INTERVIEW: Tell me about your book.
NAAM:  I decided to write More than Human in about 2002.  I saw a lot of science happening that looked like science fiction.  I read this incredible paper in the Journal of Science about scientists who implanted an electrode in the brain of a mouse, and trained it to move a robot arm, to feed itself.  And I thought, that’s crazy.  I didn’t know they could do that. And then I just saw a string of these articles where it looked a lot like science fiction, and thought I’d write a book explaining a lot of the science that was happening.

INTERVIEWER: What’s your background?
NAAM:  My background is in computer science, butt I’m a big kind of lay person who enjoys reading about other sciences.

INTERVIEWER: Describe the concept and context of the "worldwide mind".
NAAM:  The idea of the worldwide mind is that throughout history, we as a species, have created more and more technologies to allow ourselves to communicate with one another.  When we first evolved, when we first became human, we could speak.  We learned language.  That was really the thing that separated humans from the primates that came before us. 
The next step was when we developed writing several thousand years ago.  After writing we developed the printing press, which made literacy available to many more people.  The printing press set off the renaissance, with the ability to communicate all this information, more and more between people; people got access to more ideas.  They could bounce their ideas off of other ideas.  They could build on things. That human brain, that human society got smarter and smarter. 

INTERVIEWER: A collective intelligence of sorts?
NAAM:  The human society got smarter and smarter itself.  It’s like every human being is a neuron, and humanity as a whole is one giant brain.  So if you can increase the ability of humans to communicate with each other, to do something like the printing press, or the telephone, or the web, you make the whole planet smarter. 


INTERVIEWER: What’s the next step?
NAAM:  The ultimate technology for this might be the direct connection of one person’s brain to another. 
For instance, the worldwide mind means that you might be able to close your eyes, visualize a scene, and have that communicated to someone else directly, without words, without drawing a picture.  You might be able to feel what someone else is feeling.  You might be able to share ideas, or emotions, or sights, or sounds directly.

INTERVIEWER: So, do you have a chip in your brain yet?
NAAM:  I do not have a chip in my brain. 


INTERVIEWER: If it was available, would it be a wise thing for people to do?
NAAM:  I assume that people should do what they want to do.


INTERVIEWER: Does such a concept make us any less human?
NAAM:  As humanity, we have always invented tools to make ourselves smarter, stronger, faster, extend our lives.  That’s natural.  That’s what it means to be human. 


INTERVIEWER: Are we on our way to becoming cyborgs?
NAAM:  A cyborg is a human being that’s augmented themselves, that has technology that makes them more powerful.  You could say that a person driving a car, or using a cell phone is a cyborg.  They can do things that a naked human just couldn’t do. 


INTERVIEWER: But driving a car isn’t what most people think of when they hear the word Cyborg.
NAAM: So of course, in science fiction, the idea of a cyborg is someone that has technology implanted inside their body, someone who is part human and part machine.  And we’re getting there.  We have people with prosthetic limbs.  We have people with hearing aids or cochlear implants.  But it’s not fundamentally that different to have a cell phone implanted in my cheek as it is to wear a wireless, blue tooth mike for my cell phone.  Either way, the technology is giving us capabilities that we didn’t use to have.


INTERVIEWER: Do you think these latest changes will be more difficult to accept?
NAAM:  Throughout history, people have reacted to new technologies that change what it is to be human, or alter our bodies, our minds, with some degree of hesitation or nervousness.  The first smallpox vaccine generated newspaper editorials that announced it, that said that it was unnatural.  The use of birth control, the birth control pill, that’s a fundamental change to humanity in some ways, to give a woman that kind of power over their reproductive system.  That’s not that different from the things that we’re looking at now. 


INTERVIEWER: But isn’t it different when the technology is inside of someone’s body?
NAAM:  We implant steel plates in people’s bones to help them heal.  We implant contraceptive devices inside of women to give them the ability to control their fertility.  People wear IUD’s.  There’s all sorts of implantations that we do.  There’s artificial hearts and pacemakers.  We were already used to this idea that we can use technology to cure some kind of illness or give us some kind of fundamental control over our lives that we didn’t formerly have. 


