Professor Kevin Warwick, the world’s first cyborg, details his 1998 silicon chip implant enabling computer interactions like door-opening and email access. He plans deeper neural links to remotely control fingers or add bat-like sonar senses, sparking ethical debates over human upgrades and military use—where machines might prioritize survival over human safety. His upcoming experiment with wife Irena tests brain-computer signal transmission, hinting at future medical applications like electronic pain relief, yet risks social divides and unintended consequences like cyber addiction. Warwick argues that exploring these boundaries is essential to grasp AI’s potential, from consciousness to superior decision-making, despite warnings of machine autonomy resembling the Borg. [Automatically generated summary]
I've got a news story here from ABCNews.com that I read in the first hour, and it stopped me cold in my tracks about halfway through.
And it says they mention my guests for tonight.
We'll try and have Keith get the article up.
It's called ICHIP, question mark.
Technology to meld chips into humans draws closer.
It's 10 p.m.
You may not know where your child is, but the chip does.
The chip will also know if your child has fallen, needs immediate help.
Once paramedics arrive, the chip will be able to tell the rescue workers which drugs little Johnny or Janie is allergic to.
At the hospital, the chip will tell the doctors his or her complete medical history.
And of course, when you arrive to pick up your child, settling the hospital bill with your health insurance policy is just a simple matter of waving your own chip, the one embedded in your hand.
To some, this may sound far-fetched, but the technology for such chips is no longer the stuff of science fiction.
It goes on and on.
We'll get the article posted for you.
Under the category, it's another paragraph down, tiny chips that know your name.
The research and controversy of embedding microchips is not entirely new.
Back in 1998, Brian Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at Reading University in London, implanted a chip into his arm as an experiment.
See if Warwick's computer could wirelessly track his whereabouts with the university's building.
And that stopped me dead in my tracks because here comes Professor Kevin Warwick.
Dr. Kevin Warwick is a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, UK, where he carries out research in artificial intelligence control and robotics.
His favorite topic is pushing back the frontiers of machine intelligence.
Kevin began his career by joining British Telecom, with whom he spent the last, or make that the next six years, at 22.
He took his, wow, his first degree at Aston University, followed by a Ph.D. in research post at Imperial College London.
He subsequently held positions at Oxford, Newcastle, and Warwick Universities before being offered the chair at Reading at the age of 32.
Kevin has published over 300 research papers, and his latest paperback, In The Mind of the Machine, gives a warning, a future in which machines are more intelligent than humans.
He's been awarded higher doctorates both by Imperial College and the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, and has been described by Gillian Anderson of the X-Files as Britain's leading prophet of the robot age.
He appears in the 1999 Guinness Book of Records for an Internet Robot Learning Experiment.
In 98, he shocked the international scientific community by having a silicon chip transponder surgically implanted in his left arm.
A series of further implant experiments is now planned in which Kevin's nervous system is going to be linked to a computer.
I wonder what the operating system is going to be.
This research led him to being featured in February 2000 as the cover story on the U.S. magazine Wired.
I get that magazine.
Kevin also presented the year 2000 Royal Institutional Christmas lectures with great success.
Kevin is now planning a new implant experiment within the next two weeks, and in a moment he'll be right here.
Now, all the way to Great Britain and Professor Kevin Warwick.
It was in the fall of 98, so I guess about three and a half years ago.
That wasn't a sort of an ID type chip, but what we tried to get it to do, as you were saying earlier, what we tried to get it to do was to interact with the computer here in the building.
So rather than just tracking me or monitoring me, which was quite possible, what we got it doing was opening doors for me and switching on lights and talking to me and things like that as I moved around the building.
One is looking at helping in the medical world, seeing how we get signals from the nervous system to and from a computer, which will open up possibilities.
You know, Christopher Reeves' situation, he has a break, and probably the worst case in his nervous system.
Can we get somebody like that, people like that, at least in the future to have some movement, to pick up cups and things like that?
Is that possible?
I mean, I think it's worth pushing in that direction.
And what we're doing, hopefully, will help in that sort of area.
We'll understand things a bit more.
