Mind and Iron: Just how screwed are we in the 2024 election?
Plus a talk with one of the few people to ever have a computer chip inserted in his brain (really)
Welcome back to another rip-roaring episode of Mind and Iron. If you’re new here, thank you for joining us! What we’re doing is taking a humanist look at the tech changes that have begun to engulf us — at how all the ways that we learn, eat, work, heal, vote, think and live are being transformed in this new tech age. It’s going to be a fun and important conversation, and we’re happy you’ve decided to be a part of it. If you’re a returnee, it’s great to see you again.
Since our launch last week some folks have reached out to ask how often we’ll be publishing, and when. The short answer is weekly — most often every Thursday, like today. Of course this is a newsletter, based on news, and we’ll have to react newsily. So some weeks it may be more than once, like when the AI officially takes over the world’s nuclear arsenals and we humans gather underground to figure out if there are any coders who can break this thing and/or if that pile of twigs and leaves can stop a lethal superintelligence.
And other weeks might bring a quick holiday break — like next week, when we won’t be publishing due to the 4th. Either way, you can count on Mind and Iron for this: all the big tech and future news that can be broken, curated, analyzed and explained. And all through a human lens. Sure, you can read the legacy outlets until the virtual cows come home. But — a big “Almost Famous” Jimmy Fallon ‘respectfully’ here — they won’t report on these issues the way we do.
So why not sign up a friend? It could be the greatest act of camaraderie you do all week.
Now for this week’s episode, in which former Google exec Eric Schmidt offers a warning about AI and the ‘24 election while lab-grown meat goes out and hoofs it one step closer to our plates.
Also, do you not have a personal assistant who waits on your every need and secret wish? Would you want a personal assistant who waits on your every need and secret wish? Would you be OK if such an assistant was an AI? There are people developing such things, and in the MindF#ck section of this week’s episode you can hear about what they’re up to.
And in an interview you don’t want to miss, I talked to one of the few dozen people in literally the history of the world to have a computer chip inserted in his brain. Yes, this is the technology known as a brain-computer interface, or BCI, that allows a brain to relay signals to a computer that can then execute an action — in this case, enable a tetraplegic to move his extremities. What’s it like having one of those inside you, and what it’s like knowing you’re a guinea pig for a future in which simple thoughts can accomplish complex tasks? You’ll read all about that and more in this week’s episode.
Now let’s get to the messy business of building the future.
IronSupplement
Everything you do — and don’t — need to know in future-world this week
Meat ‘n Greet; Vegas Freeway Robots; Will Campaign ‘24 make 2020 look like a Student Council election?
1. JUST WHEN YOU WERE READY to settle into the summer — get that grill going and leave those fears of world-implosion behind — along comes Eric Schmidt to ruin the zen.
The former Google honcho and current AI author isn’t much concerned with computers becoming sentient and dominating us (nor should anyone, really). But he raises a concern that is inexplicably getting very little attention despite its imminence.
“The 2024 elections are going to be a mess. Because social media is not protecting us from false generative AI,” Schmidt told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this week, nightmarishly. “They're working on it. But they haven't solved it yet. And in fact the trust and safety groups are being made smaller not larger. This is a big issue.”
What he’s alluding to are image and video deepfakes — AI-enabled creations in which a person with not even an especially pro-level of sophistication can produce a convincing image or video of something that never happened. (Fans of “America’s Got Talent” may recall the company Metaphysic did this last summer in primetime, prompting worry from watchdogs, a subject I wrote about at the time.)
So what happens when George Soros is “seen” talking about his plans for world domination, or Donald Trump or President Joe Biden or any other prominent figure is “seen" saying or doing something they never said or did? If you thought putting the toothpaste back in the tube on a text-driven kerfuffle like Pizzagate was hard, just wait ‘til these misinfo videos start popping up.
So are the social-media giants really not preparing for it? I reached out to the comms teams at Facebook, Twitter and Instagram asking them to detail what they’re doing and if they feel ready. None have responded. So the bad actors are noisily working. The social-media companies? The silence alone should be scary.
