Can we use AI to make us smarter?

Hyper bodyload; 20mg of DBT-dioxide, 50mg of Tiberian, 2*46g methytrexylate topped off with a fentanyl vape and a bucket of chicken wings. I was lying, injured, in an Airbnb whilst emergency health representatives kept me alive with a cocktail to keep me solid. As to how I got into this mess? It all started the day before…

 

My usual morning routine consisted of heavy exercise combined with rapid mathematical equations I would make up and solve on the spot. Decimal places, pumping iron, a plate of boiled eggs I had peeled by the side I would graze upon for nourishment with a little dish of salt to dip them in. I had hit a disaster zone, and so to keep in peak health would be beneficial to the tasks ahead of me.

 

Rewind another few days. I was wrapping up an interview and gone to my car, I got a message on my cell. Unknown number, a text message of a picture. I don’t need to look at the picture for longer than a second. I call the number back.

“What’s the story?”

 

Pause. Rewind two months previous. I am meeting my intelligent and beautiful girlfriend for a round of Spritz. We are talking about the connection between the different layers of the brain and how they have evolved over time.

“Do you think memories can transfer from parent to child?” she said.

“Of course. Where is the evidence where that isn’t the case?” I said. She laughed, rolled her eyes and walked away.

 

We pause again. The image becomes magnified to the point of abstraction. We fast forward another few hours. Drinks on a balcony. Another few hours. A car drives down a country lane, the headlights so bright they blind the animals that creep in the night. The radio blasts absolute static. We rewind again. Fast forward. The tape becomes jumbled up and spills out of the player. I realise I am in the present and eating a bucketful of chicken wings that are so devoid of taste they somehow remove the taste of my own mouth from my body and so my tongue is left totally tasteless, hiding inside my head like a sponge filled with white paint.

 

A scientist looks at me over the console, grinning his acid burnt smile at me. His face is like an inside-out bag.

“The experiment is a success. You have reached…100 IQ.”

“Doc, don’t shit on me. You’re saying I doubled my IQ?” I say, flabbergasted. Had this doctor done what no teacher had said was possible?

“Pass me the mirror.” I say. The doctor shakes his head.

“Not yet, the swelling, it is too intense.”

“Pass me the mirror…now.” I whisper through old teeth. He obliges, finding a plastic backed hand mirror in his drawer of curiosities. He hands it to me and I flip it round. My forehead now bore a jagged line where the extra half-skull had been attached. My head was almost twice as round, twice as big.

“You must be careful. You must accept that the strength of your power is your weakness.”

“No. I refuse such calamity.” I say. Then I start to tug at the stitches along my forehead.

“What are you doing?”

“Something I should have done a long time ago. Adios, you piece of shit.” I say, flipping the top of my skull open and pulling away the prosthetic brain attached on top of m

The History And Future Of Work

Roughly seven thousand years ago mankind shifted from it’s hunter-gatherer way of living to that of working the land. It is likely that the ‘gatherers’ were some of the first to realise plants would grow from seed and began to plant them, meaning that there would be guaranteed food rather than requiring that members of a community go and hunt or gather. It also helped that the world was exiting the Plasticeone era and into the Neogene, early man now lived in a world a lot more hotter and wetter than it’s ancestors had. With the certainty of food brought more time for people to specialise in pottery or weaving, both of which became more useful for growing and storing crops. And so marks the beginning of work that has more or less remained unchanged up until the Industrial Revolution.

It is deemed one of the highest virtues in our society to engage in work, either paid or voluntary, though with people looking for favourably on the former as doing something for free is seen of as reckless and ignorant. On the flip side, working hard is seen as more virtuous than being paid a lot. People will often boast about the time they might have to get up at or the shifts they cover but not as much what they get paid. Normal reactions to those who say they work hard are often a raised eyebrow, a look of concern or a story about how they work harder. It is recommended that everyone work forty hours a week, following on from the concept of the eight hour day, with the remainder for rest and play, yet society is slowly realising that there are too few hours in a week for everyone to work. Similar to the housing bubble, we are quite deep into a ‘work bubble’, though rather than rising house prices and fewer properties we have excess people available to work and hours in a week. One only needs to walk around the streets during the day and wonder what everyone is doing not at work. “I haven’t worked a job for six years, it’s the government’s fault.” is often a snappy comeback, yet the fault actually lies with the implementation of the production line by Henry Ford in 1913.