Can we send, essentially, can we send signals from a computer onto the nervous system to bring about movement, to cause fingers to move, either when the nervous system is broken, in Christopher Reeves' case, or in my case, it's not broken, but the computer will be, we hope, causing movement, causing muscular movement.
In other words, might you go to the computer and move a little finger or an image of a little finger and your little finger would then move accordingly?
All right, well, let's see how sophisticated it could be.
For example, could the computer store information that would, oh, I don't know.
Say you reached over and picked up a cup of coffee and took a drink and put it back down.
Could the computer, with the chip that you're going to have implanted, is it sophisticated enough to record all the movements necessary to accomplish that action?
Well, it actually feels like directly nervous system into the brain.
Now, that could be helpful immediately, for somebody who's blind, not to the technology, not to repair the blindness, but to give them a different sense.
And I don't really think we know the half of it at the moment.
I mean, the science fiction idea is that of a cyborg, a part-human, part-machine, and this is really looking at, well, at least my nervous system will be connected up to the computer's nervous system.
Not quite brain to brain, but pretty close.
Yeah, it's the next step.
And yes, I think it will be very eye-opening what possibilities there will be there, yeah.
Well, if you become your nervous system, I mean, that's most seriously, becomes involved with the computer and the computer were to experience something untoward.
For sure, we've not got the sort of humanoid robots that look like us and talk like us acting as butlers and helping.
We've not gone that route at all.
I mean, we do have a lot of technology around.
If you think around the home, there's all sorts of pieces of machinery that are helping us and doing things for us.
But it's been different.
I don't know.
Partly maybe a social pickup.
There are lots of different robots that we could have helping around the home in particular, but we don't seem to want them for commercial reasons or maybe they're just not fitting into society.
Yes, but you obviously don't think it's going that way.
Instead, I see a world that you probably picture in which we all become a race of cyborgs, part man, part machine, or part computer, more likely, right?
Well, yeah, but I'm thinking of it in terms of both software and hardware for the human, looking at what the human can do at the moment and saying, well, if we can do more, you It gives us something more that we can't do, whether we necessarily feel we need it or not.
But in this case, I think the cyborg route does offer us all sorts of possibilities that we can't do at the moment simply because we're limited as we're humans.
I think on the one hand, you get the positives that anything you can do with technology linking up to the human body, if it helps somebody that has a problem, then that's a good thing.
Like we were talking about movement, somebody who can't move their arms or legs because they have a break in the nervous system.
Okay, allow for some movement.
That is a positive.
The big ethical questions come when you're saying, all right, let's take a regular person and increase their capabilities, give them abilities that they haven't got at the moment.
Then there are, well, do we want that?
If so, who wants it?
Who can get it?
Who can't get it?
And you get social divides coming in and so on.
And we really are talking big things here.
If we can look to a future where you have an implant to your brain that gives you extra memory capabilities or perhaps more so gives you the ability to communicate by sending signals from your brain to somebody else's brain, which we have to see as a technical possibility.
Well, I mean, I would tend to think that humans are in the position we're in on Earth compared to other creatures, perhaps because we're more intelligent than anything else going.
And if we're looking here at creating a cyborg with extra memory capabilities, better communication abilities that maybe can think in many dimensions, which humans are limited to three, and so on, we're looking at a cyborg as perhaps being far more intelligent than a human.
And therefore, you say who's actually going to run the show.
I don't think super intelligent cyborgs are going to listen to what humans have got to say all the time, are they?
I mean, if you just take the extra memory capability or having a chip which can do a lot of the mathematics for you, a lot of math functions, you outsource them, essentially.
But again, you know, Professor, again, the unknown quantity here is when you actually attach to the nervous system, you can't truly be sure how much of a connection you're going to get.
And you really, really could get a lot more of a connection than you anticipate.
Now, I don't know what the consequences of that might be.
Certainly, remote control movement to a certain extent, we hope.
And certainly remote sensory feelings.
I mean, it sounds a bit crazy, but it would be quite possible if somebody walked into the room here and I'm in New York, that I would get to feel it in New York.
where you are today about to do this implant in 20 more years where could it go well i guess on the i i think one big aspect you talked about robots before intelligent machines in intelligence in computers i think in the next 20 years we're going to see that start to become comparable to humans i really that the human form of intelligence and the
But I know that as fast as we're moving with computers, if the biological aspect develops, have you had to get permission from people to do this, or are you your own master here?
