Science fiction has often warned us about cyborg warriors, mainstream journalism not so much. But several recent articles have focused on this potential peril, including one in The Atlantic titled “The Pentagon Wants to Weaponize the Brain.” The subtitle asks, “What Could Go Wrong?”
Journalist Michael Joseph Gross reports on efforts of the Pentagon’s think tank, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to create technologies that result in “merging minds and machines.” The most dramatic are brain chips, arrays of electrodes that, implanted in the brain, can receive signals from and send them to neural tissue.
Officially, DARPA intends brain chips to help paralyzed and otherwise disabled veterans — for example, by allowing them to control computers and robotic limbs. DARPA is also interested in upgrading healthy soldiers, according to Gross. “What the agency learns from healing makes way for enhancement,” he writes. Brain chips could boost soldiers’ cognitive and physical functions. Soldiers could control complex weapons systems with their thoughts, communicate telepathically with other soldiers, and download large databases instantly, like Neo in The Matrix. In principle.
Raffi Khatchadourian, writing in The New Yorker, focuses on brain-implant recipient Jan Scheuermann, who was paralyzed by a neurodegenerative disorder. In 2012 she fulfilled a fantasy, eating a chocolate bar with a robotic arm controlled by her thoughts. She also controlled an F-35 flight simulator with her implant before it was removed because of the risk of infection.
Khatchadourian raises the possibility that brain chips can be used to control as well as empower implantees. He quotes a Scientific American article I wrote about brain-chip pioneers Jose Delgado and Robert Heath, who demonstrated more than a half century ago that they could manipulate patients’ limbs and emotions via implants.
I’m skeptical of the hype about brain-machine interfaces. Scientists still know little about how the brain encodes information. Moreover, attempts to use brain implants to treat depression and other psychiatric disorders has been disappointing. But breakthroughs that make bionic soldiers possible could be around the corner. Cochlear implants, which restore hearing to the deaf via electrodes implanted in auditory nerves, were once thought to be impossible.
Military officials are already envisioning how neurotechnologies will transform war. And that brings me to an essay in The New York Review of Books by historian Christopher Clark. He reviews The Future of War: A History, by military scholar Lawrence Freedman, and Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield, by former Air Force Major General Robert Latiff.
The latter “sketches a vision of a future that resembles the fictional scenarios of William Gibson’s Neuromancer,” Clark writes. In future wars a “‘metabolically dominant soldier’ who enjoys the benefits of immunity to pain, reinforced muscle strength, accelerated healing and ‘cognitive enhancement’ will enter the battlespace neurally linked not just to his human comrades but also to swarms of semiautonomous bots.”
Clark ends his review brooding over the books’ implications. “It’s hard not to be impressed by the inventiveness of the weapons experts in their underground labs, but hard, too, not to despair at the way in which such ingenuity has been uncoupled from larger ethical imperatives.” Clark deplores the books’ seeming assumption that “war is and will always be a human necessity, a feature of our existence as natural as birth or the movement of clouds.”
Clark ends his review asking, Where are the “prominent politicians” calling for war’s abolition? Good question. Here’s another: Where are the prominent scientists calling for war’s abolition — or, at the very least, for a moratorium on research that might trigger a terrible new arms race? Let’s hope we come to our senses before the era of cyborg warriors begins, because then it might be too late.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”
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