INTERVIEWER: So how would the worldwide mind work, in terms of technology?
NAAM:  So imagine this.  Sometime in the future, 2030, 2040, 2050, you go in for surgery to have a brain computer interface placed inside of your brain.  The idea is that scientists will go in, and either they’ll put a chip inside your brain that connects to various neurons, various nerve cells, or maybe using a technology like Rudolph Olenas describes they’ll send tiny, tiny nano wires, smaller than the smallest capillaries in your brain, throughout your brain, to connect to millions of cells. And then, when that happens, they’ll be able to send electrical signals in and out of your brain.  The brain is this electro-chemical device. And we’ve already shown that through electrical stimulation, or listening to these neurons we can, um, restore sight to people, we can restore hearing to people, like Michael Chorost. 
We can take people who are paralyzed from the neck down, listen to the part of their brain that controls motion, and give them control over a robot arm, or a cursor on a screen.  So in the future, as this technology gets better, we should be able to do all sorts of new things.  We should allow someone like Orlando...


INTERVIEWER: Just so everyone knows, Orlando is a character in our show from the future. The character is an astral projection, already hooked into the worldwide mind.
NAAM: We should be able to give people abilities like this character, Orlando, the ability to take our thoughts, and communicate them directly to another person, the ability to close our eyes, imagine a scene, imagine a picture, or a building, or a sound, or a sensation, and communicate that directly to another person.  Maybe even the ability like in The Matrix, to download new knowledge, or new skills into our brains.  All of this is possible, because we’re learning to decode how the brain works.  We’re learning how the patterns of neuro-firing in our brain translate into our vision, or our hearing, or our emotions, or our thoughts.


INTERVIEWER: It sounds like science fiction.
NAAM:  It sure sounds like science fiction, to be able to communicate thoughts from person to person.  But there’s a lot of good research that’s gone into this.  And now, basically the concept has been proven.


INTERVIEWER: How has it been proven?
NAAM: In about 2000 we had the first demonstration that we could take a blind person, put a camera on a set of glasses that he wears, that camera connected to a computer, he wore on a sling on his shoulder, and that computer connected to electrodes that went into the back of his skull, into his primary visual cortex. And it took the photons, the light the camera picked up, and it turned it into electrical signals into his brain, and he could see, a man who’d been blind for 20 years. 
Phil Kennedy did some of the pioneering work.  He took a patient named Johnny Ray who’d been paralyzed from the neck down, and he put Johnny in a brain imaging machine, and said, “Johnny, we want you to think about moving your right hand?”  They looked at his brain.  They could see which part of his brain is most active, and they went into that part of that brain, and they implanted a single electrode that could listen to how his nerve cells were firing.  And using that, they eventually could figure out how he wanted to move his hand.  And so they gave Johnny control of a cursor on a computer screen, so he could move it around and type out letters, and type out messages to people.


INTERVIEW: The implications for medicine could be astounding.
NAAM:  It’s early days for the medical applications of this technology, let alone the science fiction possibilities.  But basically what we’re looking at is the ability to take people who are paralyzed, and give them control over artificial limbs, or control over computers.  Be able to take people who are blind because they’ve had damage to their eyes, or their retina, and restore vision.  The ability to take people who have lost their hearing, like Michael Chorost, and give them restored hearing by directly stimulating the nerves, and potentially much, much, more.


INTERVIEWER: So Dr. Kennedy broke some very important new ground.
NAAM: Phil Kennedy’s research was really ground breaking.  For the first time, what Kennedy did was, he took a human being who had been paralyzed, and he placed an electrode inside that patient’s brain, and by picking up the signals inside the brain, and decoding them on a computer, they could give that patient control over a cursor.  So that patient, Johnny Ray, he would think about moving his hand to the right, and that would move a cursor on the computer screen to the right.  He’d think about moving left; that would move it to the left.  And so he could type out messages on an onscreen keyboard.  And this was a man who had been paralyzed from the neck down.  He’d had a tracheotomy so he could not speak.  Until this point, the most that Johnny Ray could do to communicate was blink his eyes, once for yes, twice for no.  After this, he could type out messages.  He could say things to his loved ones. 
And it just points out these more science fiction scenarios.  If you can give a person a little bit of control of a cursor, why can’t you give them control over a robot arm?  Or why can’t you just give them the ability to think about moving around inside of some virtual reality environment, for instance.