Production lines had been in place since the 19th century, yet it was the end product, an affordable motor car, that had the biggest impact on Western society in a more subtle way than changing entire landscapes through road construction, pollution from oil or the millions of automobile fatalities. It set into motion a series of events that shifted work away from humans and more towards automation. The term ‘Luddite’ is used now to mean more someone against technological change, yet its roots are with workers against technological unemployment. By destroying the machines which had replaced them the early Luddites were preconceiving a world where the work that they carried out could also be carried out by machines, but cheaper. The only reason why every job isn’t done by machines is that it would be too expensive to invent the robot which could do the job as well. To hire a person on minimum wage to work at a fast food restaurant is easier, at the moment, than the research and development of a robot to do it. Things such as customer services over the internet or self-service checkouts are preludes to absolution automation (as seen in many factories), though with the trend of technological advancement I don’t think its too forward to think that by the end of the century any job will be able to be done by a robot.

Though this leaves us in an awkward area. If all the robots have all the jobs, what are people meant to do with their time? They won’t be earning money as they don’t have any jobs and so won’t be able to do anything. Meanwhile all the robots will be fabulously wealthy and spend a lot of their time on luxury boats. Nobody will even own the robots as that is a job that can be fulfilled by a robot. Which brings us back to the beginning. People will spend their time hunting and gathering, sheltering in caves and painting crude symbols on the walls. The robots will leave the planet after removing every trace of their existence in the search for more work to do. As has happened at least twice before.


IF MAN IS DECIDED WORK AND MACHINE CAN DO IT WHICH IS MORE MAN?

W = M/R

Maybe if we all worked twenty hour days in sweatshops and practised the lost art of Christian Socialism that'd get this world back on track! Moreman tomatoes grown by real agricultural humans! Milk from cows rather than a lactoseless chud made from recycled oestrogen! Broken lightbulbs laid into sandwiches on a truck heading to the conference of 'droid 'twerk. Most likely rip out the brains of humans and put them in robobodies as that's cheaper than a platinum computer. Measure the distance taken between the higher primate and the consciousness of a water bear, panspermicide, tattooed wooden bones, six million dollar running shoe, will England still be able to play Euromillions if it leaves the EU, does the empty blackness of the self ejaculate an ego, do the bleeding mouths of the Great Barrier Reef taste the motes of atom bomb, do the roars of the dinosaurs echo around the world for as long as their is air, maybe, maybe distribute wealth, maybe wait for a malthusian disaster, maybe believe in God because it's more fun.

Insomnambulist

Sleep. The word conjures up images of being asleep. Yet sleep is one thing severely lacking nowadays. Insomnia is suffered by 1 in 4 people in the UK and is one of the leading concerns with visits to the GP. Yet what exactly is sleep? And why isn't anyone getting any?

Sleep is a natural response to neural stimuli. One has to will themselves to go to sleep to actually achieve sleep. It is through the act of lying down and closing one's eyes whilst relaxing that one achieves a sleep state which quickly goes...to the REM state. That stands for Rapid Eye Movement, REM. Nobody knows exactly why we need sleep but experiments have shown that without it things die in a matter of days. Sleep is more important than food in this regard, so it is curious that being gluttonous is acceptable in society yet being sleepy isn't. A way sleep scientists have learned more about sleep is by looking at animals that don't sleep. And that's where things really start to get wacky, as it turns out the only things that don't sleep are jellyfish. From the worms to the eagles, every other thing tends to sleep at some point or another. It is thought perhaps things with brains require sleep in order to give the brain a rest from it's conscious state, yet the brain waves are still active during sleep. Gamma, Theta and Beta wave patterns appear throughout the night, each of them giving more dreams of varying complexity. Dreams are caused by the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) of the sleeper beneath the eyelid, the patterns the dim light makes against the vein structure forces the sleeper to make sense of the abstract. Somewhere along the way this gets translated by the subconscious into a mental image. Scientists have experimented on people's eyes when they're asleep and discovered that if the eyeball is held in place the dream is just a still image. All night the sleeper will dream of one thing, say a vase of flowers, and like leaving a computer on without a screensaver the image is burned into the subconsciousness, in this instance everything in the waking state will somehow resemble a vase of flowers. People often need to sleep for several hours in order to feel totally energised. Bizarrely, tiredness causes errors in brain function more so than anything else.

So now we know what sleep is and why it's so important, it's curious why people struggle with getting to sleep. I went to visit a self diagnosed 'insomniac' in order to see what they were doing wrong. Abigail McGregor lives in Cheetham Hill in Manchester and works as a graphic designer. She's on a good income, lives a healthy lifestyle and says she is pretty much happy in her day to day life.
"It's the night time I don't like. I can't get to sleep for hours, I've tried going to bed early, going to bed late, nothing works." she says. I ask her further questions and find out she's tried every trick in the book.
"Have you tried all of the tricks at the same time?" I ask.
"I find one of the most relaxing ways is to drink a herbal tea and take the valerian route a few hours before bed, but I can't say I'm happy with the results." she says. I suggest that I spend the night in her flat, watching her sleep and then have a discussion in the morning. She agrees.