Yeah, there's certainly no shortage of volunteers.
Many, many from the United States through emails.
Some of them, maybe you feel these are crazy people, but I think many of them are very, very serious people who want to see what is possible out there.
And I admire their lull and their behavior.
I'm in the middle of the technology.
Had lawyers, all sorts of people, even one or two TV radio presenters, dare I say, who were saying, I would like to be a subject.
But if no approval were required and you could become, you know, virtually, well, I don't want to say Dr. Frankenstein, but you understand what I mean.
If you operated under a totally free hand and could operate on brains, you could do some pretty wild stuff even now, couldn't you?
Speaking with a very, very well-credentialed professor in Great Britain, Professor Kevin Warwick, he's got several books, iCyborg, with a release date of August of 2002.
Other books, QI, The Quest for Intelligence, In the Mind of the Machine, is yet another book.
And you can check them all out on my website.
Imagine you might want to.
Hearing what's hearing tonight, we'll get back to the professor in Great Britain in a moment.
Now, I realize, Professor, this is very far distant possibility.
But Joe in Los Angeles, California, I get these little computer messages.
I have to look at a screen, unfortunately, but I get these little computer messages as I do the program.
And he says, you know, couldn't you eventually, just like in the movie Brainstorm, record or play back, for example, a death experience?
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that he says that because I got asked the other day a slightly different question, and that was, with hooking my nervous system up to another person's nervous system, and then they die, so you would be getting some of the feelings at least.
And if you have a brain-to-brain link up, you could certainly experience somebody else's death as it happens in real time.
I mean, you would probably feel different, I guess.
Well, let's go a bit more on this because the plan of action, as long as everything is okay with my implant, and we need to get approval for it and everything, so it's a little bit downstream, but as long as everything is okay with my implant, then my wife, her name is Irena, she has agreed that she is happy to have one too.
Well, I guess we're working as a team here, and you've got the two sides to it.
My side, my interests are perhaps more on the scientific, the cyborg side, whereas from the surgeon's point of view, I guess it's looking pretty clearly at can we get some results from this that will help people with disabilities perhaps we can do so we're all getting something out of it in one way or another theirs is perhaps more short-term or immediate but there's all sorts of what they're looking at at helping with bowel control helping with spinal
injuries all sorts of things that they're looking at this will contribute in that in that field so so you found rather immediate enthusiasm from the surgeons yeah yes oh yes i think because this can do the the fact of taking an able-bodied person and getting results where we can we can actually look at uh what it means i think it opens up an awful lot if you if you're taking a person with a particular disability often they are unique they are the only person with that
particular problem and therefore results don't necessarily map across to anybody else whereas for me the results that the surgeons get that the research team get will hopefully map across to the vast majority of other people so it's a big difference well if we imagine um a human uh computer interface uh sophisticated human computer interface and then we imagine the internet and streaming yep then
we can easily imagine streaming um instead of a instead of watching television or going to the movies you could literally live somebody else's life live somebody's life uh who was uh doing something incredibly dangerous or incredibly sexy or incredibly something or another you know the same kind of drama you get on the tube with the exception of the fact that you would literally be part of it
feeling everything they feel right and that's the amazing thing with the brain that yeah you you can pull it into it chemically it's hallucinations or chemically is what drugs a lot of drugs do yes the only difference here is is looking at doing it electronically yeah which the brain is electrochemical most in the western world most of our medicines most of our uh what drugs and so on have been chemical to now this is
just merely looking at taking the electronic side of things and uh so in a in a way it's not such a big deal but because but in another way it is i mean you said earlier it'd be the death of radio be the death of tv and movies also now uh uh well it'll be different certainly yeah very different so different that there would wouldn't there be the danger of a total
immersion human addiction to this oh yeah i think that is a big worry um research and chimpanzees not my own research i hasten to add but research on chimpanzees where they've been allowed to stimulate excitement as it were literally press a button to give themselves excitement by direct electronic signals to the brain yes then what they've tended to do is to just go for it to go for the short-term fix and
uh to hell with everything else so i mean chimpanzees are not too far removed from humans a procedure too i think yeah so i i think it's the sort of thing if humans could do that then it would be
well very different but uh yeah it's a whole different world well you know if you look at our drug laws uh both uh those here in the u.s and i guess those are pretty close yeah not too different not too different uh we generally legislate against a lot of drugs perhaps perhaps because they provide escapism because they are anti-productive in
In other words, people tend to sit around on their butts taking trips and such.
