The younger generation of Russians, and with it their parents, are on the verge of a new big challenge associated with the readiness of transhumanist foresight officers to start an "innovative" experiment in the field of education called "Neuronet". This, so to speak, the National Technology Initiative (a program launched by globalists from ASI and the Russian Venture Company in pursuance of President Vladimir Putin's Address to the Federal Assembly on December 4, 2014), involves direct intervention in the work of the human brain (and the body as a whole) by connecting / implanting neurointerfaces into the body ("man-computer", "man-man", "man-animal"). By 2035, the digital evangelical sect intends to bring to the market a dozen leading neurotechnology companies, thereby making a "biotechnological revolution" in Russia and on a global scale. However, there are serious fears that they will undertake, under the pretext of progress, the establishment of total control over the consciousness of "biological objects" and the creation of a new version of the post-Nitschean man-god and his faithful servants.
To begin with, we present the most vivid excerpts from an interview with the head of the Department of Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University, a lecturer at the University at 20.35 (another NTI foresight project) Elena Bryzgalina, in which she talks about the forthcoming “improvement of the human bodily substratum by neurotechnologies”:
“The interest of education in neurotechnology is due to many reasons. The attractiveness of neurotechnologies for education, in addition to socio-economic reasons, is associated with the fact that they offer an answer to the requests of key trends in the development of education - the individualization of the education process and the personification of educational technologies. Turning to neurotechnologies when understanding the present and future education and its practical transformation in neuroreality requires taking into account several planes of interaction between neurotechnologies and education.
First, the interaction of neurotechnology and education is associated with the use of modern results of the description of the brain, obtained in the framework of neuroscience by means of neurotechnology, in the conceptual description of education. The detailing of ideas about the brain, when applied, occurs when the brain activity is read without affecting it. In this case, neurotechnologies collect information about the current emotional and physiological state of students, in particular, about cognitive fatigue (as an example of how this will work - see the material on biometric security cameras in Perm schools, which will determine the emotional state of students - ed..).
Second, the plane of interaction between neurotechnology and education is determined by the fact that neurotechnology is a differentiated means of influencing the brain for the development of cognitive functions. For example, they allow one to influence neuroplasticity, the activity of zones that are functionally significant during learning, and the emotional state. In this context, neurotechnologies not only affect the understanding of the process and results of education, they can be used directly in the educational process to achieve the expected educational results.
Robert Blank, in his 2013 book Intervention in the Brain: Politics, Law and Ethics, identifies several directions of neurotechnological intervention in the brain:
A) Technologies of invasive intervention (electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), electrical brain stimulation (ESB), brain implants, deep brain stimulation, transcrine electrical brain stimulation (tES), electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve, electromyostimulation with pulsed current (TENS), DC micropolarization (tDCS), magnetotherapy, psychosurgery.
B) Virtual reality technologies (neuroimaging (CT, MRI, PET, fMRI), neural transplantation, neurogenetics).
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C) Technologies based on pharmaceuticals and the use of biological drugs (antipsychotics, antidepressants, tranquilizers, hormonal therapy, nootropics).
The list of types of technologies, and even more so their content, is undergoing very rapid changes. Practical neurotechnology, in turn, makes it possible to further build up theoretical knowledge about the brain, which gives grounds for considering neurotechnology as a complex manifestation of technoscience.
When neurotechnologies go beyond the laboratories of developers into the field of education, for their practical use in working with children, especially those with developmental features, serious experiments are required that meet not only the criteria of scientific evidence (independence, statistical reliability), but also ethical and legal norms. Such norms, specifically reflecting the field of neurotechnologies, especially invasive ones, still have to be created and practically launched. At the same time, normative regulation should simultaneously create conditions for the introduction of promising technologies and products, and barriers to risky practices, protect the autonomy and dignity of a person - the subject of education.
At the same time, we draw attention to the fact that neurotechnologies are often not of a therapeutic nature, that is, there are no clinical indications associated with health conditions for their use. The reason for their use is the desire of individuals and institutions to facilitate the learning process and accelerate the achievement of educational results, a neuro-optimistic attitude towards technological innovations. Intervention in the human body occurs without the presence of objectively recorded deviations, only on the basis of a personal desire to improve performance, and quickly and without significant effort.
