Translator: Chryssa R. Takahashi Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
All my life, I've wanted to be a superhero.
When I was a kid, I wanted the Jedi mind trick.
"These are not the droids you're looking for."
"Give me a million dollars."
And then for a long time,
I thought I could be like Gene Gray from the X-Men,
and I would spend hours upon hours just focusing on objects,
trying to move them with my mind.
And then, I saw this.
(Video) Narrator: You're watching the most advanced brain-machine interface
in action.
Cathy Hutchinson is paralysed and unable to speak,
but just by thinking,
she's able to control the movements of this robotic arm
and drink her morning coffee.
Jody Medich: Did you see that?
She just moved that object with her mind.
With a chip called BrainGate2, it's a chip in her M1 neuron,
that's the neuron of your brain
that allows you to control your hand and your arm,
and just by thinking about moving her arm, she's able to move that object.
I think this means that we can make superheroes with technology.
Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.
So clearly, that means that making superhumans
is just a matter of advancing technology sufficiently.
And if BrainGate2 is any proof,
that means creating a brain-computer interface.
And why not?
We're cybernetic already, right?
All those facts and figures I spent decades learning in school,
today's generations can just google it.
Access the hive mind with some simple steps.
But why all that sounds like it should be magic?
It just doesn't feel like it.
I bet the first that leapt to mind when I suggested a brain-computer interface
was this dreaded blue screen of death, right?
And that's a reasonable projection of today's human-computer interface.
It just doesn't feel all that magical.
Why is that?
Well, today we train humans to use technology.
Today's human-computer interface, or HCI, is designed to guide the user
through the necessary steps required to make technology do the right task.
The onus is on the human to determine the proper patterns.
This is fine if you are doing, maybe, one thing at a time,
but that's not how we use technology.
I regularly get into arguments with my cell phone.
Driving down the freeway, doing 80 mph, late for my meeting,
trying to text one of my coworkers to let them know
while googling new directions of how to get around this traffic jam
that I just came upon.
Sure, any of those activities on their own is manageable, perhaps,
but combined together, there are just too many steps.
Too many decision points.
And it's overwhelming.
It definitely does not feel like magic.
Magic is skipping the right steps.
If you saw a magician shoving a rabbit into the hat
and then frantically covering it with some fake bottom
before just pulling it out of the hat and saying, "Voila!"
you wouldn't think that was magic.
You wouldn't think, "Oh, cool."
No, because it breaks the illusion.
Magic is skipping the right steps
in the process to create an illusion of simplicity,
when in fact there is complexity.
Our brains are magic. Our brains use a very similar strategy.
Just like magic, our brains intelligently skip the right steps.
For example, you're not really seeing me right now.
Your brain has a mental image of this environment,
and it's just updating itself with anything that's changing.
This is most obvious when you think about periphery vision,
where you don't really see things until they start to move towards your head.
Your brain is saying, "Ah, look out. There's something coming for you."
By skipping steps,
the brain dramatically simplifies the mental burden of any given task.
That's because humans have very limited working memory.
Working memory is your short-term or your task-based memory,
and it's in very short supply.
I know everyone here has had this experience.
You walk through a door, and you go, "Why did I come in here?" Right?
That's because we only have so much working memory.
And walking through that doorway, your brain says, "Oh, new context",
and it wipes the old stuff.
Your brain decides it's no longer relevant,
and you forget why you're there.
But now you have available working memory
for whatever new task or activity you are about to undergo.
So while it may glitch out every so often, our brains are incredibly effective
at reducing the burden on your working memory.
In order to do this,
the brain offloads complex tasks to innate cognitive abilities and senses.
For example, proprioception tells me where my hand is right now.
I don't have to think about it.
And as long as I remember to put my key in the keybox next to the door,
spacial cognition helps me to remember where objects are.
These innate cognitive abilities free up my working memory
to focus on activity-specific tasks and memory.
Our current HCI doesn't allow for any of that.
It overburdens our working memory.
Every step of interacting with our technology
is the same as walking through a doorway.
It wipes the memory,
creating an interrupt that can cost as little as three seconds to 30 minutes.
So how do we fix that? What do we do?
Well, here's what I learned from Big Dog.
A few years ago, I worked with the US Military research group called DARPA,
on the interface for Big Dog.
It's a robotic mule for the military.
Before we got involved, the training was incredibly elaborate.
It took months,
and required command line language and an Xbox controller.
It was so complicated, that soldiers told us
they would have to abandon it in a battle scenario.
They said that they just couldn't handle all the additional stress
of operating the bot while desperately trying to not die.
And not mention,
if something were to happen to the main operator of that device,
the bot would be lost
because the training was so elaborate
that they couldn't spread it out across the squad.
But we noticed something
when we were watching them practising their manoeuvres.
They used this universal language to tell each other when and how to move.
They explained to us that it was drilled into them at basic training.
It was one of the first things they learned.
And as a result, it was completely instinctual.
They didn't have to think about it, they just did it.
So we trained the bot to recognise the language.
Suddenly, the training went from a couple of months to a couple of days.
And soldiers under fire no longer had to chose between life or bot.
The cognitive burden of interacting with Big Dog was removed,
and instantly it became a much more powerful tool.
So to make tech magic, we need to teach it to speak human.
By that I mean we need to train technology
to adapt, anticipate and augment the human
in order to mimic our brain strategy
and offload as many tasks as possible to our innate cognitive abilities
though a multimodal, multisensory interface for input and output.
