The Intellectual Property of Jenna Fox

Published in 2008, The Adoration of Jenna Fox is a young adult novel written by Mary E. Pearson.  It is impossible to discuss why people interested in enhancement should read this book without spoiling some of the basic premises of the story.  I will do my best not to reveal the narrative results of these premises, but if you are already convinced to read this book, and you want to remain unspoiled then you may want to skip this blog post.

So, having yet to achieve the age of majority, Jenna Fox was in a terrible accident. So terrible that only a small portion of her original body remains intact. The rest has been replaced by a substance that is a cross between stem cells and a nano-robotic neural network. Other than gaps in her memory, and odd artifacts in her locomotion and somatic awareness Jenna is indistinguishable from an unmodified girl. Her new body is far more lifelike than even the most cutting edge prostheses available on the market. She is far more wondrous than the standard wonders in this vivid near-future thought experiment. She is also in dramatic violation of the national medical ethics standards, thus an illegal life form. Her status is the fulcrum that moves the story towards its narrative and ethical conclusions.

While all these are interesting themes, what sets Jenna Fox apart from other New Promethians is that more than just her body has been remembered. Her mind has also been uploaded to a simulated purgatory, and then downloaded into this embodied neural network. Through the course of the novel, Jenna has to decide if she is the old Jenna Fox, a new Jenna Fox, or something else entirely. There are many other plot lines and themes, and the whole book is ethically sensitive, intelligent and finely-crafted. Knowing what was done to Jenna should not keep you from wanting to find out what Jenna is, what that means for her world, and indeed for the world of the reader.

What I found particularly interesting was the question of ownership of Jenna’s mind. All parents have to go through the process of letting go of their child, allowing them to become their own person. But what if that cleaving away were not inevitable? What if it were possible to keep that child forever dependent, obedient and pliant? In short, who owns the uploaded mind of a child? In this instance, the mind is the most literal possible example of intellectual property. While it is clearly a speculative exercise, the boundaries of intellectual property are already being pushed in the real world. Technology allowing for the  genetic modification of cultivated plants and livestock is becoming more mature, and is increasingly big business. In order to protect the intellectual capital of these research giants, the processes for modifying those organisms and indeed the resulting genomes are subject to copyright protection. The sequence is just information after all, just a code. And yet, it is that code that is the essence of life. It is a small leap to make from copyrighting the information that constitutes a genome to copyrighting the information that constitutes an uploaded mind. What if someone could engineer and implant the memory of the most beautiful sunrise imaginable? Or more exotically, the memory of riding bareback on a giant predatory dinosaur? Would that not be worth a great deal of money? And yet as soon as we are able to commoditize memory, then all of identity has become commoditized. Persistent identity is the cornerstone of ethics, the justice system, and participatory democracy. If identity is trivial to modify, then the idea of individual accountability becomes farcical.

This kind of uploading-based scenario seen in Jenna Fox is not even an essential precursor for the commoditization of identity. For early stage work on memory modification, read this article in Wired Science. Jenna Fox provides us with an entertaining and enjoyable context for the exploration of identity in a world where mind can be quantified. We owe Pearson a debt of gratitude for the opportunity to work this out within the confines of fiction. It is far better to decide on our ethical response to the commoditization of identity now while it is still fiction than to wait until the technology is in place. I won’t spoil Pearson’s conclusions, since you really should read them for yourself. Ultimately, it is not important that we share her conclusions, but rather that we take the time to come to conclusions of our own, and share those conclusions with one another.

Why we should consider a post-literate society

This week, as a result of a discussion in the library profession initiated by Michael Ridley, CIO of the University of Guelph, I introduced my seminar class to the idea of a post-literate society.  Even though these students are bright, well-educated senior undergrads the idea of post-literacy was  too foreign for them to grasp it comfortably. So instead of discussing how a society might become post-literate and what that would be like, I spent the rest of the session helping them to imagine and to unpack what post-literacy meant. Not the literal words, of course, which are obvious enough. Rather we tried to figure out what information was if not collected data systematically organized through the use of a written language. It turned out, I believe, to be a fruitful exercise, because teasing out our fundamental assumptions gave us an opportunity to really explore the nature of the relationship between information tools and modes of human thought.

To do this, I first asked them to imagine the entire run of the human species in all its manifestations from our remote paleoanthropological origins to whatever those mysterious and inevitable ends of our species might be. Picture it if you will, as one vast line segment, a cutout from the even more mind-liquifyingly long universal time line. From there we visualized the part of the segment covering that fraction of time when we humans could communicate complex ideas using speech. It is surprisingly short compared to the length of time “Homo” has been around. Then, an even shorter segment is devoted to iconographic and alphabetic systems of writing. Then smaller, scribal culture, smaller still printing, tiny electric printing and finally the nearly imperceptible pinprick of desktop publishing and e-paper.