The use of neurotechnologies very sharply raises the problem of ethical justification of intervention in human corporeality, the problem of social justice and determination of the boundaries of intervention. It is already obvious that neurotechnology is shifting the emphasis from spiritual, intellectual and physical development in education to bodily technological improvement. Now there is a fixation of a person's achievements in the development of their own competencies and adaptation to the technosphere. And in the future, neurotechnology can become a tool for the symbiosis of man and the technosphere, achieved in the process of education. In extreme grounds, the consideration of neurotechnologies in education returns to the question of human nature: is the change in the substrate of cognitive processes and behavior under the influence of neurotechnologies corresponding to the meaning of human existence?
It can be assumed that the growing introduction of neurotechnologies in education will lead to a value split of society into those who are ready for technological intervention in human nature and will consider neurotechnologies as useful means for improving education, and those whose value hierarchy does not allow making a choice in favor of cardinal technologization. of human nature,”concludes Bryzgalina.
It is obvious that at the first stage there will be much more opponents of implantation of "technological improvers" in the traditionally conservative Russian society than supporters. It is also clear that, according to the "good" tradition, foresight officers will not bother with long-term ethical, legal and scientific experiments. The transition to personal development trajectories has already been formalized by the corresponding instruction of the President of Russia. In mid-August of this year. A number of university partners that have come under the influence of ASI, NTI and RVC have already announced that a neural network (aka artificial intelligence) will soon be collecting information about the progress, social life and behavior of their students, as well as giving them grades.
By the way, the ideologues of Neuronet have carefully laid out far-reaching plans (of course, the plans are not their own, but roughly translated projects of their curators from Silicon Valley, Stanford University, etc.): they bring the emergence of a new Internet format (Web 4.0), in which the exchange of data will be carried out through neurocomputer interfaces, and the computers themselves will become neuromorphic (similar to the brain) using hybrid digital-to-analog architectures. They also predict the emergence of social neural networks and a full-fledged hybrid human-machine intelligence.
And, for example, the segment of neuro-entertainment from NTI includes biometrics (the market of wearable electronic devices that read the physiological parameters of the user - that is, gradual introduction to the fusion of gadgets with the body), early career guidance (a well-known "trick" of Russian education reformers according to the patterns of NGOs Wordskills International) and (attention!) The market for monitoring and tracking potentially dangerous psycho-emotional states in real time. In other words, constant tight control over people's behavior.
“The product of 2035 will be a neuro-assisting adaptation system for mass consumption, which is the result of the merger of all small projects in the near horizon. This approach will reorient the consumer demand of the market and close users to a single universal product that fully performs all the functions and has all the capabilities specified in the detailed description of the subsegments, but in a more ergonomic form,”NTI digitizers write.
That is, real life, objective reality should fade into the background in the near future - it will be replaced by a virtual neural network. This, of course, is not a real, but a very desirable world, in which it will be pleasant to stimulate the rhythms of the human brain, immerse him in a meditative state, similar to taking a narcotic soma from the book of science fiction writer Aldous Huxley.
And this is not at all some speculation - enhanced real-time meditations are already being offered, for example, by private developers of the Brainbit neural interface, in all the colors described on their website. A few excerpts from the description:
“The BrainBit tape contains 4 dry EEG electrodes, a reference and a common electrodes, and a miniature electronic module. This allows you to register a professional electroencephalogram with the best quality among the neurointerfaces available on the market. The device amplifies and digitizes the received signal and transmits it via Bluetooth to a computer, smartphone or tablet. Unlike analogs, the position of the electrodes on the BrainBit tape corresponds to the international 10-20 electrode placement scheme. The electrodes provide direct contact in the T3 and T4 areas of the temporal lobe, as well as in the occipital area O1 and O2.
According to advanced international research, these zones are optimal for recording the level of four main types of brain waves. BrainBit records electrical activity as raw EEG data, which are represented as levels of the four main brain rhythms. The app displays several categories of the user's brain state such as stress / relaxation, attention / distraction, happiness / sadness, and sleep / awakening. All received data on brain activity can be sent to the cloud for analysis and processing using machine learning methods."
The creators of the neural interface declare that "their long-term (over 25 years) experience and professionalism make it possible to create technologies of a new level and expand the boundaries for developers and researchers in various fields of human knowledge." Needless to say, developers and researchers really get their hands on an invaluable treasure - an algorithm for controlling the mind of their client, which, as a consumer of the neurointerfaces market, will also pay for it.
