Bioelectronics and Implanted Devices

The future may well involve the emergence of humans who are fundamentally coupled with bioelectronic devices, science fiction's “cyborgs.” Revolutions in semiconductor devices, cognitive science, bioelectronics, nanotechnology and applied neural control technologies are facilitating breakthroughs in hybrids of humans and machines. The interactions of increased computing power, advances in prosthetic devices, artificial implants, and systems that blend electronic and biological components, are facilitating the merging of man with machines. Increasing numbers of body parts are being replaced with bio-electronic and mechanical items, accli matizing us to the melding of the organic and non-organic. Used as curative devices for patients with sensory, motor or cognitive deficits, active medical implantable devices evoke little dispute, allowing those who are blind, or paralyzed, or without a limb, to surmount those conditions. Significant ethical concerns are, however, raised by the potential for using these technologies to enhance and augment human capabilities, and by the possibility that humankind, as we know it, may eventually be phased out, or become just a step in evolution. Endowing humans with night vision, X-ray vision and long-range zoom capacities, or the ability to sniff out mer cury and carbon monoxide, appreciably changes human abilities. Of even more significance, is the radical enhancement possible through approaching brain-machine interfaces. Brain machine interfaces may enhance, augment or replace those most prized of human capacities, the ability to reason and remember. These interfaces will enable humans to be constantly logged onto the internet, to cyberthink and to instantaneously retrieve encyclopedic stores of information. Building in these interfaces, surgically implanting them in the brain, will allow for greater energy, and efficiency, and will enable humans to operate without radios, or TVs, printed newspapers, cameras, GPS units, credit cards, computer workstations, ATM machines, wireless, corded or mobile phones, and other separate devices (Maguire 1999) Brain-computer interfaces involve technologies which take infor mation from the brain and externalize it as well as those which provide individuals with access to information from outside. The interaction of these technologies to allow for input-output interactions raises ethical issues of privacy and autonomy, justice, and even the meaning of being human. In the future, if it becomes possible both to clone an individual and to implant a chip with the uploaded memories, emotions, and knowledge of the clone's source, a type of immortality could be achieved. Alternatively, the uploaded self could be stored in a computer. Uploaded minds would not age; such humans could travel at the speed of light and communicate directly from mind to mind. In the future, each individual, and mankind, in general, may be faced with decisions about what kind of entity he/she chooses to be: (1) a natural, (2) an immortal with a body or (3) an entity that exists in virtual reality. Because of the vast probability that these technologies will transform humanity, global ethical and legal guidelines ought to be formulated and enforced.