 How great it is. 20 years ago when I first spoke at DEF CON, the talk was hacking as practice for trans-planetary life in the 21st century. And a lot of what I prognosticated turned out to be true. The people in the audience then were kids, quote, unquote, and now they have positions of responsibility across the whole spectrum of good and evil in the world. I saw that they would be the thought leaders of this century and they are, and they have created the space in which we live and move and have our being, which is the IT space and the security space or insecurity space we all inhabit. But because that revolution now is old, starting in the 60s, it gathered momentum and has now conquered the world and created the platform in which we live. But because of that, every other thing that is on that platform is now accelerating at the same rate of speed that it itself moved at and generated and bio is one of those areas and is accelerating by bio, I mean broadly speaking, all the aspects of biology and neuroscience that are going to impact us more and more and more than impact us, they are genuinely creating a different kind of humanity. And it requires a different way of framing what we're going to be, who we're going to be and who we're going to design ourselves to be. And this will sound somewhat like science fiction, but it isn't. It really isn't. Some of it is prototypical, some of it is on the level of smaller animals than us, but it will migrate. And the proof of concept is established by doing the work on those animals. Some of it will migrate in the same form, some of it will not. But it's worth taking a look at. And I want to start with a quote from Edgar Mitchell. He was a genuine American hero, Apollo 14 astronaut, walked on the moon. And this is from a conversation we had. So I'm quoting him directly. He said, Richard, in space I had an epiphany, an experience of the connectedness of everything. I later came to understand it. It's where you experience, see the separateness of things with your physical eyes, but experience the connectedness of all things in an altered state. From that point on, life was never the same for me. I had to find what these deep issues are, recognizing that our scientific cosmology was incomplete and our religious cosmology is archaic. I was looking for a new myth about ourselves, but by myth I mean truth. As someone else said, the amazing thing is not that he experienced the unity of all things, but that he experienced himself that we experience anything as separate at all. Because our condition of being is interconnectedness, not only with each other, but with everything. And so this talk is trying to face down the fact that humans are open systems of information and energy. And the current work in biotech, nanotech, genetic engineering, artificial organisms, electromagnetic fields applied to surveillance, intrusion, health and healing and also weapons to disarm, debilitate and kill, intersects with traditional information security models, yes, but is becoming a tale that wags the dog, the hacker dog. IT caused an identity shift by turning command and control individuals who exercised authority in a hierarchical way straight down vertically into nodes in a network who learned they can only exercise power by contributing and participating in the network and that the attempt to control it and dominate it did not work in the same way. So now what we used to call individual selves are dissolving into real time physical modular network systems that are transforming our identity, our possibilities for action and therefore the future. As Roy, the replicant and Blade Runner said, we're physical Sebastian, we're not computers. And as research turns into prototypes and prototypes into applications embedded in our lives, what it means to be human is genuinely being transformed. The symbiotic cyborg system that has evolved over the past two generations, splicing organic humans and intelligent machinery is the platform, but it goes beyond computing and the internet and information systems by which we mean the communication and information systems we had made. This is about the we who made and are making a system of energy and information flows in which we are increasingly embedded. That may sound obvious, but as Whitehead said, it requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. And he also said the major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. And that is what is happening to us today. It is the business of the future he went on to be dangerous. It is among the merits of science that it can equip the future for its duties. And that's what scientists and technologists are doing by altering the identity of humanity so that it will migrate into either a new variety or a new species we don't know yet, which or even how to define those precisely as we did in the past. That future is already here, as Gibson said, but unevenly distributed. The latest developments read like sci-fi for a good reason. You know, sci-fi is how a left brain technological society dreams of its own future. Jules Verne said in the book Earth to the Moon he wrote in 1969 and it took 100 years before what he predicted became reality. