(atmospheric music)
Modern man is a miracle of evolution.
We now have a larger functioning brain
than has ever existed before
and that has enabled us
to develop things like language, culture, engineering,
technology, poetry, mathematics, philosophy,
things which have never been known before.
All constantly evolving, advancing.
My primary scientific and technical passion
is the creation of thinking machines
that can think at the human level
and, ultimately, beyond the human level.
Welcome to the brave new world.
We are moving toward a technological singularity,
a point at which there's an intelligence explosion
where an ordinary unenhanced human
can no longer understand the technological developments.
(muffled radio voices)
(clock ticking) (siren wailing)
The technologies of the digital age
have delivered unprecedented,
perhaps boundless possibilities.
(atmospheric music)
We've reached a point at which man and technology
begin to merge,
tools become body parts
and the human being digitally optimized.
The result is a controversial vision, super sapiens.
In the beginning, there was hell on earth.
(mid tempo music)
Water became the elixir of life,
from the simplest of organisms
increasingly complex beings evolved over billions of years.
Life was changing and so was the environment,
the only way to survive was to adapt.
Then came a pivotal point in evolution, the rise of humans.
Cultural achievements
bear witness to ever-increasing human abilities,
alongside the natural world an intellectual world arose,
man created art, language, and writing,
societies emerged and changed,
and technology and its increasingly swift progress
accelerated this process.
Today we can look into our deep past
and gaze into the distant future.
Technology has reached a stage where it's all-pervading,
it informs us, entertains us, runs our lives.
But what about the brain that created all the technology?
Is it still developing?
I think it's hard to claim
that our brain is still evolving in terms of hardware,
in order for that to happen,
it would be necessary that the brainiest individuals
were still surviving best or having the most children
and that's clearly not true.
What's happening is cultural evolution,
we've externalized our mental evolution.
(dramatic music)
Modern visionaries
are attempting to make sense of the dichotomy,
humans on the one hand, technology on the other.
My name's Mikey Siegel.
I have a background as an engineer
in computer engineering and robotics.
The big transition in my life
has been where I started to discover
that there was another world.
(soft music)
For as long as I can remember,
I've been excited about technology and engineering
and eventually I hit like the engineer's jackpot
and got to do robotics at MIT.
I graduated MIT,
I got an amazing job, well paying,
living with my friends in San Francisco
and, on paper, it was the perfect life,
but there was something wrong.
It's almost as if I needed to get away
from the science and tech,
in order to have the perspective
to actually see what it really means and what it really is.
Mikey Siegel spent some time in India,
there he had a spiritual experience
that inspired new ways of thinking about the nexus
between humans and machines.
It's impossible to talk about human beings
without also talking about technology,
and so the question is not whether or not we want technology
to be here,
the question is what we want technology to be.
Hooked on constant connectivity,
we've become inseparable from our digital devices,
they've become part of our lives
and now they're becoming part of our bodies.
For some people, artificial implants are all the rage,
when the body's communicating with computers.
At the Epicenter laboratory in Stockholm,
body hackers prepare to make this happen.
I think that the senses that evolution has given us humans
are quite lousy.
I see the human body as a platform,
which is a good beginning,
and it's really up to us to redesign it and to tweak it
and to improve it in all various ways,
because it needs improvement.
(laughing)
Human beings are not the fastest runners on the planet
nor the longest lived organisms on the planet,
nor can we jump higher than any other being.
We're just specific combinations of atoms,
molecules, and cells, that happened to have evolved.
Human nature is all about self transformation, I think,
we all try to become better people,
although we have very different views of what better means.
I have a chip implant here in my hand.
I have my contact details saved on my chip
so, whenever I meet someone, they can scan my hand
and they get my contact straight into their address book.
Innovation has always been with humans,
so it's not really possible to stop technology.
(speaking foreign language)
However,
you might aim at getting beneficial technologies
before dangerous technologies.
Body hackers and their chip implants
attract growing interest
at technology fairs around the world.
Start using technology as part of ourselves.
At the Pioneers Festival in Vienna,
the big names in the field
try to convince the audience of their visions.
Are you welcoming the pain?
Signal acquired,
connection established. That's to confirm stored.
