[00:00.780 --> 00:01.540]  Nice to meet you.
[00:01.800 --> 00:02.540]  We're Drs.
[00:02.540 --> 00:04.040]  Potter, Vimal, and Palmer again.
[00:04.680 --> 00:05.840]  So, quick show of hands.
[00:06.020 --> 00:07.080]  Who here is a human?
[00:08.460 --> 00:09.140]  All right, cool.
[00:09.260 --> 00:11.480]  If you didn't raise your hand, you might want to be real nervous about them.
[00:12.480 --> 00:15.240]  So, today we're here to present to you about human augmentation.
[00:15.420 --> 00:16.300]  So, why ask humans?
[00:16.660 --> 00:19.240]  And who here wears contact lenses or glasses?
[00:20.060 --> 00:20.340]  Great.
[00:20.520 --> 00:22.280]  You're familiar with human augmentation then.
[00:22.580 --> 00:23.520]  We're going to go from there.
[00:24.460 --> 00:25.780]  So, here's our outline.
[00:26.320 --> 00:28.800]  Vimal is going to kick us off with human augmentation overviews.
[00:28.800 --> 00:34.540]  Basically going, talking about the brain, the sensory systems, and more common systems out now.
[00:34.840 --> 00:40.080]  I'm going to get to talk about the hacking human augmentation parts, the more offensive side of it.
[00:40.320 --> 00:43.900]  And then we'll do, hopefully, an extended Q&A with, proctored by Dr. Palmer.
[00:44.540 --> 00:44.740]  Cool.
[00:45.000 --> 00:45.460]  Let's get going.
[00:50.270 --> 00:51.150]  All right, hi.
[00:51.330 --> 00:52.530]  My name is Vivek Anand.
[00:52.630 --> 00:57.950]  I'm a research scientist in the Ashton-Grabial Spatial Orientation Lab at Brandeis University.
[00:58.210 --> 01:01.310]  And today I'll be talking about how to hack that brain.
[01:01.810 --> 01:06.450]  And in this presentation, I'll first start with methods of hacking the brain that are very invasive.
[01:06.730 --> 01:11.470]  And then progressively, with each new method I share, it will become less and less invasive.
[01:12.590 --> 01:16.850]  And so, to begin, the most invasive way of hacking the brain is going inside the brain itself.
[01:17.170 --> 01:18.510]  And there are two ways to do this.
[01:19.190 --> 01:21.530]  You can go inside and you can dump a bunch of chemicals.
[01:21.730 --> 01:24.950]  Or you can go inside and stick wires into the brain itself.
[01:25.130 --> 01:27.010]  And I'll give you examples for both of these.
[01:27.010 --> 01:34.350]  So one really fascinating experiment that they did for hacking the brain using chemicals is looking at voles.
[01:34.430 --> 01:36.230]  And they looked at these polyamorous voles.
[01:36.290 --> 01:41.930]  So these are voles that are, you know, they have many sexual partners over their lives.
[01:41.930 --> 01:46.270]  And what they did was they genetically engineered a virus.
[01:46.270 --> 01:48.450]  And this virus carried a gene.
[01:48.450 --> 01:54.430]  And this gene was from a separate species of voles that are monogamous.
[01:54.610 --> 02:03.890]  And when they injected this into the brain of the voles, what they found were that these polyamorous voles began to display behaviors that were monogamous.
[02:03.890 --> 02:11.050]  And this is pretty extraordinary because just this simple thing fundamentally changed the behavior of these creatures.
[02:11.190 --> 02:15.210]  So it shows the power of hacking the brains of these creatures using chemicals.
[02:16.090 --> 02:20.290]  Now another way of hacking the brain is taking wires and sticking it into the brain.
[02:20.430 --> 02:22.170]  And this is something that we've done with humans.
[02:22.410 --> 02:27.170]  And so one of the first early experiments was with Wilder Penfield, who was a neurosurgeon.
[02:27.170 --> 02:29.690]  And he worked with patients who had epilepsy.
[02:30.110 --> 02:39.530]  And so as he went into the brain trying to find these locus of epilepsy, he would gently probe the brains of these humans.
[02:39.790 --> 02:45.110]  And for example, in the image to the right, he would be probing the motor cortex.
[02:45.190 --> 02:48.690]  And what he would find is that things like the fingers would begin to twitch.
[02:49.010 --> 02:53.010]  And he was able to create a map of how the brain worked.
[02:53.010 --> 03:04.250]  And he also stimulated other parts of the brain, was able to elicit dreams and smells, visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as out-of-body experiences.
[03:04.330 --> 03:09.790]  So this was the first indication that in humans we could go and we could hack the brain.
[03:09.930 --> 03:13.910]  And now the question is, decades later, what have we been able to do?
[03:14.950 --> 03:19.550]  And here's an example of something absolutely extraordinary and kind of mind-blowing.
[03:19.550 --> 03:25.630]  So they take this paralyzed patient and into her motor cortex they've implanted a series of wires.
[03:25.970 --> 03:35.450]  And what happens here is that this woman, using only thought alone, is able to control a robotic handle in three-dimensional space.
[03:35.870 --> 03:44.070]  And so again, what this is showing is some of the remarkable capabilities of hacking the brain, because it gives people the ability to do things like this.
[03:44.070 --> 03:56.570]  And who knows, maybe in the future some of the things that are predicted in science fiction movies and mecha anime may come true, where we have wires in our brain and our spinal cords being able to control these huge robots.
[03:57.990 --> 04:07.310]  Now if you're interested into more interesting and more, I don't know, wild, out-there science fiction-like experiments, here's an experiment that they did with a poor little rat.
[04:07.310 --> 04:10.950]  And they took an infrared sensor and they stuck it into the brain of this rat.
[04:11.090 --> 04:14.410]  Now normally rats can't detect infrared from a distance.
[04:14.630 --> 04:16.450]  So infrared is like heat signatures that you're getting.
[04:16.570 --> 04:18.830]  Something like a snake can detect from a distance.
[04:19.050 --> 04:27.710]  And yet, when they put this infrared sensor into the brain of the rat, this rat was able to use infrared signals to be able to navigate, to be able to learn.
[04:28.830 --> 04:34.530]  Another example of hacking the brain in a way that no one could have predicted maybe 40, 50 years ago.
[04:34.530 --> 04:39.270]  So this is, I don't know, terrifying, it's exciting, it's interesting, it's expanding the capabilities.
[04:39.610 --> 04:46.290]  You could almost even imagine a rat that has the capability of detecting magnetic fields, like a pigeon, because you put a sensor into it.
[04:46.990 --> 04:56.390]  Now, what I also want to talk about is not only the exciting, interesting benefits of hacking the brain in this invasive way, but some of the dangers that may come about from that.
[04:57.050 --> 04:59.230]  And what happens when there's no oversight?
[04:59.470 --> 05:04.590]  And so there are a lot of private companies out there, for example, like Neuralink, that are trying to put wires into the brain.
[05:04.730 --> 05:08.890]  And there are CEOs, you could say, like Elon Musk, who don't really enjoy oversight.
[05:08.890 --> 05:10.870]  So what could possibly go wrong?
[05:11.370 --> 05:13.770]  And it turns out a lot can go wrong.
[05:13.770 --> 05:20.130]  And you don't have to look too far to find examples that are absolutely terrifying of what people have done.
[05:20.350 --> 05:27.130]  So before I share an example that's terrifying that's been done in humans, I'll share a seminal study that they did in rats.
[05:27.830 --> 05:32.750]  So in this rat, what they did is they implanted a wire into the reward center.
[05:33.010 --> 05:35.490]  And then they connected it to a wire to a lever.
[05:35.750 --> 05:40.830]  And so this rat could push this lever and essentially stimulate its own reward center.
[05:41.350 --> 05:43.610]  And what happened is what you could imagine.
[05:43.670 --> 05:44.470]  It became an addict.
[05:44.650 --> 05:49.310]  It just kept pressing this lever until it neglected both food and water.
[05:49.990 --> 05:54.590]  This already is kind of terrifying that we have the capability of hacking a creature's reward system.
[05:54.590 --> 05:57.190]  But now what could happen if we did this in humans?
[05:57.450 --> 05:58.670]  And this is a terrifying story.
[05:58.790 --> 06:00.310]  This was done in the 1970s.
[06:00.490 --> 06:01.750]  I'm born in 1981.
[06:01.790 --> 06:05.710]  So this is really not that far, you know, in the distant, you know, past.
[06:06.590 --> 06:08.890]  So what they did is they took a 24-year-old man.
[06:09.130 --> 06:10.350]  This man was vulnerable.
[06:10.550 --> 06:11.210]  He had epilepsy.
[06:11.550 --> 06:12.890]  He was depressed, suicidal.
[06:13.210 --> 06:14.270]  He abused drugs.
[06:14.470 --> 06:18.370]  He was desperate to get some sort of cure, some sort of help.
[06:18.550 --> 06:19.530]  And what did they do?
[06:19.530 --> 06:22.230]  They took an electrode, just like the rat experiment.
[06:22.450 --> 06:24.550]  They stuck it into his reward system.
[06:24.710 --> 06:32.410]  And just like that reward, that rat experiment, they gave this person the ability to stimulate his own reward center.
[06:32.610 --> 06:33.550]  And what did he do?
[06:33.690 --> 06:38.970]  In the paper itself, they say that within three hours, he stimulated his brain 1,500 times.
[06:39.370 --> 06:46.090]  And they write here that he protested each time the unit was taken away from him, pleading to self-stimulate just a few more times.
[06:46.090 --> 06:48.370]  So this doesn't sound like we're helping a human.
[06:48.590 --> 06:51.230]  It sounds like we're trying to break apart a human.
