The Highwire with Del Bigtree - THE DAWN OF AUGMENTED HUMANITY

Episode Date: February 25, 2024

With Elon Musk announcing the first human has had his Neuralink device implanted in their brain, we do a deep dive into the history of implantable technology. From its CIA and military roots to the current developers whose shocking admissions should cause us all to pause. Jefferey and Del also look at the new Apple Vision Pro and its possible implications on our society.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Apple just released its Apple Vision Pro. And you can see here by some of this video we're showing, it basically allows your reality, whatever you're seeing, to become your desktop. So you can make a computer screen out of your home, out of your wall there. You have apps you can grab with your hands. It's kind of a fully interactive experience.

The problem is you have these electrified ski goggles attached to your face the whole time. And that's how you're controlling things and seeing things. But for the people with 88, ADHD, this is probably going to be really great. But this week, something also happened. So these have been now put out onto the streets, and it got kind of weird. We're starting to see a new type of human, and it looks like this. You know, I've said before, I don't know how you're ever

going to get those first people to decide to sign up on a rocket ship going to Mars, like a one-way ticket. I think they just convinced me I may want to be on one of those rockets. I am not ready to live in that world. That is going to drive me crazy. It's already hard enough to deal with the people that are talking themselves and then you realize, you know, oh, they have earbuds in. Now we're going to watch this going on everywhere we go. People standing in your way like totally, you know, consumed by a video game. They're playing standing in the way of a stairway or an elevator or anything you're trying to do in your normal life. Yeah.

For the people wearing it, forget about situational awareness. Like Apple needs to come out with an app or a setting for like, I'm going to get robbed in a second. so maybe help me out. Right. No one's going to see that coming with those goggles on. So most of us have lived long enough to see this very rapid progression from the handheld devices, even little laptop computers to wearable devices to now we're in the section of implantable devices. So you have this tech marching forward trying to get closer and closer to our bodies.

And now we're at the point where we first are now injecting it into our bodies. This is Elon Musk tweet from last week. He says, the first human received an implant from at NeuroLink yesterday and is recovering well. And initial results show promising neuron spike detection. So that, according to him on his own platform with his own company, is what he says. So this is a little balance on the other side from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. They've been tracking Neurlink and also the animal welfare used at UC Davis in the testing of this. They have a statement on this tweet.

put out, and they say this, the statement has not been independently verified. It is important to remember that Musk has a long track record of misleading the public about Neurolink's supposed developments. In addition, NeurLink has a well-documented history of conducting unnecessary, sloppy experiments in monkeys, pigs, sheep, and other animals that raise serious concerns about the safety of its device. Past experiments revealed serious safety concerns stemming from the devices invasiveness and rushed actions by company employees. And you can see some of the reporting on this. This is Daily Mail. inside Elon Musk's NeuroLink lab where 1,500 animals have been killed and test monkeys were subjected to extreme suffering.

And so there's kind of two sides of this equation here, but if you really want to know what this is, this implantable brain chip, for a complete non-explanation of this, let's look at Neurilinks promo. All right. It's kind of like a swatch, but we just injected into your brain. With bad club music. Really bad club music. I'm so happy now. Right.

So let's do a little bit of a deeper dive into this technology because people are going, wait a minute, we're here? We've been hearing about this for a long time. So in the medical literature and studies on this, you go back to about 1954, and this is one of the studies talking about this type of work when it's talking about implanting things in the brains of living animals. So it says just over 50 years ago, psychologist James Olds and Peter Milner worked at McGill University in Canada, working at McGill University in Canada, carried out their pioneering experiments,

which discovered that rats would repeatedly press levers to receive tiny jolts of current injected through electrodes implanted deep within their brains. Well, that sounds interesting. They're trying to find the pleasure centers of the brain, and they apparently found them pioneering work. But it was interesting what was happening at McGill University. at that time. This is out of the McGill Tribune. This is in Montreal, and it says this, the title, Declassified Mind Control at McGill University. What do they say about that? They say this. Project MK Ultra, the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA Mind Control Project, used unconsenting patients to test the effects of sensory deprivation, LSD, electroshock therapy, and other methods of controlling the human

psyche. Although it may sound like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel, these experiments were conducted at McGill with devastating effects on the patients involved. It consists of 144 different sub-projects, that's MK Ultra, related to the control of human behavior, which were carried out in 89 different institutions, including universities. So these are CIA experiments conducted on Americans and Canadian citizens. And some of these documents, most of them have been destroyed, but they became public in the 70s. And this is one of these unclassified documents. This is Project MK Ultra subproject 94. I believe this was from 1959.