Here you go, transition to cyborg done.
Oh my God!
We have a potential to be much more than we are as humans
and still be humans.
For example, by expanding our sensory universe.
What if we could really understand how another person feels?
I think that would make us not only more intelligent,
but also, more importantly, more ethical beings.
So I think it's very useful
to have people experimenting and doing implants.
One reason why it's so important
to have people experimenting,
even maybe sometimes unwisely or radically,
is that we don't know what could be a good outcome,
we can't know that until somebody tries it.
Being a cyborg is like the future.
Learning by doing,
but no experiment is without risk.
When you look at how technology is being designed,
it is being designed with very little foresight.
At the moment,
I'm not so eager to have something implanted under my skin,
but I can imagine doing it if it became not only tempting,
but it may seem essential.
Why would anyone want to send a email
when we can talk on the phone?
That seems like a step backward,
and yet all of us got sort of thrown over the precipice
and now are dealing with some fundamental changes
in our lives.
Many of us have outsourced our memory to the internet,
whereas rather than worry
about whether or not you can remember something,
you know you can always just search for it.
Our environment has changed quite radically,
some figures are that we have
about 7,000,000,000 connected devices on earth,
about the same number as we have humans.
But, in just five years from now,
we can expect to have 50,000,000,000 connected devices,
so more than 10 for each of us
and we need to have some smart way
to interact with all these digital things around us.
The crucial question
is how this interaction should look.
One of the controversies raised by religious people
is whether life is intelligently designed,
so far it has not been intelligently designed,
it's arisen by unconscious undesigned evolution.
Now humans are in a position
to intelligently design the future of evolution.
It could be very exciting if humans enhance themselves
in ways that make them overall better people,
but, in order to do this, we have to ask, what is the self?
Will it really be a situation where I am still me
at the end of the day?
The X-Tech conference in San Francisco
is one of the most important hubs
for innovations that connect technology
with the human brain.
Mikey Siegel is on the lookout for the latest developments
by inventors who want to improve on human beings
and their natural abilities,
who are looking to surpass their own limitations.
The spectrum ranges from virtual reality game platforms
to medical devices
that can alter the way the human brain functions.
Harnessing the mind to control objects is a popular concept.
I will save you.
But will alone is often not enough.
Oh no!
Not yet.
The conference offers a great deal of opportunities
for experiments and new experiences.
And then the next one we're doing here is the GSR,
so this is the conductivity of the skin,
and that's gonna measure
how intense of an emotion that you'd be having.
We're good, okay.
I'm gonna do my best angry face, okay, you ready?
All right.
I don't want you to get scared, all right.
It will be okay. -: Stay calm.
Go for it.
If you don't have a model of emotion,
the only way you can get that
is asking people how they feel,
but that, in turn, is changing the way that they feel.
So having a sensor system like this
allows you to look at
what is that unspoken, unbiased response to environments,
to surveys or anything along those lines.
The edge that I'm really interested in
is the edge of transformative technology.
How do you design new tools and technologies
that can connect and interface with the brain and the mind,
but can take us to a new place, to new depths,
to the furthest reaches of human flourishing?
So tell me about this headset, how does this work?
So this is a dry EEG,
it's got little sensors that look like this.
So the special thing about this
is that it doesn't actually require any special preparation.
Exactly. -: To put this on.
I mean, this could be the ticket
to actually making this kind of technology
accessible to a large number of people.
That's the idea.
And what we do is we take this and we make sense of it,
and we take the sensor activity
and we can go into your brain
and look at how activity inside your brain is changing,
and that starts to become much more powerful.
The researchers have devised a way
to visualize a person's emotional state,
a technique that may change lives.
We're doing that all in real time.
We're going to see a massive increase
in the ability for locked in individuals
to be able to communicate,
at first on a very basic level.
You can see it here on the phone.
Oh wow.
So you're very serene and contented right now.
Relaxed.
I just love EEG so much.
Well, this is just the beginning.
Everyone who works in brain computer interface,
we all think about the idea
of being able to upload a consciousness onto a machine.
Would that copy actually be conscious?
That depends upon the larger issue
of whether a machine is capable of being conscious.
