Brain Machine Interalliance

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TOKYO, Japan, May 24, 2006 "Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International ("ATR") and Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. ("HRI") have collaboratively developed a new "Brain Machine Interface" ("BMI") for manipulating robots using brain activity signals. This new BMI technology has enabled the decoding of natural brain activity and the use of the extracted data for the near real-time operation of a robot without an invasive incision of the head and brain. This breakthrough facilitates greater possibilities for new types of interface between machines and the human brain.

An interface is as much a threshold between two realities as a channel of communication. If we had an interface with hell (any hell, Dachau would do, no need to think of the Sistine Chapel) we would behave very differently. It is because we have interfaces with computers that we behave accordingly. Two years ago, I was using a very unstable OS (how did you guess it was Windows?). I was forced to save regularly the files I was working on for fear of loosing them. So I developed an irreflective "CTRL+S" habit. One day, I was, very unusually, writing a letter with pen and paper. Irrespectively, I caught myself going "CTRL+S" on the keyboard next to my left hand, after the usual lapse of a few minutes. I was trying to save my ink on paper.
Had I been using some fancy version of the already available BMI by Honda (click on the title) I would not have noticed the absurdity of the operation. My mental state "save what you've written now" would have made the technology (the computer, the pen, the you-name-it) follow suit. After all, it would be easy to replace "paper" "rock" "scissors" with "write" "paste" and "cut".
There is something puzzling and conceptually unsettling (I did not write upsetting on purpose) in the new bio-mechanical alliance brought about by BMI. It makes telekynesis look boldy visionary rather than downright nutty. It opens a bypass between ourselves, our minds, intentions or volitions, and the world that, oddly enough, we can affect without using our external body. BMI externalises our internal efforts to capture something, move an object, change a channel, browse a page. I may be embedded in an environment without (having the overwhelming impression of) being embodied. It is because we live in a Newtonian/Euclidean environment that we need and have developed the body we have. But if the world were fully reactive to our commands, we could dispose of this shell, and the disembodied ghost in it would be sufficient. So one suggestion, which might be nutty rather than bold is: should we not emigrate one day to a world in which the body does not count and meet there all our friends whose bodies do not work as well they should out here? BMI is used to make someone interact IRL (in real life), as they say, but maybe we should use it to disembody ourselves and redefine both "real" and "life".

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