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I. Who Could\u00a0Object?<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cTonight I would like to share with you an idea that I am extremely passionate about,\u201d the young man said. His long black hair was swept back like a rock star\u2019s, or a gangster\u2019s. \u201cThink about this,\u201d he continued. \u201cThroughout all human history, the way that we have expressed our intent, the way we have expressed our goals, the way we have expressed our desires, has been limited by our bodies.\u201d When he inhaled, his rib cage expanded and filled out the fabric of his shirt. Gesturing toward his body, he said, \u201cWe are born into this world with\u00a0this. Whatever nature or luck has given\u00a0us.\u201d<\/p>\n
His speech then took a turn: \u201cNow, we\u2019ve had a lot of interesting tools over the years, but fundamentally the way that we work with those tools is through our bodies.\u201d Then a further turn: \u201cHere\u2019s a situation that I know all of you know very well\u2014your frustration with your smartphones, right? This is another tool, right? And we are still communicating with these tools through our\u00a0bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then it made a leap: \u201cI would claim to you that these tools are not so smart. And maybe one of the reasons why they\u2019re not so smart is because they\u2019re not connected to our brains. Maybe if we could hook those devices into our brains, they could have some idea of what our goals are, what our intent is, and what our frustration\u00a0is.\u201d<\/p>\n
So began \u201cBeyond Bionics,\u201d a talk by Justin C. Sanchez, then an associate professor of biomedical engineering and neuroscience at the University of Miami, and a faculty member of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. He was speaking at a\u00a0tedx conference in Florida in 2012. What lies beyond bionics? Sanchez described his work as trying to \u201cunderstand the neural code,\u201d which would involve putting \u201cvery fine microwire electrodes\u201d\u2014the diameter of a human hair\u2014\u201cinto the brain.\u201d When we do that, he said, we would be able to \u201clisten in to the music of the brain\u201d and \u201clisten in to what somebody\u2019s motor intent might be\u201d and get a glimpse of \u201cyour goals and your rewards\u201d and then \u201cstart to understand how the brain encodes\u00a0behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n
He explained, \u201cWith all of this knowledge, what we\u2019re trying to do is build new medical devices, new implantable chips for the body that can be encoded or programmed with all of these different aspects. Now, you may be wondering, what are we going to do with those chips? Well, the first recipients of these kinds of technologies will be the paralyzed. It would make me so happy by the end of my career if I could help get somebody out of their\u00a0wheelchair.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sanchez went on, \u201cThe people that we are trying to help should\u00a0never\u00a0be imprisoned by their bodies. And today we can design technologies that can help liberate them from that. I\u2019m\u00a0truly\u00a0inspired by that. It drives me every day when I wake up and get out of bed. Thank you so much.\u201d He blew a kiss to the\u00a0audience.<\/p>\n
The mission is to make human beings something other than what we are, with powers beyond the ones we\u2019re born\u00a0with.<\/p>\n
A year later, Justin Sanchez went to work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon\u2019s R&D department. At\u00a0DARPA<\/span>, he now oversees all research on the healing and enhancement of the human mind and body. And his ambition involves more than helping get disabled people out of their wheelchair\u2014much\u00a0more.<\/p>\n DARPA<\/span>\u00a0has dreamed for decades of merging human beings and machines. Some years ago, when the prospect of mind-controlled weapons became a public-relations liability for the agency, officials resorted to characteristic ingenuity. They recast the stated purpose of their neurotechnology research to focus ostensibly on the narrow goal of healing injury and curing illness. The work wasn\u2019t about weaponry or warfare, agency officials claimed. It was about therapy and health care. Who could object? But even if this claim were true, such changes would have extensive ethical, social, and metaphysical implications. Within decades, neurotechnology could cause social disruption on a scale that would make smartphones and the internet look like gentle ripples on the pond of\u00a0history.<\/p>\n Most unsettling, neurotechnology confounds age-old answers to this question: What is a human\u00a0being?<\/p>\n II<\/span>. High Risk, High\u00a0Reward<\/strong><\/p>\n In his 1958 State of the Union address, President Dwight Eisenhower declared that the United States of America \u201cmust be forward-looking in our research and development to anticipate the unimagined weapons of the future.