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in the 30s and 60 years later we were ingesting Soma and conditioning our society. Neuromancer created the notion of cyberspace in the word and in 10 years later everybody was living in it. 10 years ago Bruce Sterling, the sci-fi writer said to me there's no way to predict the future anymore in science fiction because the future has already happened and the most you can go out is four or five years and now even that is an obsolete thing because the future is past, but most don't know it. That's what unevenly distributed means. Most people still live out there, not this room of elite, but the normals as we call them, the humplings who live in the hump of the bell curve and hump along. I have to admit I love that word. I created that word and one of my happiest tweets that I received was humbling my word of the day. In this book, mind games, in break memory, I formulate that concept that the hump is 100% and the 10% of the masters who dominate and manage and manipulate society and then there's 80% in the hump and then there's 10% in the dregs and they keep the dregs so that the humplings will be happy they're not dregs and do as the master wants and the whole thing moves forward into the future. The masters first designing and instantiating and then the humplings happily humping along and then the dregs who combine and whine and have their own Fox News channel. So the future is already here. Living tissue is being made artificially. You know that. Memories are made of this is an old song but it's coming to mean something completely different. Memories are made of proteins and the proteins can be altered and transferred. One of the modules of this talk will be about memory because as they said in blood radar, memories. You're talking about memories, the ground of the matrix for identity and now it can be impaired, eliminated, taken the emotional charge off, altered or moved created falsely. So who are we then? It was said in 2013 about 3D printing just a couple of years ago. Yeah, it's in the early stages but transplantable organs are years away, not decades. Tracheas, bladders today, lungs and livers tomorrow. So far we have printed heart valves, we have patches of beating cardiac muscle, we have small 3D clusters of liver tissue to use in testing experimental implants, bones, cartilage for knees and nose and joints. I'll say more about that 3D printing which you can do, you can experiment with creating your own living tissue. Just close the door when you get done so you can't come under the door out of the room after you. You can't appreciate what is happening with biotech without grasping that you can't grasp the totality of what's happening now. It's advancing faster than anyone can know. So this is a mobius strip and that's what we're walking. We think we're walking into a different kind of future and then we find ourselves coming back to who we are. What's happened now is that published papers in these subjects are often out of date by the time they're published and much of the work which is important part of this talk is in the dark, is done in research and development facilities in the military and intelligence communities but not just here, which is very important. They're often off the grid. It's taking place all over the world and it's being done by networked amateurs, sometimes supported by nation states or other transnational entities. In other words, biohacking is hacking now, period, and information system hacking is merely the machinery which connects the humanity that is indissoluble from itself. Well, let me turn to somebody who says it better than I can. This is a guy named Kit Green, Christopher Green. He has worn many hats and has a resume that's about 17 pages long and it's all solid. For 16 years reporting only to the director of CIA. He was senior division analyst for the office of scientific and weapons intelligence and chief of the biomedical branch of the life sciences division of CIA. He worked at GM for a long time and he's done global work. He could talk about who he is. I took a study as we conversed for a few hours a couple of weeks ago in Detroit. And this is what he says, with the explosion of discoveries in the area of neurosciences will come individuals, political entities, and countries that will exploit those findings for nefarious purposes. In the health sector, the enhancement market is growing offshore and is often hidden. Customers do not possess a diagnosable neurological disorder, but they are seeking some cognitive performance advantage or prevent a probable decline. And in the performance degradation arena, advantages that intersect our core values of scientists and physicians are joined and challenged in new ways. Let me translate that out of academic. They're not trying to help people. They want to give an advantage to themselves. They want to prevent themselves from declining or being impaired. And the advantages they seek will challenge our core values because they will challenge our ethics and our fundamental way of doing things. The implications for the military, law enforcement, and intelligence communities are not dissimilar, he went on to those we've experienced in the past. Exploding science discovery in physics, material science, and biochemistry, which presages developments and threats in nuclear weapons, asymmetric communications and cyber warfare, and chemical and biological weaponry. He adds predictive peer-related scholarly studies on neurocognitive futures are seriously outdated by the time of publication. For example, until recently it was not known how even to possibly generate controlled action potentials, that is using manipulative energies to make muscle and the organisms that had the muscle do things. Now we know that it's five years old, the transcranial pulsed ultrasound stimulates intact brain circuits. In other words, non-invasive, not implants, but beanies, non-invasive brain stimulation using pulsed ultrasound have generated motor responses in mice. Getting through layers in skin and skull to stimulate an intact brain in the living organism was hard, but reconfiguring ultrasound waveform parameters caused purposive movement. It not only stimulates action potentials in an intact motor