from some thyroid tissue, then ablate the original.
- alexk7 7y ago
  Thank you for that comment. Don't get me started on "compliance". Even if you are following 100% the diet and rules (which is impossible, we are humans), type 1 diabetes is HARD. We need all the help we can get! A closed-loop system improved my quality of life a lot. I would be healthier now if this stuff was available when I was a kid.

madenine 7y ago

Cool stuff, but did anyone else feel like they were reading an advertorial for the author? Managed to pack most of their CV in there.

0_gravitas 7y ago
I mean isnt that one of the main reasons of a tech blog nowadays?
merpnderp 7y ago
What's the difference between this person going on a philosophical exploration of biohacking and AI versus some drunk at the bar? Their CV.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  I guess also not doing it while inebriated. that's probably a plus.
- tempodox 7y ago
  There are literally millions of people with a CV that you could find drunk in a bar.
astura 7y ago
Blogs nowadays are more about self-promotion than anything else.
muh_gradle 7y ago
Dr. Ming clearly enjoys talking about herself.
faissaloo 7y ago
No, I just think she's extremely enthusiastic about the things she does in a way that strikes me as being almost autistic.

gnode 7y ago

> Imagine these advantages not being subtly embedded in the life experience of well-off Westerners, but being directly for sale—and turned up to 11. Intergenerational social and economic mobility would disappear. [...] augmentation could also become a tool to entrench inequality even more firmly. I disagree with this argument that commercial performance enhancement will destroy social mobility. The effect would be strongly dependent on the economics of such a market. Conversely, an efficient market in a new technology can be democratising. If hypothetically an inexpensive brain-computer interface could give a person access to information in a way which substitutes conventional education, then this could negate the preexisting socioeconomic divide which education creates. Particularly conventional education is unavoidably expensive because it involves labour on at least the part of the student, whereas the cost of a neuroprosthetic device, as with other electronic technology is diminishable.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Gpetrium 7y ago
If hypothetically, a brain-computer interface were to exist, it would likely reach individuals that are well-off first. As the base solution becomes more widely available to the mass, enhancements to speed, quality of information capture, processing and others would help create tiers to the product, some of which would only be available for the right price. Coupling access to information devices with real experience (which often involves spending resources), it means that there would continue to be gaps in social mobility further exacerbated by people's means to acquire the tech necessary to break through their socioeconomic status.
- gnode 7y ago
  In order to have a positive effect, a technology only needs to be less discriminatory than the technology it replaces. I chose the example of education because it is very expensive and discriminatory today; a technology which replaces the need for tuition could still be expensive and improve social mobility. > If hypothetically, a brain-computer interface were to exist, it would likely reach individuals that are well-off first. While often true for technology generally, medical technology has special considerations. Rather than simply reaching the well-off first, performance enhancing neurological implants are likely to reach the disabled first, where it is deemed ethically more acceptable, as has been the case so far. Due to public healthcare, health insurance, and research contribution, patients' wealth is not always crucial here. It may be the case that costs reduce greatly before non-medical uses become acceptable. In the case of BCIs, the acceptability of their non-medically necessary use cases would likely depend of the technology's maturity. The extent to which market differentiation is possible is not yet clear for such technology, particularly if the market is competitive. Tiering is typically based on either having a unique product (e.g. nobody else can make an equivalent) which can be artificially crippled, or natural differences in production quality (e.g. only some cores of this processor work).

onetimemanytime 7y ago

>>When he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I hacked his insulin pump and built an AI that learned to match his insulin to his emotions and activities. I’ve also explored neurotechnologies to augment human sight, hearing, memory, creativity, and emotions. Tiger moms might obsess over the “right” prep schools and extracurriculars for their child, but I say why leave their intellect up to chance? At some point you cross the line and the state intervenes. Why isn't he turning HIMSELF into a cyborg but his son?

daenney 7y ago
She. Herself. It's written by a woman. See the name of the author of the article, the picture, the fact that she refers to herself as a mother and a ton of other clues. As to why she's turning her son into a cyborg, that's pretty well explained in the article, though one might disagree with the fact that she's doing this at all.
ceejayoz 7y ago
> Why isn't he turning HIMSELF into a cyborg but his son? It'd be a little silly to install an insulin pump on someone without diabetes.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Not as silly as some other things - it is anabolic. It would be more interesting to install an adrenaline or steroid (testosterone, cortisone, gonadotropin and inhibitors) pump on a healthy person, but harder still to figure out how and if it works.

woliveirajr 7y ago

And won't this make the kid's body, probably unconsciously, generate feelings just to get another dose of insulin? Injecting insulin according to the emotions might give bad clues on how you "should" feel in each situation.

ceejayoz 7y ago
It's insulin, not morphine. The body doesn't crave higher and higher doses of it.
- woliveirajr 7y ago
  I don't mean addicted. Anyone who has ever gone from sugar highs and lows, or has experienced how your body reacts from a single candy when your glucose is low, or even how it reacts when you were in need and took an insulin shot... Knows that you can feel it. And if you can feel it, your body can learn to modulate your mood and feelings to get (or to avoid) another dose.