The purpose of this Saganesque exercise, as you can imagine,  was to point out that across any two points on the human fossil and historical records, people manipulated information in sometimes subtly, sometimes grossly differing ways. Likewise, it is pretty safe to say that pre-human speech era thought differed from speech-capable human thought and that pre-graphical human thought differed from graphic-capable human thought. Yet, both pre and post kinds of thought were still human thoughts. We can thus infer that there is nothing inherently more human about the way we process information today, nor about the way we think than at any other point in the history of our species. How we do so is just an incident of where we sit on that vasty line segment. Whatever method of information manipulation that provides the best competitive advantage is what we use, and human thought patterns adapt accordingly to make most optimal use of that technology.  Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy addresses this strange and interesting topic at length. In this way, my class came to distinguish post-literate adaptation from the dreaded anti-intellectual neo-barbarism.

So why even talk about post-literacy and post-literate societies if the process is adaptively self-correcting?  One wonderful reason is simply to provoke the imagination. Another is that maladaptive change is always possible. A third and perhaps more immediately practical reason is of particular interest to my fellow librarians.  This reason is that it helps contrast a keystone policy of the library profession, the promotion of universal literacy, with what I would argue is an even more critical policy. This policy is the elevation of curiosity as the most cardinal of all human virtues, followed closely and augmented by the ability to reason critically.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a librarian. I have a deep fondness for books, and love people who read. Yet, the avid readers I know tend to be so because they are people of great curiosity, who like to think critically about what they read.  I consider readers a subset of a larger population, curious-critical folk.  I argue that an educational system build on forcing people to read will not make them curious. Rather, by constantly encouraging them to be curious we may well compel them, through self-direction to pick up a book. Or whatever comes after the book, and to want to make sense of that book. To argue that reading alone is a doorway to egalitarian empowerment, or to dwell on how the internet might be making us “stupid”, is to privilege in an unhelpful and a priori way, one technology and one way of thinking over all competitors. Adaptation to environment will determine which technologies and which ways of thinking propagate. No myth of progress is implied, just pure adaptation with the potential for maladaptation. Yet there can be no reason to tether the library profession to any one technology, any one building, any one way of thinking, because no technology will be best suited for all existential conditions.

So instead of expending precious time and energy arguing the merits of books vs ebooks, text vs audio, audio vs video vs speculative future alternatives, should we not redirect that energy towards re-imagining our schools? Instead of fact-implanting factories, they should be places where curiosity is privileged above all else. The goal of education should be to learn the skills necessary to teach yourself what you need to know, wherever life should lead.

Considering post-literacy is not an act of future-lust, but an opportunity to reconsider our values and priorities in the here and now. If we continue failing to sufficiently encourage innate human curiosity and to force unnatural educational conformity, then it won’t matter what technology we choose to manipulate our information, we will become maladapted to any and every potential environment. Changing technology will never render librarians obsolete. We will only be doomed as a profession when no one has any questions left that they want to answer. Let us make sure that does not happen for a very long time.

Inherited intelligence and childhood education

So, findings in a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience point to inheritance as being the most important variable in the intelligence-determination equation. Specifically it is the inheritance of genes which promote optimal myelination of neural axons, and thus speeding the brain’s ability to process signals. Future research will be geared toward discovering exactly which gene or genes are responsible for producing optimal myelination. This research could possibly lead to wide-scale enhancement efforts, aimed potentially at raising the processing speed of entire populations. While this prospect is nothing short of thrilling in terms of increasing the general intelligence of the species, these findings can also be speciously applied.

If placed within the context of the nature/nurture debate, strong findings which favor the nature camp may be used to minimize the persuasiveness of arguments for nurturing children through universal education. If, as may be extrapolated from this finding, most of intelligence is determined by a child’s genes, then why should we bother to educate children in an egalitarian way? Why not just test for those children who are rich in myelination and put them into accelerated courses, and minimize our expenditures on those children who have below optimal levels? I’m not trying to set up a straw man here, if increase in intelligence were the main goal of education it really would make little sense to spend equal money without hope of equal results. All you would be doing is setting the child up for failure and poor self-esteem. The research here measures white matter levels and how they correlate to I.Q. scores, using twin studies to establish myelination trait heredity. Though I.Q. is a useful way of measuring intelligence, it is not the only way.

Even if it were the only way to measure intelligence, nurture, in the form of communal  education, serves many other purposes besides just the accumulation of information. Communal education is useful for acculturation, for promoting important social and communication skills, for promoting active healthy lifestyles, and for gaining life skills.  Basically access to education is a quality of life issue as much as it is about information access. Consider the work of the U.N. Berhane Hewan project, which promotes continued education and delayed marriage for girls in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. Without knowing the levels of myelination in any of these girls, and their subsequent probable I.Q.’s, I can say with confidence that the education they receive as a result of the program is improving their quality of life. So while knowledge of the hereditary causes of optimal myelination can and should lead us to research ways of enhancing myelination in all children, in the mean time, we must not be swayed towards believing that smart children in disadvantaged circumstances will simply educate themselves so we don’t have to worry about providing universal childhood education.