And if all of a sudden this phone, my phone,
knows actually what I'm feeling, on one hand,
I could imagine this being the greatest marketing tool
of all time,
but, on the other hand,
I could imagine this being like the most sensitive,
heartfelt, intuitive therapist
that I've ever come in contact with,
that is sensitive to my emotions
and perhaps helping to guide me
towards a more balanced and harmonious state.
For some, the new mind machine nexus
promises endless possibilities.
Critics warn of unchecked development,
Marie Curie, the discoverer of radioactivity,
could never have imagined the consequences of her work.
Although this example seems polemic,
what would actually happen
if machines developed their own minds?
Even influential figures like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk
warn against this scenario.
Mikey Siegel imagines another future,
where advanced technology
is used to elevate human consciousness to a new level,
by plugging the brain into a machine.
(mid tempo music)
And it felt like the more I found my path,
the less people had any idea what I was talking about.
What I'm suggesting is that we are entering into a new age,
what I would call the experience age.
There was a time where your physical capacity
was a measure of how productive you could be
and then we moved into the information age,
where your intellect, your mind was the measure.
And now in the experience age,
with technologies that can become completely immersive
and deeply impact our experience of the world,
all of a sudden, we're playing in a new terrain.
Technological progress
has always inspired and empowered people
to look for new possibilities,
to strike out in new directions.
It brings dreams to fruition and changes lives.
Morning guys.
Steven Sanchez has relied on a wheelchair
ever since he broke a lumbar vertebra in a bike crash.
A team from the University of California in Berkeley
has developed special leg prosthesis
to help people like Steven.
The construction is an exoskeleton,
an outer support structure
that's designed to provide stability.
The whole thing works electro mechanically
and is computer controlled.
Steven has spent nearly half of his life in a wheelchair,
what happens next will define his future.
(soft music)
He was told he would never walk again.
The design still has its limits,
the batteries only last a few hours
and Steven cannot go upstairs.
But, for Steven,
the freedom and the feeling of being back on his feet
is priceless.
The next step is prosthesis
that aren't controlled by computers, but by thoughts.
Mikey Siegel searches for technology
that may be useful for his research
at the X-Tech conference.
It is the Ultracortex.
The Ultracortex is a highly developed headset,
comprised of bio sensors.
They measure electrical body functions like brain activity
and heartbeat.
I wanna be a cyborg.
EEG is the main focus but, with our technology,
you can also measure EMG, which is muscle movements.
To develop their technology,
the researchers perform experiments on themselves,
all in the name of science.
(atmospheric music)
One of my recent project
has been sending EMG or muscle signals
from the OpenBCI board into a robotic hand.
The project really just started out of interest,
but over the course of the last six months,
there's been a huge rise,
a surge of energy in open source prosthetics
and I just immediately saw the value of OpenBCI
as a high channel count system to help augment the space.
Well, the first step is to help people
who have medical problems.
Moving into the future,
we might imagine BMIs as a form of enhancement
rather than just a form of therapy.
What if you could get artificial limbs
and then, should they break,
you could just have them replaced.
How long would it take you
to sign up for those kinds of enhancements,
rather than just using your biological limbs?
In regards to the robotic arm that I've been working with,
there's an element of machine learning.
What we're doing is very simple machine learning,
but the field of machine learning
is growing at an exponential rate
and our ability to handle and process the data
that is getting generated by systems like OpenBCI
is only gonna get more powerful.
David, I like to think that when the robots take over,
they're gonna spare the two of us.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We'll still be useful.
I like that theory.
Until recently, the EEG has been a very expensive device
that one laboratory,
one highly funded laboratory at the top tier schools
have access to.
But now, all of a sudden, in the last five to 10 years,
it's just blown wide open the entire space,
because we've got 100 dollar devices
that are as good as the best technology 10, 20 years ago.
Technology now feeds itself,
high-tech progress enables components
to be manufactured smaller and cheaper,
which, in turn, ensures technological advance.
A lot of people that have an incredible vision,
all of a sudden have a tool that they can afford.
They have a tool that's accessible
and they have a community of people
that are also using this tool,
that they can get support from and work with.
The startup OpenBCI
is an example of how affordable technology
is fanning the flames of technological development.