cortex, it generates comparable motor responses to those using implanted electrodes. In other words, already we are growing out of implants in the brain which have been used to work on certain diseases. What can ultrasound do? It can modify behavioral states and memory formation. It can manipulate brain function and stimulate the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, in the hippocampus to increase brain plasticity. What does that mean? Increasing brain plasticity means we can use pulsed ultrasound to enhance the ability of the brain to respond with the elasticity and resilience to the inputs fed into it and to the sensory input and cognitive inputs that challenge it to make sense of the world around it. And it could eliminate memories. Where will it show up in the lives of young hackers? First probably in gaming. Gamers will, I don't know when, but they will be able to download information and experiences while encoding them into the brain using ultrasound. That could lead to creativity hats. Creativity hats already exist in a way. They're merely taking the pulsed ultrasound I just described and putting them in hats and putting them on your brain and enhancing the ability to respond to life and to focus, to be highly focused. So why is it important for the military? Because a focused soldier is the most important soldier of all. One who is totally intrinsically attentive to the task at hand. So the means to detect, record, analyze, modulate and insert brain signals is moving faster than we can grasp. How can we even guess which applications will be pursued by all of the various organizations in this country and others depending on their ultimate goals and interests which may be for good and may be for evil. Okay. Tim Thomas wrote, he's a member of a think tank I know. He wrote long time ago, 1998, last century in parameters. The bottom line he said is that the human body much like a computer contains myriad data processors. They include the chemical, electrical activity of the brain, the heart and the peripheral nervous system. The signal sent from the cortex region to the brain to other parts of the body, the tiny hair cells the inner ear, the process auditory signals and the light sensitive retina and cornea of the eye that process visual acuity. We're in the threshold set of an era in which these data processors in the human body will be manipulated or debilitated. In other words, this is serious stuff and a serious threat potential exists. This is where it comes in the realm of hackardom which has to decide if it's going to be hacking white hat, gray hat or black hat, whatever that may mean. And please notice that he wrote that in 1998. Kit Green told me that the work done inside in the dark generally is not known out here or noticed out here for 20 to 30 years like stealth technology or drones which were flying 30, 40 years even. Get referred to developments in the 1970s which are just now becoming known. So one of the ways we can determine the future about which we are talking is to look inside the research and development. I'll talk about that later if I have time. How you do that kind of creative work and connect the dots best over timelines using tools that we all have online in order to see where we have already been and how it is often used for covering deception operations to protect the secrets that it represents. So we're saying that companion research in the Navy indicates the magnetic fields of very low levels can influence animal behaviors, creating seizures and blocking short term memories. In other words, we can erase memories. You go in, of course, most of you are young. Who's 60 or over? Raise your hand. Okay, so you had a colonoscopy, right? Okay. So they gave you versed, right? I know a surgeon who's quick on the trigger. He's also a sadist. I mean one of the two. So when he's prepping people, he says, I think we can start. And people I knew worked in the surgical center, heard people crying out in agony. And then they would come out an hour later and they'd say, how was your procedure? He said, it was great. I didn't feel a thing. Well, what they didn't have were the memories of what they did feel. Because the drug that they were given, which was versed, made sure that those memories were wiped out. So we can do it that way pharmacologically with people who willingly consent by setting the agreement to let anything being done to them be okay. But we're also learning to do that, as I say, through magnetic fields of very low levels that can block short term memory formation. So we're going to be using forgetfulness as a weapon. Now we know that on a societal level, that's what the media has done. That's what the memory hole is for. To distract people from what's real and what's happening by giving them nonsense. My wife and I not long ago watched Idiocracy again on HBO. And then it segued into coverage of the Republican primaries. And yeah, you know the punchline. It was a seamless transition, right? And because we were watching that nonsense, both the movie and its real life basis, we weren't paying attention to the horrible things. They got intelligence briefings every morning in email. And all the people were being blown up. All the people were having the heads cut off. All the people were being killed. All the bombs are exploding. It's a great way to start the day. But it's real. And reality is that which couldn't have Philip K. Dick will not go away because you refused to believe in it. So all emerging technologies that we're studying to discuss are hazards in two ways. They can go horribly wrong. Or there can be unforeseen consequences even when they go right. Bad intentions, remember, often drive innovation and application. We developed the