# Against certain naive varieties of transhumanist sentiment

A frequent idea that I run across when speaking to technophiles with
transhumanist leanings these days is the superiority of tech over…

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### Against certain naive varieties of transhumanist sentiment

A frequent idea that I run across when speaking to technophiles with
transhumanist leanings these days is the superiority of tech over biology.
People will say, “I’ll upload my brain and live forever”, or “I’ll replace my
arm so that I can be stronger”, or “I’ll get a wetwire to the internet so I
can read faster”. This isn’t a new idea; I said variations on the same thing
when I was fifteen. But, it’s absolutely stupid.

We have never built a machine with a lifespan and resilience comparable to a
human being. Machine failure rates fall along a bathtub curve, but while an
expected human lifespan is betweenseventy and eighty years these days, it’s
the rare freak of a machine that still functions after ten or twenty years —
let along thirty, let alone continuously. Biological systems have insanely
complex self-repair and self-maintenance systems, and the reason we live for
eighty yearsis that our parts are continuously being maintained, rather than
undergoing routine maintenance on a human scale of weekly-monthly-yearly. The
very first programmable electromechanical computers were built in the 30s
(depending on who you ask and how you define it, you can push it forward or
back about ten years), meaning that a human being living an average lifetime
that was born at the same moment as the very first programmable computer in
the modern sense would be dying *right now*; drum and disk storage is twenty
years younger(along with transistors, ram that’s not based on relays/mercury
tubes/CRTs, programming languages other than machine code, and interactive
terminals), and the internet is about fifteen years younger than *that* (along
with email, pipes, directories, and asymmetric key cryptography). Someone born
at the moment the first packet was sent over the internet would be middle-
aged. Nevertheless, all these systems have changed drastically many times over
the course of their lifetime, in incompatible ways. All of the component parts
have been replaced many times over. At various points in the past, all these
systems have had *complete* failures (yes, including the internet). These
systems are not at the point where they could be expected to safeguard the
lifetime of a rat, let alone extend the lifetime of a human being.

Likewise, with prosthetic arms. Prosthetic arms are great — for people who are
missing their arms. Cochlear implants aren’t competing with people’s real
ears; they’re competing with being deaf. The prosthetic eyes that have finally
gotten FDA approval have approximately the same resolution as a [TRS-80 Model
100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100#/media/File:Radio_Shack_TRS-80_Model_100.jpg)
— they aren’t competing with real eyes, but with total blindness.

Wetwires are in an even worse position. The current state of the art in brain
implants can, with incredibly invasive and dangerous brain surgery,
temporarily hook your brain up to 200 I/O lines, each of which neurons *might*
decide to grow on. Wetwires are competing with reading: a four thousand year
old technology that’s constantly being improved upon, that takes advantage of
the human eye and optic nerve — a pipe so fat that the eye is considered to be
a part of the brain, a pipe so fat that the eye does complex processing
independently of the visual cortex and can independently trigger signals to
the amygdala about emotionally striking scenes before the visual cortex can
even receive the image data. Furthermore, reading is a technology that the
government of every developed nation spends huge amounts of money on
installing into its citizens! Wetwires can’t compete with that.

That said, this isn’t the end of transhumanism, or even of grinding. Implants
aren’t going to go away. It’s just that we aren’t looking at them correctly.

Implants are a *long* way away from replacing the things that human beings
already do well, like living and thinking and reading and moving. Generally
speaking, to the extent that it’s trivial to do so, when there’s a problem
with scale, we invent an external technology to handle it — when we need to
turn bolts, we build wrenches that fit in our hands instead of hacking our
arms off and replacing them with wrenches. If we depend upon implant tech (and
other varieties of transhuman tech) to fund itself by being an improvement
over what humans already are capable of doing, then the whole field will go
bankrupt. But, there aretwo fields in which this kind of tech can excel. One
is performing aworse job at than the human body at tasks that the human body
already does — prosthetics for people with missing limbs, and replacement
parts for people whose parts are faulty or missing. The other is allowing
human beings to do things they’ve never done before — not by increasing scale,
but by qualitative change.