Now, this would be that times 1,000.
So if it's anti-productive, if productivity of a nation would suffer because of it, like the Chinese suffered with the drug problems they had, then don't you see the possibility of laws that would immediately come down against this sort of thing?
thing oh i i and i think it would be right but uh we we're talking here on the negative side.
And with any technological change, or with most technological changes, you get potential negatives, but you get potential enormous positives.
And the enormous positives we're talking about here would be electronic medicine.
Again, most of the medicine in the Western world so far is chemically based, but the possibility of having electronic signals to get rid of your headache, let's say, or to keep you slim or to stop somebody becoming pregnant electronically.
So you've got enormous positives cropping up potentially, but as you said with the sort of cyber narcotics, I don't know what else you'd call it, the sort of drugs that are electronic drugs rather than chemicals, you've got enormous potential negatives as well.
And that would be the possibility of hooking yourself up to the internet and downloading a piece of software that makes you high.
Well, movement is one thing we want to look at, remote control movement and studying the signals that go with moving fingers and the wrist and so on.
Extra sensory input, we want to look at ultrasonic input directly onto the sensory side of my nervous system, which feeds directly into my brain and hence motion.
Well, literally, with the little robots we've got here, they have ultrasonic sensors very much like the ultrasonic sensors that a bat has, but it's not a sense that humans have.
It's something like 40 kilohertz, which is twice or more than twice the frequencies that humans will hear sound at ultrasound.
And so we're going to feed the output from those sensors down onto my sensory nerves.
Because if we can do it with ultrasonics, which is what we want to look at, then can we do it with infrared and x-ray and ultraviolet, all the sort of signals that humans can't sense at the moment, can we in the future?
The students and your colleagues would be excited.
But when it gets into the mainstream press, as it now is, with this ABC News article and I'm sure many others, then you probably start to get other feedback, don't you?
The vast majority of it is either questions, people trying to understand more what it is we're doing, or support saying, wow, this is great.
Like you were saying earlier, that maybe we haven't gone as far as we thought we would into the science fiction type of future that people were predicting.
And yet, I guess to a lot of people, that's exactly what we're doing here.
We're actually taking a, you know, it's a bit like Blade Runner or Terminator Or something, we're creating cyborgs in a way.
So for some people, I think, well, are you actually doing it?
This is great.
But I don't know.
It's less than 1%, I would say, from.
And it is more people that have a particular religious feeling, I think, that question perhaps what I'm doing.
And it is difficult to get most of the emails that I've had in that way, I don't know, it's difficult to see the logic that they're coming from, but maybe that's just me.
Yeah, well, I mean, we have the technology now and it's starting to take off in a sense.
I mean, that was my 1998 implant.
So I scientifically moved on from that.
But now it seems other people, families are starting to get that sort of technology.
It's interesting to see a few years downstream the technology improves and people take it on board more and accept it, perhaps philosophically accept it more as well.
And I know that you're in the seal a little bit, and I would like to ask you about this.
I watch computers double in speed every 18 months, whatever it is.
And so we're rapidly going down a highway that is going to take us, I'm not sure where, but it seems to me at some possibility, at some point there is a possibility that computers would become aware of self.
one of And when you see a computer as a brain of a robot, and the robot moves around and interacts with the world and changes what it does and learns and adapts, there's no question in my mind that the robot, the computer, is aware of itself if it's sending out signals in a different way to a human, but nevertheless.
Well, of course, our manner of sensing the world is tempered or influenced by our emotions, which meter would not necessarily be burdened with or have the luck to have, depending on how you look at it.
Oh, that certainly I feel, and most likely will be, yes.
I think just because they're different does not mean they're worse.