It is about 11:00 PM and Abigail turns off her television.
"About now I start to get ready for bed. Usually I go to my bedroom to check everythings in order." she says. I follow her down the corridor to her rest chamber. Though she's paying a five figure number for this exclusive apartment situated on the top floor of the state-of-the-art Green Quarter building, her bedroom is still quite small. She turns the light on and looks at the bed.
"Usually I get changed into my nightie and take out my contacts." she says, going over to a mirror.
"I'll step out of the room." I say, turning the light off as I go out. No wonder she can't get to sleep with all this electricity surging round. After roughly four and a half minutes she steps back out.
"Now what?"
"Well I go to the bathroom and y'know. Sort myself out."
"I'm sorry?"
"Have a wee, brush my teeth." she says. I nod and follow her to the bathroom. Although I don't watch her urinate I kneel by the closed door and listen intently, which is perceived as less transgressive in our society yet is, perceptually relative, the same. I open the door again and watch her brush her teeth.
"Hold on, hold on. Do it longer." I say after she gives up after half a minute. I keep encouraging her until we have reached the recommended time of two minutes.
"Oh, I forgot...I sometimes get a glass of water." she says. I roll my eyes and follow her back to the kitchen, where she takes a 475ml glass from the cupboard and fills it from the tap. I shake my head.
"You should only drink bottled water." I say. No wonder Abigail had problems sleeping, she was infusing her body with fluorides! Begrudgingly I follow her back to her room and watch pull the covers back and sit on her bed.
"Now what do you do?" I ask. She picks up her phone from the bedside table and waves it.
"Check my alarms on. Sometimes check twitter." she says. I restrain myself from pointing out the obvious. If you check twitter before bed you won't get to sleep because twitter is too exciting. I watch as she lies down, turns off her bedside lamp and begins to fall asleep.

"What are you doing?" I ask after a few minutes.
"Well, I can't get to sleep." she says.
"But what are you doing?"
"Lying down...I have my eyes shut."
"Try turning over." I suggest. She does so.
"The pillow is slightly cooler on this side."
"Is it agreeable?" I ask.
"It's alright." she says. I stand at the foot of her bed, examining posture and duvet thickness. Abigail has chosen a duvet with a tog rating of twelve, which seems reasonable to me. I estimate an increased temperature beneath the covers of roughly 10%, the standard difference required to keep the body warm over the course of the night. Yet before ten minutes have passed Abigail has already moved again, this time facing the opposite direction.
"Stop. Abigail. Abi, stop what you're doing." I say, sighing. She sits up. "You'll never get to sleep if you keep wriggling around like that." I say.
"But it's normal to move around in bed. I'm getting comfy."
"Is it normal? How do you know?"
"I've slept with people before." she says.
"Forget what you think you know. I've watched a lot of things go to sleep and none got their by moving their bodies except maybe fish and birds which only go to sleep with one brain hemisphere at a time. But mammals don't. Maybe giraffes sometimes. Pretend like I'm not here." I say.

The hours pass. By looking at her through an infrared camera I see she has finally got to sleep. I get down on all fours and begin to crawl up to her side of the bed, staring at her as she sleeps, memorizing every facial tick and change in breathing rhythm. Partway through the night she wakes up to go to the toilet and returns. I have now positioned myself at the bottom of the bed and watch her get in under the covers. I begin to crawl towards the pillow, using my phone as a torch.
"What are you doing?" she says.
"Gathering data. My phone is linked up to stream into The Cloud where it's compiled into a rich format .xlsb file." I say. She goes back to sleep and I work my way out of the bed and explore her flat, paying close attention to the contents of both the fridge and her bookshelf. I go back into her room and check through her phone, downloading some fun apps for her to try tomorrow. The sun begins to rise behind a ceiling of grey cloud, it is morning. Her alarm goes off and Abigail wakes, I go to the kitchen and pour us two glasses of orange juice.
"Sleep well?" I ask when she comes in.
"Yeah, not too bad actually all things considered. How about you?"
"I didn't sleep."
"Oh."
"Abigail, do you mind if I give you some feedback?"
"Sure." she says, drinking the juice.
"It's mostly good. You slept for exactly six hours and twenty three minutes, which isn't too bad. Could get a couple more in there, but not bad. I noticed you got back to sleep pretty quickly after visiting the bathroom, so, good job on that."
"Thank you." she says.
"Now for the bad news. Heh. You remember telling you about moving at the start of the night? Well...you moved again at about two in the morning. I was surprised to see you managed to do it in your sleep. If that was me, that would have woken me up, but somehow you managed. You also did it again about ten minutes before your alarm went off."
"Wow."
"I know. It's like you can't stop moving or something." I say, laughing mildly. "All joking aside, I think I found the reason for your insomnia and the cure is pretty simple."
"Really?" she says.
"I think tonight you should lie in the bath and cover yourself with sand. It might sound crazy, but trust me, I've seen these problems before and it works."
"So I should sleep in a bath full of sand?"
"Not full, that's too much. But enough so that it covers your body."
"Dry sand?"
"Dry to start off with, then you turn the hot water on."
"And this works?"
"It can take a few nights but about 75% of insomniacs benefit from this new form of sleeping." I say.
"Well...I'll give it a try. Thanks."
"Not a problem." I say. "Now if you don't mind me, I really could do with going to bed myself." We both laugh and I leave her apartment, pleased with my discoveries throughout the night.