[CNBC]
2. PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW THE FUTURE OF FOOD were ready for this moment. But it was still groundbreaking: the FDA last week approved two lab-grown meat companies to begin selling their products in the United States.
This is the tech where animal cells are cultivated in a lab, yielding a food product that, according to pretty much anyone who’s eaten it, is basically indistinguishable from actual once-living cuisine. The companies, Upside and Good Meat, both out of Northern California, passed muster with the USDA as well as the FDA, which issued it a coveted “No Questions” letter. The public can now be served.
Now cultivating meat and chicken from animal cells is still a massively expensive operation, which is why in the near future you’ll only be able to get these products at very specialized wallet-draining places — San Francisco’s Bar Crenn on the northern edge of Pacific Heights and the Jose Andres restaurant China Chilcano around the corner from the National Archives Museum in D.C., for instance. (Or you can go to Singapore.) Certainly it could be a while before either of these companies can reach the kind of scale that would make lab-grown meat cost-effective for your local supermarket or neighborhood diner.
Still, this is a major regulatory breakthrough for an industry that could, if its hypesters are to be believed (and there is plenty of reason they should), transform where our food comes from. Lab-grown meat looks and tastes and quacks like a duck — and, existential questions aside, may actually be a duck — all without requiring a single duck to conceive, be born, be raised or be slaughtered.
(There’s a strong documentary about this named “Meat the Future” that’s narrated by Jane Goodall — a little cheerleady but still revealing of at what Upside Foods and its chief, an ex-Mayo Clinic cardiologist named Uma Valeti, have been up to.)
The reality is that the amount of arable land that lab-grown meats could save (we’re talking entire countries-worth) and methane gases it could reduce (ditto) — not to mention drastically eliminating cruelty — without even requiring a change in diet is pretty astounding. The other reality is that the rancher industry is a pretty damn powerful D.C. lobby, and good luck unseating powerful D.C. lobbies. Bronco up, cowboy, this one’s gonna bridle.
[AP and The Guardian]
3. IT’S BEEN A FEW YEARS since I've visited Vegas. So perhaps in the intervening time it has become a place of orderly behavior, of dignified roll-up-the-sidewalks-at-10-p.m. restraint, a Geneva of the West Coast.
Barring that, it's hard to imagine how the news of a self-driving car unloosed in the city is a good idea.
Zoox, an Amazon subsidiary that has been developing self-driving "robotaxis," this month began piloting (or I guess technically not piloting) its vehicles on roads in Sin City. The cars are deployed, passenger-less, on a mile loop around the company's Vegas headquarters, according to local outlet KSNV, part of a test to see how it operates under real-world conditions.
The driver-less experiments from Tesla have of course been going super-well, not causing pileups or anything, so you can imagine why a municipality heard the proposal and said "Driverless cars? In real-world situations? In our city? Bring them on!"
And then there's the particular municipality in question. Anyone who's ever tried to dodge traffic on the Strip — or, you know, just walk a half-block down it — will testify that the chaos is already great enough without throwing some Decepticons into the mix. (The testing radius — at least at first — is a bunch of miles away from the Strip. The company also is trying the taxis back at its Foster City home base in Northern California.)
Then again I've seen more than a few pedestrians on the Strip look like they could really do with a ride back to their hotel, and at the same time a few drivers who look like they shouldn't be anywhere near a car. So perhaps an injection of driverless vehicles into the Vegas biosphere isn't the worst idea. Plus it'll be fun to see the expression of a reveler bro as he tries to convince his buddies of what he just saw. "Dude, I'm telling you, I looked out the window and there was no one in it." The guffaws alone may make this worthwhile.
MindF#ck
Notes from the Future’s Edge
I won’t give up until I’m Satisfi-ed
BY NOW THE ARCHETYPE OF THE PERSONAL ASSISTANT is so strong as to be cliché. You know, the employee who intuits the boss’ every desire before they do — picking up birthday gifts for their kids, making dinner reservations at restaurants they didn’t know existed, being a second brain that can outthink the first. Who on God’s blue marble wouldn’t want such a deputy at their disposal? (At least in theory, that’s a lot of business to be all up in.)