Listen to what they're working with here. Right alongside universities, like McGill University, it says the purpose of this subproject is to provide a continuation of activities in selected species of animals. Miniaturized stimulating electrode implants in specific brain centers will be utilized. And it also goes on to say in this document, initial biological work on technique and brain locations essential to providing conditioning and control of animals has been completed. So again, it's all about control when it comes into these documents and the military. Well, at the same time, the Frank Church had his church committee.

This was a 16-month investigation in America. It was very public. This was actually a historical committee. And you can see the document here in 1977 joint committee. They looked at all types of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the work they were doing covertly against the American people. This led to a lot of oversight and a lot of really big aha moments of what the U.S. government was doing behind the scenes. And so at that point, you had this like unconsenting experimentation on American people with this type of experiment. Kind of went a little bit underground. You didn't hear much about this stuff. And then in the two, in around 2000, it really starts to pop onto the scene. And here's 2014 headline DARPA program to develop brain implants for mental

disorders. So you remember DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. That's DOD. Darpa actually had the diffuse project. That was Ralph Barrett. He submitted that project. So again, you have these military underpinnings working with this implantable technology. But then 2015 comes along, and Wired Magazine does a great article here. It said, what will personal computers look like in 20 years time? And they interviewed a couple people. One of them was Adam Adizinski. He's a British professor of computer science. And he says this, remember, 20, years at that time of 2035, he says personal computing will become intrapersonal and intracellular. Each human neuron will be hijacked by a self-growing, self-reparing molecular network.

Computers will be networks of polymer filaments growing inside and together with a human. Seeds of the networks will be injected into embryos in the first month of their development. Like, where's this guy getting this stuff? They will form a gigantic network inside the brain. Computers will be inside us. They will span all living creatures in united computing network. Now, these aren't just like postgraduate people that had some crazy ideas. These are the luminaries working in this field at that time.

And it's not just one or two of them. Here's another guy. Charles Lieber. He's one of the top people working with this type of technology at that time. He says same kind of vibe. Personal computing will become very, very personal. Currently, our interface is through the peripheral nervous system, input by touch and voice, output to eyes and ears.

In a very personal future, we will work directly. from our brains integrating 3D nanoelectronics with our neural networks. We have already created the blueprint for innovative or cyborg tissue and recently shown how electronics can be injected and intermingled with the brain. So you've got a lot of brain activity. They really are targeting this brain from MK Ultra all the way to present day, all the way to must implant. And a quick side note there, Charles Lieber had his own research group at Harvard University. And for about 10 years, he received about around $15 million from agencies like NIH, DOD, and this is the headline just recently for a good old Charles Lieber.

In Boston court, a superstar of science falls to Earth. It was found out that he was also working as a what was called a strategic scientist for the Wuhan University of Technology, basically providing them some of this tech. And he was also a contractual participant to what was called the China's Thousand Talents Program. So he was sharing this tech with China. So there's clearly a first mover advantage that people are racing. Countries and governments are racing to try to get to this future that they're talking about here.

And one of the people that really has talked about this potential future is Ray Kurzweil. You may know him. He's written several books on this. This is his main focus. One of the essays he wrote in a book titled The Scientific Conquest of Death, he writes this. By 2030, six years from now, electronics will utilize molecular-sized circuits. The reverse engineering of the human brain will have been completed. It will be routine practice to have billions of nanobots, nanosized robots, coursing through

the capillaries of our brains. There it is again. Communicating with each other over a wireless local area network, as well as with our biological neurons and with the internet. One application will be to provide full immersion virtual reality and encompass all of our senses. I mean, this is, again, the reason we're reading this, reason we're showing this is you have the people that see Elon Musk and you see this, you know, kind of upbeat disco dance promo video and they're going to help someone walk. They're going to help someone see. Okay, great. That sounds like great technology.

But behind the scenes, the people that have been developing this for 30 years plus military, these people saying we want to course. We want millions coursing through your brain. every capillary is going to have a local area network connected to the Bluetooth. I mean, these is very interesting. And so you get to this point, how are they going to do this? How are they going to start testing that type of technology? Right. And you have, you have a professor of ethics here, and he wrote this.