The cochlear implant kind of sucks. When it’s installed, wires are stuck to
the cochlea — a snail-shaped fluid-filled organ in the inner ear that does the
heavy lifting in hearing (the rest of the ear is basically involved in
amplification and protection). In normal hearing, vibrations from outside the
ear are amplified by a set of bones that operate like a cam assembly, before
pressing on a flexible membrane on the big end of the cochlea, and the
movement of tiny hairs inside the cochlea produces the perception of sound,
with the position of the hairs that are most stimulated determined by the
frequency of the sound. In a cochlear implant, the wires cause the hairs to be
stimulated directly, with galvanism, and so the number of wires installed
corresponds to the resolution of sound available. We do not have the
technology to produce CD-quality sound. We don’t even have the technology to
produce speak-and-spell-quality sound. People with cochlear implants are stuck
trying to decode speech based on fewer distinct frequencies than there are
bars on a child’s xylophone. But the cochlear implant, as an accident of its
nature, has one improvement over the ear — it has a built-in headphone jack.
Cochlear implant-like technologies are far from being an improvement over
ears, but when combined with throat mics or other mechanisms for producing the
fundamental elements of speech from subvocalizations, they might be an
improvement over the walkie-talkie. At the point at which this technology has
enough demand to make people voluntarily submit to brain surgery, I expect
that this is exactly how it will be used (and I expect the first market to be
military or paramilitary — people who, on a life or death basis, need to
communicate without using their hands and without being heard by other people
nearby).

There’s another trend going on, as well. Just as desktops became laptops and
laptops became smartphones, smartphones are on the cusp of becoming wearables,
and wearables will become implants.

However, this change-over is very rarely quick, and even more rarely complete.
Before desktops, we had minicomputers, and before minicomputers, mainframes;
however, minicomputers are not quite gone (IBM still sells machines running
z/OS, although most of the market is dying), and desktops are hardly going
anywhere.

We haven’t yet reached the point where it’s reasonable to develop software on
a smartphone — which means that smartphones are about where personal computers
were in 1979, but beyond where laptops were in 1989 (when the now-famous New
York Times article suggesting that the age of the laptop had come and gone was
written, but also, paradoxically, when the HP-95 palmtop was released — which,
as it so happens, was perfectly capable of having software developed on it if
you could get along with a calculator-style chiclet keyboard). Smartphones are
currently being used for light-duty applications while the heavy-duty
applications like video editing, compiling, and triple-A gaming are being done
on laptops and desktops — a mirror of about ten years ago, when laptops were
being used for lighter-duty applications. Meanwhile, wearables are at the same
stage that smartphones were in the Palm Treo era, or that PDAs were in the
Newton era — in other words, just close enough to seem potentially
commercially viable, but not quite far enough along yet to be useful as
anything more than an expensive toy. Expensive toys can be industry-changing,
if they’re popular enough, but to do that you need to pull a Sony and sell
under cost at scale. (Sony is the only company I can think of that has pulled
off making its new technologies ubiquitous and cheap by selling under cost at
scale multiple times — it did it with 3 1/4 inch floppy disks by supplying
Apple with them under cost in the mid-80s, again a few years later with CDs,
and again by shipping every PS3 with a blu-ray drive. But, it’s also failed
multiple times with that technique — with mini-discs, with the cell
processor…)

Every few years, the entire tech industry pulls out twenty-year-old project
from the MIT Media Lab or CMU or PARC or somewhere and collectively decides to
shit its pants over it. Recently, we’ve been hitting a quadruple-whammy:
wearable computers, the Internet of Things, 3d printing, and virtual reality.

