 decisions? I think that is where an exhibition – undertaken before these technologies are implemented in the real world – can open up territory that is all too infrequently addressed. These far futures can make us more sensitive to near futures and the present, and they can also augment our ability to interrogate, question and navigate present relationships. Look at the degree to which smartphones are reshaping who and what we are. They slipped into our
lives in such a way that we didn’t reflect on what they did and who we became as a result; what we became when we had the total memory and knowledge of the internet – or lack thereof – on our bodies. Coming into Mental Work and having this almost sci-fi experience of operating one of these machines brings you back to your cyborg relationship with your phone.
José We don’t have all the answers. This area of technology will require new ethical regulations because if our cognitive capabilities are suddenly amplified, they will become apparent to everybody. What happens to privacy in that case? Until now, we could keep our mental processes secret, whereas we are now opening those up. I don’t have the solution to that problem, but these are the kind of questions that we want to generate. There are three pillars in Mental Work. One is philosophical, another artistic and the third scientific. We look at this experience as a large-scale experiment that gives us an unprecedented opportunity to recruit thousands of potential subjects under relatively well-controlled conditions. Analysing the data we collect will provide opportunities to improve the design of brain-machine interfaces. For example, I’ve been told that some people are very good at mental work straight away. Why is that? What kind of characteristics do those people have? We also hope that there will be many people who will start with a certain level of brain performance and, as they move from machine to machine, experience a better level of control. What is the process behind that improvement and how can we design better algorithms to follow the mental skills the workers are developing? Conversely, what happens for mental workers who, despite all their efforts, have a limited feeling of control? You need to find the most appropriate algorithm to fit your individual brain, such that you feel that this machinery is not something that comes over you, but something which follows you.
Michael Mitchell One of the things I found most exciting was being able to take a technology from the clinical setting of a laboratory and bring it to the public before it was offered by any of the commercial giants such as Google or Facebook, who might have other designs for it. We can create something abstract and philosophical that allows people to think about what kind of future they would like to see this technology be developed in. I’ve been a Mental Worker several times this week and sometimes you’re good at it and sometimes you’re not, but it does always provoke something. It makes you imagine a seamless brain-machine interaction with the world around you. I’ve gone home, for instance, and imagined turning the lights off or controlling my environment with my mind. If we do that frequently enough through modulating brain activity, we might reach a point where we don’t even realise we’re interacting with the world through this interface. Is that telling us that our relationship with our body isn’t as special as we have imagined it to be? Up until now, we have always thought that our body was the only thing with which we could interact without an intermediary interface – the only thing we can relate to on that very intimate level. So how does the potential of these brain-machine interfaces and the hyperconnected world change that relationship? It raises very profound questions about who we are and how we define ourselves.
Jonathon In the past, we had stories as mechanisms for understanding ourselves – for speculating on who and what we are, and what we might become. Various art forms have developed around that, ranging from plays, to mov