This new human-computer interface strategy creates magic.
VR is a perfect example.
VR is magic.
It skips the right steps by augmenting human vision
to enable our innate cognitive abilities associated with sight.
By removing that literal divide between you and the screen,
VR skips the cognitive burden to suspend disbelief.
So that rather than needing to be completely engrossed in that story or game
to imagine you are there,
you just believe you are - because that's what you are seeing.
By simply putting the screen close to your eyes,
VR provides 70% of your visual sense
and is processed by the brain just like real world sighting.
And that's a very important sense to humans.
If you take your hand, and you put it on the back of your head,
that's about the size of your visual cortex.
That's a huge portion of your brain.
It's so important to us, that even the blind
use it to process 85% of our innate cognitive abilities.
And sight we use to interpret all other senses.
For example, just by looking at this image here,
you can deduce a number of things, right?
You can tell that the wind is blowing and from what direction.
You can probably even imagine what it feels like to be here,
what the temperature might be like,
what the breeze might feel like on your skin.
You can imagine the sound of the leaves and the trees.
Some birds singing, right?
And you create a mental image of where you are
in relationship to the elements in the scene.
You can picture yourself as standing on the ground
looking up through the trees at the sky there.
Look what happens when I flip the video.
Suddenly, you have an entirely different mental image of what's happening here.
Now it seems like you are standing above the treeline,
looking out through those leaves at the sky.
So because VR provides 70% of sight without that real world interruption,
we have an incredible visceral sense of presence in virtual worlds.
Our bodies have an incredibly hard time
differentiating between the other sensory data coming from our body
and the virtual.
This is one of the reasons why some people get motion sick in VR, myself included.
It's because your visual and your visceral senses don't match up,
and your bodies get confused.
(Laughter)
But we can harness that phenomenon to our extreme advantage.
VR is so powerful,
it provides superhuman strength to transcend pain.
Unfortunately, burn patients have to be awake during treatment.
And the pain is so excruciating
that morphine only deadens the pain by 20%.
That's nothing.
Researchers at University Washington's HIT Lab
made an icy wonderland VR visualisation,
this one here, called Snow World,
for patients to wear during treatments.
And because it's the complete opposite of fire - it's this icy world -
it completely cancels out that burning sensation
that they are receiving from the pain receptors.
It reduced pain by 60%.
That's amazing. No drugs.
It skips the right steps by providing direct visual stimuli to your brain.
Perhaps more incredible,
VR can actually let us heal our own brains.
Just like Wolverine.
So, you can reprogram your brain
by manipulating the visual stimuli that you are receiving,
and it reenergizes neuroplasticity,
which we long thought to be solidified by age eight or twelve, OK?
With VR you can recreate new neuropathways at any age.
For example, this is Diplopia,
it was designed by a man named James Blaha
when he was told he would never be able to fix his lazy eye or 2D vision -
in the real world he only had 2D vision -
because he was over the age of 12.
Doctors said he could no longer create neural pathways,
and so not only could he not fix his eye,
but his sight would continue to deteriorate.
He didn't take no for an answer.
Instead, he created this VR game to stimulate his lazy eye
and was able to fix it.
Here's what it looks like.
(Video) Narrator: This is where Diplopia comes in.
Diplopia is a video game based on the latest strabismus research.
By displaying game elements in different contrast ratios to each eye,
the player's brain is able to integrate all of the information,
receiving it in three dimensions.
JM: Pretty simple, right?
But this simple tool that he created, not only was he able to fix his own eye,
but he was able to do it for people much older than him.
Well past the age of eight.
The results are so superhuman.
People are already creating all kinds of VR treatments
for everything from anxiety to stroke and Parkinson's disease.
So, to make tech magic, to make superhumans,
we just need to train tech to speak human.
First, adapt to the individual.
And this should be easy.
We are entering a world of ubiquitous sensors and quantified self.
Right now already, we have more data about ourselves
than we could ever possibly use in an entire lifetime.
And if we could, we would see that we do the exact same things,
at the exact same time, in the exact same places,
every single day.
You can predict what I'm looking at on my phone in the morning
as I'm getting ready within one or two things,
versus when I'm sitting in my spot on the couch next to my husband
watching TV in the evening.
So pay attention to what I'm doing, when, where and with whom, and adapt.
Then use that data to anticipate the right steps to skip.
Computers love patterns, right? They love them.
Today's technology can already predict my needs and intents
faster than I can even perceive them.
You know, assistive cars take evasive action
before a human even realises there is a problem.
And AlphaGo is able to see patterns and complex gameplay
that humans have never even imagined or thought of.
And using data direct from your optic nerve,
researchers at University of Washington can predict what you are seeing
faster than what your own perception.
So train tech to use pattern recognition to anticipate my needs
and take action on my behalf before I even realise the need,
thereby eliminating all these extraneous steps from our HCI.
And finally, augment the human, not just my vision.
Allow me to offload tasks to my innate cognitive abilities,
and use cognitive ergonomics
to effectively stimulate the right parts of my brain
to enable true workload management.
If you follow these steps to train technology to speak human,
we will have magic.
And then, even the sky is no limit.
We haven't yet begun to understand what we can do with these technologies.
X-Ray vision, superhuman strength and speed,
telepathy, telekinesis, omnipotence.
Your superpower is waiting. Will you answer the call?
Thank you.
(Applause)