INTERVIEWER: What do you think all of this means for the future?
NAAM:  The human ability to predict the future is pretty limited, and a classic mistake that people make is to overestimate the changes that will happen in the short run, and underestimate the changes that happen in the long run.  It’s always hard to know exactly when something will happen. 
But at a really fundamental level, what’s happened over the last couple decades, and really has been happening for a century, and is going to keep happening for centuries to come, is that we are decoding the human brain.  We’re decoding the human genome.  We’re decoding how the human body works. We’re doing it because we want to heal people.  We’re unraveling how the brain works, because we want to heal Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, or restore sight to the blind.  We’re decoding the genetics, because we want to stop multiple sclerosis, or other genetic diseases. 
But in so doing, we’re getting an understanding of how we’re put together, and when you understand something, you can change it.  What that means is, we’ll be able to change our life spans, our appearance, our personality, uh, the ways that we think, how smart we are, how much we can remember, how much we can communicate with other people.  What we are right now, human beings, we’re going to get a tremendous amount of power and control over in the decades and centuries to come. 


INTERVIEWER: Are we going to become robots?
NAAM:  Are we going to become robots?  We are going to become whatever we want to be.  I don’t even know what a robot is, at some point. We’re probably not going to give up our flesh entirely.  That seems unlikely.  I think, as far as we can predict, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to take our flesh, and we’re going to take our brains, and we’re going to improve on them. 


INTERVIEWER: At what point do we go beyond being human.
NAAM:  So there is this idea that by increasing our abilities somehow we become less than human, that it’s cheating, for instance.  That if I take a pill to make myself smarter, that that’s not fair, that’s not as good as having gotten there by myself in some way, or that if we slow down the aging rate that that’s unnatural.  But I think those kind of arguments miss the point.  We have always, as long as we have existed as humanity, we’ve always looked for ways to make ourselves smarter, make ourselves live longer, give ourselves more physical abilities.  That’s why we invented writing.  That’s why we picked up sticks.  That’s why we invented the use of fire.  We’re always looking for these ways to improve our lives, and improve our control over who we are, and our environment. That’s what it means to be human. 


INTERVIEWER: So, the 22nd century will look very different than the 21st.
NAAM:  The 22nd century is so far away, it’s really hard to know what anything that far away looks like.  But I think it’s going to be a period where we human beings have more control over who and what we are, where we can change our appearance, we can change our personalities, we can change our capabilities.  We’re not stuck in this more static mode that we’re in today. 


INTERVIEWER: Certainly, there are some frightening potential outcomes with these technological advances.
NAAM: Powerful technologies have powerful potential side effects or consequences.  And sometimes they’re not what you expect.  When the automobile was invented, no one really thought about the fact that it would cause highway accidents or smog.  People just didn’t think about that as a possible consequence.  And the automobile has had down sides.  It’s caused car crashes.  It’s caused pollution.  But overall, it’s been a benefit to society. 
The story of history, for the most part, is that greater technology has given us great ability to improve our lives.  There have been awful, awful, awful things that have happened as a result of technology.  Nuclear weapons have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, at least.  Planes, and trains, and the combustion engine have been used to power tanks, and missiles in warfare.  Technology can destroy.  But overall, in society, we live longer than we’ve ever lived.  We have more personal freedom than we’ve ever had.  We have more leisure time.  Our lives are enriched with more information.  We have more control.  We have the lowest rate of death from violence than this planet has ever seen, today, even with these wars going on. 
Even when you tout World War II and World War I, in the 20th century, we had a lower rate of deaths.  A smaller fraction of our deaths came from violence than in any century in the past.  These things can kill millions, but there are billions of us alive right now.  Overall, this is the most peaceful, most prosperous, most enriched, most free, most wonderful time period we’ve ever had as a species. 