I think that the merger of man and machine
has kind of been going on now for quite some time,
it's no surprise that we're talking about this here,
that I have an opportunity
to be a part of something like OpenBCI,
where we see more and more of these kinds of projects
and examples of technology, digital, mechanical,
and biology,
humans, animals, sort of coming together
at even closer connections.
Joel Murphy
is preparing a spectacular experiment,
the guinea pig is neuroscientist David Putrino.
Are you on the scalp now, too?
Yeah, I can feel that up against my scalp.
Okay, this is looking better.
All right, so blink your eyes a couple of times.
Okay, great, some nice eye blink artifacts.
Fly this helicopter.
Oh, just fly the helicopter,
is that all? With your brainwaves,
with your brainwaves, okay?
Sounds awesome, let's do this.
We're gonna look simply at the alpha wave
coming off your occipital lobe,
we've got an electrode back here for measuring that.
We're always creating electrical potentials
from our brains, from our muscles,
our heart is a big electrical signal generator.
And so it depends on what you want to do with those signals
and one of the things that you could do
is interface them with a machine,
either to tell the machine about your state
or to get feedback
from a machine that's measuring your state
and distilling some useful information out of it.
So this is looking pretty good.
The preparations are complete,
Joel is satisfied, the test flight can begin.
Now we're seeing some good alpha,
we're sending energy to the helicopter.
(atmospheric music)
The test pilot tries to relax.
(beeping)
(helicopter whirring)
It seems like things are working,
but the helicopter isn't taking off.
Alright, all right you can open your eyes now.
David, stop it!
All right, I'm just gonna make an adjustment.
So I've just got to figure out what the best.
So you're thresholding me now?
Yeah, well it's also, this is super fresh code,
so it's my handicap.
We have this capability now of actually, you know,
taking the analog world inside of our head
and turning it digital, turning it binary,
and then harnessing technology,
harnessing computers to better understand consciousness,
better understand what it means to be human
and then maybe even improve the human condition.
Joel Murphy is not about to give up.
Looking good. -: And that looks really nice.
Those little eye blinks, artifacts, that's nice.
Again, test pilot David tries to relax.
The success is astounding.
(soft uplifting music) (helicopter whirring)
Yeah, get it up there!
What I find really exciting, the consumer market
is actually driving a lot of the innovation.
We have these young startups,
which are saying, you know what?
Science is moving too slowly,
let's crowdsource the problem out to the community.
Okay, maybe the problem's in hardware.
And let's get the community
thinking about how to solve these problems,
let's get the community
making the next big technological steps
and making huge innovations,
and that's what I think is really exciting.
Okay, it's okay.
At first, most people are really psyched or turned on
by the idea of interactivity
and controlling robots and mind control drones.
But what I'm more excited about
is the capability to give individuals access
or further understanding of the tools
that already exist inside of their own heads.
You have switches and the ability to alter these states
inside of your own head, if you know how.
The enigmatic relationship
between mind and body
is the focus of experiments at the University of California
in San Francisco.
Researchers here are investigating
how physical activity influences mental performance
and how this knowledge can be used to enhance our lives.
AJ, we're gonna take a look at your glass brain right now,
could you just do some activity
so we can see some stuff going on in there?
So what you see here
is real time brain activity data being visualized,
literally with just a two tenths of a second delay
in it being generated in his brain,
to being visualized in the glass brain.
And so the promise of this
is that we'll identify those patterns and images
that reflect optimal performance,
and as you understand that,
a machine can feed that back in
and train them to that state.
Exactly.
All right.
The experiment is a video game,
however, in this case,
the test player doesn't sit comfortably at home on his sofa.
Ready in 10 seconds.
Five seconds.
Initiating cognitive workout sequence.
Here we go.
(uptempo electro music)
The experiment
is literally a mind body workout.
While the participant exerts his body physically,
he challenges his mind to solve cognitive problems.
And a hypothesis here is that his outcomes,
how his attention abilities improve,
will exceed someone that played a version of this game
just sitting down at the computer.
There's a lot more to the human mind
than we encounter in our everyday lives,
so if we try to unleash hidden potential in our brains,
we could learn new things about ourselves
and perhaps improve our level of consciousness.