\u201d A few weeks later, his administration created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a bureaucratically independent body that reported to the secretary of defense. This move had been prompted by the Soviet launch of the\u00a0Sputnik\u00a0satellite. The agency\u2019s original remit was to hasten America\u2019s entry into\u00a0space.<\/p>\n During the next few years,\u00a0arpa\u2019s mission grew to encompass research into \u201cman-computer symbiosis\u201d and a classified program of experiments in mind control that was code-named Project Pandora. There were bizarre efforts that involved trying to move objects at a distance by means of thought alone. In 1972, with an increment of candor, the word\u00a0Defense\u00a0was added to the name, and the agency became\u00a0DARPA<\/span>. Pursuing its mission,\u00a0DARPA<\/span>funded researchers who helped invent technologies that changed the nature of battle (stealth aircraft, drones) and shaped daily life for billions (voice-recognition technology,\u00a0GPS<\/span>\u00a0devices). Its best-known creation is the\u00a0internet.<\/p>\n The agency\u2019s penchant for what it calls \u201chigh-risk, high-reward\u201d research ensured that it would also fund a cavalcade of folly. Project Seesaw, a quintessential Cold War boondoggle, envisioned a \u201cparticle-beam weapon\u201d that could be deployed in the event of a Soviet attack. The idea was to set off a series of nuclear explosions beneath the Great Lakes, creating a giant underground chamber. Then the lakes would be drained, in a period of 15 minutes, to generate the electricity needed to set off a particle beam. The beam would accelerate through tunnels hundreds of miles long (also carved out by underground nuclear explosions) in order to muster enough force to shoot up into the atmosphere and knock incoming Soviet missiles out of the sky. During the Vietnam War,\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0tried to build a Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine, a jungle vehicle that officials called a \u201cmechanical\u00a0elephant.\u201d<\/p>\n One aspiration: the ability, via computer, to transfer knowledge and thoughts from one person\u2019s mind to\u00a0another\u2019s.<\/p>\n The diverse and sometimes even opposing goals of\u00a0DARPA<\/span>scientists and their Defense Department overlords merged into a murky, symbiotic research culture\u2014\u201cunencumbered by the typical bureaucratic oversight and uninhibited by the restraints of scientific peer review,\u201d Sharon Weinberger wrote in a recent book,\u00a0The Imagineers of War. In Weinberger\u2019s account,\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s institutional history involves many episodes of introducing a new technology in the context of one appealing application, while hiding other genuine but more troubling motives. At\u00a0DARPA<\/span>, the left hand knows, and doesn\u2019t know, what the right hand is\u00a0doing.<\/p>\n The agency is deceptively compact. A mere 220 employees, supported by about 1,000 contractors, report for work each day at\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s headquarters, a nondescript glass-and-steel building in Arlington, Virginia, across the street from the practice rink for the Washington Capitals. About 100 of these employees are program managers\u2014scientists and engineers, part of whose job is to oversee about 2,000 outsourcing arrangements with corporations, universities, and government labs. The effective workforce of\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0actually runs into the range of tens of thousands. The budget is officially said to be about $3 billion, and has stood at roughly that level for an implausibly long time\u2014the past 14\u00a0years.<\/p>\n The Biological Technologies Office, created in 2014, is the newest of\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s six main divisions. This is the office headed by Justin Sanchez. One purpose of the office is to \u201crestore and maintain warfighter abilities\u201d by various means, including many that emphasize neurotechnology\u2014applying engineering principles to the biology of the nervous system. For instance, the Restoring Active Memory program develops neuroprosthetics\u2014tiny electronic components implanted in brain tissue\u2014that aim to alter memory formation so as to counteract traumatic brain injury. Does\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0also run secret biological programs? In the past, the Department of Defense has done such things. It has conducted tests on human subjects that were questionable, unethical, or, many have argued, illegal. The Big Boy protocol, for example, compared radiation exposure of sailors who worked above and below deck on a battleship, never informing the sailors that they were part of an\u00a0experiment.