People are upgrading themselves into a new species with esper powers

One day when it was raining, when Bill was cycling, the truck in front of him suddenly braked. Bill simply can't react. The impact caused him to be paralyzed from the chest down.

Bill's life now depends on the body functions he retains, with the help of technology. For example, the voice control helps him to pull the curtain in the room or adjust the angle of the bed automatically.

With activities that technology cannot support, he needs to be looked after 24/7.

Bill never met Anne. She is a Parkinson's patient with trembling hands but still tries to look at her makeup. Neither did they know Stephen, who was blind in adulthood by a degenerate condition. Stephen depends on his sister, every time he needs to move out of the house.

Imagined, the three of them were like characters in an overly funny story, a blind man, a guy with paralysis, and a Parkinson's patient who entered the bar. But in fact, Bill, Anne and Stephen combined their life stories together to create a new documentary called I Am Human .

The film is being screened at the Tribeca Film Festival following the footsteps of three underprivileged patients, entering the land of revolutionary brain treatment experiments. In it, scientists will open their skulls, insert them inside the electrodes in the hope of helping each person regain what they have lost.

For Bill, it's the ability to move the lower body. For Anne is the ability to control movements and with Stephen is his eyesight. All three are working with scientists to face risks to find 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 a biological entity as we are, but also promises to incorporate neurological technologies that allow us to go beyond our own physical limits. .

It is a future when chips attached to the brain can allow us to possess superhuman abilities.

Taryn Southern, the film's co-director, said she started thinking about the same brain in Black Mirror and Westworld , films that exploit the thriving relationship between people and technology. She found herself fascinated by sci-fi, simulating how computers could participate in human evolution.

Electronic machines not only improve and upgrade us, those machines really change humanity. " But there seems to be a disconnection between the ideas we see in those movies, with what is actually happening in the real world ," Southern said.

Black Mirror and Westworld, films that exploit the thriving relationship between people and technology.

But Southern is not the only one who shows passion in this topic. Other documentaries introduced at the Tribeca Film Festival also exploit similar stories: Almost Human look at the relationship between the people and the robots they create; Universal Machine, a short film, tells about the confrontation between a woman and artificial intelligence.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have lived with a brain-computer interface, technologies that have been developed by science since the 1970s. Some experts predict this number will reach 1 million. In the next decade, when science and technology become more and more sophisticated.

" Real life is performing things even better than science fiction ," said Elena Gaby, co-director of I am human with Southern.

Even so, the activities within our brain are not well understood. And the benefits that we exploit from this kind of technology have just begun to appear.

A brain contains about 100 billion neurons, each of which is " as complex as the entire city of Los Angeles " with about 500 trillion connections, said David Eagman, a neurologist in the film.

The methods that science is using to treat Bill, Stephen and Anne are mainly in the process of testing, without any guarantee of their safety and success.

" Interestingly, we can now count each step accurately, count calories consumed, rearrange genomes, take blood and measure heart rate, but we hardly have any insight about his brain, "said Bryan Johnson, the founder and CEO of the Kernel, a neuroscience startup.

" We just know a small piece of our interior, most of the rest is still a black box ."

"We just know a small piece of our interior, most of the rest is still a black box."

Mysteries within the brain create a suspenseful fear in I Am Human . When you follow the process Bill, Stephen and Anne struggled with the decision to chip into their brains, it was a much more difficult reality than anything in the Black Mirror .

"Someone is cutting into your brain ," said Anne in the film. " And you can't know what will happen after that."

After ideological struggles, she finally decided on deep brain stimulation testing, a procedure that works by implanting electrodes in the brain to stimulate specific regions (in Anne's case, she needs to reduce extremism in the motor system).

The method proved to be very successful for Parkinson's patients. The chips send " data " out of the brain and back up an electric current that runs into Anne's brain area, freeing her from constant tremors.

Stephen began experimenting with another treatment, called Argus , that involves implanting a chip beneath the eye that is connected to electrodes in the brain.

Bill, who was paralyzed from the chest down, volunteered to test a brain-computer interface , hoping it could restore the connections between the brain and nerves in the body that were broken after the incident. accident.

To " retrain " his brain, Bill looked at a virtual arm on the screen, imagining himself moving his arm.

Gathering neurological data from there, a group of scientists will build algorithms that encode Bill's intention to move, and then the signal is sent to the electrodes implanted in the arm and the table. hand. The idea they aimed for was: this brain interface - this computer will help Bill control his own muscles.

" It's a future with a little something like Star Trek, " Bill said on the screen, with wires hanging from the top of his head. " This seems to be something that has just been brought out from science fiction."

Brain interface - the computer will help Bill to control his own muscles.

At first glance, I Am Human is a scientific documentary, with a wealth of information about the human brain and recent advances in neuroscience.

It involves more than a dozen neuroscientists who will lead viewers into their labs, talking about the technical challenges of creating a working chip inside. human skull.

However, behind those scenes, the film's central question is more about a existential problem: What makes us human? And how can technology upgrade our species - by helping some people regain the capabilities they have lost and ordinary people beyond their limits before?

Brain-computer interfaces promise to help blind people see again, restore hearing to deaf people and bring a sense of body control to us. But in the second half of the film, viewers will follow some scientists and entrepreneurs, like Johnson, who believes that neurological technology will soon give us new super powers.

What will happen, if in addition to cure Stephen's blindness, can we really improve eyesight so he can see in the dark?

What if a device could allow Bill to not only move his hand again, but also compose the text with only his thoughts? Can we cure depression? Can we create a twist that only needs to be rotated a bit to make people more sympathetic?

Can we create a twist that only needs to be rotated a bit to make people more sympathetic?

It is not a science fiction scenario. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have invested in a brain-computer interface to enhance people's capabilities. Musk's Neurink aims to improve awareness, enabling us to compete with AI in the future.

Zuckerberg's idea to do it is like a thinking reader. Johnson's start-up company, Kernel, is working to create a brain interface, enabling the development of real-world applications, based on high-resolution brain processing.

"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 ministry. movie. " So the problem now is just to choose what we want to be."

The director of I Am Human wanted to show the idea of ​​empowerment in her film. "When I look at new ways of communicating with the brain, I think things like these will also become interesting new options for people ," Southern said.

"I find that the idea of ​​upgrading people - expanding our abilities and senses, goes beyond what we think is normal - very interesting . "

Back in the present, the most evolved machine-people at the moment are clearly not the same as Musk's, Zuckerberg's, or anyone in Silicon Valley's elite. They are now disabled people like Bill, Stephen and Anne, with a small apparatus in the brain that helps them to return to live as normal people.