A few weeks ago, I dedicated a blog to Policy Horizons, the Canadian government’s agency dedicated to preparing the way to transhumanism or biodigital convergence. All government ministries and agencies are working towards that goal. The Ministry of Digital Government is, as the name implies, another hub coordinating our transformation into transhumanist things.
In that blog, I didn’t notice what was missing from Policy Horizons. There was no discussion at all in the long and detailed presentation by Policy Horizon’s director of the role of the military, namely the Pentagon, in the coming political economy. Van der Elst presented a Jetson’s vision of our future in which we are connected to a system of artifical intelligence every moment of the day and night. The more she tried to arouse my enthusiasm for this coming world, the more I felt spiritually gutted.
I have already expounded on my hypothesis that the Pentagon is central to this global transformation. However, Van der Elst referenced uniquely research from university or private laboratories. There were hundreds of references about the “exciting” research into biodigital convergence. But, DARPA, the Pentagon’s Department of Advanced Research Production Agency, was mentioned nowhere.
This could only have been a deliberate deflection on the part of Policy Horizons and the government of Canada. If you don’t mention it, maybe they won’t make the connection. Humbly, I have to admit their strategy worked on me … at least, temporarily. As I continued to review the science of BCI – brain computer interface – the Pentagon was everywhere. It’s not just me saying that, but DARPA’s most prestigious proponents.
This post is going to show how the Pentagon, through DARPA, has been at the centre of the drive towards tranhumanism. This background may help us to understand what could be in the covid19 vaccines and for what purpose. Many analysts are recognizing the fingerprints of the military all over Operation Covid. It looks almost certainly to be the kind of psyop that the military and intelligence services of the USA and other NATO countries have been mounting for decades. They have been able to hide behind the mask of “national security” in the past. Will the population continue to give them a pass, even when we are the targets of their machinations?
So, this is one small step towards outing the Pentagon and other military and intelligence services as the central players in this psyop (psychological operation).
In 2017, Doctor Phillip Alveda gave a presentation entitled “AI and Neuroscience: Artificial Personalities” in which he discussed his experiences as a project manager in the Biology Initiatives section of DARPA for the previous three years, working on direct human brain-computer interface. Alveda also looked to the future, from 2017, to imagine how artificial electronics and intelligence could “mate with our real intelligences.” He looked at the potential for combinations of carbon and silicon to create “artificial people.” What is the machinery inside our heads that makes humans so powerful computationally?
A little history: in the early 2000s, the Vetarans’ Administration had been funding research on prosthetic limbs for veterans. They achieved some success, at first with prosthetic arms that were not connected to the brain of the veteran; the patient accessed the controls by moving the foot. At Duke University, DARPA experimented on monkeys who learned to manipulate a mechanical arm to feed themselves while their actual arms were immobilized. The monkeys controlled the mechanical arms through their brain waves. Wires from the monkeys’ brains were attached to a large computer that translated the waves to the mechanical arm. Their movements were limited, far from their naturally athletic ability. In 2005, a human quadrapelegic was able to control mechanical arms with her thoughts; however, her clumsy movements were achieved through a set of wires that connected her brain to a very large computer attached to the prosthetic arm. They were still far from the dexterity Luke Skywalker had achieved in the Star Wars movie with his robotic arm, controlled directly by his thoughts. One problem in these technologies was that wires attached to the brain ultimately generated deadly heat.
DARPA continued to fund research into neurotechnology. There are trillions of neurons in the brain and you can conceivably manufacture an equally complex computer to receive the signals. But you cannot get the information from the brain out to that computer with a hundred wires. DARPA needed to find a wireless way to communicate the brain’s activity to a computer that could make sense of the signals. Researchers were also learning just how complex the brain is. You can’t just stimulate a neuron electrically and expect to achieve the kind of results that our brains coordinate all the time. Imagine musicians and athletes, a dog catching a frisbee in mid-air, a squirrel leaping from one branch to another fifty metres in the tree canapy.
In 2016, researchers at Stanford were able to map the activity in a mouse’s brain as it ran a treadmill. The map showed trillions of neurons flashing in incomprehensible ways. What did it mean? How did those trillions of synapses corelate to the mouse’s activity? This technology that allows us to look into the cortex opened up new possibilities. Humans could never figure it out; but a computer capable of reading the signals might be able to. DARPA’s NESD Program Vision was established to develop that next generation of interface between neurons and transistors.
The goal was first to develop general neural interfaces using wireless devices. By 2017, there were a number of Nobel Prize-winning labs researching such technologies to understand what the human brain is doing. Researchers wanted to create a universal neural interface that could act like a modem acts to transmit signals from your computer to the Internet. The goal was to access the different parts of the brain on command with very high data transmission rates.