[06:51.410 --> 06:53.050]  And it's a very sad story.
[06:53.050 --> 06:54.410]  And it gets way, way worse.
[06:55.150 --> 07:08.070]  Because then in the paper, they describe that one aspect of the total treatment program for this patient was to explore the possibility of altering his sexual orientation through electrical stimulation of the pleasure sites of the brain.
[07:08.250 --> 07:12.930]  So he was straight and they were, I mean, he was gay, and they were forcibly trying to turn him straight.
[07:13.830 --> 07:15.910]  Horrifying, scary that people would want to do this.
[07:16.050 --> 07:18.990]  And so what they did is they showed him heterosexual porn.
[07:19.170 --> 07:23.670]  And then they write here, he responded with revulsion to the film, registering angry protests.
[07:24.030 --> 07:27.110]  And then they let him self-stimulate his own reward system.
[07:27.310 --> 07:28.750]  And this is in a scientific paper.
[07:28.850 --> 07:33.630]  They write, he became increasingly aroused, had an erection, masturbated to orgasm.
[07:33.630 --> 07:36.590]  And it gets worse because then they brought in a prostitute.
[07:37.210 --> 07:44.450]  And they write here, he began active participation, achieved successful penetration, which culminated in a highly satisfactory orgasmic response.
[07:44.590 --> 07:48.770]  And I go through this excruciating detail of reading this because I want to horrify you guys.
[07:49.030 --> 07:54.290]  I want you to feel in your heart, emotionally, that this person was really taken advantage of.
[07:54.290 --> 08:02.430]  And it shows how fundamentally human behavior itself can be changed when you're invasively hacking into the brains of a human.
[08:02.450 --> 08:04.550]  And what can happen without oversight.
[08:05.170 --> 08:09.650]  What I should also say is that, like, you don't have to do something as extreme as this with stimulation.
[08:10.030 --> 08:18.650]  You can also do, like, very subtle stimulation at the right moments, and you can nudge human behavior in a way that the person is not aware.
[08:18.650 --> 08:22.350]  So those are also equally dangerous ways of manipulating people.
[08:23.050 --> 08:26.390]  Now, the next method I'll talk about goes further away from the brain.
[08:26.470 --> 08:27.630]  So it's a little bit less invasive.
[08:27.870 --> 08:31.250]  It goes into the sensory nerves that are going into the brain itself.
[08:31.630 --> 08:33.550]  And there are many examples of those.
[08:33.650 --> 08:36.410]  There are retinal implants, vestibular implants, and there are cochlear implants.
[08:36.510 --> 08:39.530]  I'll talk about cochlear implants because they're pretty established and they're pretty cool.
[08:40.430 --> 08:46.790]  So cochlear implants are for individuals whose, you know, the biological hardware of hearing is damaged, something in their inner ear.
[08:46.790 --> 08:50.930]  But their auditory nerve and their auditory cortex all work.
[08:51.110 --> 09:06.470]  And so for these individuals, what they're able to do, the cochlear implants consist of a microphone, and then that microphone is able to do signal processing because neuroscientists have figured out what kind of electrical signals the auditory nerve needs in order to create some sort of decipherable sound.
[09:07.790 --> 09:12.330]  And then they bypass the hardware, go right into the auditory nerve, and send electrical signals.
[09:12.330 --> 09:19.930]  And, you know, people with cochlear implants can't hear exactly the same way as perhaps I might be able to, but they get something that's close enough.
[09:20.010 --> 09:21.150]  And it's pretty extraordinary.
[09:21.830 --> 09:29.290]  And in the presentation that Lucas will do, he'll talk a little bit more about the dangers that could happen if someone wanted to hack into this system.
[09:29.330 --> 09:31.710]  Because again, the key here is that you're very close to the brain.
[09:31.850 --> 09:36.550]  You can really affect the sense of reality once you start trying to mess with these things.
[09:37.470 --> 09:41.910]  Now, going even further away, no more surgery, now we're outside the brain.
[09:42.150 --> 09:43.910]  How do we hack the brain from outside?
[09:44.350 --> 09:46.690]  And so there are a number of ways of stimulating the brain from outside.
[09:46.930 --> 09:50.030]  You can send ultrasonic waves, you can send infrared waves.
[09:50.450 --> 09:55.830]  The two ways that have a lot of papers on them is TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation.
[09:55.830 --> 10:00.910]  This is where you take a strong magnetic pulse, and that induces a current in the brain.
[10:01.070 --> 10:05.610]  And this can stimulate a part of the brain, or it can disrupt it.
[10:05.610 --> 10:09.430]  And there's also TDCS, transcranial direct current stimulation.
[10:09.690 --> 10:18.950]  And this is essentially, you take a battery, you put two wires in it, you like Frankenstein, stick it across the brain, and essentially send an electric signal right across it.
[10:19.090 --> 10:26.030]  And this also can either stimulate the brain, or disrupt the portions that you are trying to send that electric shock through.
[10:27.150 --> 10:33.630]  Now, some of the benefits of TDCS, and again, there's a little bit of debate at how strongly this can actually benefit you.
[10:33.630 --> 10:41.030]  But, you know, for example, if you stimulate the motor cortex, there are some studies that show that there's modest improvements to skilled motor learning.
[10:42.450 --> 10:46.730]  Again, some benefits to memory tasks, or to some attentional tasks.
[10:46.870 --> 10:52.470]  And so, you know, and then there's some studies that show modest improvements to some people that may have depression or Alzheimer's disease.
[10:52.470 --> 10:55.510]  So, overall, you know, this isn't going to turn you into super genius.
[10:55.670 --> 10:57.010]  You can't hack your brain to do that.
[10:57.010 --> 11:01.650]  But you may get a small edge, if done properly, in the right paradigm.
[11:02.470 --> 11:10.470]  Now, what's kind of fascinating, or maybe kind of scary, is that if any of you want to hack your brain by shocking it, you can go home tonight and do it by buying this device.
[11:10.650 --> 11:12.410]  It's available for people.
[11:13.050 --> 11:19.310]  And no one has tested what happens if someone wants to hack their brain every day for a year for multiple hours at a time.
[11:19.350 --> 11:21.990]  But you could imagine that this could have some detrimental effects.
[11:22.410 --> 11:25.270]  For the negatives of this, I want to share a study that was kind of interesting.
[11:25.470 --> 11:30.510]  They used TDCS on a different part of the brain than the ones that I listed for the benefits.
[11:30.510 --> 11:33.950]  And what they found, ultimately, is that you can change moral judgments.
[11:34.850 --> 11:37.230]  And again, these results were nuanced.
[11:37.490 --> 11:39.530]  You know, it wasn't like you're turning someone from good to evil.
[11:39.890 --> 11:47.150]  But, you know, as they conclude here, most importantly, moral decision-making is not a permanent individual trait, but can be manipulated.
[11:47.570 --> 11:52.890]  You can nudge a person to statistically go and make judgments in a way that maybe they would not.
[11:53.090 --> 12:00.490]  And so, again, these are things we have to think about that as we consider hacking the brain, what could be the possible ways that we're manipulating people.
[12:01.330 --> 12:07.850]  Now, getting even further away from the brain and into different sensory systems, we can look at this thing called sensory substitution.
[12:07.910 --> 12:08.950]  And it's pretty wild.
[12:09.050 --> 12:11.790]  When I first encountered it, it was kind of hard for me to believe.
[12:12.170 --> 12:20.230]  So sensory substitution is this idea that if one of your sensory systems is not working, you can substitute it with another sensory system.
[12:20.350 --> 12:26.570]  And it was popularized by a guy named Bakirida, whose catchphrase was, that you do not see with your eyes, you see with your brain.
[12:26.570 --> 12:33.690]  And what he meant by that is that visual information is coming in through your eyes, but then it's being shattered across multiple layers of your brain.
[12:33.850 --> 12:37.210]  So there are some neurons that are responding to direction, other to movement.
[12:37.670 --> 12:40.690]  And so then it's being stitched back into your visual cortex.
[12:40.850 --> 12:49.110]  And his idea was that, okay, if your eyes can't take that visual information in, what if you can somehow give that same information in through a different sensory system like your skin?
[12:49.430 --> 12:58.470]  In theory, your brain is plastic, and it can make a connection to your skin so that you ultimately are seeing through your skin and activating your visual cortex.
[12:58.490 --> 12:59.810]  This is what he had proclaimed.
[12:59.990 --> 13:01.870]  And there's some evidence that it kind of works.
[13:02.730 --> 13:08.310]  So in his experiments, he took people that are recently blind, he gave them a movie camera, and they sat down in this chair.
[13:08.590 --> 13:13.170]  And in the chair, if you look, you know, at the back of this chair, you'll see these little dots.
[13:13.470 --> 13:14.490]  These are solenoids.
[13:14.490 --> 13:17.470]  So that when they activate, they lightly push you on the back.
[13:18.150 --> 13:25.330]  So as a blind person moved the camera, if the camera saw a box, they would get a box-shaped poke on their back.
[13:25.330 --> 13:29.870]  If the camera saw an X, they would get an X-shaped poke on their back.
[13:30.070 --> 13:34.350]  If it saw a face, like you see on the right here, they would get a face-shaped poke on their back.
[13:34.490 --> 13:41.250]  And when these individuals, these blind individuals, did this for like a hundred hours, they were able to recognize a whole bunch of different objects.
[13:41.250 --> 13:43.050]  They were able to catch a ball.
[13:43.290 --> 13:47.970]  Some of them even said that, you know what, I kind of feel like I can see again in low resolution.
[13:48.390 --> 13:49.810]  This was like mind-blowing.
[13:49.950 --> 13:50.970]  This was kind of extraordinary.
[13:50.990 --> 13:51.890]  And it's kind of interesting.