The current wearable computer boom started with Google Glass taking pretty
much equally from the work that Thad Starner and Steve Mann were doing in the
early 90s; appropriately, Starner was brought onto the Glass project, while
Mann was completely uncredited despite the fact that they took the name from
him. And, despite the fact that Glass was a complete PR disaster, Google
definitely decided what parts of Starner’s work to borrow with an eye toward
PR — Starner’s most interesting idea, subliminal reminders, was omitted from
Glass and the Glass UI standards and Glass UI frameworks were written in such
away that subliminal reminders should be completely impossible. Now, in an
almost hilariously ironic turn of events, Microsoft has taken essentially
exactly the same technology, made it steroscopic, reframed it in terms of
geolocation-centric AR (something Glass was never going to be capable of
doing, by design), and turned it into a massive PR success.

In comparison, the current Internet of Things boom seems to be driven entirely
by industry-wide amnesia. That’s not entirely unfair, since the industry has,
until now, had a very hard time figuring out what to call it. The current term
of art is the Internet of Things, but from around 1995 to around 2005,
everybody was calling it Ubiquitous Computing. The IoT is hitting a lot of the
same media roadblocks as VR did in the early90s, which makes me think that
it’s probably around the same point in the hype cycle, although
technologically, it’s definitely further along.

Ten years ago, when I was an unemployed teenager, I had two big projects that
were lighting up my eyes. One of them was a wearable computer project. The
other was a UbiComp project — what you’d now call the Internet of Things. At
the time, the wearable computer project was by far less feasible; displays
were expensive, cpus were expensive, making either run off a battery and
getting the thing small enough and light enough to fit on your body meant
lowering its capabilities to an extreme. I designed several prototype wearable
computers around the AT90S8515 — an 8-bit microcontroller that cost$10 and had
127 bytes of ram — and various LED-based displays, but it was clear that
unless I was willing to either buy thousand-dollar equipment or strap a laptop
to my back and make due with The First Church of Space JesusThe First Church
of Space Jesusaudio cues as an interface, wearable computers were really
infeasible. (I ended up strapping a laptop to my back and using audio cues, in
the end.) The UbiComp project, on the other hand, was completely within the
realm of possibility — I had a working prototype for a system for communal
cooperative use of a single computer, based on identifier tokens stored on a
cheap wiimote knockoff that doubled as an input device; the cost of the system
was the cost of a random desktop computer, a projector, and a $20 wiimote
knockoff. If I had had steady disposable income, I could have formed a
corporation and finished my prototype and become yet another failed IoT
startup — the technology was there, solid, and absolutely trivial.

Today, IoT is even easier. My potentially-$300 [≈ cost of PS3 gaming system,
2011] computer could be replaced with a $20 raspberry pi. Wiimote knockoffs
don’t even cost $20 anymore. The projector costs more than the rest of the
system in total, and my homebrewed account-sharing system could be replaced
with the kind of cloud-based thing that newbies whip up in minutes and brag
about on hacker news. A couple years ago,[ I did a wearable computer, too —
with about $350worth of parts (a raspberry pi, a twiddler, a $100 head mounted
display, and a USB battery
pack)](http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/2014/01/off-topic-wearable-
computer-project.html), I built something that, while not comparable in
usability to a laptop, beat the pants off the absolute best I could do with
that kind of money in 2005 — mostly because of economies of scale provided by
the popularity of smartphones. PDAs manufactured in 2005 couldn’t really run
800x600 color VGA, or even 300x200 color VGA — too slow. (Maybe you could do
it if you were especially clever. I wasn’t clever enough to make up for my
lack of riches — wagering the cost of disassembling an expensive PDA on my
ability to make it drive a display was too rich for my blood.) A single-board
computer capable of running Linux in 2005 was a fucking high-end single-board
computer. But, the iPhone came out — a single board computer running BSD
shoved into a PDA — then the Android phones started appearing a couple years
later — cheaper single board computers running Linux and Java shoved into
PDAs. Now the chips that run Linux in smartphones are cheap enough that Texas
Instruments will give away a handful of free samples to anybody with a
university-affiliated email address, complete with specialized circuitry for
fast video decoding. [Single board computers running Linux can be sold for $20
and make enoughmoney to prop-up a non-profit
organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation).
Meanwhile,[ some nerds figured out that a series of cheap wifi chips could be
reflashed](http://www.esp8266.com/), and[now you can buy complete postage-
stamp-sized wifi-enabled systems that can run Lua for
$5](https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-huzzah-esp8266-breakout/using-nodemcu-
lua).