atom bomb in the 1940s to use on Germany and stop Hitler. But when Germany went down, we had the bomb, so we had to use it, so we used it on Japan. In part, as a warning to the Soviets about what we could do in the postwar world. So it wasn't all good benevolent intentions to develop that horrible technology. Neurotechnology products will all be dual use. Products intended for health will be sold for enhancement and for degradation. Safety, social, ethical, legal constraints that we even think about here may not apply in other countries. Others will want applications we would not even seek. And the task of the military and intelligence establishment is to discover them and warn and prepare counter measures. But so far, according to Kit Green, our governments do not have the internal capacity to warn against neuroscientific developments that could lead to catastrophic intelligence failures. In other words, what we anticipate will happen will happen and we will not see it coming. That's why science and technology is a priority for intelligence collection and analysis. And we have to unite the best technological and scientific minds in our country because we are no longer the best and the brightest at this. It's all over the world and we are not alone in this any longer. So how do you live in a world without walls? I used to say that about what IT was doing to bring down boundaries between geopolitical structures and people and identity. But now it's around identities themselves. Identities are a function of boundaries and boundaries around organisms, species, internal systems of organs and electrochemical processes. That's what's going the way of geopolitical borders. So security will be redefined as extended networked entities are redefined by humanity 2.0. Matt Blaise said long ago, the weakest link in the security chain is the definition of the problem, which is often not what people think it is. But the weakest link in the identity chain is also the definition of the problem. And the real definition of identity is not the one most people are using or working with. You are not who you think you are, is what I'm trying to say. You are who you are becoming, who we are making ourselves become. And to think in 20th century old think is inadequate to the networked intelligent organism that is evolving on the planet in the 21st century and hacking is about to enter that space with passion and in fact already has. So the old Microsoft slogan, where do you want to go today, should be thrown out. It is who do you want to be today? And what do you want to be today? So I'm talking about identity. What is identity? Well, many years ago we had this book from Marvin Miski, The Society of Mind. He said, the mind is modular. Let me move this over so I can do this. The mind is modular and it looks like this. Using a different image as a metaphor, it looks kind of like that. It's modular units which are integrated and referred to an illusory self. Each mind is made up of smaller processes he wrote called agents. We join them in societies or networks, the Society of Mind that leads to true intelligence. It also leads to a sense of self and this illusory sense of self, Einstein called it an optical illusion of consciousness. The intuitive sense of self is an effortless and fundamental human experience, but it is nothing more than an elaborate illusion. Under scrutiny, many common sense beliefs about selfhood unravel. This is relevant because whatever is plugged into the existing neuron channels that exist into the brain, the body brain which is one system will parse that and the neoplastic brain can be trained to use them as inputs and integrate it into self-awareness and then the self will just think that's who it is the way you think you are who you are now. You will be that which is created out of the inputs integrated into, assimilated into and then unified with that illusory sense of self that was just defined. So it's like the internet disappeared. How many of you say I'm going on the internet today? Young people today, older people are running. Not to say I'm going on the internet. You say I'm going to make a text. I'm going to tweet. I'm going to make a call. You refer to the event of going on the internet by the appliance that has replaced the invisible internet which has gone into the background the way we don't say could you please turn on the power grid? You say turn on the lights. Turn on the projector. But it used to be the power grid and if somebody from the 17th century came into our society the very first thing they would see is power lines everywhere that to you are invisible because you filter them out and no longer see them but they feel the landscape. We make things invisible, create out of the new content, the context of our lives and then fill it with new content which can then be created. Sensory extensions can be plugged into us in a way that the plasticity of the brain can take advantage of and integrate. People who have to learn Braille. It's wonderful fact. You know Braille is done with fingertips, little raised dots and people who are blind and have to learn Braille at first can't feel anything. I just had on the sensor belt which is a way to hear. And at first you put it on I just felt vibrations but after months of training yourself to hear with it you can begin to formulate words which are said which activate the different sensors and you can bypass the ears which are broken. Well when you learn the Braille the part of the brain that refers to this that links to the sensitivity of fingertips increases its connectivity. It grows more and more neurons. Attention generates a cooperative effort by the neuroplasticity of your own brain. So what you intend and what you