One rainy day, while Bill was riding his bicycle, the truck ahead of him suddenly braked. Bill simply couldn’t react in time. The impact left him paralyzed from the chest down.
Bill’s life now depends on the bodily functions he retains, with the help of technology. For example, voice control helps him pull the curtain in the room or adjust the tilt of the bed automatically.
With activities that technology cannot support yet, he needs 24/7 care.
Bill had never met Anne. She is a Parkinson’s patient with shaking hands but still trying to look into the makeup mirror. Neither knew Stephen, who was blind in adulthood by a degenerative condition. Stephen depends on his sister when he needs to move out of the house.
Imagine, the three of them are like characters in an outrageous joke, a blind man, a paralyzed man and a Parkinson’s disease girl walk into a bar. But that’s not the case, Bill, Anne and Stephen have combined their life stories to make a new documentary called I Am Human .
The film, which is premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival , follows three unfortunate patients as they step inside the land of revolutionary brain therapy experiments. In it, scientists will open their skulls, inserting electrodes inside them in the hope of helping each person regain what they have lost.
For Bill, it was the ability to move the lower body. For Anne it was his ability to control movements and for Stephen it was his eyesight. All three are facing scientists with risks to regain freedom in their own bodies.
The journey of the three characters is both scientific and philosophical. I am human not only talks about humans as biological beings as we are, but also promises to incorporate into it neural technologies that allow us to go beyond our own physical limits. .
It’s a future when chips embedded in our brains could allow us to possess superhuman abilities.
Taryn Southern, the film’s co-director, said she’s starting to think of the brain as in Black Mirror and Westworld , films that explore the emerging relationship between humans and technology. She finds herself enthralled by science fiction, which reimagines how computers might be involved in human evolution.
Electronic machines not only improve and upgrade us, they actually change humanity. “But there still seems to be a disconnect between the ideas we see in those movies, and what’s actually going on in the real world ,” Southern said.
Black Mirror and Westworld, films that explore the emerging relationship between people and technology.
But Southern isn’t the only one showing a passion for the subject. Other documentaries presented at the Tribeca Film Festival explore similar stories: Almost Human looks at the relationship between humans and the robots they create; Universal Machine, a short film, about the confrontation between a woman and artificial intelligence.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world once lived with a brain-computer interface, technologies that began to be developed by science in the 1970s. Some experts predict this number will reach 1 million. over the next decade, as science and technology become more and more sophisticated.
” Real life is doing things better than science fiction ,” said Elena Gaby, co-director of I am human with Southern.
Even so, the inner workings of our brains are still poorly understood. And the benefits we’re getting from this kind of technology are just beginning to emerge.
A brain contains about 100 billion neurons, each of which is ” as complex as the city of Los Angeles ” with about 500 trillion connections, says David Eagman, a neuroscientist who appears in the film.
The methods that science is using to treat Bill, Stephen and Anne are mostly still in the testing process, there is no guarantee of their safety or success.
“Interestingly, now we can accurately count steps, count calories burned, rearrange the genome, draw blood, and measure heart rate, but we have almost no insight into what’s going on. your brain ,” said Bryan Johnson, founder and CEO of Kernel, a startup in the field of neuroscience.
” We only know a small piece of our inner self, most of the rest is still a black box .”
“We only know a small piece of our inner self, most of the rest is still a black box.”
The mysteries inside the brain create a suspenseful fear in I Am Human . As you watch as Bill, Stephen, and Anne grapple with the decision to implant a chip in their brain, it’s a reality far more difficult than anything in Black Mirror .
“Someone’s cutting into your brain ,” says Anne in the film. ” And you never know what will happen after that.”
After some mental struggles, she finally decided to try deep brain stimulation , a procedure that works by implanting electrodes in the brain to stimulate specific areas (in Anne’s case, she needed to reduce exaggeration in the locomotor system).
The method proved to be very successful with Parkinson’s patients. The chips send ” data ” out of the brain and feed back an electrical current into Anne’s brain region, freeing her from the constant tremors.
Stephen began testing another treatment, called Argus , which involves implanting a chip underneath the eye that is connected to electrodes in the brain.
Bill, a guy paralyzed from the chest down, volunteered to test a brain-computer interface , in the hope that it could restore connections between the brain and nerves in the body that were severed after the accident. accident.
To ” retrain ” his brain, Bill looked at a virtual arm on the screen, imagining himself moving it.
Collecting neural data from that, a team of scientists will build algorithms that encode Bill’s motion intentions, then signals are sent to electrodes implanted in the arm and table. hand. The idea they were aiming for was this: this brain-computer interface would help Bill regain control of his own muscles.
” It’s a future that’s a little bit like Star Trek ,” Bill said onscreen, with ropes hanging down from the top of his head. ” This seems to be something straight out of science fiction.”
Brain-computer interface will help Bill regain control of his own muscles.
At first glance, I Am Human is a science documentary, packed with information about the human brain and recent advances in neuroscience.
It features more than a dozen neuroscientists, who will lead viewers inside their labs, talking about the technical challenges of creating a chip that works inside. human skull.
Behind those scenes, however, the film’s central question is more of an existential issue: What makes us human? And how can technology upgrade our species – by helping some people regain the abilities they lost and ordinary people beyond their former limits?
Brain-computer interfaces hold the promise of restoring sight to the blind, restoring hearing to the deaf, and giving us a sense of control over our bodies. But towards the second half of the film, viewers will follow some scientists and entrepreneurs, like Johnson, who believe that neurotechnology will soon give us new superpowers.
What if, in addition to curing Stephen’s blindness, we could actually improve his eyesight so he could see in the dark?
What if a device could allow Bill to not only move his hand again, but also type text with just his thoughts? Can we cure depression? Can we make a knob that only needs to be turned a little to make it easier to empathize with people?
Can we make a knob that only needs to be turned a little to make it easier to empathize with people?
It’s not a sci-fi scenario. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have invested in brain-computer interfaces to enhance human capabilities. Musk’s Neurink aims to improve cognition, making it possible for us to compete with AI in the future.
Zuckerberg’s idea to implement is like a mind-reading machine. Johnson’s startup, Kernel, is working to create a brain interface that will allow the development of real-world applications that rely on brain activity processed in high resolution.
“My hope is to help us reach a milestone in the advancement of technology, where we are not limited by our own technology, we are empowered by it,” Johnson said in the set. movie. ” So it’s just a matter of choosing what we want to be.”
The director of I Am Human wanted to embody that idea of empowerment in her film. “When looking at new ways to communicate with the brain, I think things like this will also become exciting new options for humans ,” Southern said.
“I find that the idea of upgrading people – expanding our abilities and senses, beyond what we think is normal – is very exciting.”
Going back to the present, the most advanced robot-robots at the moment are clearly not what Musk, Zuckerberg, or anyone in Silicon Valley’s tech elite think. They are now disabled people like Bill, Stephen and Anne, with a tiny machine in their brain that helps them go back to being a normal human.