[13:52.050 --> 13:55.030]  And later on, they even made a device that was portable.
[13:55.270 --> 14:00.330]  And instead of pokes, they got a 12 by 12 grid that you put on your tongue and it shocks it.
[14:00.390 --> 14:04.210]  So if the camera sees an X, you get an X-shaped shock on your tongue.
[14:05.010 --> 14:10.110]  These individuals, they put in an MRI and their visual cortex, to a certain extent, was lighting up.
[14:10.110 --> 14:16.850]  So maybe these individuals, through tongue shocks, were getting some sort of sensation of being able to see again.
[14:16.990 --> 14:18.850]  So this is an example of hacking the brain.
[14:18.990 --> 14:19.790]  That's extraordinary.
[14:19.930 --> 14:20.510]  That's interesting.
[14:20.810 --> 14:24.070]  Now in my own research, I study spatial disorientation.
[14:24.170 --> 14:29.350]  This is when pilots and astronauts lose sense of where UP is.
[14:29.630 --> 14:30.890]  This can be extremely dangerous.
[14:31.050 --> 14:34.370]  It's one of the leading causes of aircraft accidents where people are dying.
[14:34.630 --> 14:39.270]  A lot of what I look at is what astronauts may have to experience, because my funding comes in through NASA.
[14:40.990 --> 14:48.010]  And astronauts will not be able to rely on gravitational information that they sense to their vestibular systems to determine which way they're oriented.
[14:48.230 --> 14:52.530]  And usually, visually, astronauts and pilots are overwhelmed with visual information.
[14:52.690 --> 15:05.710]  So what NASA was interested in is, can we take that same information that, in theory, your vestibular system would be picking up, and instead, in a sensory substitution way, express it through your skin, through vibrations that you feel on your skin.
[15:06.470 --> 15:08.830]  So the way I study that is, I strap people into this machine.
[15:09.190 --> 15:12.890]  They try to balance themselves, kind of like a pilot stabilizing a spacecraft.
[15:14.030 --> 15:20.970]  And then I put them into an orientation, which I call my zero-G analog condition, where they cannot rely on gravitational cues.
[15:21.090 --> 15:23.730]  Now, this is not going to make sense, because I need a full presentation on the science.
[15:24.090 --> 15:27.270]  But if you're interested, just ask me, and I'm happy to talk about it more.
[15:27.410 --> 15:35.910]  For now, just, I guess, accept that in this situation, people cannot use gravitational cues like they normally would be able to through their vestibular system.
[15:36.590 --> 15:43.730]  And then what I do is, on their arms, those red circles, are little vibrators that I put on there that indicate how, you know, how far away they're from the balance point.
[15:43.830 --> 15:45.930]  The further they go, the more vibrations they feel.
[15:46.150 --> 15:50.530]  And long story short, I am able to find that people do do a sort of sensory substitution.
[15:50.830 --> 15:53.870]  They are able to use these vibrations to orient themselves.
[15:54.070 --> 15:57.250]  However, there's this perceptual conflict that people feel.
[15:57.530 --> 16:02.130]  They feel like, erroneously, they're in one location, and the vibrations are saying, hey, you're here.
[16:02.130 --> 16:05.750]  And they have to make this gut-level, fast decision to stabilize themselves.
[16:06.070 --> 16:14.670]  So a lot of the research questions I'm looking at is, how do you build not only a cognitive trust, but a subcognitive trust with this sensory substitution device?
[16:15.590 --> 16:20.630]  So a lot of the open questions in human augmentation that I look at in my creative projects, too.
[16:20.690 --> 16:23.390]  I'm doing stuff with, like, dancers and putting vibrotactors on them.
[16:24.090 --> 16:29.370]  And in my research as well, I ask, you know, what is required in terms of training so that you feel merged?
[16:29.370 --> 16:32.990]  So you hack the brain so you feel merged with something that's actually external to you.
[16:33.150 --> 16:34.350]  And how do you gauge that?
[16:34.430 --> 16:35.330]  What are the benefits of that?
[16:35.510 --> 16:43.790]  How do you develop a subcognitive way of having trust with this device that's external to you, when you can't even rely on your own internal sensors?
[16:43.970 --> 16:45.330]  What can disrupt this?
[16:45.530 --> 16:47.750]  And what are individual differences like?
[16:48.250 --> 16:53.290]  Now, getting even further away of methods of hacking the brain, there are non-technological ways.
[16:53.350 --> 16:56.650]  And a lot of this I explore just in my home, in my backyard.
[16:56.650 --> 17:00.730]  So if you guys are ever in Lexington, Massachusetts, you're welcome to come to any of these events.
[17:00.950 --> 17:05.130]  But things like meditation, scientifically, people have found that this can literally change your brain.
[17:05.250 --> 17:06.350]  You can hack your brain with it.
[17:06.550 --> 17:09.370]  There are psychological and physiological changes that you can have with it.
[17:10.010 --> 17:17.630]  We've done, you know, events looking at the subconscious, looking at the science behind it, looking at how do you hack your subconscious, especially when dealing with things like trauma.
[17:18.170 --> 17:21.830]  We've looked at altered states of mind, which is also another way of hacking the brain.
[17:21.830 --> 17:25.410]  And how do you reach that through things like rhythmic-induced trance?
[17:25.710 --> 17:36.030]  And we've looked at, you know, age-old methods of storytelling, narrative, rituals, which all have the capability of fundamentally changing the way that you perceive things, and therefore hacking your brain.
[17:36.430 --> 17:38.090]  Now, there are other non-technological ways.
[17:38.270 --> 17:40.950]  You know, drugs and alcohol can, to a certain extent, do it.
[17:41.290 --> 17:45.510]  Psychedelics have had thousands of years of people using it as a way to hack their brain.
[17:45.510 --> 17:52.510]  Just recently, the field of neuroscience has been given the permission to use psychedelics in research again to a limited extent.
[17:52.770 --> 18:01.490]  And it does look like a very promising tool to help hack the brain in situations with depression and PTSD and things like that.
[18:01.690 --> 18:02.910]  Of course, there are evidence, too.
[18:03.010 --> 18:05.230]  If you don't use it properly, then negative things can happen.
[18:05.650 --> 18:11.230]  If you guys aren't familiar, you know, people outside the science world have used this in really unusual ways.
[18:11.230 --> 18:19.850]  The CIA created a program called MKUltra in the 1950s, where they tried to do mind control and brainwash people using drugs.
[18:19.990 --> 18:27.850]  And one of the most infamous operations, Operation Midnight Climax, they got a whole brothel, had prostitutes give people LSD without their consent.
[18:28.090 --> 18:34.810]  And then, after having sex with them, tried to, like, you know, manipulate them and tried to have them tell truth and other things.
[18:35.590 --> 18:39.490]  So there are very, like, unusual histories behind all of this.
[18:40.170 --> 18:46.690]  The concluding statement I want to say is that all of these methods I've shared about hacking the brain is just a limited set.
[18:46.850 --> 18:47.610]  There's a lot more.
[18:47.710 --> 18:52.210]  And the reason why is that our brains are evolutionally designed to be very hackable.
[18:52.370 --> 18:57.570]  And this is because our brains are needed to continuously be adapting to changes in the environment.
[18:57.970 --> 19:06.750]  You know, one of the things our brains does is take sensory information in, and then, and you take the sensory information and you compare it to an internal model of reality.
[19:06.750 --> 19:12.930]  And when there's a discrepancy between these two things, your brain updates the internal model.
[19:13.170 --> 19:19.190]  And for this reason, almost any sensory information has the capability of hacking your brain.
[19:19.370 --> 19:20.770]  I'm going to give you an example of that.
[19:20.890 --> 19:27.090]  So, in the lab that I work in, the Ashton-Grabial Spatial Orientation Lab, they have a rotating room, which is an artificial gravity simulator.
[19:27.710 --> 19:34.390]  When people go into this room, and they try to reach, a Coriolis force acts on them, and they're not aware of it.
[19:34.630 --> 19:40.130]  And the first time you try to make a straight reaching movement in this rotating environment, your arm goes off to the side.
[19:40.250 --> 19:41.390]  And you're like, whoa, what happened?
[19:41.610 --> 19:43.570]  Your brain registers in error.
[19:43.810 --> 19:58.130]  And then, without you really consciously knowing what it's doing, the brain adjusts, it rewires the way it's activating all of your muscles, so that the next reach is closer and closer to the target, until you're able to reach the target, and not have to think about, what are you doing differently?
[19:59.990 --> 20:07.770]  When the room stops, you have a huge after effect, and now you have to go through the same sensory motor adaptation to come back to normal life.
[20:07.970 --> 20:13.410]  Again, this highlights how, like, hackable our brain is, and there's an evolutionary advantage to this.
[20:13.470 --> 20:25.050]  When you're out in the wild, and you're hunting for stuff, you pick up a spear or a hammer or whatever, the physics of the way that your hands and muscles work changes, and you have to be able to change that very quickly.
[20:25.050 --> 20:29.590]  I kind of want to also highlight that this kind of hackability is for our perception, too.
[20:30.430 --> 20:33.950]  So the rubber hand illusion is a famous experiment that they've done.
[20:34.070 --> 20:41.070]  In this case, the participant sitting, she can't see either of her hands, and what she can see is a fake rubber hand in front of her.
[20:41.330 --> 20:50.610]  And then what the experimenter does is they rub the fake hand, and as they're stroking this fake hand, they're stroking her actual hand, too.
[20:50.790 --> 21:00.590]  So what she sees is this fake hand being stroked, And she feels that on her hand as well and begins to identify this fake hand as almost being part of her.
[21:00.750 --> 21:07.590]  And then what the experimenter does is they take a hammer or a syringe and they stab this fake hand.
