ge system and two pistons – each of which is activated by a different brain signal selected by the co-worker.
In this way, Mental Work is designed to explore both the excitement of moving machinery with one’s mind, as well as the current limitations of BMI technology. Unlike most artistic expressions or technological demonstrations that employ passive EEG technology – a field in which it is currently near impossible to distinguish the signal output of a human brain from that of a wet sponge – Mental Work’s brain-machine interface mirrors the parameters used in contemporary neuroscience laboratories where users must consciously engage voluntary modulations of their neurological activity. It is exhausting work.
The tasks are not immediately accessible to everyone, although around 70 per cent of participants have been successful to date. Each of the three machines poses different practical and philosophical challenges. If the worker discovers the right strategy to send a strong enough signal, however, the brain-machine interface loop is completed and the machines glide into motion.
It is simultaneously a humbling and empowering experience. Less than a month before the exhibition’s opening, after five years of working on the project with more than two-dozen collaborators, I activated the first machine – it was an otherworldly sensation. Over the three months that Mental Work was operational at EPFL, my performance fluctuated from day to day, but the strangeness faded away, leaving comfortably intuitive control in its place: I had done this type of apprenticeship before. Whether learning to drive a car, navigating the intricacies of a new language or sending a signal to a machine, the brain’s capacity to adapt and find novel strategies is an infinite well of individual and collective potentiality. Technology is a way to exercise this potential, but if we wilfully ignore that it also holds the danger of unwanted consequences, we are heading blindly into a future that could one day be out of our control.
Jonathon Keats I’ve always been fascinated by the machinery of the Industrial Revolution because you could look at it and essentially understand how it works. Those mechanisms had a physicality to them – they emulated what we do with our muscles, which meant that the Industrial Revolution was beautifully instantiated in its machines. As I began to think about this project, and the cognitive revolution we are currently facing through artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces, I immediately thought back to the Industrial Revolution. My idea was that taking the technology of the present and looping it back to that period – into machines which we experience through their motion – might provide a way of examining the electronics and computers that are driving what our future may become.
José Millán The machines of the Industrial Revolution amplified or augmented our manual capabilities. Today we have the opportunity to augment our cognitive capabilities as well. Also, the Industrial Revolution didn’t give autonomy to machines – someone had to operate them – whereas many contemporary machines are completely autonomous, which is where responsibility starts coming into the equation: do we want amplifications of our cognitive or mental processes going on without our intervention? In the case of Mental Work, we’re asking our workers to initiate voluntary, self-generated processes to operate the machines. We’re not exploiting any kind of automatism within the brain, which we could have done by using unconscious processes to drive the machines. Making an effort to engage something costs energy and time. If we exploited less conscious processes our responses would be faster but, as with everything in life, there is no free lunch: you delegate too much, you lose too much. It is our responsibility when designing things for the public to make our choices transparent, because sooner or later you might wonder about the whys and why nots.
Jonathon Exactly – there is always a question of who is doing the delegation. Who is making those