Now comes along a tantalizing question — can new digital tech can serve this purpose for those of us who are…not so deep of wallet? Is AI the great Assistant democratizer?
Can we go from a world in which Google tells us the history of dinosaurs when we ask to a world in which AI books us tickets to the science museum when we don’t?
That could seem like a stretch given how, right now, ChatGPT doesn’t even seem to know “Avatar: The Way of Water” was already in theaters.
But I recently talked to one of the people making this future happen in a low-key way. And he may be on to something.
That person is Don White, the co-founder of a New York-based conversational AI company called Satisfi Labs. Satisfi has deals with more than 400 clients — pro sports teams and venues and cities’ tourist attractions. And the work he and others are doing seems to be heading us into this digital personal-assistant world, like it or not (obviously at least a decent percentage will like it, which is why we’re headed there).
Right now Satisfi’s focus is on more incremental advances — improving the chatbot you use to communicate with a team on issues such as season-ticket subscriptions and the like. The company helps provide both “verified” responses that’s sort of an official team line and “generative” responses in which an AI answers based on questions it’s been asked thousands of times before.
So far, so early 21st-century — basically it’s a really helpful customer-service representative. But then: it’s not much of a jump for the AI from understanding the information you seek to anticipating the needs you have — from passively providing answers to actively divining your desires. After all, if so many others of your very similar profile have asked about X before as a prelude to wanting Y, then it will know that, maybe even before you do, and act accordingly. It’s the assistant that has access to the desires our own scattered brains have yet to uncover.
So it might realize, to use one example White provided, that someone visiting an Atlanta Braves game with two kids could well also want to see the Georgia Aquarium, and mention the hours there and how to buy tickets. It’s not that different from the current “do you also need a rental car” when you’re making hotel reservations, but only in the way that the Flintstones car is not that different from a Tesla. Because this isn’t just guessing that you might like something else vaguely travel-related. The machine has specific nuanced historical information; it knows, with ruthless processing efficiency, what you’re interested in, based on intricately knowing not just your profile but the tens of thousands of similar and different profiles that came before you.
And then there’s the final step — actually doing it for you. This requires something called AutoGPT (more on that in a future episode). But suffice to say that such an action is not hard to program — that AI, having understood your needs, could go out and fulfill them without a crazily elaborate set of separate coding instructions.
“The next step really is when it buys the Mets ticket for you and also buys one for your Dad because it knows it’s his birthday and that he loves the Mets too, and it checked your calendar and you’re both free that day,” White told me. “And it also bought a jersey of his favorite player because it knows that too.” Your entire family outing has been planned, and a gift shopped for besides, without you even knowing about it.
You see how this can quickly accelerate into assistant territory. In fact it sounds like it’s already in assistant territory.
The reason I think White is not just blowing smoke is that the brands themselves want this level of automation. I mean, why not? You sell more tickets and jerseys when the machines remember to buy what we addled humans forgot.
On one level this all sounds good. Because who wouldn’t want a personal assistant? There’s something beautiful about the shift; like so many great innovations, it democratizes that which was once reserved for the elite. (See also: the automobile, the personal computer, sushi.)
But there’s also something pretty creepy about it. Because it’s weird enough when you were just texting your friend about a topic and a related ad pops up. Weird, but harmless. What happens, though, when you didn’t even ask and it’s made a purchase? What happens when it’s already made plans for you without you knowing it? And messaged your friend (or, more likely, your friend’s AI assistant) to set them?
If you thought letting that streaming subscription auto-renew was fifteen bucks a month you’d never see again, these AI assistants have come along to say ‘Hold my beer.’ Which it probably ordered for you.
“It does sound creepy,” admits White. “I think there will need to be a temperature setting and people will adjust it up or down based on their comfort level.”
For now, I’m lukewarm.
IronClad
Conversations with people living the deep side of tech
The Human Who Had a Computer Put Into His Brain
IAN BURKHART WAS JUST ANOTHER COLLEGE STUDENT on a beach break when his life changed. While on the coast of North Carolina in 2010 he jumped into the water and broke his neck, suffering a complete spinal-cord injury in the cervical spine. He would become a C5 tetraplegic; in addition to paralysis in his lower body, doctors said he would never be able to move his hands again.