attend to often engages the brain in a kind of secondary effort to make sure you get what you want. I knew a guy who was blind who would speed up cassette tapes. I can't show you one nobody has them but some of you remember what I mean look at that tape and you put in a machine and it would get caught up and you unwind all the tape and curse. Well he sped those up six times because he trained his brain to hear speech at six times normal speed. He was a professor at MIT. The brain can do astonishing things in response to what we ask of it. And so as we add artificial retinas, cochlear implants, infrared glasses with built-in night vision and the like, it's like the guy who built the feel safe belt which detects the magnetic field of the earth. For six weeks Udo Vakhtar was his name. He had an unerring sense of direction he said. He had a belt lined with 13 vibrating pads and on the outside of the belt was a power supply and a sensor that detected the earth's magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. At first it was strange but then he realized his whole perception of who he was and where he was on the earth had shifted. He had developed an internal map of the city in his head. He could always find his way home. He always knew where north was. He could never get lost again. The tricky bit is not creating the sensors and then plugging into the neuronal structure that already exists so the brain will take them and start to work with them. The tricky part is processing the input. So you had to change the sensory data, electromagnetic fields, ultrasound, infrared and it's something the human brain is wired to accept like touch or sight. The brain is a lot more flexible than we thought as if we had unused sensory ports waiting for the right plugins and now we can build them. It's limited only by your imagination in terms of what shall I explore as a possible input from the environment that my brain did not detect except in a secondary cognitive manner. So 1996 they said they wanted to work in the cortical modem, a virtual retinal display from an outside source directly onto the retina of a viewer's eye. A DARPA program manager announced a project for the cortical modem, a direct interface to enable the visual display of information without glasses or goggles. Leveraging optogenetics, the use of light, stimulate cells. The cortical modem project aimed to build a low-cost neural interface based display device. The short-term goal was about this big, a couple inches high for about ten dollars to enable simple visual display via a direct interface to the visual cortex with a visual fidelity of something like an early LED digital clock. This is not ready for prime time but eventually as it's enhanced and refined the device could replace all virtual reality and augmented reality displays. So what you're seeing there is a guy wearing second sight made by Argus II, a retinal prosthesis that bypasses dead cells of the eyes and reroutes visual data via an implant to the eye parts that still work. It's like a video camera that gathers light to transmit to the brain via an implant as an electrical signal. You can also see with your tongue a guy at University of Wisconsin in Madison did this. He put sensors on the tongue which enabled someone to see in the same way that the magnetic field could be detected. Another example, this is important, colorblind monkeys in 2009 using gene therapy were enabled to see red and green. This is exactly what I'm talking about. The surprise is that we can do it with an adult animal said neuroscientist Jerry Jacobs. Evidence that the visual system is incredibly plastic and provides a practical potential for using gene therapy to ameliorate color defects. Let's take that up a notch with tetrachromacy. Some women see more colors than all men. I think on the X chromosome, don't quote me if I'm wrong, or even if I'm right because it's by accident. It's a genetic mutation and it enables the brain to detect and process up to a thousand different shades, lights, and colors that other people can't see. Now that sounds like something extraordinary but to a colorblind person to see not colorblind is extraordinary and to a quote normal to see that enhanced way that about 20% of women can see, it's shocking to them how little normal's see. That's a great metaphor for what hackers can build as sensual possibilities that normal's humplings will not see or experience or do. And this is an important part. Although technochromats have more receptors in their eyes, their brains are wired the same way as a person with normal vision. So how can they see more colors? By practicing. Practice makes perfect even when it comes to neural pathways. So even many more technochromats may exist but may not know it or have exceptional color perception because they haven't first noticed that they did, second allowed themselves to be special and exceptional and different instead of filtering it out and then we're willing to practice to train their brains to pay attention to the sensory inputs. That's really important because it says even if you're wired for it in your chromosomes you have to allow yourself to know who you are not listen to the voices that disparage who you are allow yourself to receive the sensory input and then have the guts to train your brain to become exceptional and special it is no accident that movies about the X men are so popular it's what we're talking about we're talking about mutants with some kinds of superpowers which is what people at DARPA some of them say they want okay. So let me see what time is it really where's my where's my guy somebody's supposed to tell me it's two minutes past when he was supposed to tell me oh there you are thank you thank you