<\/p>\n Last year I asked Sanchez directly whether any of\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s neurotechnology work, specifically, was classified. He broke eye contact and said, \u201cI can\u2019t\u2014We\u2019ll have to get off that topic, because I can\u2019t answer one way or another.\u201d When I framed the question personally\u2014\u201cAre\u00a0you\u00a0involved with any classified neuroscience project?\u201d\u2014he looked me in the eye and said, \u201cI\u2019m not doing any classified work on the neurotechnology\u00a0end.\u201d<\/p>\n If his speech is careful, it is not spare. Sanchez has appeared at public events with some frequency (videos are posted on\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s YouTube channel), to articulate joyful streams of good news about\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s proven applications\u2014for instance, brain-controlled prosthetic arms for soldiers who have lost limbs. Occasionally he also mentions some of his more distant aspirations. One of them is the ability, via computer, to transfer knowledge and thoughts from one person\u2019s mind to\u00a0another\u2019s.<\/p>\n III<\/span>. \u201cWe Try to Find Ways to Say\u00a0Yes\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Medicine and biology were of minor interest to\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0until the 1990s, when biological weapons became a threat to\u00a0U.S.<\/span>\u00a0national security. The agency made a significant investment in biology in 1997, when\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0created the Controlled Biological Systems program. The zoologist Alan S. Rudolph managed this sprawling effort to integrate the built world with the natural world. As he explained it to me, the aim was \u201cto increase, if you will, the baud rate, or the cross-communication, between living and nonliving systems.\u201d He spent his days working through questions such as \u201cCould we unlock the signals in the brain associated with movement in order to allow you to control something outside your body, like a prosthetic leg or an arm, a robot, a smart home\u2014or to send the signal to somebody else and have them receive\u00a0it?\u201d<\/p>\n Human enhancement became an agency priority. \u201cSoldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitation will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future,\u201d predicted Michael Goldblatt, who had been the science and technology officer at McDonald\u2019s before joining\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0in 1999. To enlarge humanity\u2019s capacity to \u201ccontrol evolution,\u201d he assembled a portfolio of programs with names that sounded like they\u2019d been taken from video games or sci-fi movies: Metabolic Dominance, Persistence in Combat, Continuous Assisted Performance, Augmented Cognition, Peak Soldier Performance, Brain-Machine\u00a0Interface.<\/p>\n The programs of this era, as described by Annie Jacobsen in her 2015 book,\u00a0The Pentagon\u2019s Brain, often shaded into mad-scientist territory. The Continuous Assisted Performance project attempted to create a \u201c24\/7 soldier\u201d who could go without sleep for up to a week. (\u201cMy measure of success,\u201d one\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0official said of these programs, \u201cis that the International Olympic Committee bans everything we\u00a0do.\u201d)<\/p>\n Dick Cheney relished this kind of research. In the summer of 2001, an array of \u201csuper-soldier\u201d programs was presented to the vice president. His enthusiasm contributed to the latitude that President George W. Bush\u2019s administration gave\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2014at a time when the agency\u2019s foundation was shifting. Academic science gave way to tech-industry \u201cinnovation.\u201d Tony Tether, who had spent his career working alternately for Big Tech, defense contractors, and the Pentagon, became\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s director. After the 9\/11 attacks, the agency announced plans for a surveillance program called Total Information Awareness, whose logo included an all-seeing eye emitting rays of light that scanned the globe. The pushback was intense, and Congress took\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0to task for Orwellian overreach. The head of the program\u2014Admiral John Poindexter, who had been tainted by scandal back in the Reagan years\u2014later resigned, in 2003. The controversy also drew unwanted attention to\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s research on super-soldiers and the melding of mind and machine. That research made people nervous, and Alan Rudolph, too, found himself on the way\u00a0out.