But instead of retreating into a cocoon of self-pity, as so many of us might, the Dublin, Ohio, resident began a whole new odyssey. His doctors told him about a highly experimental trial at Ohio State University and Battelle Memorial Institute in which surgeons could implant in him something called a brain-computer interface, or BCI. Essentially, a complex neurosurgery would see a very small set of gridlike electrodes —it looks like a tiny hairbrush — inserted into his brain. There it would record signals and transmit them to a device outside his body, which would translate them and relay them back to his body — basically a machine that reads his thoughts and feeds them back into him so he could move his hand again.
Doctors explained that the microchip, manufactured by a pioneering Utah company nameed Blackrock Neurotech, would allow him to move his fingers again while hooked up. With others, they noted, it could help move different extremities, or even speak. (BCIs are what Elon Musk is doing, with mixed effectiveness, at his company Neuralink. Blackrock was doing it years earlier.)
Burkhart was one of the first people to ever have a BCI implanted when doctors successfully inserted the chip in his brain in 2014, when he was 24. And for 7 1/2 years, he had the implant in his brain, a melding of mind and machine sci-fi authors have barely conceived of. More practically, it restored a lot of movement to his hands, literally remedying his paralysis. An article in the journal Nature described him as “the first paralyzed person to be re-animated.”
For years Burkhart held the record for longest BCI implant, and was still that record-holder when he had the device removed, in another complex surgery, in the summer of 2021 after the trial was over. (The record has since been broken. He’s happy about that.) To this day, only about 35 people worldwide have ever had a BCI device implanted in their brains, from the likes of Blackrock and another startup named Synchron. Musk has yet to do it.
These days Burkhart works as an activist, mentor and fund-raiser, helping to raise millions for research and accessible equipment. He also is president of his own foundation and consults with medical-device companies.
Burkhart lives with the surreal knowledge he was an experimental subject in one of the most cutting-edge medical procedures the modern world has seen. That has stirred some complicated feelings. I talked to him by Zoom from his home in Dublin, Ohio, just northwest of Columbus, about those feelings and where he thinks BCI can and should go. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Mind and Iron: Thanks so much for joining me today.
Ian Burkhart: Thank you very much for the chance to share my experience.
M&I: So take me back to the moment of the accident first. How did you cope — or not cope — with what happened?
Burkhart: It was really challenging to even wrap my head around it — to understand what the future was holding for me. Over time I started to cope with it pretty well but it was still one of things where I would often say ‘how can I improve?’ ‘Is there a way to make things better for myself?’
M&I: And that brought you to BCI.
Burkhart: It did. It’s what led me to always ask the doctors about what was new that I might apply to be a part of. And it’s what led me to have a neurosurgery I didn’t need that honestly had zero guarantee of improving my quality of life. Because I knew that if somehow it did work, restoring hand function would be something magical.
M&I: Is magic what you felt? Or is that too strong a word…
Burkhart: It started just a little slow. But then I began to see how this wasn’t just an idea but actually a possibility. And then it got to the point where I could do functional things, really moving. I could open and close my hand and move fingers, which I could never do since my accident. I could pick up a drink, take a drink, pour a drink into a glass. I could play ‘Guitar Hero.’ I could even use a credit card — I could always kind of manage to pick it up but without my fingers I could never have the force to swipe it through the reader. And now after the surgery I could do it.
M&I: What percentage of function would you say the chip restored?
Burkhart: Not 100 percent. But maybe 60, 70 percent? Not, like, being able to play piano. But functional tasks, which was more important to me.
M&I: One thing that made me a little sad to learn is that you were able to take advantage of the implant only in the lab, when you were hooked up to the signal-translation box and other equipment.
Burkhart: Yes. That was a little disappointing. A few others who’ve had the surgery could use it at home. Even just in a controlled setting at home. But that still makes a big difference. For me it was just three times a week for a few hours in a lab, and then later in the trial twice a week.