And even if we look at consciousness and say, well, a machine can't be conscious in the same way, or it's not likely it's going to be conscious in the same way as a human, that doesn't mean at all that intellectually it's going to be inferior.
Yes, but isn't our natural tendency as humans, if we regard a machine as more intelligent, capable of making more rational decisions, not influenced by these ragged old emotions that we are burdened with, to begin to turn decision-making over to machines like that for humanity, right?
Well, very much so, I think, is what we are doing in a lot of sectors.
The military sector is going that way.
A lot of the financial decisions, yes, we're deferring more and more because not only can the machine do things physically that we can't do, but the decisions are much better.
Well, then isn't there some danger that if a machine were to acquire more intelligence than ours and we bestow upon it the ability to make decisions, it will start to make decisions that it considers perhaps even for our own benefit, but not a decision that we would Necessarily make.
In other words, they could become dangerous to humanity.
I think almost surely if they're looking for it wouldn't take long for the decisions to be for the best of the machine in its own right.
Therefore, that could be most likely it would be against humans before too long.
I mean, that was my book, In the Mind of the Machine, which was out in 98, I think only in the UK, so I think people in the US have not had the pleasure of spending evenings reading it, but that's really what that was about, looking realistically at how that is quite likely to come about going the way we're going.
And simple examples that point in that direction would be in the military domain and the financial domain, those sort of sectors where you can see the shift going in that way, quite clearly.
But I think not in the science fiction ideas have been more the sort of Arnie Schwarzenegger self-contained machine that goes off and does this.
I don't see it in that way.
I really see the network as being quite a critical central focus point.
It's perhaps more the sort of Star Trek Borg type of thing is more the way, I guess, with an intelligent network with smaller beings, machines that operate to and from it.
But with the military using machines of this sort in applications regarding arsenals, nuclear weapons, all the rest of it, if a machine began to show a great deal of self-interest, it would very quickly become an antagonistic situation, a worrisome situation for humans.
And, gosh, there was a movie I'm remembering where a machine finally decided that humans had become too big a threat to it.
Well, there are now a lot of military machines that are at least semi-autonomous.
Fighter planes that are actually being built.
The X-36 McDonnell Douglas, the X-45 Boeing are human pilotless fighter planes, for example.
And there were various things tried out in the recent Afghanistan situation.
But there it's just looking at flying and attacking without a human pilot on board.
It's a simple, well, a very small step to say, all right, well, we'll get the human out of pressing the button in the first place because the machine can make the decision better.
It's a very small step in that case.
And then the decision is completely taken by the autonomous fighting machine, whatever it happens to be.
It may take some mistake, some problem, some situation where somebody is killed or a whole group of people are killed where that was not the human intention, but it's clearly the machine's intention based on its own experience and so on that would raise people's awareness to it.
But whether it would, because most likely there would be something of a cover-up as to what has gone on, I doubt if we'd ever get to hear fully what the situation was.
Well, this is where, I mean, for our students, we like to give them sensible projects, sensible, shall we say, a task, rather than just getting them to do some project that sits on the shelf after it's finished.
We give them a challenge.
And what we challenged the students to do was to create the world's first half-marathon robot.
So this was a robot to do a half-marathon with humans in the...
Oh, yes.
And so they built the robot, and how it was operating was essentially tracking me on an infrared signal.
So I was running in front of it, wearing a bum bag with an infrared transmitter on the back.
And Roger, which is what we called the robot, had an infrared receiver on the front.
Now, because it was England, we thought it was likely to be raining for the half marathon.
So the students made sure the electronics was watertight.
And just in case it was sunny, they gave Roger a little peak cap.
But we had to get permission to enter it in the race and everything and make sure it didn't go bumping into people.
But what actually happened on the day of the half marathon, uncharacteristic for England, it was a very sunny day.
And because the sun is a wonderful transmitter of infrared, now the students had programmed the robot to stay two meters, six feet, six feet behind me, trying to keep that distance all the time.
So if I went faster, Roger went faster, if I went slower, Roger went slower.
On the day of the half marathon, very, very sunny.
Roger followed me for about one mile and then caught sight of the sun and went hurtling off towards the sun because it was picking up the infrared as fast as it could go.