[21:07.750 --> 21:10.410]  And usually these participants will flinch.
[21:10.530 --> 21:12.350]  I mean, it happened to me and I was like, oh my goodness.
[21:12.610 --> 21:15.050]  And you can see this graph here showing a physiological response.
[21:15.250 --> 21:22.450]  Again, this shows that the boundaries, like we can hack our sense of ownership and the boundaries between what is self and what is other.
[21:23.070 --> 21:28.870]  So businesses, you know, everything know all about this and they're trying to hack our reward system.
[21:29.010 --> 21:33.230]  Not necessarily anything bad that they're doing, but these are things that we really need to be aware of.
[21:33.930 --> 21:40.730]  With VR, XR, AR, all of these things are becoming higher and higher fidelity, where it's harder to tell the difference between truth and illusion.
[21:41.170 --> 21:43.510]  They're all being designed to hack our reward system.
[21:43.730 --> 21:50.010]  Some of the early vision statements of Meta for VR was that we use VR at work, at home, for education, for entertainment.
[21:50.630 --> 22:03.710]  To the extent where they collectively hack the reward system of humanity, such that humanity would want to invest huge amounts of money and resources to buy virtual clothes for their avatars because all of a sudden now their avatars mean a lot to them.
[22:03.710 --> 22:06.910]  So, we are being influenced by this at all times.
[22:07.010 --> 22:08.850]  And social media tries to hack our attention.
[22:09.250 --> 22:11.410]  You know, you may have heard of attention economics.
[22:12.190 --> 22:15.270]  And AI, finally, has the capability of hacking our free will.
[22:15.370 --> 22:26.310]  Way before LLMs and ChatGPT, YouTube, you know, not on purpose created an algorithm trying to keep people on its platform, but the way it did it was to show more and more extreme videos.
[22:26.310 --> 22:33.670]  Now, the person who were clicking on these videos thought they had complete free will, and yet they were statistically being pushed in a direction.
[22:34.030 --> 22:38.830]  Again, showing that you can kind of control people's actions to a certain extent.
[22:39.110 --> 22:43.950]  My final conclusion is our capabilities of hacking the brain are growing at an exponential rate.
[22:44.070 --> 22:47.810]  We're moving like a million miles per hour, and the question is, where are we going?
[22:48.110 --> 22:51.470]  We really need to philosophically ask, what is the destiny of humanity?
[22:51.470 --> 22:55.450]  What does humanity want, and what exactly do we want to birth?
[22:56.010 --> 23:00.390]  I love talking to people, so please come and talk to me, and then Lucas is going to go to the next section.
[23:07.520 --> 23:09.200]  Lucas thought we were going to talk about computers, didn't you?
[23:10.780 --> 23:11.100]  Cool.
[23:11.600 --> 23:14.200]  So, Xavier and I are more on the Red Team side of things, usually.
[23:14.780 --> 23:17.060]  We are going to present hacking human augmentation.
[23:17.280 --> 23:22.520]  So, basically, taking all these augmentative tools and finding out how someone can use it as an offensive against you.
[23:23.340 --> 23:25.640]  So, our brief definition of human augmentation.
[23:25.640 --> 23:30.740]  You take a human, if you add something to them, and they can do something they couldn't do before, they're augmented.
[23:30.980 --> 23:31.300]  Great job.
[23:32.000 --> 23:32.680]  High fives all around.
[23:33.040 --> 23:36.980]  Again, 3D glasses because I'm not good at drawing, but you get the idea, hopefully.
[23:37.640 --> 23:39.760]  Now, who here is familiar with the term attack surface?
[23:40.540 --> 23:41.460]  Hopefully most of you guys.
[23:41.520 --> 23:41.640]  Cool.
[23:42.380 --> 23:44.120]  So, this is your typical attack surface.
[23:44.360 --> 23:50.500]  You have computers, you have machines, you have routers, printers, whatever else you have in your normal day-to-day office life.
[23:51.060 --> 23:55.440]  When it comes to medical equipment and devices, the attack surface gets exponentially larger.
[23:55.740 --> 23:58.200]  The attack surface can include things like autoclaves in a hospital.
[23:58.360 --> 24:02.020]  It can include, importantly, things like medical devices that are implanted into you.
[24:02.640 --> 24:03.580]  If any of you guys...
[24:03.580 --> 24:04.720]  I'm not going to ask because this is personal.
[24:05.060 --> 24:12.920]  If any of you guys have experience with a pacemaker or have a pacemaker surgery, you might be familiar with this giant drum that used to put on your chest and control with radio controls.
[24:12.920 --> 24:14.980]  As hackers, we hate that kind of thing.
[24:15.140 --> 24:18.020]  It was a big bulky preparatory item that you couldn't get your hands on.
[24:18.480 --> 24:26.320]  But, how many people have had no issue ever connecting to a Bluetooth device and think, hey, I think I want my pacemaker to be Bluetooth controlled?
[24:27.780 --> 24:29.180]  Probably fewer people.
[24:29.900 --> 24:31.420]  So, why should you worry?
[24:31.640 --> 24:37.820]  Because a lot of these communication mechanisms are open-source, that's great.
[24:38.580 --> 24:39.940]  They're not terribly secure.
[24:40.300 --> 24:43.340]  Some of them are Bluetooth, and that's because both Bluetooth shields are pretty cheap.
[24:43.500 --> 24:47.460]  If you have an insulin pump and you wanted to communicate with your phone, great.
[24:47.660 --> 24:51.200]  Bluetooth seems like a solid bet until someone can control your insulin pump.
[24:51.300 --> 24:52.120]  We'll get into that one later.
[24:53.080 --> 24:56.120]  So, we have three broad attack modalities that we're going to talk about.
[24:56.360 --> 24:57.760]  One is just breaching privacy.
[24:57.940 --> 24:59.360]  And this is through passive listening.
[25:00.100 --> 25:07.160]  Who here is familiar with, I think it was about 10 years ago, the Strava breach of an Afghanistan forward operating base?
[25:07.640 --> 25:08.260]  Okay, cool.
[25:08.420 --> 25:08.920]  At least someone knows.
[25:09.180 --> 25:14.360]  So, basically Strava is a GPS, kind of our Fitbit track, fitness tracker service.
[25:14.780 --> 25:21.180]  A bunch of people were using them, soldiers specifically, and doing their laps around a forward operating base in Afghanistan that the U.S.
[25:21.300 --> 25:22.000]  did not admit was there.
[25:22.760 --> 25:29.220]  It was kind of harder to say that it wasn't there when they had a bunch of GPS paths running around said base in the middle of Afghanistan.
[25:29.220 --> 25:36.180]  It's almost like, hey, why do Afghanistani people have Stravas, and why are they running around this one circle in the middle of nowhere?
[25:37.800 --> 25:39.000]  It was a great question to ask.
[25:39.580 --> 25:42.260]  Second, we have active interference, which modifies device behavior.
[25:42.500 --> 25:44.680]  This is the insulin pump I was talking about earlier.
[25:44.920 --> 25:46.240]  This is a Medtronic device.
[25:47.380 --> 25:52.020]  And it is the first medical device, to our knowledge, that has been recalled because of a cybersecurity threat.
[25:52.020 --> 25:58.260]  Specifically, you could actually access how the insulin output to this, which I thought, okay, well, that sucks.
[25:58.400 --> 26:01.000]  If you have diabetes, you know, couldn't regulate it properly.
[26:01.220 --> 26:02.240]  But how bad would it be?
[26:03.340 --> 26:10.580]  If you are asleep and you have an overdose of insulin, you have nightmares, then you die, which can't imagine a way I'd like to go out less.
[26:10.780 --> 26:11.420]  So, there's that.
[26:11.940 --> 26:16.020]  Finally, we have data poisoning, which falsifies the outputs and basically cover your tracks of doing this breach.
[26:16.020 --> 26:18.320]  And for this, we have a picture of CTGAN.
[26:18.600 --> 26:22.340]  It is a piece of malware that's been lab deployed, not deployed in the wild.
[26:22.560 --> 26:22.860]  Thank God.
[26:23.720 --> 26:32.040]  It can detect and eliminate or insert tumors where there were none in neural images, which is a bit of a problem because of two reasons.
[26:32.380 --> 26:33.900]  One, it's something you have to check.
[26:34.080 --> 26:38.880]  In theory, you could just have a different CT scan or a different modality and try that out and say, okay, well, hey, there's no tumor.
[26:39.020 --> 26:39.440]  There is a tumor.
[26:39.880 --> 26:40.120]  Great.
[26:46.620 --> 26:48.180]  And that can be really expensive.
[26:48.360 --> 26:49.120]  It can be really onerous.
[26:49.200 --> 26:52.040]  And I can't imagine a worse thing than a surgeon having to say to a patient.
[26:52.380 --> 26:53.200]  I can't imagine a worse thing.
[26:53.460 --> 26:59.060]  On the list of things that are bad, I'm guessing a surgeon telling a patient, hey, sorry about the surgery I gave you that you didn't need.
[26:59.360 --> 26:59.960]  My bad.
[27:01.040 --> 27:01.720]  It's up there.
[27:03.240 --> 27:05.600]  So, for the rest of this talk, we're going to talk about individual risk.
[27:05.900 --> 27:08.260]  Now, I totally get that there are systemic risks.
[27:08.420 --> 27:12.100]  So, individual risk, we're talking about, hey, I have lost access to my cochlear implant.
[27:12.380 --> 27:14.360]  I don't have a thing that works anymore the way it used to.
[27:14.960 --> 27:22.600]  Population risk is something that one of the big theories Xavier and I had when we first started doing red teaming was a lot of fitness trackers had AFib detection.