Universal childhood education is a way of affirming the humanity of a child, of affirming their worth to the greater community, and of obliging them to contribute in return to the betterment of society. The benefits of this go far beyond raising a few I.Q. scores.

(via ScienceDaily)

Beautiful enhancement

One of the main roadblocks to open discussion of cognitive enhancement is the “yuck factor”. The yuck factor a sense of distaste or wrongness that arises when considering alternative expressions of the human condition. It may be seen clearly in the prejudicial aversion to those who are physically disabled, mentally handicapped or mentally ill. From the perspective of evolutionary psychologists, the yuck factor is a deeply rooted, if cruel, means of evaluating the fitness of a potential mate. Radically different morphology or mentality may be interpreted as a sign of reproductive non-viability.

This inspiring 2009 TED Talk given by enhancement activist Aimee Mullins documents her efforts at overcoming the yuck factor when it comes to physical disability. Through various custom leg prostheses, she demonstrates that radical morphology can be not only aesthetically appealing but also sexually attractive. Mullins’ efforts to make enhancement acceptable are inspiring. It is one thing to argue for enhancement from an ethical or practical standpoint, and it is another to see how a person’s self-esteem and quality of life really do improve as a result. Watch her video and see what you think. It may be NSFW for some artistic nudity.

(via IEET.org)

Existential threats and intelligence

So, basically this blog is about my life’s work, which is to do everything I can to make the human species and the tools we use more intelligent. This comes not out of some elite intellectualistic notion that to be a smarter is to be onlogicically better. Instead, I think that we as a species are facing several existential threats in this century, and that we’re not currently smart enough to find solutions to those threats. Some of ways we can increase human intelligence are fairly conventional, and fit well with a classic progressive agenda. (Improved nutrition for children, universal education including advocacy for the education of women in developing countries, unfettered access to information, etc.) Other ways are much more radical, including the use of nootropic substances, volitional evolution and body modification and augmentation. Still others lie somewhere in between with the extension of computer networking and the micronization of processors to create a smart world, where the “internet of things” is able to respond and proactively adapt to human needs.

This blog will be a way for me to comment on some of the more interesting enhancement news items that crop up, as well as a place for me to muse on this subject and others related and not so related that interest me. Comments are welcomed and encouraged.

What to do when you are your own Blackberry

The Boston Globe recently published an article titled, “How the city hurts your brain…And what you can do about it.” by Frontal Cortex blogger Jonah Lehrer. The substance of the article is that the chaos and complexity of dense urban environments have deleterious effects on our attention span, mechanisms of impulse control and emotional well being. In contrast, natural settings rich in biodiversity have the opposite effect. Lehrer cites research suggesting that the trade off for the loss of focus is an increase in ingenuity and creative novelty.

This is an interesting observation, that has implications for a society that is increasingly enmeshed in communication networks. The same kind of bazaar shock that overcomes mental faculties in the city center may be found in the living room, class room or board room. Wireless networked devices provide a river of information. Sports scores, political spin, celebrity gossip and stock prices wash past us in real time. We, the young information professionals, are encouraged to be baptized in this river. Washed away are not our sins, but our egos. Not egos in the sense of self importance, but egos as in grounded self. That self which is neither at the mercy of base impulses or beset by guilts for satisfying those impulses. The river is no substitute for self.

Yet, it is not possible to become unbaptized. Once you’re dunked, you stay dunked. An information professional abstaining from information is a bum. As the article suggests, going into the wild can help reconstitute a mind that is stimulated to distraction by the bazaar, but can it do the same for the mind that’s tasted of the river? Can you really be at peace in the woods when your iPhone still has edge coverage?

I have long thought that the future of information technology was to bring it closer and closer to the human body, until the access point for networked information was the body’s own nervous system. Think classic cyberpunk interfacing. Now I have to consider the implications of this internalization of the river. Having the source of innovation always at one’s whim is an intoxicating proposition, but having a perpetually diverted consciousness hardly seems worth it. The radical transhumanist approach would be to use an fMRI to find out what part of the brain responds to biodiversity, and stimulate it endogenously.  So what about the less radical proposition? Can you be an information professional in a shack in the woods? We were all promised an end to cities in the 1990s. Everyday telecommuting is now right up there with flying cars and robot butlers in the pantheon of unrealized Buck Rogers conveniences. But must it be so? If the head of the river is in our heads, who cares where the mouths are?

The upshot is, now that we know that constant overstimulation has negative consequences, and that those consequences are ameliorated fairly easily, the onus is on each of us to insist that we be given the opportunity to ease our mental burdens. It’s our well being, and we have the right to protect it.