So, we’re at the point now where you can [stick the guts of a smartphone on
the side of your head and have a head-mounted smartphone with a battery life
of about two hours](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass), or you can
[stick the guts of your smartphone on your wrist and have a smartphone with a
battery life of about a day if you barely ever have the screen
on](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Watch). Or, you can [stick the guts of
a smartphone in your pocket and stick a screen on your head, and actually have
a reasonable battery life with reasonable
usage](http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/2014/01/off-topic-wearable-
computer-project.html). We aren’t at the point where we can start making fully
wearable never-take-em-off computers with reasonable battery life and
reasonable capability, although I think that if we take a page out of the MIT
Media Lab book and combine this with IoT, we might be able to make due with
what we have for a little longer. This has problems — centralized IoT is the
domain of natural monopolies, with most of them fated to go the way of
AppleTalk (although centralized IoT is all the rage now, with every consortium
of manufacturers competing to make their own incompatible standards on the off
chance that theirs will be the one to take off); meanwhile, decentralized IoT
is the stuff of IT nightmares, where failures in logistics and/or security can
lead to [a lightbulb DDoSing your house and/or the white
house](http://fusion.net/story/55026/this-guys-light-bulb-ddosed-his-entire-
smart-house/). My own design, which was based on a federated model with an
open protocol and a market for competing vendors, has unfortunately been
obviated by time — it was based on the assumption that the normal use would be
an evolution of the cyber-cafe, and it probably would have worked in 2005, but
no longer makes sense in the same universe as widespread smartphone ownership
and devices like chromecast. Offloading computing from wearables onto IoT
nodes will require an extreme of either security or naivete — and because
security is complicated, I fully expect a future hellworld of incredibly
insecure wearable/IoT mesh networking comparable to the amazing terror of
running Windows 9x on the internet in the 90s. Welcome back to an era where
anybody with a modicum of knowledge can remote control your computer and
nobody can patch it for five years; except this time, the computer is strapped
to your face.

This is a problem that *must* be solved before the wearables become
implantables. Implants need to be smaller than wearables. Right now, the state
of medical device security is pretty low — while medical device software,
along with airplane control software and nuclear power plant software, has
higher quality standards under normal operating conditions, it’s largely no
better than normal consumer-grade software when it comes to resisting actual
planned attacks, and sometimes worse. We already have computers in all sorts
of things — horrible, insecure computers; our airplanes can be hijacked
through the in-flight wifi network, our cars can be hijacked through the CD
player, our pacemakers can be remote-controlled over wifi, and our routers are
already sustaining self-replicating botnets. When these devices are on our
bodies, the threats become more visible; when they are in our bodies, they
become potentially fatal — not necessarily because of malice (it takes a
special kind of person to actually shut down somebody’s heart by exploiting
their pacemaker) but because of incompetence (it doesn’t particularly take a
special kind of person to try to make a botnet out of every exploitable wifi-
enabled device, including pacemakers, and then not check available memory and
crash the pacemakers because he’s just written to an address that doesn’t
exist).

Implants are coming, and wearables are coming first. Implants will come both
faster and slower than we expect, because they won’t be used how we expect.
They won’t make us live longer or read faster, but instead will let us do
things we haven’t imagined yet. Let’s fix our shit before we’ve got buffer
overflow vulnerabilities that’ll take actual brain surgery to patch.

This article was originally published at [The First Church of Space
Jesus](http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/2015/05/against-certain-
naive-varieties-of.html).

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [May 24,
2015](https://medium.com/p/3535eec7e5fd).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/against-certain-naive-varieties-
of-transhumanist-sentiment-3535eec7e5fd)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.