[27:22.880 --> 27:33.140]  Like, hey, well, if I really wanted to, you know, make a terrorist attack worst, I would just have a bunch of unsecured AFib detecting Fitbits, tell people they had AFib, send them all to hospital.
[27:33.280 --> 27:33.840]  Love the hospital.
[27:34.060 --> 27:34.340]  Genius.
[27:35.260 --> 27:38.840]  It basically was a really easy way to affect a certain segment of the population.
[27:39.180 --> 27:44.720]  And especially in that case, you'd probably get people who are richer, wealthier, because who else is affording that?
[27:44.820 --> 27:47.660]  Who else cares about AFib and who else can go to hospital at this point?
[27:49.120 --> 27:53.340]  And finally, that's systemic risk, which is basically a risk that ruins an entire industry or entire idea.
[27:54.120 --> 27:58.260]  For this case, you can look to 23andMe, which DNA sequencing is great.
[27:58.640 --> 27:59.100]  It's really cheap.
[27:59.460 --> 28:02.340]  I don't know how many repeat customers you're going to get considering your DNA.
[28:02.540 --> 28:05.420]  It doesn't usually change all that much because it's, you know, your DNA.
[28:06.640 --> 28:13.200]  But the systemic risk there was more that you had 23andMe, go out of operation, and they sold your DNA, which you cannot change.
[28:13.200 --> 28:16.720]  And in theory, it can be used to track you for the rest of your life and your family.
[28:16.800 --> 28:17.500]  No, it's already everywhere.
[28:17.800 --> 28:18.080]  Sorry?
[28:18.440 --> 28:19.940]  But your DNA is already everywhere.
[28:20.000 --> 28:20.820]  Well, it's not sequenced.
[28:22.360 --> 28:22.980]  Also fair.
[28:23.060 --> 28:23.740]  Wash your hands.
[28:26.200 --> 28:26.520]  Okay.
[28:26.880 --> 28:29.060]  So anyway, let's welcome ourselves to the gauntlet.
[28:29.200 --> 28:31.720]  Basically, if you look at a bunch of medical devices, how can you mess with people?
[28:32.580 --> 28:34.980]  And, yeah, this was an interview with AI.
[28:35.620 --> 28:36.480]  It's kind of awful.
[28:36.600 --> 28:37.380]  I don't like it.
[28:37.660 --> 28:39.340]  But I wanted to make AI look at it.
[28:40.380 --> 28:41.960]  So here's the standard augmentation vulnerability.
[28:41.960 --> 28:46.280]  So let's say you're a perfectly average person with the average capabilities of a person.
[28:46.560 --> 28:47.240]  You're not Superman.
[28:47.560 --> 28:48.700]  I haven't seen the new Superman movie.
[28:48.900 --> 28:50.640]  I think I vaguely remember from a kid.
[28:50.640 --> 28:51.340]  He has X-ray vision.
[28:51.900 --> 28:53.560]  In theory, you can give yourself X-ray vision.
[28:53.680 --> 29:03.600]  If you're a surgeon and you have a CT image of a skull and you want to do a neurosurgery, or in this case, I think it's an oral surgery, you can have that skull in some AR classes and see it the entire time you're doing this.
[29:03.760 --> 29:05.440]  This would be great in, like, cases of trauma, right?
[29:05.620 --> 29:07.620]  Hey, I have little bone fragments I need to take care of.
[29:07.680 --> 29:09.040]  I need to remove or I need to put back.
[29:10.660 --> 29:14.220]  What if I just inserted a bit of junk code that was just a weight command?
[29:14.780 --> 29:18.840]  And, hey, my skull is no longer registering where it actually is in my AR glasses.
[29:19.340 --> 29:21.800]  That makes it really easy for that scalpel to slip just a little bit.
[29:21.800 --> 29:29.740]  And that's one that, honestly, you'd probably have difficulty tracing, because are you going to have a surgeon go through that AR system and find out where the attack was?
[29:30.240 --> 29:35.680]  In any case, this could be, in theory, done by a company just wanting to get you to buy the newest version of this software.
[29:36.000 --> 29:42.200]  I think, I forgot what company it was, but a phone company was ruining the battery charge levels in phones to make you get the new version.
[29:42.380 --> 29:45.620]  And, in theory, that's a perfectly standard practice you could do here.
[29:46.700 --> 29:47.780]  Here's an implanted one.
[29:48.500 --> 29:51.400]  So, this is actually done because it's tricky because we need two things.
[29:51.720 --> 29:53.240]  One, we need access to your cochlear implant.
[29:53.640 --> 29:55.320]  Who here is in the ham radio community?
[29:56.060 --> 29:56.500]  Awesome.
[29:56.860 --> 29:58.680]  So, you guys would probably use software-defined radios, right?
[29:59.520 --> 30:05.360]  There's at least one cochlear implant that's voltage regulation is software-defined, not hardware-defined.
[30:05.760 --> 30:10.980]  Which means that, as long as it's coded, you can put in whatever voltage you want, as long as you have enough power to give it that voltage.
[30:12.480 --> 30:17.200]  So, our theory we had was, okay, well then, A, I can just mess with them.
[30:17.360 --> 30:23.540]  I can say, okay, if your phone's not been moving around a lot, if your gyroscope's not active, if your accelerometer's not active, send a little whisper.
[30:23.880 --> 30:24.460]  Just mess with them.
[30:24.980 --> 30:30.300]  I feel like I'd probably mess with anyone if you just started hearing whispers every time you sat down to think about something for more than five minutes.
[30:31.760 --> 30:38.120]  Second thing was, hey, if you have access to your GPS and I know how fast you're going, wait till you're going 70, then just max out the voltage on your cochlear implant.
[30:39.100 --> 30:46.060]  Which, again, individual risk, but if you had that happen to someone or heard about it, you probably wouldn't want your cochlear implant to do that either.
[30:46.380 --> 30:49.720]  And then you have to consider what you do in that case.
[30:49.800 --> 30:53.360]  If you're the company, if you're the person with it, what happens with your cochlear implant.
[30:54.180 --> 30:56.400]  Now, here's a super-century augmentation vulnerability.
[30:56.740 --> 30:58.160]  So, this is a sense you guys don't have.
[30:58.360 --> 30:59.040]  There are a couple.
[30:59.040 --> 31:00.320]  This is a north sense.
[31:00.700 --> 31:04.860]  It is a tactile haptic device that will alert you when you're pointing north.
[31:05.460 --> 31:06.480]  It's basically a magnet.
[31:06.880 --> 31:09.680]  And in theory, it's a magnet you can embed inside of you, which is kind of cool.
[31:10.620 --> 31:19.260]  Because there are some cultures that, like, refer only to north and everything, but I don't know if they actually know that, or if they just wake up, orient themselves, and go around the rest of the day.
[31:19.720 --> 31:21.340]  I don't want to ask.
[31:22.440 --> 31:29.420]  But in theory, if we have this as, let's say, a soldier who, you know, ejects out of a plane, he's lost, doesn't have anything else with him, he just needs to go somewhere.
[31:29.960 --> 31:33.580]  All you'd have to do is just mess it by a couple of degrees to send them kind of crazy.
[31:34.440 --> 31:43.020]  They'll basically ruin their sensory, their super-century augmentation to make them think that, or to affect their behavior in a way that benefits you.
[31:43.600 --> 31:48.600]  One way that could also be done with this is, who here uses Google Maps to get around?
[31:49.400 --> 31:49.740]  Great.
[31:50.020 --> 31:52.340]  You probably don't ask yourselves the question of why they send you that way.
[31:52.400 --> 31:54.480]  You assume it's traffic, or this, or that, or whatever else.
[31:54.900 --> 32:02.060]  If you have your super-century augmentation of Google Maps, and it just sends you to buy a McDonald's every time you go for a walk, you're probably eventually going to buy a McDonald's.
[32:03.200 --> 32:04.580]  Even if it tastes awful.
[32:04.580 --> 32:07.920]  I know, it's the one thing I can't give up, despite having money now.
[32:08.060 --> 32:08.920]  It's another being a grad student.
[32:10.100 --> 32:11.080]  Here's some closing thoughts.
[32:11.820 --> 32:17.340]  So, as far as policy concerns for security of your medical devices, who pays for device security upgrades?
[32:17.720 --> 32:19.360]  Once they make the device, is that it?
[32:20.360 --> 32:21.720]  Do they have to give you upgrades?
[32:21.900 --> 32:22.920]  Do they have to make it secure?
[32:23.320 --> 32:25.240]  Do they care once you bought the thing?
[32:26.280 --> 32:27.580]  How are vulnerabilities disclosed?
[32:28.500 --> 32:30.280]  I thought I checked that.
[32:30.920 --> 32:32.420]  More importantly, do we have a CVE?
[32:32.720 --> 32:37.640]  Or if we have that CVE out there, do hackers start immediately trying to ruin it before you can patch it?
[32:38.320 --> 32:41.740]  And do we prioritize speed of device development, or device safety development?
[32:42.140 --> 32:42.860]  Which is important.
[32:43.020 --> 32:48.100]  No one out here who lost an arm, lost a leg, wants to wait any longer than they have to, to get a replacement.
[32:49.080 --> 32:55.560]  But if that arm or leg is going to kill them because of some cybersecurity considerations you should have thought of, but didn't, what do we do about that?
[32:55.680 --> 32:56.280]  What do we prioritize?
[32:56.280 --> 32:57.660]  And frankly, I don't...
[32:58.240 --> 32:59.700]  I don't see a market solution that...
[32:59.700 --> 33:00.780]  Libertarian's happy to...
[33:00.780 --> 33:03.760]  I'm happy to hear Libertarian give me a market solution to it.
[33:03.900 --> 33:05.500]  I don't think I'll hear one.
