The Economist - USA (2020-09-05)

68 Science & technology The EconomistSeptember 5th 2020

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mapping of where (and when) casualties

were suffered, broadly confirmed the find-

ings from the interviews.

Crucially, this fieldwork revealed much

about the casualties various types of units

can take before survivors lose the will to

fight. A typical fighting force, it is generally

thought, will collapse sometime before a

third of it has been destroyed. Some Kurd-

ish and isunits in Iraq, however, fought on

in a co-ordinated fashion after sustaining

far more grievous losses. Artis therefore

tried to classify and measure the belief sys-

tems behind such remarkable bravery.

One finding was that a fighter’s identity

must have fully “fused” with those of his

brothers in arms. The top priority of such

fighters must, says the think-tank’s boss,

Richard Davis, have shifted from family to

another cause, a transcendental ideal that

has become so “sacralised” that it would

not be traded away for anything. Artis’s re-

searchers identified fighters who had men-

tally downgraded their families to second

or third place. Some were Peshmerga, who

most valued “Kurdeity”—a love for the

homeland steeled with commitment to fel-

low Kurds and Kurdish culture. Many is

captives, for their part, had shunted their

families into third place behind the caliph-

ate and sharia. Units girded with those be-

liefs had fought on effectively even after

seven-tenths of their comrades had fallen.

The broad outline of this analysis

would, of course, be familiar to any student

of military history. Fanaticism has long

been recognised as a plus in a soldier, be it

the Zealots of ancient Israel, the Roman

Catholic conquistadors of the Americas, or

the Nazis’ 12th ss“Hitler Youth” Panzer Di-

vision. What is different about the Artis ap-

proach is its attempt to quantify, or at least

to approximate, what is going on. That

should help both in assessments of an ene-

my’s performance on the battlefield, and in

designing training and indoctrination pro-

grammes for your own side.

Based on their work in Iraq, Artis’s 45 or

so behavioural scientists have now led

studies on willingness to fight and die for

customers in 21 countries as diverse as Brit-

ain, Egypt and Guatemala. The goal is to in-

corporate such insights into predictive

software. One organisation working on do-

ing this is the United States Air Force Acad-

emy’s Warfighter Effectiveness Research

Centre (werc), in Colorado. werc’s re-

searchers are using Artis’s data to quantify

how different levels of the will to fight alter

the performance of tasks. For example, ac-

cording to Lieutenant-Colonel Chad Tos-

sell, werc’s director, aircraft pilots whose

wills are flagging are unlikely to buckle

completely, but their reaction times typi-

cally slow down. His team is developing

equations that reflect this. These are then

fed into a version of “Far Cry”, a video game

that the air force is modifying to incorpo-

ratewill-to-fightcalculationsintocombat

simulations.

Comparinghowunbloodedcadetsplay

thegamewiththeapproachtakenbycom-

batveteranswillpermitwerctocompile

dataonhowexperience,sex,ageandother

factorsaffectthespeedwithwhichplayers

dothingslikethrowingtheirvirtualselves

ontoa grenadetosavetheircomrades.How

mucha willingnesstoperformsuchanac-

tionina gametranslatesintobehaviouron

thebattlefieldremainstobeseen.Butthe

hope,Lieut-Colonel Tossellsays, isthat

thisstudywill,withintwoyears,helpthe

airforcetonudgerecruitsintocombatpo-

sitionsthatmakethemostoftheirlevelof

willtofight.Theresearch,headds,hasal-

readyledtogreateremphasisintrainingon

thetranscendental ideals that underpin

America’ssupportforitsowndrivingideo-

logicalcreed:liberaldemocracy. 7

I

n idle moments, people sometimes

dream about the future. Of cars that can

drive themselves. Of travelling to other

planets. Of moving objects by the power of

thought. Whichever particular dream you

have, though, Elon Musk is probably trying

to make it real. Self-driving cars and travel

to Mars are the provinces of two of his

firms, Tesla and SpaceX respectively. Mov-

ing objects by the power of thought is the

province of a third, Neuralink. And on Au-

gust 28th, at a presentation broadcast over

the internet, Mr Musk showed off the firm’s

progress. The highlight was the appearance

of Gertrude, a pig with a chip implanted

into her brain.

Reading the brain’s electrical signals, a

technique called electroencephalography

(eeg), started more than 100 years ago and

is now routine. It generally involves plac-

ing electrodes non-invasively on the scalp,

though it sometimes requires the invasive

insertion of wires into the scalp or the

brain itself.

Non-invasive eegprovides useful in-

formation, and can even be employed to do

things like playing simple computer games

via software which interprets the signals

received and turns them into instructions.

It is, though, a crude approach to monitor-

ing the activity of an organ that contains

85bn nerve cells and trillions of connec-

tions between them. Invasive eegoffers

higher resolution readings from those

nerve cells, albeit at greater risk because of

the surgery involved. The device Gertrude

carries, known technically as a brain-com-

puter interface (bci), carries invasiveness

one stage further still by making the eegre-

corder a potentially permanent implant.

Signals from implants such as this

might be employed to control a prosthetic

limb, or even a real one that brain or spinal-

cord injury has deprived of its normal

nerve connections. They might also be

used to control non-medical machinery, if

someone thought it worth the risk of hav-

ing a bciimplanted to do this. And it is pos-

sible to use them to send signals in the op-

posite direction, too, to give instructions to

the brain rather than receive them. That

might be used to generate signals which

suppress an incipient epileptic seizure.

Neuralink’s bci, the size of a British tup-

penny piece, carries 1,000 flexible elec-

trode threads, each of which has a diameter

less than a quarter of that of a human hair.

This flexibility is important because the

brain moves around in the skull and the

electrodes must be able to accommodate

this movement while continuing to work.

The device communicates wirelessly, and

is recharged by induction. This means that,

unlike many previous attempts to build

bcis, it requires no skin-penetrating cable

that might admit infections to the body.

Along with this improved interface

Neuralink has built a robot that will im-

plant it. To do so, the robot first takes a

high-resolution scan of the recipient’s

brain. Using this, it is able to sew the elec-

trode threads into place with a precision

that avoids any blood vessels in the area.

That, Mr Musk said, reduces the risk of

damage during surgery. The robot can put

the interface in place in less than an hour,

he said, though it cannot yet open the skull

in order to do so. General anaesthesia is

not, he said, needed for the procedure.

The highlight of the show, though, was

Elon Musk’s vision of what is to come

takes another snuffle forward

Brain-computer interfaces

And pigs may drive