Ramez Naam - Crux

More than perhaps any other writer that I know, I’m truly fortunate to have a large cadre of beta readers who have been willing to read this book, often at very early stages, and give their feedback. I cannot say enough how much this has improved the book. If you’re an author and don’t use this process, I highly recommend it.

Beta readers, I love you! Thank you Ajay Nair, Alexis Carlson, Alissa Mortenson, Allegra Searle-LeBel, Anna Black, Avi Swerdlow, Barry Brumitt, Betsy Aoki, Beverly Sobelman, Brad Woodcock, Brad Younggren, Brady Forrest, Brian Retford, Brooks Talley, Coe Roberts, Dave Brennan, David Perlman, David Sunderland, Doug Mortenson, Ethan Phelps-Goodman, Gabriel Williams, Hannu Rajaniemi, Jayar La Fontaine, Jen Younggren, Jennifer Mead, Jim Jordan, Joe Pemberton, Julie Vithoulkas, Kevin MacDonald, Kira Franz, Lars Liden, Leah Papernick, Lori Waltfield, Mason Bryant, Mike Tyka, Morgan Weaver, Paul Dale, Rachel Kwan, Rob Gruhl, Rose Hess, Ryan Grant, Scotto Moore, Stephanie Schutz, Stuart Updegrave, and Thomas Park!

And ultimately, neither this book nor I would exist without my incredible parents, Nash Naam and Elene Awad, who birthed me, raised me, brought me to this country, fought to stay here, and always taught me that it was okay to ask hard questions. I owe them everything. Thank you, Mom and Dad! I couldn’t possibly have asked for better.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ramez Naam was born in Cairo, Egypt, and came to the US at the age of three. He’s a computer scientist and an H.G. Wells Award-winning writer of science and science fiction. He spent thirteen years at Microsoft, where he led teams working on email, web browsing, search, and artificial intelligence.

When not writing, Ramez has climbed mountains, leapt over and occasionally descended into crevasses, worked as a lifeguard, backpacked through remote corners of China, ridden his bike down hundreds of miles of the Vietnam coast, chased sharks and eagle rays through the ocean depths, clambered over ancient ruins, and blown things up in the desert. He really should know better.

Ramez lives in Seattle.

rameznaam.com

twitter.com/ramez

THE SCIENCE OF CRUX

Like Nexus before it, Crux is a work of fiction, but based as accurately as possible on real science.

In the extras at the back of Nexus I described the brain-implant experiments that have given humans bionic eyes and ears and the ability to control robotic arms, even from thousands of miles away.

Just in the year that has passed since the writing of Nexus, more impressive work has been done. A team of researchers led by Thomas Berger has demonstrated that a digital chip can repair the impairment of a mouse’s memory that occurs with brain damage to part of the brain called the hippocampus. Berger’s team then went further and showed that they could improve mouse memory through the same brain implant. Another experiment by Sam Deadwyler and colleagues at Wake Forest University placed specialized brain implants in the frontal cortex of rhesus monkeys who were then trained on a “delayed match and sample” test – a kind of monkey IQ test. Later, the monkeys had their test scores lowered by the administration of cocaine. But if the implant was switched into an active mode, it could correct this impairment, and even more. The frontal cortex device could actually raise the test scores of monkeys well beyond the scores of normal monkeys who lacked the implant. So in animals, at least, we’ve used brain implants to boost both memory and intelligence.

Of course, the most transformative thing about the Nexus technology isn’t mere augmentation – it’s communication directly from one mind to another. Here also there has been progress. In an experiment by Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues, two rats, thousands of miles apart (one at Duke University in North Carolina, the other in Brazil) both had implants placed in the motor cortices of their respective brains. Nicolelis and colleagues showed that they could train one rat to respond to a series of lights by pulling the correct lever. The other rat, who had never seen these lights or levers before, would, in turn, pull the right lever most of the time, based simply on the input to its brain from the trained rat thousands of miles away.

A similar study, funded by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency inside the US Department of Defense), involved two monkeys, each with an implant in its auditory cortex – the part of the brain responsible for processing sound. The researchers showed that they could play a sound for one monkey and that the second monkey – in a soundproofed room – could hear that sound via the neural link, and could even identify what the sound was. The research, by the way, was conducted as part of DARPA’s “Advanced Battlefield Communications” program – a program with the goal of enhancing communication and coordination between soldiers, their squad-mates, and command.

Progress towards Nexus, in short, continues apace.

Crux introduces some new science, and in particular, “uploading”. The Su-Yong Shu we see in Crux is not a flesh and blood person. Instead, she is a computer program, a vast mathematical construct of electronic neurons that initially mirrored the precise neural map of the original Su-Yong Shu’s brain. For every neuron the original Su-Yong Shu had, her upload had a digital counterpart. For every synapse connecting two neurons, the upload also started with a counterpart.

The idea of uploading sounds far-fetched, yet real work is happening towards it today. IBM’s “Blue Brain” project has used one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers (an IBM Blue Gene/P with 147,456 CPUs) to run a simulation of 1.6 billion neurons and almost nine trillion synapses, roughly the size of a cat brain. The simulation ran around six hundred times slower than real time – that is to say, it took six hundred seconds to simulate one second of brain activity. Even so, it’s quite impressive. A human brain, of course, with its hundred billion neurons and well over a hundred trillion synapses, is far more complex than a mouse brain. Yet computers are also speeding up rapidly, roughly by a factor one hundred times every ten years. Do the math, and it appears that a super-computer capable of simulating an entire human brain and do so as fast as a human brain should be on the market by roughly 2035–2040. And of course, from that point on, speedups in computing should speed up the simulation of the brain, allowing it to run faster than a biological human’s.

Now, it’s one thing to be able to simulate a brain. It’s another to actually have the exact wiring map of an individual’s brain to actually simulate. How do we build such a map? Even the best non-invasive brain scanners around – a high-end functional MRI machine, for example – have a minimum resolution of around ten thousand neurons or ten million synapses. They simply can’t see detail beyond this level. And while resolution is improving, it’s improving at a glacial pace. There’s no indication of a being able to non-invasively image a human brain down to the individual synapse level any time in the next century (or even the next few centuries at the current pace of progress in this field).

There are, however, ways to destructively image a brain at that resolution. At Harvard, my friend Kenneth Hayworth created a machine that uses a scanning electron microscope to produce an extremely high resolution map of a brain. When I last saw him, he had a poster on the wall of his lab showing a printout of one of his brain scans. On that poster, a single neuron was magnified to the point that it was roughly two feet wide, and individual synapses connecting neurons could be clearly seen. Ken’s map is sufficiently detailed that we could use it to draw a complete wiring diagram of a specific person’s brain.