My brain is the most effective signal processor out there… And so is yours (for now)
By: Kamel Gazzaz
Tags: Brain Machine Interfaces, Artificial Intelligence, Empathy, Ambient Computing, Signal Processing

Carlo Rovelli suggests that spacetime is made up of a network of quantized loops of gravitational fields. In other words, contrary to the classical idea that particles are physical entities with perturbative gravitational fields that exist in a background (spacetime), that the spacetime metric and the gravitational field are the same physical entity. To that end, everything in the universe is part of spacetime and every discrete quantum of spacetime only exists in relation to other quanta. In other words, spacetime is a cascade of interactions between quanta where each quantum’s behavior emits signals that create consequences on the rest of the quanta of spacetime.

Loop Quantum Gravity basics

As embodied cognitive organisms, our sensory systems are tuned to capturing a very finite subset of the signals emitted in the world. With the common examples that we can only see 400 nm to 700 nm electromagnetic waves as light and hear 20Hz to 20kHz mechanical waves as sound, our sensory systems can only capture a sliver of the signals emitted in the world. Our sensory systems, while highly sophisticated, are oblivious to many potentially informative signals out there in the world, such as the gravitational fields that allow migratory birds to navigate the skies, the ultrasonic sounds bats use to echolocate, the vibrational data moles use to forage in subterraneous tunnels, or the electric activity patterns eels and sharks use to detect motion… Our sensory system’s tacit filtering shapes our subjective experience from the start, limiting the data we can capture about our invironment (internal ecosystem) and environment (external ecosystem).

The human sensory system can capture a tiny sliver of the signals in the world via the 5 senses. Imagine how much rich signal goes unnoticed for the receptors we don’t have.

Our nervous system is still capable of doing tremendous computation on the sensory data it has access to. Once our receptors capture and preprocess sensory data, every neuron in the chain integrates excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) and inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSPs) at its neural junctions and decides its behavior. Should I fire action potentials? Should I not? At what frequency? Computation occurs at every level of the nervous system to give rise to perception.

Each neuron integrates electrochemical signals to compute a decision

The human experience is a consequence of at least trillions of these decisions concurrently being made by our neurons. As such, human perception is at its core a set of probabilistic inferences about the self and the environment that, in conjunction, make up our qualia. In this sense, the human experience is entirely a computational construct: sensory information continually flows into the brain and consequences occur. The subjective mind is but an amazing signal processing network, filtering out noise and surfacing relevant signal to our attention.

Therefore, our brain constructs our reality based on probabilities dictated by the sensory input that our receptors have access to. This simplistic view of human sentience yields an important consequence. To compute the best decisions, the human mind needs to optimize its access to the highest quality data about its embodiment and the world. Our civilization’s 5,000 years of technological advancements have ultimately served this purpose. Humans have gradually developed better communication systems to increase their access to perceptual information; language and writing, mechanical transport, social structures, satellite telescopes, and the internet all serve one purpose: to bring relevant information to the human brain so that it can learn from that information and better effectuate fitness-promoting behavior.

Our technological advancements enable us to capture more signals about the world

Technology has always played an enabling role for humanity and we’ve made significant strides over the past two millennia to attain our current intellectual understanding of the world. By the Matthew Effect (and Moore’s Law), we know significantly more than our ancestors did, and our successors will know more than we do, as we keep accumulating more effective ways of capturing signals about the world.

The paradox of this automation is that we’ve become increasingly reliant on non-humanly native technologies to access vital signals about the world that dictate our reality. Whereas modern technology has provided a quasi-universal place to store information for our minds to access by way of the Internet, it has also made the process of acquiring and acting on that information more inhuman. In today’s world, humans need to go out of their way to create or requisition sensory information via technology. For instance, to innovate, our technological infrastructure requires us to write programs in languages understandable to the machine. To access information, as opposed to sensing what’s around us via our receptors, we need to query databases via keyboards and web browsers. This mode of interfacing with computers is not in line with native human perception and there is much work to be done on human-computer interfaces. Human-machine interaction needs to evolve. Paraphrasing the father of user-centered design Don Norman, tech must “accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.”

We spend our lives conforming to non-humanly native technologies. This ^ is not how humans should access the world’s signals.

My thesis is that technology that does not seamlessly integrate with human life will be rendered obsolete with the rise of organic ways of resolving the human-machine dichotomy. Today’s technologies are already increasingly seeking to adapt to human cognition. On the creation side, AI is progressively trending towards humanization: programming languages are reaching higher levels of abstraction to better conform to human minds, i.e. Python and other interpreted languages are more humanly intuitive than machine language. With the rise of neural networks and deep learning, programmatic ways of problem solving are gradually being phased out altogether. Google’s teachable machine, SwiftUI, and Touch Designer are all in the right direction of humanizing technological innovation. The low code/no code movement is disrupting application development. Human-centered design, a creative approach to problem-solving that seeks to create solutions tailored to suit the needs of humans, is all the buzz in design these days. On the access side, affective computing systems, wearables, and digital companions all seek to bridge the gap between humans and technology.