[33:06.320 --> 33:07.280]  But here's our takeaways.
[33:07.840 --> 33:08.880]  So first, we need to...
[33:08.880 --> 33:12.320]  We think we need to promote open security standards for interoperability and transparency.
[33:13.080 --> 33:15.860]  Second, we need to support open security studies for medical devices.
[33:16.360 --> 33:19.900]  A lot of people say, okay, well, the companies have their own...
[33:19.900 --> 33:22.340]  Companies have their own medical standards and security standards.
[33:22.500 --> 33:24.880]  We can just rely on them to do it and they can keep it all in-house.
[33:25.380 --> 33:27.500]  That's great until they don't tell you about it.
[33:28.240 --> 33:31.480]  And then we think clinicians, regulators and engineers have to collaborate on safety.
[33:32.000 --> 33:34.200]  If you're an engineer, you always want to build the best product.
[33:34.560 --> 33:39.820]  I know when I'm engineering something, I want all the money in the world and all the time in the world because I'm going to make that really, really cool.
[33:40.600 --> 33:44.440]  But then I go, okay, well, I don't have infinite money, so I guess I'll just make it good enough.
[33:44.720 --> 33:44.960]  Fine.
[33:46.420 --> 33:46.720]  Cool.
[33:46.900 --> 33:47.700]  Here's our call to action.
[33:48.060 --> 33:50.580]  Consider medical devices as part of critical infrastructure.
[33:51.040 --> 33:54.700]  Currently, hospital systems are covered under CISA, but not specifically medical devices.
[33:55.280 --> 34:00.280]  And then we would like to demand clear regulations, adequate disclosure protocols, and interoperable standards.
[34:00.940 --> 34:01.520]  Thank you.
[34:01.760 --> 34:03.260]  We're opening the Q&A.
[34:03.420 --> 34:06.200]  You can email Dr. Palmer or myself with these emails.
[34:06.440 --> 34:08.080]  And Dr. Bramal has his contact.
[34:08.280 --> 34:08.740]  So from the next slide.
[34:09.580 --> 34:11.360]  Anyway, of course, love to hear your questions.
[34:21.480 --> 34:21.980]  Hello, everybody.
[34:22.240 --> 34:23.720]  Happy to host the Q&A.
[34:23.940 --> 34:25.200]  Feel free to ask any questions.
[34:27.840 --> 34:30.900]  Friends, if we could come up to the mic for questions, that would be lovely.
[34:32.080 --> 34:37.940]  When folks have questions in Matrix, at tagmanchicken, and I will come up to the mic and ask the question on your behalf.
[34:47.180 --> 34:48.120]  Whichever one do you ask, Matt?
[34:48.540 --> 34:48.700]  Yeah.
[34:53.300 --> 34:53.940]  I'm sorry.
[34:54.080 --> 34:56.960]  I didn't get a good look at your call to action site.
[34:56.960 --> 35:08.720]  But is one of your calls to action for, like, more openness in the design of devices and, like, making everything open-source, basically?
[35:10.060 --> 35:11.880]  We think that's one of the solutions to it.
[35:12.060 --> 35:23.960]  Because one of the issues we see behind making everything super secure and encrypted to the point, or super secure to the point that no one else can buy it, is that, hey, well, if it's that secure, then who gets to decide who gets these devices?
[35:25.160 --> 35:29.700]  Which, hopefully, we'd have everyone who needs an augmented medical device to get their augmented medical device.
[35:30.420 --> 35:33.940]  Preferably, without paying an arm and a leg, because they kind of might have already lost those.
[35:34.540 --> 35:42.140]  But, yeah, we think open-source might be a valid way to get that security at the price point that would give people the chance to get their medical devices.
[35:44.040 --> 35:44.720]  Thank you.
[35:44.920 --> 35:45.360]  Thank you.
[35:45.360 --> 35:48.460]  And I think at least one of you mentioned that you're in the Boston area.
[35:48.700 --> 35:58.100]  And I'm doing a residency with MIT's Media Labs Augmentation Lab this summer.
[35:58.100 --> 36:01.100]  And I was wondering what the best way to invite you to our summit is.
[36:01.340 --> 36:02.180]  Yeah, that'd be cool.
[36:02.480 --> 36:03.960]  You can just email me.
[36:04.040 --> 36:07.620]  And then afterwards, I can, you know, give you my card.
[36:07.860 --> 36:14.160]  Interestingly, just as a side story, with MIT Media Lab, there was this guy, I forget his name, but he made a GVS.
[36:14.320 --> 36:15.860]  So, GVS is another hacking tool.
[36:16.020 --> 36:17.760]  It's called galvanic vestibular stimulation.
[36:18.220 --> 36:21.800]  And what it does is it sends an electric current through your vestibular system.
[36:22.480 --> 36:28.980]  And what you can do is, like, people who are walking in the dark, if you stimulate their vestibular system, they'll turn without really even knowing it.
[36:29.360 --> 36:31.600]  So, in any case, I've been thinking about using that in my research.
[36:31.780 --> 36:34.160]  But, yeah, I'd love to collaborate or just come over to Brandeis.
[36:34.240 --> 36:35.280]  And then, yeah, let's connect.
[36:35.700 --> 36:36.020]  Okay.
[36:36.120 --> 36:36.980]  You just shoot me an email.
[36:37.980 --> 36:38.300]  Okay.
[36:38.820 --> 36:39.260]  Thank you.
[36:40.380 --> 36:44.180]  So, there is the academic and medical side of things.
[36:44.360 --> 36:46.680]  There's also the body modification side of things.
[36:46.880 --> 36:49.920]  For a period of four or five years, I had magnets in my fingers.
[36:50.100 --> 36:51.580]  Let me sense magnetic fields.
[36:51.660 --> 36:52.340]  And it was super cool.
[36:52.960 --> 36:54.740]  Eventually, I had to get those taken out.
[36:55.020 --> 37:02.180]  Because it turns out that was not a rigorously tested thing to do to the human body.
[37:02.180 --> 37:09.620]  In any case, I've been looking for other ways to augment the human body.
[37:09.640 --> 37:11.140]  And there just aren't very many.
[37:11.300 --> 37:18.640]  It seems like there are sort of the more electronic approaches of putting an RFID tag under your skin.
[37:18.820 --> 37:22.880]  Or, you know, a more aggressive approach of putting an entire computer under your skin.
[37:22.880 --> 37:28.540]  But they don't really seem to have a lot in the way of practical applicability.
[37:28.960 --> 37:40.640]  Do you know of any interesting avenues that people are working on right now that are perhaps not accessible through the medical or, you know, front of the alley surgeon approach?
[37:40.640 --> 37:42.820]  But more back of the alley surgeon approach.
[37:45.400 --> 37:45.840]  Yeah.
[37:46.060 --> 37:47.540]  So, this is a really great question.
[37:47.700 --> 37:50.560]  And it is kind of central to some of the research that I do.
[37:50.780 --> 37:56.980]  Because how do you create something that perceptually feels like you've hacked the self?
[37:57.140 --> 38:02.720]  You know, like the invasive stuff, like sticking a wire into your brain, can actually do some pretty remarkable things.
[38:02.880 --> 38:04.000]  But there are a lot of drawbacks, too.
[38:04.120 --> 38:08.280]  Because, like, the neurons that are connected to the electrodes can die.
[38:08.280 --> 38:12.920]  And, like, an animal, like, researchers, what they'll do is they'll screw that electrode in deeper.
[38:13.300 --> 38:15.860]  And so, these are not things that you necessarily want to do with a human.
[38:16.060 --> 38:17.680]  And especially if someone's moving around.
[38:18.260 --> 38:32.560]  On the perceptual side, with, like, some of the sensory substitution things I showed you, the people who get, like, a really deep feeling of, like, expanding their consciousness, feeling something like you did with electric fields, these require tremendous amounts of, you know, training.
[38:34.400 --> 38:35.400]  Like, hundreds of hours.
[38:35.460 --> 38:43.040]  This is why I've been starting to explore things kind of outside the box of, like, can ritual and storytelling fundamentally change the way that you're doing things and ramp it up?
[38:43.120 --> 38:45.520]  Or can vagus nerve stimulation do that?
[38:46.260 --> 38:50.840]  So, long story short, I don't, you know, like, I've been now starting to collaborate with people in the art world.
[38:50.840 --> 38:58.680]  Because that's where some individuals are trying to do interesting things that are kind of, like, not surgical, kind of away from the academic world.
[38:58.920 --> 39:01.800]  But they're really focused on the human experience.
[39:01.920 --> 39:07.560]  Whereas the academic world is more focused on, like, answering particular questions in a very controlled environment.
[39:07.560 --> 39:16.920]  So, like, one of the guys who I'm collaborating with has these, like, it's kind of like a speaker that gives you, like, the vibrations I use for my research are just, like, vibrating.
[39:17.140 --> 39:19.740]  But what the human body responds to is stroke.
[39:19.980 --> 39:22.560]  There are specific neurons that just respond to stroking and things.
[39:22.800 --> 39:31.260]  So, if you can create, like, this, like, really emotionally evocative vibration, maybe we can use that, and then you connect it to a magnetic field.
[39:31.740 --> 39:36.460]  So, instead of having magnets stuck onto you, it is, like, electronics, but then you get something really visceral.
[39:37.180 --> 39:41.920]  So, it's not, you know, maybe an answer that satisfies you, but this is all that I know of.
[39:42.040 --> 39:45.460]  If anyone knows of anything cooler, please, I see some hands here.
[39:45.760 --> 39:46.360]  So, yeah.
[39:47.300 --> 39:52.240]  I have to say, if you're doing neurosurgery, maybe consider not the back-alley surgeon.