Entering next level.
The other big technological advance
that we're trying to push to the next level,
is real time brain recordings during an activity
and also looking at
how areas are communicating with each other.
So the holy grail being a direct feedback loop,
brain to machine to brain.
That's exactly right
and we could do that during many, many different activities.
Cognitive workout completed.
We have a version of this where you meditate
and we're recording brain activity and feeding that in,
so the meditative experience
is responding to what's going on in your brain.
All right, our signals look good.
Mankind has been seeking
and using connections between mind and body
since time immemorial.
Meditation, for instance,
has a positive influence on people,
this has been scientifically proven many times over.
The ability to take sometimes ancient practices
and bring in technology,
so that we could create algorithms
so that they're adaptive and personalized,
that's the really massive win that we're seeing now.
So there's some really solid evidence coming out
that these ancient practices
can have very tangible benefits on our biology,
but if we can bring in all of this technology
and get it into people's hands
in a way that they find much more enjoyable and engaging,
especially young people,
these can be tools to elevate our minds.
And if we think about that from this perspective, really,
the sky's the limit on what we can accomplish.
The point is most of it
has always been about capability,
the ability of the machine to do clever things
and very little have been thinking about, is it safe?
Does it actually produce good outcomes?
But many researchers
are well aware of the risks of scientific progress.
With respect to the idea
of the merger between man and machine,
I think it's both very exciting,
but also very frightening at the same time.
I think we have to be very smart and cautious
about how we proceed into the future
and really approach the future,
while looking far off into the horizon.
We've made a lot of mistakes regarding data and privacy
and security with the emergence of the internet,
and I think that we should learn from those mistakes
as we begin to connect our brain to the internet.
In many ways, if we could continue forever
by being very cautious, very boring,
uncreative, and never doing anything fun,
I think most people would say
that's not the right way of living,
some risk is necessary.
(soft music)
Imagine you can modify your mind
any way that you can imagine it
and specify in detail and program,
then you become something massively smarter
than what you can imagine now.
You know, I wish I could remember 1,000 things in my mind
at one time, instead of just 10, okay,
let's increase the short-term memory buffer size, right?
I'd like to have a calculator, Mathematica, and Google
accessible inside my mind, that power of thought,
instead of having to interact with these things
by my fingers, which is very slow and awkward, okay.
One goal of research
is to enhance certain abilities of the human brain.
Take that plug it into this.
I meet my friend, Michael, who's a neuroscientist
that's been studying how electrical activity
can change the way the brain works.
Your body's gonna conduct electricity.
Once again,
Mikey Siegel plays the part of the human guinea pig.
So there's all these sensors around this conference
that are reading the electrical activity of the brain,
but what this is actually doing
is it's essentially changing
the electrical activity of the brain
and you're targeting a specific part of my brain
that is gonna have a certain effect, in this case,
for visual processing.
That's right, exactly.
Really cool.
We can start the stimulation when you're ready.
I'm ready. -: All right.
He wires me up with his latest gadget
and, immediately, I can feel the tingling on my head.
I'm in your capable hands here, Mike.
And I can taste this metallic taste in my mouth
and I also started to notice
that my speech seemed a little weird.
I certainly wouldn't wanna
feel like that all day every day.
Yeah, okay so I have a question for you, Mikey,
do you remember the project
that you and I talked about putting in at the MoMA?
Yeah.
Tell us about it.
Okay, well it was a year ago, one year ago.
Yeah, at this conference.
We were downstairs,
I remember I had just had a fight with my girlfriend.
I didn't know that part.
And I'm trying to remember what the details were,
some kind of installation.
Yeah.
I don't really remember all the details.
And I'm totally stumped, I can't remember the answer
and he explains to me
that one of the effects of this electrical stimulation
is that it's, in certain ways,
impairing my memory and my language processing.
The aim of the experiment
is to significantly improve visual perception
and the processing of optical information in the brain.
Do you still have your phone?
Yeah.
Let's have you do something hardcore visual.
So I pull up this game that I've been playing
and a little frustrated with for the past few months.
Mikey starts playing as he normally would.
It actually makes it more visual.
Then quickly realizes
his perception of the game is different,
it's sharper, focused, more lucid.
