It was amazing to me how the Brant protocols were set up for each test run of the Cyclone. The next two days were spent running electrical tests and then animal-based tests against the two Cyclone helmets.
I had a couple of Brant's earlier technologies explained to me - Selexor and Createl, which had now been integrated into what was the Cyclone 2 helmet.
Then, on Friday of my first week, Rolf, Amy, Hermann and Juliette were huddled with me around the Cyclone 3, ready for some tests
Amy explains, "Levi Spillmann knew that the AI component called Createl which he had invented for aerial crop evaluation couldn't be transformed into something that could do image recognition of faces on a large scale. The AI component which Levi's Createl linked to is called Selexor but it is also flawed. It was originally supposed to hire recruitment candidates, but is driven by manually constructed rules, like 'no one over 1.8 metres high' and so on."
"Now Cyclone may look impressive, but it only works at a very slow speed, and requires many wires attached to it."
She looks piercingly at me, "Put the chain together. Selexor (dubious) plus Createl (flawed) plus Cyclone (sluggish) and you can see the current invention doesn't work."
"Okay then, what about Kjeld Nikolajsen?" I ask, "Surely he must suspect something?"
"No, I don't think so," comes Amy's reply, "Have you ever watched how workmen dig holes? They look busy but once they have dug a hole and have a pile of earth, to keep looking busy they will fix the hole with the earth they have dug."
"And there's always some earth left over," I say.
"Yes so they can dig another hole to bury it," chips in Rolf, smiling, "That's us, here, with this project."
"And well funded too," adds Hermann, "It shows that Brant wants to buy time and expects that the Cyclone will emerge as a working prototype one day."
Amy cuts in, "Well, I'm not sure how this fits in, but it looks as if Kjeld has also been making moves toward the Chinese. Some of this will sound like Robocop, but the Chinese are interested in developing soldiers with ‘enhanced capabilities.’
Hermann nods, "China is conducting tests on its army hoping to create biologically enhanced soldiers, according to the Pentagon. John Ratcliffe, who used to be the US director of national intelligence, made the claims in a newspaper editorial, where he warned China poses the greatest threat to America today."
"I saved that article, from the Wall Street Journal," says Rolf, "It was also in the UK Guardian."
Herman nods, "Yes, the reports stated Beijing intends to dominate the US and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically. Many of China’s major public initiatives and prominent companies offer a layer of camouflage to the activities of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Rolf adds, "China has even been conducting human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army hoping to develop soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities."
Hermann steps forward, "As we say, Wetware isn't Hardware."
Rolf adds, "Now let's look at the Wetware to Hardware interface. As ancient Greeks fantasised about soaring flight, today’s imaginations dream of melding minds and machines as a remedy to the problem of human mortality. Can the mind connect directly with artificial intelligence, robots and other minds through brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies to transcend our human limitations?"
These research scientists had thought this through. I was starting to get the impression that the Cyclone might actually work.
Hermann continued, "Over the last 50 years, researchers at university labs and companies around the world have made progress toward achieving such a mind-meld vision. Brant's Selexor used Createl and other entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk with Neuralink and Bryan Johnson with Kernel have visionary companies that seek to enhance human capabilities through brain-computer interfacing.
Rolf points to a simple diagram, "The difference between the more primitive technologies they are using and our one at Brant is that we don't have to open the skull and run intrusive brain rewiring to make it work. And it's the same whether we use Cyclone 1, or 2 or the hybrid Cyclone 3."
Hermann adds, "But an inductive link will not be as precise nor as powerful as something directly connected to the brain. A bidirectional brain-computer interface (BBCI) can both record signals from the brain and send information back to the brain through stimulation. The most sophisticated BCIs like those developed here in Brant are “bi-directional” BCIs (BBCIs), which can both record from and stimulate the nervous system.
Herman chose to illustrate it with a simple diagram of a head and a computer chip with arrows between them, pointing in both directions.
He continues, "We’re exploring BBCIs as a rehabilitation tool for stroke and spinal cord injury. We’ve shown that a BBCI can be used to strengthen connections between two brain regions or between the brain and the spinal cord and reroute information around an area of injury to reanimate a paralysed limb.
Rolf adds, "With all these successes to date, you might think a brain-computer interface is poised to be the next must-have consumer gadget."