This is just throwing out there in this whole mix. He says this, titled, A Modest Proposal for Suicide as a facilitator of transhumanism. Now, transhumanism, remember, is the merger of man and machine. it's which Klaus Schwab gets really excited about because he thinks we're here now. And this ethics professor writes this. Perhaps the most potent argument against suicide in modern secular societies is that it constitutes wastage of the agent's own life. However, the force of this argument could be mitigated if the suicide occurred in the context

of experimentation, including self-experimentation. But as long as research ethics codes for human subjects continue to dwell in the shadow of the Nuremberg Trivarez. trials, a very high bar will be set on what counts as informed consent. Nowadays, more than 70 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the only obvious reason for such a high bar is the insurance premiums that universities and other research institutes would need to bear if they liberalize the terms of which subjects could offer themselves in service of a risky enhancement research.

I mean, I've never heard the Nuremberg be talked about like that. The Nuremberg trials or the code that came out of that. And that code was meant to protect people. And here we are so many decades later with people and professors and ethicists saying, we can maybe tinker with this little bit because we have this really fancy new technology we need to start testing on people.

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing if you think, obviously informed consent is the heart of our nonprofits name, the informing consent action network. This is something that is alarming to us. And we've watched it. I've said the vaccine program is already flying in the face of informed consent consent, you're not giving consent. When you force someone to get a vaccine or they can't go to work or they can't go to school, that's coercion. That's against the Nuremberg Code. So it's already under attack, but I can already see the ads. Considering committing suicide, well, why do you try NeuroLink? We need experiments and we need people. And if you're going to die anyway, come on over. Maybe we'll pay your family. I mean, it's an amazing concept, right? And you see where it's coming from. How are you going to try these technologies on people?

because, I mean, here will be the argument, right? Well, you have to be sane to sign off on this consent and who's sane would sign off on consenting to have something put in your brain that is probably and let's be honest. It's going to be like pong, right? I mean, I don't know who would be the first one signing up. You're getting like the first version of this.

I mean, if you want pong in your brain, that's what you're about to get, I'm sure. I think I'll wait till we're like at mortal combat level and then let's talk, you know. Right. And so at the same time, these conversations are happening, the FDA, just two months ago, released this final rule on informed consent. This is the Federal Register, FDA HHS final rule. It says the final rule permits

an institutional review board IRB to waive or alter certain informed consent elements or to waive the requirement to obtain informed consent under limited conditions for certain FDA regulated minimal risk clinical investigations. So let's pause for a second because the inventor of the MRNA technology, one of them won the Nobel Prize, said everything in this vaccine is totally natural. It's all part of what you have in your body. There's lipid nanoparticles and some mRNA. That would probably be minimal risk at the beginning of this conversation. So who decides minimal risk in this future we're going into this possible dystopian future? This is a very interesting space for the FDA and institutional review boards to have. And this is a conversation

because on the other side of this, because the tech community and the medical community are almost indistinguishable at this point because they're merging this. And on the other side of that wall that's being held back by informed consent and rational people in medicine are people that look and sound like this. Take a listen. The singularity I put in 2045, at that point, the non-biological intelligence that we create that year will be about a billion times greater than all biological human intelligence. There are a growing number, maybe a few hundred people, who are seeing the writing on the wall,

that these technologies are coming this century. And they will allow humanity, if we, as human beings, as a species, if we choose, and it's a critical concept, if we choose, we could build godlike, massively intelligent machines with capacity. is, oh God, trillions of trillions of times above ours. In my mind, it's definitely going beyond biology. But I don't define human as just biological.

I mean, we're already taking steps beyond biology. There's not a single organ in the human body, including regions of the brain. We are not already creating substitutes or extensions or augmentations. So if somebody has an artificial pancreas, are they not human? If they have a neural implant in their brain, are they not human? How about two neural implants? So maybe you can have up to 10, then you're human, but 11, you're not human anymore. If you have these nanobots, blood cell-sized robots in the brain

that actually have computers interacting with your biological neurons, is that still a human? Well, one nanobots probably okay. How about 500 million nanobots? We are going to become gods, period. If you don't like it, get off. You don't have to contribute. to participate. But if you're going to interfere with me becoming God, you're going to have big trouble. God will have warfare. Wow, some real light, beautiful ideas there. You know, Jeffrey, this is a