Alvelda discussed how his work as a project manager at DARPA was to help seed the neuro-engineering industry globally; “part of the fun of being at DARPA is that everyone takes your call because you’ve got a lot of money.”
The technologies that were necessary to accomplish this step towards artifical intelligence existed, but were held by many different companies and university researchers didn’t have access to them. Some of the tech fields that had to come together to realize this step towards artifical intelligence were computational neuroscience, photonics, electronics, microelectronics, regulatory packaging, computer science, electrical engineering, fabrication. So the challenge was ecosystem building, whereby you needed to convince people in different fields in different countries and companies to get together to work towards this goal. So, over three years, DARPA hosted a series of workshops and ultimately defined the project, thanks to the incentive of “a huge pot of money.” Ultimately, hundreds of labs on three continents were funded and many more contributed to the project.
What Alvelda describes is the military-industrial complex on a global scale. It would be hard to name a university or tech company that was not involved in some way in the various systems that grew out of this work.
Just one example: Brown, Stanford and several other tech firms and universities were funded to research Distributed Neurograins to Treat Aphasia. To treat schizophrenia, they were able to create communications between different part of the brain. You may ask why the Pentagon should be the government department working on these medical issues. Alvelda says that there is a whole range of such conditions that the Pentagon thinks it can correct “and, possibly, even enhance.” In other words, the Pentagon was motivated by a desire to enhance human brains. We are now in the realm of transhumanism. Alvelda was enthusiastic about the Pentagon’s vision, saying that it might be able to “improve the connectivity between parts of your cognitive process – kind of a tantalizing thought.”
With DARPA as the hub, this work on artificial intelligence had been moving forward incredibly quickly by 2017. DARPA had created an ecosystem of industries and fields, expertise from around the world working together to hack the human. However, only DARPA would know the ultimate goal. The idea that this is all dedicated to medical breakthroughs is patently absurd. The initiative, backed by unlimited public money, gave rise to a number of new start-ups, like Elon Musk’s Nueuralink; Kernel, founded by Brian Johnson, a hundred-million-dollar startup; and Galvani Bioelectronics, a 700-million-dollar joint venture by Google and GSK (collaboration between Big Pharma and Big Tech). So, by 2017, DARPA had been successful in catalyzing a new industry.
Given the state of the neuro-engineering industry as he left DARPA, Alvelda predicted that by 2020, there would be direct sensory APIs to allow the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the mute to speak. In other words, by 2020, they would have developed a digital interface to our primary senses. Again, DARPA is said to be on the cutting edge of medical research.
Alvelda established cortical.ai on leaving DARPA. His start-up was established to go beyond healing. DARPA was about freeing the body from the limitations of the damaged mind. But cortical.ai was about freeing the human body from the limitations of the healthy mind and the healthy body. This is clearly transhumanism. As a graduate of DARPA, he wanted to work on the integrative functions that our brains do naturally. His goal was to mimic how the brain was thought to work. It is thought, for instance, that the hippocampus integrates the many different sections of the brain so that the whole brain fires at the same time. Sight and auditory signals can be integrated at the hippocampus. All the different regions of the brain come together there and create a kind of synthesis of experiences or knowledge. So, for Alvelda, “building an artificial hippocampus is the first challenge.” It was a tantalizing challenge.
The cerebellum (at the back of the head) has more neurons than the rest of your brain put together and it’s involved in prediction. It’s connected to your entire brain. The theory is that the cerebellum’s purpose is to predict future states. To project the state of all your cognitive processes put together. Everything. Our ability to anticipate what is coming in the next instant or the distant future is fundamental and is located in the cerebellum.
Four years ago, this wasn’t pie in the sky. DARPA was already developing it and expected the machinery to be in place by 2020.
So, his start-up, cortical.ai aimed to do three things: integrate the senses (in other words, reproduce what he thinks humans can already do in daily life); embody fundamental cognitive abstractions (in other words, understand what humans already do without knowing, because we don’t need to know how we work any more than a squirrel does in order to be successful); and to be able to anticipate and imagine future consequences.
Alvelda thinks that the last one is the cornerstone of value judgements and, therefore, ethics. When you can see the consequences of a number of different actions, you can judge which result is preferable and, therefore, become a moral being.
Alvelda thinks AI will be powerful when it can do this: make ethical choices based on the ability to anticipate the future. Then it will build trust. Alvelda says that ethics is nothing more than that. Since we have a theory about the mechanics of projecting ourselves into the future, there is no reason that we cannot build computers to do just that. So, he’s imagining ethical Artificial Intelligence. He calls that digital empathy.
In any case, I think we can conclude from his experience that the Department of Defense, through DARPA, is squarely behind the entire industry of artificial intelligence. In the first installment of the Who’s Calling the Shots series, we saw evidence of the Pentagon’s rationale for imposing a system of artificial intelligence on us all.