<\/p>\n In this time of crisis,\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0invited Geoff Ling, a neurology\u2011ICU<\/span>physician and, at the time, an active-duty Army officer, to join the Defense Sciences Office. (Ling went on to work in the Biological Technologies Office when it spun out from Defense Sciences, in 2014.) When Ling was interviewed for his first job at\u00a0DARPA<\/span>, in 2002, he was preparing for deployment to Afghanistan and thinking about very specific combat needs. One was a \u201cpharmacy on demand\u201d that would eliminate the bulk of powdery fillers from drugs in pill or capsule form and instead would formulate active ingredients for ingestion via a lighter, more compact, dissolving substance\u2014like Listerine breath strips. This eventually became a\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0program. The agency\u2019s brazen sense of possibility buoyed Ling, who recalls with pleasure how colleagues told him, \u201cWe try to find ways to say yes, not ways to say no.\u201d With Rudolph gone, Ling picked up the\u00a0torch.<\/p>\n Ling talks fast. He has a tough-guy voice. The faster he talks, the tougher he sounds, and when I met him, his voice hit top speed as he described a first principle of Defense Sciences. He said he had learned this \u201cparticularly\u201d from Alan Rudolph: \u201cYour brain tells your hands what to do. Your hands basically are its tools, okay? And that was a revelation to me.\u201d He continued, \u201cWe are tool users\u2014that\u2019s what humans are. A human wants to fly, he builds an airplane and flies. A human wants to have recorded history, and he creates a pen. Everything we do is because we use tools, right? And the ultimate tools are our hands and feet. Our hands allow us to work with the environment to do stuff, and our feet take us where our brain wants to go. The brain is the most important\u00a0thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Ling connected this idea of the brain\u2019s primacy with his own clinical experience of the battlefield. He asked himself, \u201cHow can I liberate mankind from the limitations of the body?\u201d The program for which Ling became best known is called Revolutionizing Prosthetics. Since the Civil War, as Ling has said, the prosthetic arm given to most amputees has been barely more sophisticated than \u201ca hook,\u201d and not without risks: \u201cTry taking care of your morning ablutions with that bad boy, and you\u2019re going to need a proctologist every goddamn day.\u201d With help from\u00a0DARPA<\/span>colleagues and academic and corporate researchers, Ling and his team built something that was once all but unimaginable: a brain-controlled prosthetic\u00a0arm.<\/p>\n No invention since the internet has been such a reliable source of good publicity for\u00a0DARPA<\/span>. Milestones in its development were hailed with wonder. In 2012,\u00a060 Minutes\u00a0showed a paralyzed woman named Jan Scheuermann\u00a0feeding herself a bar of chocolate using a robotic arm\u00a0that she manipulated by means of a brain\u00a0implant.<\/p>\n Yet\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s work to repair damaged bodies was merely a marker on a road to somewhere else. The agency has always had a larger mission, and in a 2015 presentation, one program manager\u2014a Silicon Valley recruit\u2014described that mission: to \u201cfree the mind from the limitations of even\u00a0healthy\u00a0bodies.\u201d What the agency learns from healing makes way for enhancement. The mission is to make human beings something other than what we are, with powers beyond the ones we\u2019re born with and beyond the ones we can organically\u00a0attain.<\/p>\n The internal workings of\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0are complicated. The goals and values of its research shift and evolve in the manner of a strange, half-conscious shell game. The line between healing and enhancement blurs. And no one should lose sight of the fact that\u00a0D\u00a0is the first letter in\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s name. A year and a half after the video of Jan Scheuermann feeding herself chocolate was shown on television,\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0made another video of her, in which her brain-computer interface\u00a0was connected to an F-35 flight simulator, and she was flying the airplane.\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u00a0later disclosed this at a conference called Future of\u00a0War.<\/p>\n Geoff Ling\u2019s efforts have been carried on by Justin Sanchez. In 2016, Sanchez appeared at\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s \u201cDemo Day\u201d with a man named Johnny Matheny, whom agency officials describe as the first \u201cosseointegrated\u201d upper-limb amputee\u2014the first man with a prosthetic arm attached directly to bone. Matheny demonstrated what was, at the time,\u00a0DARPA<\/span>\u2019s most advanced prosthetic arm. He told the attendees, \u201cI can sit here and curl a 45-pound dumbbell all day long, till the battery runs dead.\u201d The next day, Gizmodo ran this headline above its report from the event: \u201cDARPA<\/span>\u2019s Mind-Controlled Arm Will Make You Wish You Were a Cyborg.\u201d<\/p>\n