sidlls 7y ago

This person is playing a dangerous game and using her autistic child as an experimental toy. She's overconfident and certainly does not understand all the ramifications of what she's doing.

cabaalis 7y ago
Hacking the operation of an insulin pump for your child seems so insanely dangerous I could not even conceive of attempting it. The other things she talks about, such as helping autistic people recognize emotions, could be enormously beneficial and much less potentially harmful. My understand of part of the autism spectrum is difficulty empathizing, not being able to understand cues of emotion. I have the benefit of being able to understand pretty well that words I've just spoken or actions I've taken have hurt somebody's feelings. If an AI can flash up an image of "this person is now sad" right after someone lacking that ability has done or said something, they have the opportunity to apologize or say it differently. That could greatly improve their social interactions and personal happiness.
- inimino 7y ago
  > I could not even conceive of attempting it. Someone had to write the software that runs on her kid's insulin pump. If you could make it better and had the resources to do it right, you'd probably find it less insanely dangerous and more like the obvious way to approach the problem.
- craftinator 7y ago
  I'd feel more comfortable with my software running the pump than someone else's, especially given the UI of most insulin pumps I've seen. They make it easy it get it wrong.
thrav 7y ago
She demonstrated a bit of a misunderstanding of ADHD and the impact it has on people. Interestingly, if her working memory device is as good as she says, it may have serious potential as a non-chemical treatment for ADHD.
7y ago

jonstaab 7y ago

This kind of thing makes me intensely uncomfortable, given that Wendell Berry is basically my spirit animal. But her points are really compelling. What's the difference between repairing damage (cochlear implants) and enhancing a healthy body? I love her rule: "You should not only be better when you’re using it, you should be better when you turn it off." Also (for the christians out there), as someone who believes in the Fall of Man, we are all broken in some way, so every enhancement that brings us closer to the way we were created (in God's image) is actually damage repair, even brain implants to bring us closer to health and holiness. My only doubt is whether we have the wisdom to pull off a work that seems to belong to God.

faissaloo 7y ago
Muslim here, I've been thinking about something like what you're talking about, right now my best answer is that we would have to define some threshold for what constitutes a gross imperfection. I think most people can agree that the replacing of a damaged organ or limb is fine, so we could go from there and progressively discuss more minor imperfections until its something the overwhelming majority of people have.

roribob 7y ago

It's time for humans to disappear from the world stage. The lack of self replication means that in the future more and more robots will be needed to care for the aging populations. Humans are already incapable of building robots without machines. The only value humans will provide is by giving them orders through programming them. General AI will never arrive but we will only ever need a million or two robotics developers the same way we only need a few million software developers.

inimino 7y ago

I find the top-level comments here on the whole shockingly negative, uninformed, wildly speculative, and even downright spiteful. From the snide "hope there's no bugs" Titanic joke about an insulin pump -- This is a real mom and a real kid you're talking about. You think you're the first person in the room who's read about the Therac-25?? Do you think a snide joke implying catastrophic consequences is appropriate in this context!? To the apophatic "almost as if she is performing research on a human child when they are not of the age to consent" which raises missing the point nearly to the form of art... almost as if you had memorized a handbook of research ethics guidelines but yet somehow completely forgotten why we do research in the first place and what technology is even good for! Then we have the comments whining about the author mentioning other work she's done (like having built this stuff for much of her professional career is somehow irrelevant to having thoughts on what the risks and opportunities are?) as though it were pure self-promotion. And the funny-if-not-sad, "Why isn't he turning HIMSELF into a cyborg but his son?", missing both the author's gender and her point. If you'd glanced at the byline or even the author bio before commenting, you could hardly have missed that the author is a woman, not any kind of a "HIMSELF". And maybe, just maybe, if you had read the article just a little more carefully, it would have occurred to you that she is turning her son into a cyborg and not herself because her son is the one who has autism. > I don’t want to “cure” someone of themselves. Especially not my son. I want them to be able to share that self with the world. There is fascinating, thoughtful stuff here touching technology, medicine, science, religion, parenting, and ethics, and there are discussions we could be having around these issues, but first we have to actually engage with what's being said.

joyeuse6701 7y ago
To me (not having read the article) the click bait title sets the tone for the discussion, which makes it acceptable for jokes, despite the underlying seriousness of the topic.
- inimino 7y ago
  Well perhaps that's the problem. I read a thoughtful if high-level piece about a technologist wrestling with difficult issues while trying to help her son, and came back to see a bunch of jokes based on the provocative title (which is typically picked by an editor not the author) rather than on the article.

e2le 7y ago

After reading this and researching the state of open source diabetes care, it's quite disappointing to see there isn't any work being done on open hardware insulin pumps and instead are relying on insecure old existing pumps to make this work.