INTERVIEWER: It’s interesting that so much technological advancement has stemmed from the military.
NAAM:  The military is always interested in ways to empower its soldiers, ways to, uh, increase their effectiveness, their capabilities, in some way.  So DARPA, the military’s research agency, if you will, is the second largest funder of research into brain computer interfaces. They want to be able to give their soldiers better abilities to communicate on the battlefield.  They’re also a big funder of genetic research, and medical research.  They want to develop technologies that can stabilize, or heal soldiers that have had horrible wounds.  They want to find ways to re-grow lost limbs for soldiers that have been at war. They’re building those things because there’s a there’s a military application.  But those same technologies will eventually filter out into the public at large.  And the result is that while they develop these battlefield technologies to heal injured soldiers, or to increase soldier to soldier communication, that eventually everyone gets to have this richer communication, or benefit from these new medical technologies. 

INTERVIEWER: What are some of the other drivers of technology.
NAAM:  A few things drive the early creation in research into new technologies.  Medical research is a big driver by itself, because people want to stay alive.  Entertainment is a big driver of new technologies.  You can say that porn, in particular, is a driver of new technologies.  There’s a classic story about VHS and BETAMAX and how that developed.  And then the military is also a driver of new technologies, because they are very future focused, in the sense that they’re always looking for ways to increase capabilities. 
But the way that science works, the hard part is figuring out how to do something.  The hard part is not building a chip to go into your brain; it’s figuring out how to build that chip, how to implant it safely.  Once you’ve done that, that knowledge gets out, and people can apply that for other kinds of uses.

INTERVIEWER: What makes a new technology attractive to people?
NAAM:  The first uses of almost any new technology that touches the brain, or the mind, or the body are medical ones.  People are interested in these technologies, not because they want to build super powerful cyborgs out of science fiction. They’re interested because they want to cure or control Parkinson’s disease, or they want to restore vision to the blind, or they want treat people with memory damage. 

INTERVIEWER: And these things may not be that far off?
NAAM:  We can only guess about the treatment, and my guess is that by 2030 you’ll see consumers having a much wider set of options of ways to alter their minds and their bodies.  You may see consumers buying products that actually lengthen their lifespan.  You may see people buying products that alter their personality.  Maybe somebody who’s shy wants to be a little bit bolder.  Somebody who isn’t confident in their relationship with their spouse wants to have gene therapy, or brain implant that cements their love in some way.  Maybe someone just wants to change their appearance.  And possibly, people will be buying interfaces that go into their brain, that give them greater ability to think, greater control over their own thoughts or emotion, or be able to communicate these ideas to others as part of this worldwide mind.

INTERVIEWER: But, can we ethically give consumers the choice to alter their brains?
NAAM:  Well, the fundamental idea here is that individual consumers sometimes make bad choices, they really do.  But collectively the best decision making system we’ve ever seen is one where lots and lots of individuals make individual choices.  Some people choose a product that ends up being not so great.  Others make a choice that ends up being fantastic.  They learned from each other, and that seems to produce better results than any system of state control.  That’s what capitalism and democracy are all about.

INTERVIEWER: Should the government be involved?
NAAM:  It’s possible the government will have their fingers in this.  I think there’s some good places for it.  I think government regulation of safety is a good idea.   I think government-assisting education of people to help them make better choices is a good idea. What I’m hoping for is that in the future we have a world where individuals and families make choices about themselves, where I get to choose what my brain is like, what’s implanted in it, what my personality is, what my genes are.  And I don’t think that’s so far fetched.  I think that’s the foundation of western society, to some extent.
I think if people stand up and demand their rights, and say, I have the right, I want the freedom to decide who I’m going to be, I want the freedom to decide what goes on in my brain, just like giving man the freedom to decide what we want to read, what we want to watch.  We wouldn’t stand for the government saying, you can’t watch this, you can’t read this.  So why would we stand for the government saying, here’s what your genes are going to be.  Here’s what is and is not allowed inside your brain. 


INTERVIEWER: Will access to these technologies be a major divider of the classes?
NAAM:  Ah, so there is this question about equality.  Do the rich get better stuff than the poor?  Do they benefit more?  And initially, maybe a little bit.  But there’s this idea of diminishing returns.  If you look at the prices of, um, cars or televisions, for instance.  For a few thousand dollars you can buy a car that basically runs.  For $200,000 you can buy a Lamborghini.  Is that car really 40 times better than the basic car?  It’s not 40 times faster, or 40 times safer, or 40 times more fuel efficient?  It’s a status symbol.  So yeah, the rich will be able to afford stuff that’s somewhat better, but not dramatically, dramatically better. 