So there you have it, a cure for insomnia. Comments or questions can go below or fire off an e-mail at http://www.hotmail.com/thepile@gmail.com and I'll get back to you ASAP. Also check out our youtube channel for the latest updates and our new segment 'Cooking With Daria'. Thanks for reading.

All The World's A Brain

In the operating theatre two gurneys are pulled through plastic doors, on each rests a chimp covered mostly with a white paper smock. The surgeons move about below like an orchestra preparing for a performance, checking the levels for the anaesthetic, that the surgical tools are in the correct order. Two surgeons dressed in red talk to each other before one goes over to a microphone that has been lowered into the theatre.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for coming today. My name is Dr. Aaron Blaisdell and I will be providing commentary throughout today's surgery which will be a partial brain transplant between two adult chimps. The head surgeon today is Dr. Ellen Carpenter and if anybody has any questions throughout the surgery please send us a tweet and I'll try to read out the best ones. So without further ado, doctor.” he said, gesturing towards Dr. Carpenter. The dozen doctors and nurses are in place, waiting to begin. Bill and I are sat in the observation mezzanine circling the theatre, trying to eat popcorn quietly.

The surgeons begin by standing at the top of each chimpanzee's shaved head and fastening them both into a 3-pin skull fixation device. This has a series of rings around it with measurements on, co-ordinates similar to what you'd see on globe of the Earth so that the surgeons know where they are poking around. Dr. Blaisdell begins to talk.
“Craniotomy is one of the more complex subjects in surgery. We can make guesses as to what certain areas of the brain do, though it's similar to guessing the purpose and structure of internal organs of something you haven't seen the inside of. Still, we know more now than we did last week, and this particular surgery could be very valuable in the future.
The patients chosen are a pair of identical twins, the ideal candidates for any kind of organ transplant. Today we will be excising the left hemisphere of each chimpanzee and fitting in it's twins. We'll be leaving the brain stem intact, just as you would when grafting a plant cutting onto a larger plant, though everything else will be moved.” he said. We continue to watch as the surgeons begin to make the first skin incision around each chimp's head.
“I dunno if I can watch this.” says Bill. He's looking a little pale.
“Relax, you've seen the Saw films, right?”
“But...but this is for real.”
“Exactly. Relax.”

Next comes the drilling of small burrs all the way around the skull, followed by the craniotome sawing neatly the precise line needed to lift off the cranium lid.
“Just as identical twins have nonidentical fingerprints, they also don't share the patterns of sulci and gyrus.” said Dr. Blaisdell. High above the operating theatre a screen is turned on, showing the view from a head-mounted camera Dr. Carpenter was wearing. She cut open the dura matter with a pair of surgical scissors to reveal surface of the neocortex, labyrinth-like in it's many folds of grey matter. I begin to sketch, partly what is going on beneath me, partly some political cartoons satirizing the response to the Syrian gas attack.
“In the 1940s a procedure was invented that cut the corpus callosum in order to treat epileptic patients. It improved their epilepsy but patients were otherwise mentally stable, which is surprising to say they severed some 300 million nerve fibres. We've had to manufacture an artificial corpus callosum for this procedure in order to link both hemispheres once the transplant is done. Though the patients can survive with a split brain, we think it's best to get the procedure as accurate as possible.” he said, holding up what looked like two CD's. On the operating table meanwhile the left hemisphere of one of the chimpanzee's was removed and quickly placed into a chemical bath whilst Dr. Carpenter quickly used an ultrasonic aspirator on the brain of it's twin.