Within about 10 minutes, I get a high score.
Wow, I've never beat that level before.
(atmospheric music)
Mikey is astounded by his new abilities.
Wow, so, before this day,
I don't think I've even gotten half as far.
And then when I looked up
and started just looking around the room,
I started to notice that I could spot fine details,
I could look out the window and see the leaves on the trees.
It was really a very interesting experience.
What I notice is this possibility
to actually totally zone into what I'm doing.
It was a little hard with all the cameras around me,
but when I hit it, it was quite incredible.
Mike, what did you just do to my brain?
Because I seem to have extra special abilities here.
We may have an opportunity to sculpt our brains
and there may be a plurality of different kinds of minds.
One person may have echolocation,
another could have a mobile internet connection,
another could be incredibly smart,
could be a superintelligence.
They may choose to enhance themselves
in ways that they feel their employer wants
and we have to have legal protection
for those people who decide not to enhance.
So it was amazing
to have this experience with this technology.
What if you actually took multiple devices simultaneously
and you actually connected them to a group of people?
Well, if we could merge two human brains,
I think that would produce a very different kind of mind,
we know that to be the case
because people have had their brains divided surgically
to mitigate grand mal epileptic seizures.
And you have two minds, at that point,
that are no longer communicating with one another.
In certain circumstances,
they can get into a kind of tug of war with each other,
so that, literally, the left hand is buttoning the shirt
and the right hand is unbuttoning it,
but it's not, in principle,
different than uniting two separate human beings,
if we had the technology to do that.
This is not science fiction,
there is a very real concern
that unchecked technological development
will trigger an unpredictable chain reaction.
Today, virtually anyone with adequate programming knowledge
can design body brain interfaces
and tailor-made software without regulation.
What we have created today in our technological landscape
is an expression of who and what we are as a human culture.
(atmospheric music)
Culture entails, among other things,
interpersonal contact,
an exchange of information, thoughts, feelings.
We share these things with others,
sometimes in a playful way.
Technology is an instrument for this,
but because of technological progress,
much is at stake in the future.
Losing a game is not necessarily a bad thing,
because the point of a game is activity.
What about losing a world?
That's kind of different because, in many ways,
we actually care about being in the world,
but we do care about
also kind of playing the game of existence.
There has been a number of human species on this planet.
All of these homo species
have lived and they have passed away,
who says that homo sapiens are any different?
It's not obvious to me that a replacement of our species
by our own technological creation
would necessarily be a bad thing.
The future of mankind
seems inextricably connected to technological progress,
for some, this makes it all the more imperative
to explore and use every possibility.
(phone ringing)
Hello?
Hey, how you doing, what you up to?
Oh, hey Craig.
yeah, I'm on my way to the hackathon right now,
I should be there in like five minutes.
There should be probably about 15 or 20 folks
from the Consciousness Hacking community
that are gonna be there.
We've got some people
that are bringing in some pretty big projects, actually,
there's someone that's coming
that's been building a nightclub
that interacts with your mind.
When I started this journey, I felt totally alone,
but things began to change very quickly.
I started a small community called Consciousness Hacking,
which started as 10 people sitting around a table
discussing these ideas.
(mid tempo music)
Mikey's group was on the right track,
within a year, they had 100 members who regularly met
in the San Francisco Bay area.
A year later,
there were about 20 other such groups worldwide,
totaling over 10,000 members.
Their goal is to explore ways to use technology
to expand human consciousness.
Mikey Siegel seems to have arrived at his destination.
He and his group have found a home for their dreams,
thanks to a generous investor
who believes in their utopian vision.
The Co Hack home, the Consciousness Hacking home
is the center of activity for this special group of people.
They see themselves as a kind of modern commune.
The members live together and work together,
at first glance,
this is reminiscent of the communes of the late 1960s
and their quest to expand human consciousness.
Mikey Siegel
now works at the Stanford University School of Medicine,
he's created his own curriculum for a new subject
called consciousness hacking.
We've got some fun projects going on.
I have like a class on technology and meditation
and then all the way on the other side
is a collaboration with the D school, the design school,
where students actually form into teams.