Tools like lobe.ai are making signal transmission between humans and machines more organic. Here the user is training a deep learning model just by showing the computer what he wants it to learn. But this is just scratching the surface…

We need to take human-centered design a step further. Humans should not go out of their way to share or gain access to the world’s information. In the same way that the human mind can seamlessly access its past experiences via memories to inform its behavior, I propose that the exchange of information between humans and machines needs to occur much more harmoniously.

To achieve true synchronicity between humans and machines, we need to design technology with the purpose of offering us access to signals in a humanly intuitive way. The goal is to create a holistic computational environment that responds to our individual needs, where we can integrate technology seamlessly to support us in everything that we do. The concept has been popularized as ambient computing and will enhance technology’s usefulness by reducing the attentional toll it takes to go out of our way to interact with it. Ambient computing will give us truly curated on demand access to the world’s signal spaces.

We can enhance human perception by embedding technology to sense the world’s signals in the background and surface relevant information to our attention.

Ambient computing can also enable technology to transmit relevant signals to the human perceiver within the context of the human perceiver’s life. Thus far, whereas mild personalizations exist in the form of cookies based on previous web surfing history and recommendation algorithms based on 5-star ratings, these signals used to curate our entire digital experience pale in comparison to the rich array of sensory signals that are available in the world. This vacuum creates an immense potential to upgrade our digital experiences (and thus our access to sensory information, our perception, and ultimately our intelligence) by factoring in holistic contextual signals, including our current and historical mental, emotional, and physiological data, to the human-machine interaction.

Linking signal processing technologies to human perception can help us surpass our perceptual limitations and enhance human intelligence. This view has been championed by Steve Mann, Ray Kurzweil, and Marvin Minsky as Humanistic Intelligence (HI). HI is a new framework that views technology as inextricably intertwined with the natural capabilities of our human body and mind. According to Steve Mann:

It is common in the field of human-computer interaction to think of the human and computer as separate entities. (indeed, the term “HCI” emphasizes this separateness by treating the human and computer as different entities that interact.) However, in HI theory, we prefer not to think of the wearer and the computer with its associated I/O apparatus as separate entities. Instead, we regard the computer as a second brain and its sensory modalities as additional senses, in which synthetic synesthesia merges with the wearer’s senses. When a wearable computer functions in a successful embodiment of HI, the computer uses the human’s mind and body as one of its peripherals, just as the human uses the computer as a peripheral. This reciprocal relationship is at the heart of HI.

The symbiosis between technology and our cognitive faculties.

Modern technology has brought much of the world’s information to our fingertips, it’s time for it to bring the right information directly to our awareness. By adding human intelligence into in the computational feedback loop, the human agent and technological agent can function in tandem and surface relevant interoceptive and exteroceptive signals to overcome naturally-imposed sensory limitations and enhance our fitness. Many companies and researchers are turning to wearable computing to achieve these ends: Fitbits, Apple Watches, Muse Headbands, Google Glasses all monitor our physiological data in the background and allow us to access that data to improve our lifestyles.

Wearable computing can help us increase our sensory bandwidth, allowing us to capture more interoceptive and exteroceptive signals and act on them. Here, the Muse headband gives people access to their brain activity.

Some more ambitious researchers are looking to create a direct link between the world’s signal spaces and our nervous system. This is the case with Neuralink and Kernel’s brain-machine interfaces. A brain-machine interface (BMI) is a direct communication pathway that allows for bidirectional information flow between the human brain and a digital device. But integrating technology into the human nervous system is a big feat and it is our responsibility to ensure these advanced capabilities are used for human welfare. To begin with, BMIs have lots of therapeutic and rehabilitative value.

BMIs can be used treat neurological disorders, restore lost sensory and motor function, and control artificial limbs. Neuralink’s primary application is to help people with severe spinal cord injury communicate and explore the world by giving them the ability to control computers and mobile devices directly with their brains.

Integrating brain-machine interfaces can help us enable human lives. Here the neuroprosthetic helps restore the person’s control of their left arm via an artificial limb.

As innovation continues, BMIs will not be limited to a few basic sensorimotor tasks. Rather they will allow our brains to sense and interact with all the relevant signals throughout the world much more thoroughly. According to Neuralink’s website:

Eventually BMIs will have the potential to expand how we interact with each other, with the world, and with ourselves.

BMI integration will give our brains a direct signal flow with the rest of the world’s signal space to help us seamlessly access and share rich multimodal sensory information that will help each of us best navigate their life.