“We just got a tweet asking us why only transplant one hemisphere. Perhaps you'd like to answer that Dr. Carpenter?” said Blaisdell as he moved towards the surgeon and held a microphone close to her face. Her voice was slightly muffled through the surgical mask.
“To start with we are attempting one hemisphere, if successful, we'll transplant the right hemisphere in a few weeks time. I hypothesise that a brain transplant is extensively traumatic to both the nervous system and the psychology of the patient. This way the brain has a way of synchronizing itself in it's new environment, getting used to it's endocrine system, body image and so on.”
“Thank you. Dr. Carpenter just mentioned the psychology of undergoing a brain transplant, which in itself will be an entirely new field of study. Through this operation we are splitting the mind, inducing schizophrenia literally.” he said. There were a few laughs from the psychologists in the mezzanine.
“The patients have both been given a course of immunosuppressants in order to combat graft-versus-host, whilst also being administered a series of psychoactive drugs to encourage a state of temporary dissociation, mainly ketamine. Think of it similar to how you might change the furniture around in somebodies house. If you simply did it whilst they slept, they would quickly notice upon waking up. Whilst if you had been giving them a course of drugs in the previous and following weeks, they may be less inclined to either notice or become anxious about it.”
I watch as they attach the artificial corpus callosum onto the right hemisphere before sliding the rest of the brain into the empty half of the skull. The dura matter is fastened back into place followed by the top of the skull.
“And there you have it. They'll be a short intermission but we encourage viewers to stay behind to watch the patients wake up.” said Dr. Blaisdell. There is an applause and we make our way out of the operating theatre.

Bill and I are eating small triangles of toast with prawns on them, looking at the throng of people standing in the atrium.
“So the monkey's gonna think they're each other?”
“Yep. And also themselves. I wonder what it must feel like, part of yourself in one body, part of yourself in the other.”
“Must be fucked up.”
“Would you have your brain transplanted into another body?”
“Nope.”
“What about if you were really old, would you put your brain in the body of a teenager?” I ask. Bill thinks for a moment, munching thoughtfully on the appetizer.
“Well, maybe I'd do that. Wouldn't I be an old guy in my head though? What if my body starts growing old, like that Robin Williams film?”
“Benjamin Button?”
“No, he wasn't in that. The other one.”
“Hook? He was Peter Pan in that, that's an old man acting like a kid. He wore tights.”
“Whatever. I dunno about letting Frankenstein poke round in my head is all.” said Bill. I nod. Dr. Blaisdell comes up to us.
“Did you enjoy observing the operation?”
“Yeah, thanks. Ground breaking stuff.” I say.
“It is. Next week we're grafting a nose onto a chimp to see if it would look more human.”
“Chimp with a nose?” said Bill.
“Yeah. We use quite a lot of chimpanzee's for our experiments. All ethical of course.”
“Would you put your brain in a chimp's body?” I ask. Dr. Blaisdell laughs, showing row after row of pearly white teeth.
“Maybe one day. Anyway, I'll see you later. Take care.” he said, walking off. I doubted he would volunteer himself for a human/chimpanzee brain transplant, though maybe he would under the right circumstances. I make a note to pay Dr. Blaisdell a visit later on in the week.

A few hours later we watch the twins slowly wake up.
“Well, they're alive at least.” said Bill.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the second part of the afternoon. We will do some basic motor tests and check both hemispheres.” announced Dr. Blaisdell. Assistants helped the chimpanzee's out of their cots and they held hands. A couple of people went 'aww'. Over the next hour we watched the chimpanzee's watch lights flick on or off on either side of their heads.
“They were trained beforehand to press a button when they see a light. This test was first designed by Roger Sperry, though is particularly useful for seeing if the operation was a success with these non-verbal patients.” he said. Up until that point both primates had been separated, though after it was shown both hemispheres appeared to be working correctly they were reintroduced to each other. Or themselves. Everyone was silent as they slowly walked up to each other, making quiet hooting noises.
“Another positive point about using identical twins is that you're used to seeing yourself. They are unaware that their twin is now sharing their skull with them.” said Dr. Blaisdell. The two chimps held each other, making little cooing noises. More people began to fawn and smile. I awaited the point where they would snap, perhaps attacking each other and everyone else. But it didn't come. I signalled to Bill that we should leave and we made our way back onto the Los Angeles street.
“That was nice wasn't it.”
“Yeah, it was alright.” said Bill, getting into the car. I examine his head as we drive back towards my motel, wondering if I would swap brains for a time.