INTERVIEWER: Eventually, it will probably become commonplace.
NAAM:  Well, the idea is that over time this technology gets cheaper and cheaper, and when you want the very, very best, you get a product maybe one percent better than the next one down, and costs twice as much.  So maybe the world’s richest, richest billionaires could afford something that was five or ten percent better.  But if you look at it now, um, Bill Gates, no matter how rich he is, can’t buy genetic engineering for his kids.  He can’t extend his life.  He can’t get a chip implanted in his brain.  There’s not that much difference between him, and you, and me, in terms of what we can really buy in terms of improving ourselves and improving our life. 
The idea here is not to create a master race.  It’s to give individuals and families the choice.  It’s not to tell people, here’s how it’s going to be.  It’s to tell people, choose, pick yourself.  What do you want?  Do you want to be smarter? Do you want to have your kids be like this, or like that? 

INTERVIEWER: Misusing technology is certainly not uncommon.
NAAM:  Well, people can always misuse technology.  And certainly, there are people who are television junkies, who just sit and watch television all day.  There are people who are drug addicts, who consume drugs all day, until it ruins their lives.  But that’s not most people.  Despite the ready availability of television, or drugs, or alcohol, most of us deal with these things just fine.  We might have a drink when we come home from work, to relax a little bit. And that actually increases your life expectancy.  We might watch television, like watching a PBS show to inform ourselves, or watching a show or a movie to relax a bit.  And that’s perfectly healthy.  Overall, people seem to do pretty well at employing technologies in a way that’s healthy and constructive for them.  I don’t think they need a big brother watching over them, telling them what they can and can’t do with their own minds and bodies.


INTERVIEWER: Are we all destined to become similar; won’t we all want to be super-human?
NAAM:  That variation in our abilities is part of what it means to be human.  But I think, given the ability to control our personalities, our thoughts, our bodies, we’re not all going to make the same choices, because sometimes things are going to be incompatible. 

INTERVIEW: But what about controlling other people’s choices?
NAAM:  These technologies give us control over ourselves.  They’re not really an effective way to control other people.  They’re so time-consuming.  We already have the ability, or bad guys already have the ability to point guns at other people, and say, you will do what I tell you.  That’s a far more effective form of, uh, control of others than any of these technologies.  What these are about is controlling ourselves.  It’s about changing ourselves, altering ourselves to be the kinds of people we want to be, with the abilities that we want to have. 

INTERVIEWER: Isn’t much of the fear associated with the future merely the fear of the unknown?
NAAM:  Great question.  People often fear new technologies because they’re unknown.  Let me give you an example.  The first in vitro fertilization, Louise Joy Brown, beautiful little blonde girl, very healthy, and alive today.  But after she was born, there were protests about playing God, and creating test tube babies, and no other invitro fertilization case happened for two years after that.  But today, there have been more than a million IVF babies born.  I think 3 million total conceptions, and a lot more babies on the way right now.  It went from being this case of playing God, and of test tube babies, and this kind of demon-ization of it, because it was unknown, to being a situation for parents to say, “Yeah, we had some fertility problems.  We went and saw a doctor, and it’s all better now.  We have a beautiful baby.”  People fear the unknown, but when they see the benefits it gives them, they adopt it. 

INTERVIEWER: So, final predictions?-
NAAM:  I think the future is going to be a lot stranger than anyone imagines.  In science fiction we imagine the future is outer space.  But it looks like the future is inner space.  The future is not so much about all of us leaving this planet, it’s about gaining control over our genes, gaining control over our bodies, gaining control over our brains and minds, and being able to alter them so we can look the way we want to, so we can be stronger, and faster, so that we can work for decades, or maybe centuries more, so we can restore youth to people who are aged, and so we can alter our thoughts, change our personalities, become smarter, communicate things back and forth, from brain to brain.