Science school getting closer with the business school
and actually beginning to develop a lab,
or some kind of work or collaboration space.
The Co Hack home has several work spaces,
here, researchers from different disciplines
develop, plan, and construct new types of electronics,
new program codes, and software systems.
Their mission is to create completely new technologies
and to use those technologies to design devices
that will enhance human consciousness,
elevate it to previously unimaginable levels.
Can you get data off of this thing?
It doesn't give us the data inherently,
we'd have to hack into it.
Mikey Siegel
is not only the founder of a new movement,
he is also a pioneering thinker and a visionary.
One of my main interests
is not just how the individual can transform,
but how we can create interpersonal transformation,
how we can shift the relationship between people.
And, if we think about it, this is nothing new,
this has been at the core of human culture
for thousands of years,
it's a defining quality of human beings.
If I were to ask you
what the most meaningful and important experience
you've ever had with another person was,
it probably wouldn't be about an idea or a thought,
it would be about a feeling.
(atmospheric music)
And my question is how can we use technology
to help support this already innate capacity
for deep profound human connection?
Mikey's group
is constantly working on the development
and creation of new tools.
This laid back free-form workspace
is a hub focused on helping people to develop,
using the most advanced technologies available,
devices that measure brainwaves.
Computers that capture individual states of being.
Let me activate the EEG again.
But the researchers
are thinking far beyond purely scientific
and technical contexts,
they want to create the technology of the future
to awaken people to higher consciousness.
We just got funding
for a brand new and very exciting project,
really an experiment
to see what happens when we use new types of technology
to support a deep sense of connection
between a group of people.
What we do is we actually take special sensors
that monitor the brain and that monitor the heart,
(ambient music)
and we wire up not just one person,
but we wire up the whole group together.
And then a computer system
analyzes all the data coming from this group
and what it's doing is it's actually comparing
against a scientific understanding
of what it looks like in the brain and in the heart
when we fall into a very natural sense of deep connection
that is always available, but not always accessible.
We talk about feeling synced up with a person
and sure there's slang around that,
but this actually has real scientific meaning.
And our experiment is to explore,
can we actually use this special type of technology,
not just to measure the connection,
but to actually guide this group?
And this is a new frontier,
this possibility of what happens when technology is used,
not just to connect us through information,
is an incredible profound space of possibility.
The expansion of human consciousness
through modern technology is still in its infancy,
but scientists are already hard at work
studying the possible consequences.
I think that in terms of what we can expect
from the next five to 10 years,
I get really excited about it,
because I think that we're gonna really start to develop
what we can do with brain computer interfaces.
Would we have a bifurcated society?
Would people of such different types
even want to live together in the same civilization?
This is only the beginning of the kind of questions
and issues which we'll need to address.
We are at the transition
between animals that cannot understand what they are
and reflect on their own thinking and behavior,
and the next stage of intelligence,
which is intelligent beings
that can be fully self-reflective,
understand their own minds and bodies,
and repurpose and refactor and improve themselves
according to their goals.
A relatively small number of evolutionary changes
led to all the things that the human brain have produced,
modern technological societies, complex organizations,
scientific understanding of the world.
It just seems very plausible that like some similar,
additional tweaks on top of that, you know,
whether by biological enhancing human condition
or creating AIs that surpass us,
could have equal or much greater impact on the world.
(eerie music)
The change that we are exerting on the world
is far more dramatic
than the change that homo sapiens was exerting on the world
when Neanderthal man was watching it happen.
Our biological bodies were never selected
to live in this breakneck changing world of technology
and who knows what the future may bring.
Technological progress
seems to be just a click away.
(dramatic music)
But are we really facing a glorious future?
(atmospheric music)
Mikey Siegel wants to connect,
indeed to reconcile mankind and technology,
but, even for him, many questions remain unanswered.
So where do we want to go from here?
We're about to see a generation born into a world
where every waking moment will be mediated by technology.
But can we really separate who we are from what we build?
Isn't technology
just a mirror of who and what we are as a humanity?
Perhaps the smartest are not always the fittest.
The greatest innovation of humanity will not be a gadget,
it will be the software that runs our minds and our hearts.
The greatest innovation of humanity
will be our inner operating system.