M&I: That had to be weird, that transition from having so much hand use to being paralyzed all over again several times each week.
Burkhart: It is to some degree. The way I always looked at it was to compartmentalize it: 'When I'm in a lab I'm an upgraded version of myself. And when I'm home I'm back to who I am.’
M&I: I can't imagine those kinds of highs and lows on a regular basis.
Burkhart: I got used to that after a while. But the trial being over was difficult. It meant reverting to an earlier, darker, more limited time. To some degree it's almost like having another spinal-cord injury again. Which is something I don’t think a lot of people realize: what happens when these trials end? But I also think a lot of it for me was ‘how do we get this to other people, to people who need it even more than I do?’
M&I: How much of your personal pie chart in getting the BCI implant was just that — more a sacrifice for research versus anything it would specifically do for you?
Burkhart: That was a good portion of it. I knew it was such a fantastic opportunity to participate in something meaningful — and just 20 minutes from my house. And I had a flexible schedule when it started because I was in school. I would think ‘if someone in my position would say no because they were too afraid, I’d respect that, of course. But it would mean science wouldn’t progress.’ So the altruistic view of things really helped me decide to do this. I knew at a minimum science as a whole would learn something from this, even if it was a complete failure, even if I had serious complications and passed away from it there would still be something that would be learned from it and that would be valuable to society.
M&I: And the risks didn’t gnaw at you.
Burkhart: Certainly there were a lot of risks— my surgeon had never put in a device like this before. But I guess my attitude was either there was going to be a problem and they’d be able to handle it or they wouldn’t and I was not going to have to worry about it because, well, it’d be past that point. Really I had to sell it to my family more than I had to sell myself. At that point it was three-ish years after my spinal-cord injury. My mom was like, ‘three years after you have your life flipped upside-down, do you really want to risk it again?’ She was like, ‘why are you doing this; how is it going to benefit you?’ But for me it made sense and I was just gung ho from the start.
M&I: Now, you were actually only supposed to have the chip in for a short period, yes?
Burkhart: It really was planned just to be 12-18 months. And it ended up being seven and-a-half years. There were a lot of question marks along the way about whether we could get the funding to extend — it was all internally funded, there was no grant funding or industry-sponsored funding. At one point they wanted to stop the trial due to funding constraints and make me have the device removed. I had to fight — I had to get a lawyer to help me so I could retain the device.
M&I: Was your passion to have this chip in you validated in the end? Was it all worth it?
Burkhart: It was, but more in the details than with a miraculous awakening. It was something I knew was really exciting — I was the first person in the world to be able to restore movement to their own paralyzed hand. But at the same time because it was centered in the lab it wasn’t that I had this life-changing capability restored. It was just a reiteration of possibility.
M&I: So what's your main focus these days?
Burkhart: I have a group called the BCI Pioneers Coalition. I'm wrangling together both current and former people in these trials. We're pushing forward to make sure there are good ethics around the development of these devices.
M&I: Something the medical-device industry does...not always have a smooth relationship with.
Burkhart: Yes. We want to make sure they have patients' interests in mind. There's a lot of excitement in the space and even more so with Neuralink getting final approval from the FDA this month [for human trials]. Precision Neuroscience [another startup] is now bringing this to people in a less invasive way. Things are progressing.
M&I: It's funny, in one sense it seems to be moving quickly and in others not quickly enough. Like, with so much money and energy it's amazing in a way how few people have had the implants.
Burkhart: And a lot of what we're doing is just trying to encourage the industry to push it out there. It doesn't have to be in perfect form for people to benefit from it. Some people it could help — like, late-stage ALS patients who have lost the ability to speak — could really benefit from it. But they may not be around in five or ten years to do that. So it's something we need to push out as soon as possible for all the people who don't have a lot of time left.
M&I: Would you go through the surgery again? If there was a new trial?
Burkhart: I would. I'm always looking. Certainly I’m open to something again. I'm waiting for something new that can be fully and permanently implanted. But I’m also definitely eager for a day where it doesn’t need to be implanted at all — when a device can be used outside the brain. For a future when I don’t need any surgery to be able to use my hands.