The language we use to understand the world around us may be about to radically change if current plans to meld AI and human thought succeed.

As we hurtle towards ever greater connectivity with computer intelligence the question of how we speak to AI is set to become even weirder. This article explores some of these implications and the role that language will have in both describing and defining our future reality.

Existential threat?

Tech investor Elon Musk last year announced his newest venture, Neuralink, a company founded with the aim of linking the human brain with machine interfaces.

The venture’s aim is to develop a “neural lace” or “direct cortical interface“ that will allow brain signals to be transmitted directly between users. With these interfaces, Musk aims to allow humans to communicate their thoughts directly with each other, a process he claims would essentially allow humans to “engage in consensual telepathy”.

Now, this may sound very sci-fi but brain interfaces already exist in the medical realm and in an indepth interview with website Wait But Why Msuk outlines some of the thinking behind setting up Neuralink.

“You wouldn’t need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something … But the conversation would be conceptual interaction on a level that’s difficult to conceive of right now,” Musk said.

How this is achieved technically is of course a difficult question but presuming some success in this direction the concept of direct brain-to-brain transmission raises some very interesting issues for our very understanding of language.

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

~ J. G. Ballard

First words

The field of direct brain-to-brain transmission has developed rapidly in recent years following the first successful experiments between animals in 2013, as reported in the journal Scientific Report. That experiment, which involved sending signals between a rat’s brain in Brazil and a partner in the US, heralded a new age where the concept of sending brain data between individuals became a concrete reality.

Described at the time as an ‘international mind-meld’ the experiment itself is far from what Musk hopes to achieve but points to a future where technology can enable cooperation. In the experiment, the Brazilian rat — the encoder — was trained to press one of two levers to gain a reward, dependant on whether or not an LED in its enclosure was lit. A neural interface recorded the activity in the rat’s motor cortex and then transmitted this to the US rat — the decoder — which was also faced with two levers.

The neural input the US rat received helped it choose which lever to press and, every time it chose the same as the Brazilian rat, gain a reward. Provided they cooperated they could improve their rewards and overall they achieved a 64% parity, far better than even odds and what the researchers describe as “a new central nervous system made of two brains”.

The team conducting the research at Duke University in North Carolina was led by Dr Miguel Nicolelis who believes that this research paved the way to define “an organic computer capable of solving heuristic problems that would be deemed non-computable by a general Turing-machine”

Creating collaboration or multiplying fictions?

As impressive as the hyperbole surrounding mind interfaces is the interesting questions are not so much in the concept of a borg-like superbrain but in the ways that humans could ultimately relate to this technology.

While rats are able to react to stimuli and adjust their behaviour in order to gain rewards they do not have a developed sense of self and hence their collaboration is fairly straight forward.

In many respects, there is little difference between a rat responding to an LED light or responding to an electrochemical signal. If instead of a neural interface the rat in the US simply watched a video transmission of the Brazilian rat’s LED we might also expect it to do better than a 64% correspondence.

In essence, the transmitter acts to deliver a sign to rat, a signal that represents the intent of some other, far away. Humans have of course already more than achieved this capability thanks to our ability to send and decode words to each other.

The highly complex sense of self developed by humans through centuries is without doubt intrinsically linked to our use of spoken and written language. It is the ability to manipulate words that first allowed us to cooperate in the plains of Africa and since then has allowed us to process complicated experiences and generate societal reward/gratification strategies.

Would an implant give us any more idea what anyone was really thinking? Would we not simply learn to game the output for our own purposes?

One might assume that any neural transmitter would simply extend the scope of our language, in the same way that access to email has broadened international communication, but does the history of natural language evolution suggest this is all that will develop?

Our first reaction might be that a link such as this would create — as Elon Musk hopes — an almost telepathic connection, a connected mind that would lead to a utopia of collaborative thought but is this likely? Does the concept of neural transmission offer the potential for more cooperation or more deception?

Down the rabbit hole

It can be argued that the entirety of human civilization has developed purely because of our ability to create those fictions which allow us to co-operate. The idea of an all powerful god, the ideas of nationhood and culture or the concepts of money and capitalism.

These fictions are powerful but ultimately limited. They can be ignored. Tuned out. We can all recognize the difference between our own first-person experience and what we are told by others. While religion or capitalism may appear seductive they are both abstract concepts, both lack any direct evidence from our senses.

The more our language has developed — broadened in vocabulary, branched into different tongues, deepened in meaning — the more persuasive and powerful these fictions have become but still language has limits.

What happens then when our communication is linked more deeply into our brain? When it is on a par with our other senses? Plugged directly into our first-person experience? Maybe even more primary to our existence than our sense of sight or of taste?

If the immediacy of these intercortical communications is on a par with our sense of touch or taste will we not believe them more — even if they are deceptions?

Is it not likely that the forms of fiction we will develop and transmit may run so deep that it will be very hard to tell them from fact?

A bridge to new language

This is not to say that we will be hoodwinked or deceived in some way — at least no more than we have been hoodwinked by the development of language.

Language has deepened our understanding of the natural world, doubtlessly, but it has also allowed us to create rich and deep fictions which in some cases allow people to manipulate whole populations. Is it not likely similar themes will play out with any new form of language?

The rats in the Duke experiment already exhibited some signs of emergent behaviour. Since both rats got a reward each time the decoder chose correctly, the encoder rat started to try and aid its partner in the US by adjusting its movements to create a clearer signal.

Over the course of the experiment the Brazilian rat refined its movements making clearer, smoother presses on the lever. In this case, the system was set up to favour collaboration but what would the result be if only one rat could receive a reward each time? Would the Brazilian rat try to obfuscate its mental signal?

When it comes to human social interactions there are of course a far wider range of options than simply ‘left’ or ‘right’ lever. Some people will blurt out whatever is in their head while others show icy restraint, some people speak plainly while others always rely on irony, some people invariably tell the truth while others lie incessantly.

Would intracortical microstimulation make these variations less pronounced or more? Would an additional sensory input lead to fewer lies or more?

Certainly the introduction of written language did little to reduce the amount of fiction in human communication.

Before the first written language, human cooperation was limited but so too was organised religion or nationwide warfare.

It begs the question — what forms of language will this lead us to?

Greeks Bearing Gifts

These questions all come before we even consider the software and hardware architectures used to transmit any ‘thoughts’. The researchers in the Duke University experiment used software to try and ‘clean’ the signal.

With a choice of just two levers the result the rat desired each time was fairly obvious so they were able to boost the signal-to-noise ratio and transmit a clearer signal. But what implications are there for the interference of software in transmission when the moral or ethical outcome is less clear cut?

Will Elon Musk or his competitors develop algorithms to ‘clean’ the transmission between two humans? Should he? And what if a government intelligence agency chose to monitor or manipulate a signal?

What level of trust would we or should we have of a sensory input that arrives not directly from the outside world but via an opaque network such as the internet? Could we ever know if such a signal had been manipulated or ‘cleaned’ by software? or even who had truly sent it ?

Whatever Elon Musk’s intentions it is undoubtedly many years before anything approaching a neural bridge can be developed for humans but it seems certain that the language with which we, as a society, construct our thoughts in the present day is never more important — as this will be the language upon which these first prototypes will be built.

(An edited version of this article was originally published on 33rd Square)

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