well I'm back let me let me try to hop through the important points because you can't go over time people never remember what you say but if you go ten minutes over they remember you remember that schmuck yeah he just went on and on what was he talking high tone okay all right so a lot of the work we do is with animals much research is currently with animals and we don't know yet how much of it will port to humans but how we use the animals is prototypical some of it is a little extreme here we have uh oh you can't see that come on come on iPad be good okay what you have here is a genuine diagram of a procedure that's carried out where the head of monkey a was transplanted onto the head of monkey be it was the first successful head transplant and it was almost 50 years ago now if dr nittaly swears you'll do this with humans in two years there might be a problem doing with humans uh for one I mean here's a mouse that we did it with you see how happy the mouse is uh it lived for six days happily like sisyphus one must imagine sisyphus happy one must imagine the mouse with a head transplant happy here's another one giving away what happened to it with a white body and a black head but in this case we were able to use electromagnetic pulses to detect what the mouse was thinking after the procedure and that's what the mouse was thinking well the truth is if you line up to do these things or let someone do them to you I mean it's one thing to put the little chips in your arm that's cool that's the start but before you do the head transplant remember unintended consequences this is a movie not real life her head is about to be happily removed and put on another body okay well that's the next thing let me go back to that okay uh so they're using animals they have a hybrid insect DARPA wanted to create a whole bug army out of beetles and bees um they are using shark cyborgs because sharks have a much better ability to detect the electromagnetic field around us uh one goal of the high memes uh program that's the insect program is the controlled arrival of an insect within five meters of a target located a hundred meters from the insect starting point where it must then remain stationary indefinitely unless otherwise instructed uh it must also be able to transmit data from DOD sensors providing information about the local environment so it's one thing to send a spy into harm's way and it's another to send a beetle that's just the way we think uh they tried to do a detection of biological and chemical warfare agents using honey bees they hope the natural foraging behavior of honey bees could be used for military applications but it found that if after initial success is nevertheless their instinctive behaviors for feeding and mating prevented them from forming reliably in other words given a choice they always opted for sex and food um that discovery is probably what led to this is a true story a sex gay bomb uh the uh uh laboratory air force laboratory in Ohio proposed creating a gay bomb uh because then by spreading the pharaohs pharaohs among the enemy soldiers uh you could turn this is what a soldier is supposed to look like and the goal of this program was to turn them into that okay uh that's an actual photo um it's true that sexual orientation couldn't be changed so this didn't work uh but they tried it wanted to build a gay bomb and uh their hope was that the soldiers would become so enamored of one another that they would just shed their uniforms and start uh having sex and forget about fighting unfortunately they were basing that hypothesis on what heterosexuals do more often than gays so we use animals and the bio to mechanical is important here you have a uh a cheetah robot a dog robot you have a cheetah robot and here's uh let me show you both there's there's a cheetah there's the dog more and more robotics being spliced with this using animals i'm showing you this just to say this is a prototype for what we want to do with human beings we want to use bardic body armor we want to make a stronger faster uh greater ability to jump and so on this is the actual insect that they created you can see the little cpu on this guy uh didn't take much turn left turn right start stop fly stop land left right uh pay attention turn on sensors get the data uh bring it back uh as i said sharks have sensors that humans don't have so they are working with sharks uh in the same way for remote control so there's also chimeras of course um kit green again one of my favorites to quote in the bulletin of atomic scientists these are all of course non classified statements that they made in the bullet of atomic scientists he said uh not all not all good research will be done exclusively in the west results of the work will make sick people well and soldiers safer but technologies will not follow our ethics such as human stem cell research research and willing prisoners and work on human animal chimeras in other words they'll do stem cell research in a way that we would not accept they will use unwilling prisoners as well as willing uh and you can coerce a prisoner into being a willing prisoner uh in quite a few ways because they're a prisoner uh and work on the human animal chimeras some sheep now have livers with up to eighty percent human cells that produce the compounds normally made by human livers we have a line of pigs that have pig blood cells human blood cells and a new kind of blood cells with characteristics of both humans and pigs uh you can find that in my family at uh at Stanford Irving Weissman is heading a project that injects human neural stem cells into mouse fetuses the result is mice with brains that are one percent human they want to increase that percentage to one hundred percent