Rolf continues, "The first demonstration of a non-invasive brain-controlled humanoid robot avatar named Morpheus was in the Neural Systems Laboratory at the University of Washington. The non-invasive BCI infers what object the robot should pick and where to bring it based on the brain’s reflexive response when an image of the desired object or location is flashed."
Hermann adds, "All these demos have been in the laboratory – where the rooms are quiet, the test subjects aren’t distracted, the technical setup is long and methodical, and experiments last only long enough to show that a concept is possible. It’s proved very difficult to make these systems fast and robust enough to be of practical use in the real world. This work is difficult."
Now Rolf speaks again, "Even with implanted electrodes (ie brain surgery) another problem with trying to read minds arises from how our brains are structured. We know that each neuron and their thousands of connected neighbours form an unimaginably large and ever-changing network. What might this mean for neuro-engineers?
Juliette speaks, "Imagine you’re trying to understand a conversation between a big group of friends about a complicated subject, but you’re allowed to listen to only a single person. You might be able to figure out the very rough topic of what the conversation is about, but not all the details and nuances of the entire discussion. That's the challenge. Even our best implants only allow us to listen to a few small patches of the brain at a time. We can do some impressive things, but we’re nowhere near understanding the full conversation."
Juliette continues, "There is also what we think of as a language barrier. Neurons communicate with each other through a complex interaction of electrical signals and chemical reactions. This native electro-chemical language can be interpreted with electrical circuits, but it’s not easy. Similarly, when we speak back to the brain using electrical stimulation, it is with a heavy electrical 'accent.' In other words, we can't yet speak 'Brain Language' very well. This makes it difficult for neurons to understand what the stimulation is trying to convey in the midst of all the other ongoing neural activity."
Hermann added, "Finally, there is the problem of damage. Brain tissue is soft and flexible, while most of our electrically conductive materials – the wires that connect to brain tissue – tend to be very rigid. This means that implanted electronics often cause scarring and immune reactions that mean the implants lose effectiveness over time. Flexible biocompatible fibers and arrays may eventually help in this regard. We were hoping to get some thoughts from our contacts working on the chemistry of neural pathways, and maybe this will follow."
I realise that this was a sideswipe at the non-appearance of Simon Gray, nor of anyone from his lab.
Juliette picks up the latest headgear."We used to call it the ServoCask, from casque de cerveau but then Brant asked us to change it to Cyclone."
Juliette explains, "This Cyclone 2 headgear records brain signals without the need for surgery and can either measure the electromagnetic fields generated by groups of neurons or detect small changes in blood oxygenation, which correlate well to nearby neural activity."
She added, "We are using magnetometers to measure tiny changes in magnetic fields and light pulses through the skull and into the bloodstream in order to measure how much oxygen the blood is carrying at any given time."
Juliette continued, "It's a similar concept to the way that smart watches or oximeters measure blood oxygenation but has a vastly extended coverage. The headgear takes advantage of the relative transparency of the skull and brain tissue to near-infrared light by beaming photons through the skull and measuring their scattering and absorption, allowing inference about blood flow and oxygenation. That's something called haemodynamics."
Hermann added, "This headgear offers the resolution and sensitivity of state-of-the-art haemodynamic systems across the top layers of cortical tissue.
Herman produced an animated diagram, "Traditional 'continuous wave' near-infrared spectroscopy devices apply light to the head continuously, which then scatters throughout and is detected at various locations upon exiting the head. It has a decent level of accuracy but the processing time (we'd call it latency) of the system means it is like having very slow reactions. In fact they are more like the reactions from someone on the other end of a satellite phone call."
Hermann explains, "There is something odd about the software created by Levi Spillmann. Its as if he took Zero Trust to the nth degree. It's as if there is a whole extra layer of software in the Createl design, but I can't work out what it is doing."
Rolf adds, "Yes we'd assumed that the base code of Createl was good and pretty much the way that Levy intended it, but the more we drill into it, the stranger it looks."
Hermann said, "I think Levi built the system with a protective layer around it. It seems to need a key to unlock it and then it will run smoother and many times faster."
I noticed that we were already running on an Exascale computer - which was one of the fastest on the planet.
"You mean it's like a 'diagnostic layer?' I ask, "To help iron out bugs and to prevent viruses?
"That's what we thought first, but I think it is something more subtle. Something which downgrades the software unless a security token is served to it," answers Hermann, "Except we don't have the token nor a means to serve it."
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