Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010
THE CONTRARIAN
Avatar—the Soul in the Machine
by George Vradenburg
If you haven't seen Avatar, do. Particularly in its 3-D version, it is a film that will engage your senses. James Cameron has created a product that extends the palette of our filmmakers as dramatically as the introduction of sound to silent film or color to black-and-white films.
The film's story is simple: greedy corporate profiteers, with the aid of the U.S. military, seek to exterminate indigenous populations (nine-foot-tall, blue-complexioned peaceful beings called the Na'vi) and to destroy the environment (God-like trees capable of healing the dying) in order to get access to valuable natural resources. It is a distorted Hollywood caricature, but one with enough verisimilitude to permit suspension of disbelief.
Boy, are the people, plants, and forest on that planet beautiful! And you are inside the film, flying with birds, running through a forest vividly colorful and wonderfully alive.
But all of this is fantasy.
Or is it? The technology that animates the hero of this film may well anticipate developments in the "real" world. Our hero is a soldier who is able to enter and act in the indigenous world through an "avatar" who has the physical characteristics of a Na'vi but whose brain (hence, sensations and values) wirelessly mirrors the brain of our hero as he lies inside a whole-body container-transmitter in a safe environment miles away.
Developments on the horizon may make this man-machine connection a reality within our lifetimes, raising any number of intriguing issues.
Researchers are now working on modeling and mapping the entire brain. Doing so, it is hoped, will enable the diagnosis and treatment of brain impairments -- from mental disorders like bipolarity and depression, to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, to traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by combat or concussion. Computer technology capable of mimicking brain functions, and perhaps modeling therapies for brain impairments, is not beyond reach.
Brain researchers are considering scenarios where a model of a patient's brain might be "downloaded" into a computer for analysis, diagnosis, and design of personalized therapeutic treatments. New insights into brain plasticity (the ability of the brain to build new connections or to recover memories) lead one to ask whether a computer-modeled brain with impairments might be electronically repaired and then, once repaired, "inserted" into the patient, with instructions to develop new neural connections to eliminate brain impairments.
Fascinating philosophical issues are obvious. Does a simulated brain inside a computer have a "soul"? Is that computer "spiritual"? If the computer is a robot with humanoid features, is the computer-robot "human"? If we can otherwise treat brain impairments by rewiring neural networks, can we "cure" mental tendencies to war and prejudice? If the computer finds a way to reproduce itself (robotic "hardware" with brain "software"), are we breeding the next evolution of beings? If the "real" brain animates a human's limb, can the mirrored "downloaded" brain in the computer-robot be wirelessly instructed to imitate that behavior?
This emerging technology that promises so much in treating brain impairments has obvious commercial applications. Simply programmed humanoid robots capable of performing household chores are already on the market in Japan; reprogrammable robots are now in widespread use in manufacturing. With personalized brain mirroring and more powerful computers, could robots respond in real time to instructions given from a distance by the robot's master?
It is also easy to see the military applications. A brain-activated robotic soldier would do for the infantry what the unmanned Predator and Raptor airframes are already doing over Pakistan and Afghanistan today. In the hands of terrorists, man-machine look-alikes could eliminate the need to recruit suicide bombers with the manufacture of suicide robots.
Fantasy? Consider this: the Army is investing heavily in prosthetic devices that replace limbs lost by soldiers in combat, limbs now so powerful that runners using those devices are being disqualified from athletic competitions because they are thought to give an unfair advantage over athletes without prosthetics. In the next few years, that same Army is investing over one billion dollars in research into traumatic brain injury. How difficult is it to imagine "brain prosthetics" to "remedy" combat-related brain impairments? Is a combat avatar avoiding human casualty in war altogether not a natural next step?
Like our movie storytellers of the past, James Cameron has given us a vision of future machines empowered with a soul and a sense of awe and wonder about the universe -- and yet the power to kill. What a fascinating and troubling vision that is.
George Vradenburg is the publisher of Tikkun.
Vradenburg, George. 2010. The Contrarian: Avatar—the Soul in the Machine. Tikkun 25(2):7. http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010vradenburg
