VENICE BEACH, California: Like many in Silicon Valley, technology entrepreneur Bryan Johnson sees a future in which intelligent machines can do things like drive cars on their own and anticipate our needs before we ask.
What's uncommon is how Johnson wants to respond: find a way to supercharge the human brain so that we can keep up with the machines.
From an unassuming office in Venice Beach, his science- fiction-meets-science start-up, Kernel, is building a tiny chip that can be implanted in the brain to help people suffering from neurological damage caused by strokes, Alzheimer's or concussions.
The team of top neuroscientists building the chip – they call it a neuroprosthetic – hope that in the longer term it will be able to boost intelligence, memory and other cognitive tasks.A former Mormon raised in Utah, the 38-year-old speaks about the project with missionary-like intensity and focus.
“Human intelligence is landlocked in relationship to artificial intelligence and the landlock is the degeneration of the body and the brain,” he said. “This is a question of keeping humans front and centre as we progress.”
It’s easy to dismiss these efforts as the hubristic, techno-utopian fantasies of a self-involved elite that believes it can defy death and human decline, and in doing so, confer even more advantages on the already privileged.
And while there’s no shortage of hubris in Silicon Valley, it’s also undoubtable some of these projects will accelerate scientific breakthroughs and fill some of the gaps left in the wake of declining public funding for scientific research, said Laurie Zoloth, professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern University.
Moreover, techies are motivated by the fact that many biological and health challenges increasingly involve data-mining and computation; they’re looking more like problems that they know how to solve.
Large-scale genome sequencing for example has long been seen as key to unlocking targeted cancer therapies and detecting disease far earlier than current methods.
For over two decades, Theodore Berger, a pioneering biomedical engineer who directs the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California, has been working on building a neuroprosthetic to help people with dementia, strokes, concussions, brain injuries and Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts one in nine adults over 65.
Johnson called Berger and their meeting was a culmination of a long-time obsession with intelligence and the brain. Shortly after Johnson sold Braintree, he was already restless to start another company. He spent six months calling everyone he knew who was doing “something audacious” – about 200 people in all.
“I wanted to understand what mental models people maintained, how did they define what to work on and why?” he says. He then set up a $100 million fund that invests in science and technology start-ups that could “radically improve quality of life”.
The fund, which comes exclusively from his personal fortune, was called OS Fund because he wanted support companies that were making changes at the so-called operating-system level, he said.
Johnson’s goal was to take projects from “crazy to viable”, including start-ups attempting to mine asteroids for precious metals and water, delivery drones for developing countries, and an artificial intelligence company building the world’s largest human genetic database. At the same time, he kept returning to intelligence, both artificial and real. As he saw it, artificial intelligence was booming – technology advances were moving at an accelerated pace; the pace of the human brain’s evolution was sluggish by comparison.
So he hired a team of neuroscientists and tasked them with combing through all the relevant research, with the goal of forming a brain company. Eventually they settled on Berger.
Ten months later, the team is starting to sketch out prototypes of the device and is conducting tests with epilepsy patients in hospitals.
They hope to start a clinical trial, but first they have to figure out how to make the device portable. (Right now, patients who use it are hooked up to a computer.)
Zoloth says one of the big risks of technologists funding science is that they fund their own priorities, which can be disconnected from the greater public good. Many people don’t have enough resources to fulfil the brain potential they currently have, let alone enhance it. “Saying that if tech billionaires fund what they want may inadvertently fund science for the larger public, as a sort of leftover effect, is a problematic argument,” she said.
“If brilliantly creative high school teachers in the inner city for example could fund science too, then perhaps the needs of the poor might be found more interesting.”
Johnson says he is acutely aware of those concerns. He recognises that the notion of people walking around with chips implanted in their heads to make them smarter seems far-fetched, to put it mildly.
He says the goal is to build a product that is widely affordable, but acknowledges there are challenges. He points out that many scientific discoveries and inventions, even the printing press, started out for a privileged group but ended up providing massive benefits to humanity.
The primary benefits of Kernel, he says, will be for the sick, for the millions of people who have lost their memories because of brain disorders. Even with a small improvement in memory, a person with dementia might be able to remember the location of the bathroom in their home, for example, and help people maintain their dignity and enjoy a greater quality of life.
And in an age of AI, he insists that boosting the capacity of our brains is itself an urgent public concern. “Whatever endeavour we imagine – flying cars, going to Mars – it all fits downstream from our intelligence.
“It is the most powerful resource in existence. It is the master tool.”