[39:53.460 --> 39:59.800]  But I think it's an interesting question, because it comes, I think, to me, what it comes down to, as an engineering person, is economics.
[40:00.220 --> 40:04.620]  It helps, how you get your money to do a surgery in this country is through insurance.
[40:04.940 --> 40:08.180]  They're not going to pay for you to get a surgery to add something new onto you.
[40:08.500 --> 40:15.440]  So, there's probably a lot of really cool, invasive things out there that we could do right now, the technology we have, and the skill and knowledge that we have.
[40:16.280 --> 40:19.920]  But no one's going to pay for it, because it costs as much as a very nice house.
[40:21.360 --> 40:28.860]  Yeah, and to piggyback on both points, yeah, there's no shame in either just substituting what you would do with the implantable versus just a wearable or combination.
[40:29.180 --> 40:43.080]  You know, sometimes a wearable might be much better than the implantable, or just, as you mentioned, like the, just the ritual or the, or just the narratives, things like that, which can be just, which can accomplish the job, basically.
[40:45.580 --> 40:54.620]  You, you, you may have actually answered this already, but it sounded like the primary sensory substitution you were using was vibration-based, correct?
[40:54.940 --> 40:55.040]  Yeah.
[40:55.220 --> 40:55.360]  Right?
[40:55.540 --> 40:57.920]  And you, you're not satisfied with that.
[40:58.120 --> 41:00.340]  It, what is your sort of next big avenue?
[41:00.480 --> 41:04.300]  I know you mentioned ritualism and like that, but is it organic skin response?
[41:04.300 --> 41:05.560]  Where, where, where's your next guy?
[41:05.760 --> 41:05.760]  Yeah.
[41:05.840 --> 41:13.900]  So the reason NASA was interested in vibratactile feedback was, you know, I briefly mentioned like auditory and visual information is really saturated for pilots.
[41:14.040 --> 41:14.840]  It's just overwhelming.
[41:15.380 --> 41:20.420]  So the idea was that the skin, that information could be processed in parallel.
[41:20.900 --> 41:22.740]  And so that's why they went with the skin.
[41:22.860 --> 41:23.980]  And we did get good results.
[41:24.140 --> 41:28.300]  I mean, like people were able to use it, but they just weren't able to bridge that perception gap.
[41:28.820 --> 41:32.860]  They, they were fighting inwardly because they were like, I really feel like I'm on location.
[41:33.140 --> 41:35.560]  How do I trust this thing that's completely external to me?
[41:35.680 --> 41:38.060]  And they cognitively were like, I trust it.
[41:38.300 --> 41:42.780]  But then at the gut, when it came to like really making these joystick deflections, they weren't able to use it.
[41:43.080 --> 41:44.920]  Maybe training could overcome that.
[41:45.120 --> 41:48.800]  Maybe again, like some psychological techniques could do it.
[41:49.280 --> 41:50.820]  Um, so these are things that are not known.
[41:50.900 --> 41:57.940]  Within the field, really like, you know, the Air Force and, you know, the army and stuff like that, they're looking to 3D audio.
[41:57.940 --> 42:00.620]  Where you can kind of separate where the sound's coming from.
[42:00.800 --> 42:07.100]  So that's like, you know, in the past, it was hard to do because you need to like head transfer functions and stuff like that to really get a good sense.
[42:07.340 --> 42:08.880]  And now it's getting a little bit easier.
[42:09.020 --> 42:12.160]  But that's where like the research world is going that I know of.
[42:12.360 --> 42:14.720]  But again, I, I, you know, I know like a section of it.
[42:14.960 --> 42:20.500]  And, you know, I, I know you were saying that maybe you guys have like a different cooler, so I'd love, I'd love to hear what you guys.
[42:20.740 --> 42:20.980]  Yeah.
[42:21.500 --> 42:22.100]  All right.
[42:22.600 --> 42:27.460]  So have you done any work with or heard of audiovisual entrainment?
[42:29.280 --> 42:30.240]  Audiovisual entrainment.
[42:30.320 --> 42:30.500]  Yeah.
[42:31.140 --> 42:34.860]  Um, so the guy I'm collaborating with does like heartbeats and stuff like that.
[42:34.980 --> 42:38.800]  And then you try to entrain brain rhythms to like, yeah.
[42:39.260 --> 42:42.980]  Yeah, it, it does have a heartbeat as well, but it is light and sound.
[42:42.980 --> 42:47.540]  Yeah, and you wear headphones and a set of goggles.
[42:48.000 --> 42:54.300]  And they're different programs based on frequency and how it affects your brain and what it can help you with.
[42:54.820 --> 43:01.260]  I learned about it through my eye doctor who helped me relax my eye muscles so I don't overstrain them.
[43:01.860 --> 43:06.620]  And one of the side effects was creativity shots through the womb.
[43:06.940 --> 43:12.300]  So, so it was, you know, like a really interesting experiment, I would say.
[43:12.300 --> 43:12.740]  Thank you.
[43:12.820 --> 43:13.860]  I'll, I'll look into that.
[43:14.000 --> 43:14.600]  I appreciate it.
[43:14.680 --> 43:14.780]  Yeah.
[43:15.320 --> 43:16.520]  It's a company in Canada.
[43:17.120 --> 43:17.520]  Okay.
[43:17.520 --> 43:18.220]  I'll give you the...
[43:18.220 --> 43:18.480]  Okay.
[43:18.620 --> 43:18.940]  That'd be great.
[43:19.060 --> 43:19.340]  Thank you.
[43:21.800 --> 43:22.520]  Hi, everyone.
[43:22.680 --> 43:23.760]  Thank you for your presentation.
[43:23.820 --> 43:25.540]  I have a question first for you.
[43:25.540 --> 43:30.660]  You mentioned something like the subconscious brain, did I get, and you refer to it as that, the God.
[43:30.920 --> 43:32.220]  I hope I got it correctly.
[43:32.380 --> 43:49.960]  But in general, it's kind of, I'm more curious about hearing a little bit more about how, how have you gone about understanding and defining the God or like that subconscious way of processing information with the interplay between academia, science and the arts and like the spiritual rituals and
[43:49.960 --> 43:52.020]  like, how have you seen those evolve for you personally?
[43:52.700 --> 43:53.900]  Curious to hear more about that.
[43:53.900 --> 43:53.900]  Yeah.
[43:53.900 --> 44:05.180]  You know, so these events that I do in my backyard are kind of like these exploratory things where it has like a certain taste of academia, but then it has a freedom to do things that are completely outside of it because academia limits you.
[44:05.260 --> 44:06.420]  Everything has to be very controlled.
[44:07.400 --> 44:12.180]  In the subconscious event, you know, part of what I looked at was the scientific literature behind the subconscious.
[44:12.400 --> 44:15.800]  There's a lot of controversy or debate around that.
[44:16.720 --> 44:24.400]  Some people believe it's almost like a separate entity, whereas most of the field now it seems like believes that these are like invisible associations that your brain has made.
[44:24.700 --> 44:28.380]  Like in the past, you're not really aware of them, but they're very simple associations.
[44:28.740 --> 44:30.100]  So how do you uncover it?
[44:30.160 --> 44:35.700]  And so we did like these mini workshops that went through trying to understand like what's in there.
[44:35.940 --> 44:41.240]  And it probably take a long time to just, you know, explain now, but like after because I saw that we have five minutes.
[44:41.460 --> 44:43.800]  So afterwards, I would love to tell you about it.
[44:43.920 --> 44:44.900]  But thanks for asking.
[44:45.320 --> 44:45.400]  Yeah.
[44:49.720 --> 44:50.560]  Either one of you guys.
[44:50.760 --> 44:51.380]  Go ahead.
[44:51.880 --> 44:52.800]  Um, okay.
[44:53.160 --> 44:57.520]  Uh, the person who talked about entrainment, audio visual stuff.
[44:57.720 --> 45:08.320]  So I write the signal processing algorithms to kind of translate like brain waves to audio visual stimuli.
[45:08.800 --> 45:28.600]  Um, and it is really amazing to watch people over many hours of training, be able to control like a little pixelated ghost on a screen is like one of the visuals I program, you know, and they, and they can't explain to me how they're controlling it, but they have been able to exercise a degree of
[45:28.600 --> 45:28.980]  control.
[45:29.260 --> 45:33.780]  And a lot of, um, so this is like a therapeutic modality, like neuromodulation.
[45:34.200 --> 45:49.500]  Um, and, uh, a lot of like my clients have this, uh, they come because they want to restore their attention and they want to restore capacities that they feel like they've lost because of the laundry list of things that you said.
[45:49.640 --> 46:04.000]  And what's kind of struck me, um, also kind of integrating like what you said about like how augmentation can be hacked is that all of this sort of like, especially VR stuff, like your eyes think that they're seeing far away, but they're really seeing something close.
[46:04.220 --> 46:08.780]  People experience nausea, their proprioception, you know, kind of gets messed up.
[46:09.040 --> 46:18.620]  And, um, people have been talking to me a lot about severance because there's this part in season two where this neuromodulation was used to like restore someone's capacity.
[46:18.720 --> 46:19.580]  Anyway, I'm talking a lot.
[46:19.940 --> 46:20.960]  I'm just very excited.
[46:21.300 --> 46:34.920]  This is a great talk, but I guess the question I have and the thing that makes my work feel cool and restorative is there is an artistic and meditative aspect to this training that I integrate into my work and that's very satisfying.
[46:35.520 --> 46:46.240]  And then the AR VR seems to me to come from like another paradigm, another world that is driven by market forces and that is like siphoning attention and turning it into economy.
[46:46.300 --> 46:57.740]  And I guess I'm wondering when you're engineering such types of, uh, sensory augmentation or when you're thinking about how these present attack surfaces, is there like an ethos?