human brains in mice bodies in order to better understand diseases it always starts with good intentions and to understand diseases and help heal them but a hundred percent human brain in a mouse you can imagine the response uh what the frick is is only the start if that mouse learns to speak right rabbit human hybrids are being used for stem cell research and monkey human chimeras for the study of Parkinson's disease so you've got chimeras which are animals being spliced into one another which means the identity of the species is up for grabs and you have cyborgs and of course it's relevant to ask where are we doing this well some of you saw this earlier this is uh i think that's DARPA uh one of the best places to go to find out what has happened and is happening is a historical review of all the proposals and all the request for information and studies that come out of DARPA you can get an awful lot of information online and you can connect an awful lot of the dots so you can learn for example there's an experimental pentagon program that developed two types of advanced terminator like prosthetic arms that a quadriplegic woman with sensors implanted into her brain controlled one of the robotic limbs to grab a cup shake hands and eat and she also flew an f-35 joint strike fighter simulator using only her thoughts DARPA wants to build a pacemaker sized device to improve memory of troops who suffered a traumatic brain injury a hard drive of sorts for the brain they want to use a memory chip and alter the consciousness of soldiers to make them more fully aware it's important to remember 20 30 40 years ago these things began to be developed let me give you some examples 1996 us air force scientific advisory board prevent voluntary muscle movements control emotions and thus actions produce sleep transmit suggestions interfere with short-term memory and long-term memory produce and delete experience sets think about that these are high-falutin words for something that is extremely challenging and dawning to what it has meant traditionally to be a human being 1998 implant enables a brain computer link let's a paralyzed person move a cursor by thinking the person's brain is the computer mouse 2000 paralyzed use thought to command robotic limbs monkey think robot do monkey moves arms computer transmits brain signal robot acts wherever it is in the world 2003 a mind machine merger is coming to yield thought controlled robots enhanced perception and communication 2006 to chip in the brain turns thoughts into actions like turning on the lights by thinking I'm suggesting that when you go through the timeline and connect the dots it is easy to see where it's going to trend toward the future and what kinds of intentions govern it and how drastic the confrontation is to human identity they want to create some of them a real zombie army you know what a computer zombie army looks like I mean you have computers all working together and you know from movies what a real zombie army looks like uh this is only half a joke because with implants and universal connectivity between the beings in whom the implants are put that will develop a hive mind and we've already heard how instrumental it is to use those implants to change the action behavior and thinking in memory of the individuals so networked what would it really look like to be networked it would look like this they call them brainettes networks formed by multiple animal brains starting with mice or rats in this case cooperating and exchanging information in real time through direct brain to brain interfaces to provide the core of a new type of computing device an organic computer organic computer devices means not only that we can network animals with one another to increase processing power we can network ourselves with other species and spice our perceptions back and forth from one to the other so instead of reporting out we would add a perceptual field this is a different kind of chimerical outcome it is using the connectivity to enhance the ability of all the members of different species to be part of one another back to Kit Green we need near real time multimodal cognitive measurements so we can watch people think while under stress this is an achievable goal scientifically big pharma is now global but drug discovery research is increasingly beyond the control of governments and the public and individual scientists in the areas of cultural anthropology and ethnography will be trained in the physics of neuroimaging and neuropharmacology thus learning why people misbehave will be subjugated to new learning methods and unethical manipulation of innocent people's behaviors remember DARPA is concerned with offense and defense against what we think they are doing but who are they a direct quote from the deputy director of SIGINT and the office the director of the NSA is this someone objected to our treatment of the Brits because our special ally our special friends and the deputy director said excuse me we have no allies we have no friends we have only targets read WikiLeaks read Snowden if you need evidence for that we have only targets if everyone is a possible target outside our sphere of identity as a nation-state and inside you can connect the dots what is it that DARPA wants they don't want incremental change they want innovative research proposals of interest in the biological technologies office to investigate leading edge approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science technologies or systems at the intersection of biology with engineering math and physical computer sciences BTO wants unconventional approaches outside the mainstream the challenge assumptions and have the potential to radically change established practice