topic that I'm trying to be more, I guess, mature about it a little bit, because there's a part of me that now says, I mean, obviously, we want to push back against any atrocity against human beings. We want to make sure that nobody, that everybody has a right to live the life and the pursuit of happiness, right? The American dream. But when I think about this, you know, do we just push back completely? Because I can't think of a single technology through the years that every generation worried about and said this is going to be the end of us that stopped. Did we stop any technology advancement ever? And I don't know. And I just, just can't imagine this one's going to stop either, right? There's going to be people putting computers

in their brains. And, you know, and I guess, you know, in some ways, when we put all of our energy on saying stop and screaming, reporting, which is what we're doing right now, certainly stop and think about it a minute, you know, are we wasting the time we should have been using to get involved with these technologies and make sure that maybe there's good that can be done? You know, maybe people that in wheelchairs can walk, and there's so many great applications, but if all the good people are trying to stop it and the bad people are trying to become gods, then that's how we watch these technologies

then just get used for harm. And maybe somehow, some way, we've got to figure out how to embrace the advancements that are happening, create freedom so that you don't have to do it if you don't want. But when I look at this, if I look at people, I think a lot about it. Ironically, I talked about Alex Jones earlier in the show,

But one of the things he said during that interview that has stuck with me is he said about Elon Musk. Elon Musk would sort of be the perfect example of the Illuminati. And that's these people that actually believe they are trying to save humanity. They're worried, he said, if I'm paraphrasing, but they're so worried about the AI technology takeover, the computer takeover of the world that they believe human beings to the fight for humanity, we've got to create super humans by meshing them with their technology so they can fight for humanity against that just pure technology and that the Illuminati, like they're fighting for humanity.

So it's a really wild concept. And I'm, you know, I know we're on the fence. Every time we're going to bring up Elon Musk, we're having a debate, you know, about where he's really at. But I think, you know, there's people that sit in the gym, you know, six, seven hours a day that can lift a thousand pounds. I can't lift a thousand pounds. Now, are they more to advance in some way? Sure.

Well, there's a situation where you need to lift a thousand pounds. There's someone that's going to do that better than I am. Or, you know, there's people at higher learning institutions that spend, you know, years and years just pushing their brain to the max and, you know, getting into sciences and maths or things that maybe I'm not doing. Is this really any different? Like, what happens in a world where someone plants a chip and they want to be on the internet and using, you know, some chat GPT all the time? does that really affect me? Or is it going to just be different parts of society? Natural ones, ones that consider themselves advanced?

I don't know. I mean, it's just, but it doesn't look like a beautiful future, I guess, is what bothers us, right? Yeah, and I think about, you're mentioning other technologies you can't think of. I'm thinking about the nuclear bomb. I mean, that's the only thing that I could see where that was a runaway program that was developed in secret, then kind of rolled out to the public in a really shocking way during World War. too. No. But eventually, I mean, the testing, you can go back and look at the testing what has done to the environment. But that eventually, humanity got together and said, look, these crazy

scientists in the corner of this, in the corner of this segment of population need to kind of stop what we're doing. We need to make some laws around this. We need to make some treaties around this. But with this type of technology, I mean, we're reporting on it so people get a different view because obviously they're seeing it's going to give sight to the blind. It's going to mean, very godlike. I mean, it's, so you got to understand what you're really signing up for, because they're asking for volunteers now for this from the public. So you really got to understand, like, this is the infancy of this program. And look at the intertwined way it's been working with the military for so long. And there's a lot of people. The big issue I have with this is that

the luminaries in this space are talking about crunching data, talking about intelligence, talking about God. God has empathy. God has consciousness. God has morality. I don't hear any of them talking about that. The guy, the last guy you just, Robert C. said, I'm going to go to war with you if you don't basically take the chips I have because I'm going to be a God. These aren't the type of people. These are the type of early people you saw on the nuclear program saying, I am death, the destroyer of worlds. You don't want these. That's my concern with this, is you see that type of mentality creating this. Now, if they make a chip for empathy and consciousness and things like that, then let's have a conversation. But right now we're talking, what are we talking about?

What's intelligence to one person may not be to another person? Well, look, I think my point is I hope someone is making that chip for empathy and human connection. You know, God knows we could use more of that in this world. Hopefully we learn to find that in ourselves and start talking to each other, start communicating. Part of, you know, I think the need for this is, you know, the media, as we've said, earlier is just tearing us apart. You know, when we see how they talk to us, when they see how little they trust us, when, you know, that is why this is all going where it's at, that we are just too stupid to take care of ourselves.