[46:57.880 --> 47:03.120]  Is there like something that makes it bad or good to put it, you know, loosely?
[47:03.160 --> 47:07.560]  Or is there like a set of guidelines that you follow when engineering these things?
[47:07.720 --> 47:12.400]  Is there like a, um, I don't know, like an ethos that you attach to it or identify?
[47:12.600 --> 47:20.000]  Because I got like little dimensions of that in both of your, um, yeah, talks and yeah.
[47:20.380 --> 47:21.700]  I think that's an interesting question.
[47:21.820 --> 47:26.260]  I think it's, it's strange because I went to engineering school, went to grad school for engineering.
[47:26.960 --> 47:31.420]  You don't get much ethical training as an engineer, especially not enough.
[47:31.560 --> 47:35.500]  If you guys have been following news about Neuralink, maybe you, uh, think there should be at least a little bit more.
[47:35.980 --> 47:40.120]  Um, I think one of the weirder things is that we are always constrained by these economic realities.
[47:40.360 --> 47:40.460]  Okay.
[47:40.600 --> 47:44.620]  Well, for the person last time, uh, who pays with cybersecurity for your enterprise?
[47:44.800 --> 47:46.240]  Uh, how much can you really afford to do?
[47:46.480 --> 47:52.740]  And in this case, century substitution has been co-opted mostly to make you buy things.
[47:52.740 --> 47:54.480]  And that's been the case forever.
[47:54.680 --> 48:01.960]  I mean, even you can see, uh, take that, for example, the Roman empire rolling into a place saying, Hey, we're going to build a nice new town or whatever.
[48:02.400 --> 48:12.020]  But every visual thing you see, the design landscape will only sort of remind you of us, because we're different, we're better, and we're going to like, now we're here.
[48:12.600 --> 48:18.220]  Um, and in this case, it's like every perceptual thing you have almost is going to be dominated by ads.
[48:18.600 --> 48:20.180]  You can drive on the highway, you'll see ads.
[48:20.300 --> 48:21.940]  You go and take the train, you'll see ads.
[48:22.100 --> 48:25.260]  You'll watch TV, you'll see ads before you watch more ads to watch TV.
[48:25.720 --> 48:30.360]  Um, so I think the interesting thing about perception is taking it back basically as it does.
[48:30.640 --> 48:33.160]  Say, okay, well, what if I want to perceive something different?
[48:33.280 --> 48:38.180]  What if I want to be closer to something that doesn't necessarily have monetary or fiscal value attached to it?
[48:38.640 --> 48:43.220]  Um, which is fascinating because hacker spaces are basically the only places where that could be possible.
[48:43.400 --> 48:50.260]  Um, I don't have to work on ethos with some, with you guys or with anyone, but I think we'll be running some issues real fast.
[48:51.460 --> 49:05.960]  And the only thing I'd add on to that is like, you know, there was a time when scientists were like dreamers and philosophers and things like that, but a lot of our training has been focused now on just on the technical capabilities and advancing things in a way it's kind of very clean and
[49:05.960 --> 49:09.900]  sanitized, but at the same time you lose like that holistic dreamer, dreaming state.
[49:10.040 --> 49:18.120]  And that's why it's really important to bring people who do creative arts, people who do therapy, people who do things that are very mixed into the discipline of science.
[49:18.440 --> 49:21.480]  So anyway, cause I'd love to talk more about some of those things.
[49:21.580 --> 49:24.020]  Like some of the early visionary stuff with VR too, it was pretty wild.
[49:24.140 --> 49:29.960]  Like they were creating like lobster people and like you had the VR helmet and you were kind of feeling like, what does it feel like to have multiple arms?
[49:30.160 --> 49:32.000]  What happens if your arm is two times as long?
[49:32.160 --> 49:33.320]  So it was a real journey.
[49:33.520 --> 49:34.300]  And now you're right.
[49:34.400 --> 49:35.580]  It doesn't feel like that anymore.
[49:37.040 --> 49:39.100]  I don't know if there's time for one more or is it?
[49:39.160 --> 49:39.600]  Okay, cool.
[49:39.600 --> 49:40.500]  Yay.
[49:41.920 --> 49:42.760]  Dreamer here.
[49:45.280 --> 49:48.040]  There's not enough time for me to ask all my questions.
[49:48.660 --> 49:57.320]  But my area of interest, passion and research is related to human sexuality in the age of AI.
[49:57.720 --> 50:03.240]  And so I'm really interested in the attack surfaces of sex tech.
[50:03.460 --> 50:08.420]  I'm really interested in nervous system stimulation with regards to sexuality.
[50:09.540 --> 50:11.280]  And all kinds of things besides.
[50:11.580 --> 50:29.820]  So I'll probably come find you all afterwards because I know that there's also a lot of taboo and siloing where any bringing of sexuality, human sexuality, even into scientific realms or like, you know, technical realms can get messy fast.
[50:30.040 --> 50:41.600]  And so my question is related to, are there researchers, you know, in sex tech security or human augmentation for sexuality?
[50:42.560 --> 50:49.700]  So that this information, I just want to know who's researching it, who's looking into it, who's dreaming about it.
[50:50.000 --> 50:53.800]  And yeah, yeah, that's my cluster of curiosity.
[50:55.380 --> 50:57.740]  I mean, I think it's a very new field.
[50:57.980 --> 50:59.100]  I haven't met anyone.
[50:59.300 --> 51:03.440]  And but I, you know, like, I probably haven't even done like the right keyword searches.
[51:03.760 --> 51:07.060]  So like, this is very motivating for me to like, start looking into it.
[51:07.120 --> 51:10.420]  I gave a few examples that I found when I was making this presentation.
[51:10.840 --> 51:15.800]  But like, human augmentation, and like, in the world of sex, yeah, it's hard, you know.
[51:17.160 --> 51:24.000]  The one thing I would say is that when I go to like, the NASA conferences, they do talk a little bit about like, what does sex in zero G look like?
[51:24.260 --> 51:29.420]  But they're not like, specifically research papers, they're more like, kind of like literature reviews.
[51:30.020 --> 51:36.140]  And they'll send sperm up to the International Space Station, like bull sperm, and sometimes human sperm.
[51:36.380 --> 51:43.320]  But they won't have like, astronauts like, you know, creating a space sperm.
[51:43.560 --> 51:44.220]  In there, right?
[51:44.380 --> 51:45.960]  Yeah, that is just like, huge barriers.
[51:46.340 --> 51:46.540]  Yeah.
[51:46.840 --> 51:47.240]  Yeah.
[51:47.700 --> 51:48.620]  It's a great question.
[51:48.800 --> 51:49.800]  I'd love to collaborate on it.
[51:50.000 --> 51:50.160]  Yeah.
[51:50.420 --> 51:50.700]  Yeah.
[51:51.180 --> 51:51.460]  Great.
[51:51.580 --> 51:51.880]  Thank you.
[51:51.880 --> 51:59.240]  I also worked with NASA, and I've met a handful of astronauts, and I cannot imagine a more horrifying idea than astronauts be dating.
[52:00.860 --> 52:06.200]  But I think one of the bigger issues, well, I disagree with one thing, you said, which is that it's a new field.
[52:06.420 --> 52:10.800]  I don't think it really quite is, because you probably saw this with people getting, sorry.
[52:12.060 --> 52:17.780]  We probably saw this with people getting addicted to being online, playing games, or probably in this case, porn.
[52:18.760 --> 52:23.720]  One thing I think of is, imagine back in the 50s, where you had to go somewhere and buy a thing.
[52:23.960 --> 52:25.920]  You had to like, talk to someone and they had to see you.
[52:26.320 --> 52:33.120]  Eventually, no matter how much of an absolute mental degenerate you were, some guy would go, hey man, you've been here four times today.
[52:33.520 --> 52:35.240]  Maybe, maybe go home.
[52:35.540 --> 52:36.320]  Maybe just sleep.
[52:37.780 --> 52:46.720]  With online, as with the online environment as it is, the longer you're there, the more chance that they'll get money off of you, that you'll see an ad, that you'll have something.
[52:46.980 --> 52:55.860]  We see this all the time in our research we're doing with AI psychosis where people, you know, you'll say something to someone and let someone, no, that's wrong, weird, stupid, and I don't like that.
[52:56.660 --> 52:57.480]  LM's don't do that.
[52:57.680 --> 52:58.820]  They don't ever disagree with you.
[52:58.920 --> 53:01.060]  They just try to be as supportive as they can be.
[53:01.440 --> 53:06.680]  And for a lot of people, I think Internet stuff was that crutch that maybe got them through something or whatever.
[53:07.420 --> 53:09.260]  But it's probably a really bad crutch.
[53:10.480 --> 53:23.480]  And I think the bigger issue there is that the Internet as it is, as it has been commodified and sold to us, benefits people, benefits the people who own it if you stay online as long as you can.
[53:23.800 --> 53:27.400]  Which is what they're trying to do now, basically, with more LLM's and LLM's and everything.
[53:27.640 --> 53:32.240]  There's a lot of incentive for disembodiment, but we'll continue this when it's not five after.
[53:32.380 --> 53:32.720]  Thank you.
[53:33.220 --> 53:34.660]  I was just going to say... Oh yeah, you have more?
[53:34.820 --> 53:41.740]  Yeah, just real quick, like outside of a space context, there are some at the intersection of cyber security, but yeah, after, yeah, we can talk.
[53:41.760 --> 53:42.540]  Yeah, Grant, thank you.
[53:43.280 --> 53:44.140]  Nice to meet everybody.
[53:44.200 --> 53:44.540]  Thank you all.
[53:48.470 --> 53:49.570]  Thank you very much, everybody.