lead to extraordinary outcomes or create entirely new fields we don't want just incremental change they are not kidding they are not kidding they held a symposium in 2015 in the Bay Area brought together leading edge scientists and technologists from startups companies and academia to look at how advances in engineering and information sciences are driving biology into a new era one in which biology is technology so we've got to come to oh shoot we've kind of come to close to the end so let me just hit on points rather than discuss them in any detail bioelectricity can repair brain defects we discovered this year can repair genetic defenses and can grow the brain to cause the brain to grow tissue where it doesn't normally we are regenerating body parts printing bladders skin tissue and new life forms you have the capacity with very little money to do artificial intelligence and create synthetic organisms now one of the things DARPA wants to do is let's see if I can find it yeah that's morphing that's taking Mars and moving Mars through phases by morphing how by creating organisms which will terraform the planet and make it more earth like I put it up there because it's an image of morphing period which is what is happening to human identity as we describe it it is starting in one place and by the addition of microorganisms it will go somewhere else we can talk about the whole microbiome and fecal transplants people joke about fecal transplants when you look it up on the web you won't get an image of a fecal transplant you'll get a happy fecal transplant patient but C. diff which is really serious for older people can be cured 90 percent of the time with the fecal transplant it's going out of jokes I wanted to say a lot about the biome which we are just beginning to explore in terms of its profound impact for the entire human project it's new you can go and do hacking in the biome it's accessible there's an open biome program it's called give a shit campaign it's true in other words shit not only happens but it patterns personal microbiomes are as unique as fingerprints better than in terms of identifying individuals okay so I just want to hit some of the points of memory and say what is being done with memory I wish I had more time to discuss it in detail we can record a memory and play it back into a mouse that does not have it we can imprint real memories and false memories using optogenetics we can transplant alter delete create new and false memories in 2004 10 years ago rats were trained to fear a tone and they lost that fear when a drug was injected into their brain we want to alter traumatic memories keep the memory but delete the fixed emotional charge we have drugs that ease the pain of bed memories like propanol now as a result that came out in 2006 out here research raises the prospect of editing memories deleting bad ones and inserting experiences you never had just like in Blade Runner scientists are looking 2008 to discover ways to reverse loss of memory we are discovering that long-term memories that have been lost through amnesia are not really lost it is access to the memories that is lost and that can be restored and has been restored in the laboratory mouse memories have been flipped from fearful to cheerful brain waves can be used to guide memory formation amnesia can be undone that's what I was referring to and they restore lost memories on and on memories can be modulated or erased enhanced or put into long-term core for retrieval in vast detail the genomics is moving too fast to follow do not underestimate according to the people I've talked to the ability to target selective memories not chemotherapy a whole memory area but target selective memories for deletion for alteration and with a mouse we know we've implanted a false memory had monos be frightened transplanted the protein to another mouse it became frightened but with synthetic engineering we can use a false memory out of a protein that we have created ourselves if memories can be manipulated at will what does it mean to have a past if we can erase a bad memory or create a good one how do we develop a true sense of self memory is identity you are what you have done and what you have done is in your memory what you remember defines who you are remember this all goes back to we want to alter behavior and affect behavior and control behavior it's all about cybernetics feedback mechanisms on behalf of control but who is doing the controlling okay where's my man does that mean you're excited no that means okay I'm finishing now can I just show one more picture I have to have permission I don't want to you know violate the thing here an example of where you can go for this this is called THINK T-H-Y-N-C and theoretically you can zap yourself here it's already a product available that will make you feel stimulated and happy or you can zap yourself somewhere else by moving this around and using I don't know if it works or not I know this is what the company says it looks like this is what some people think it looks like after the fact there's a lot of biohacking you can do I will try to put these copious notes in some kind of order so that they will be accessible in the whole of this presentation which I'm sorry ran a little long because there's just so much going on but the point is when you integrate it when you look all over the world at what's being done when you really assimilate it and then synthesize it and think about what it means for the humanity of the next week and the next month and next year it's humanity 2.0 the question you have to face is am I going to participate in defining how that happens and in creating that that new humanity or am I going to be a victim of it thank you very very much