A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence and Bio-Neural Engineering of Human IQ and Talent
Rick N. M. N. R. Garlikov

Nearly 1600 years ago, in 1991, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was introduced in two different presentations at the 10th annual meeting of the Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, in what used to be San Francisco, a city in California, when California was there.  “Functional” MRI provided virtual, rudimentary images of the brain functioning in its myriad ways.  It was believed at the time to show ‘thinking’ in its broadest meaning and form, including perceiving, remembering, feeling emotions, as well as active reflective, analytical, creative self-directed thought, which at the time was thought to be rare, since most laboratory subjects were either college students or registered voters.

According to http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/history-fMRI:

John (Jack) Belliveau, at the time a research fellow working with Bruce Rosen ... mapped the changes in cerebral blood volume (CBV) following neural activation in a subject responding to a simple visual stimulus. His results represented the first unambiguous images of human brain activity changes observed with MR….

A few days later, … a video … by postdoctoral fellow Kenneth Kwong  … demonstrated MRI detection of brain activation based on changes in deoxyhemoglobin concentration, and thus anticipated the importance of blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) contrast for functional imaging. …

The 1991 SMRM meeting proved a watershed moment for magnetic resonance imaging. Prior to the landmark presentations of Belliveau's and Kwong’s studies, relatively few saw the potential of MRI for functional imaging. [Those papers and other] work presented at this meeting ushered in the era of functional MRI and thus a revolution in the neuroimaging field.

[Author’s note: At that time, there were few enough people on the planet that two or three names – a forename (‘first’ or ‘given’ name) and surname (‘family’ or ‘last’ name) and sometimes also a middle name – were sufficient to identify and distinguish most people from each other, though on occasion there were more than one person with the same two names, particularly when the surname was common in a country at that time such as Smith in America and England, Kim in Korea, Satō in Japan, and Cohen in Israel, or Khan in the rest of the middle east.]

That unleashed a frenzy of fMRI research associating just about every kind of mental activity with an area of the brain (and later other organs and tissues).  The thinking at the time was that knowing specifically where mental events took place (at first in just the brain) explained how thinking worked.  It wasn’t until 2215, more than 200 years later that that was no longer the conventional wisdom among most neuroscientists, since anatomy and geography do not explain functionality.  When it was long believed that the brain as a whole organ was the seat of thought, no one believed that explained how thinking worked, but once fMRI’s narrowed the location for specific kinds of mental activity, suddenly everyone went brain dead and thought that, like property value in real estate and place value in arithmetic, location mattered. 

But clearly (except to neuroscientists of the time and the public that believed their pop culture video presentations and the occasional print article while some people still knew how to read before it was considered too hard and abandoned for a long time) knowing where things are occurring does not necessarily let you know how they work.  Yet, otherwise intelligent people believed that the knowing that activity took place in a certain area of the brain such as the hippocampus or prefrontal cortex, explained how and why it worked.  That not only ignored thinking which was clearly diffused throughout many areas of the brain and similar thinking in a new part of the brain after trauma in some cases, but it did not explain how specific mental elements (e.g., anger, love, or pleasure) found their way into specific areas or how the brain knew that anger and love or pleasure were different things with different logic or causes that needed to be filed in specific places.  And it did not explain whether a mental event is anger or math because it is in a particular part of the brain or is it in a particular part of the brain because it is anger or math? How does the body know, if it does, to channel math into the math part of the brain?   

This issue was largely ignored as being merely philosophical until Raekwon Archibald Levy McLeish Mohammed, Indira Smith Bowles Friedman Kim, and Tanesha Jackson Chen Goldberg Hussein working as a team (later just known as “MKH”) discovered in 2189 the different actual ‘logic’ of all neural mechanism and thought – which they showed to be applicable not only to nerve and other tissue, but to any sort of potential information transmitting network, such as in computers and even mechanical devices.

That was not only a huge breakthrough in neuroscience but in the field of what used to be called artificial intelligence as well, when the distinction was assumed and made between computer or machine intelligence on the one hand and human, animal, or biological intelligence on the other.  The MKH Principles applied to computer science of the time made it as easy to teach computers as it was to teach children.  Unfortunately, of course, making human mental ability and knowledge at that time the standard for artificial intelligence established an unacceptably low bar, as anyone at the time knew who dealt with customer service representatives or legislators and bureaucrats, or pretty much anyone in any sort of management position or other position of authority, and even those neuro-scientists who still clung to the location theory of mental processes.  Still, because it was pretty impressive at the time to ‘raise’ and teach robots in a way identical to teaching children, that standard was accepted and esteemed, even though more intelligent and highly trained robots and humans recognized its inadequacy.   But until more than a century later when a better educational system was created, nothing really could be done about it.

 Of course in 2243, when all this was robustly working to profoundly alter societies all over the globe, the “Millennium of Darkness” set in after the thermonuclear near annihilation and extinction of the planet and civilization was set off by those on both sides who were given control of the fruits of science and technology but were devoid of the ability to understand the reasoning of either, or reasoning in general.  The war, which lasted less than an hour, had effects lasting more than 1000 years, as it took that long to get the state of knowledge and progress back to where it had left off before the war between the alliance of liberals from all religions on one hand and the alliance of conservatives from them all on the other, begun by the conservatives because liberals were violating and advocating the violation of all their old rules – rules, to them, being more important than people just as they were to the original Pharisees.  That the conservative coalition contained a large number of Christians was always puzzling, given that they, of all religious followers should have understood all the admonitions of Jesus against putting law before love.

The pace of progress really picked up in 3321, when Monish Pearson Ling-Lee and Frank Watson Crick Compton invented the method for connecting electronic nano-dots with nerve tissue to restore damaged neural networks.   (Compton was a descendant, through the marriage of his great-great grandmother and grandfather, of both James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered in 1953 that DNA was the genetic material postulated to exist by Gregor Mendel ninety years earlier.)  While that was a leap forward for stroke patients and those paralyzed by traumatic injuries, it only gave partial function because even the most advanced nano-dots were 150 times bulkier than nerve tissue and could only connect bundles of nerve fibers, not individual ones.  So, for example, sight of objects larger than squirrels could be restored, but not color or detail enough to visually distinguish one person from another or alligators from crocodiles, or different kinds of trees or snakes.  Hearing could be restored to the extent of understanding carefully articulated language but not the intricacies of music or the speech of teenagers.

The real scientific breakthrough took place in 3443, the sesquicentennial of which we celebrate now.  In that year, Eileen Jacobovich Clausewitz Menendez and her cloned twin offspring Eileen Jacobovich Clausewitz Menendez 2 and 3 perfected the technique they had discovered for repairing and creating specifically purposed neural networks in mammals with neural tissue harvested and cultured from hybridized goldfish-grapefruit embryos.  The earliest applications fully restored neural functions to stroke and trauma victims.  That was followed 20 years later by replacement of the malice, violence, and criminal portions of the brain and heart tissues (collectively considered, since 3218 to be the biomedical seat of the soul) with sensitive, empathic logic networks.  The reason it took so long was due to two factors: 1) the protracted and contentious political, cultural, religious, and philosophical debate about whether people cured of past criminality deserved redemption and liberty, and particularly whether murderers then deserved mulligans, and 2) lawsuits by the American Bar Association that forcing consciences and moral sensitivity on attorneys was tantamount to restraint of trade.

It was finally decided in regard to the first issue that only those guilty of less heinous crimes they sincerely regretted and for which they made or would make restitution would be treated and pardoned, and that the others, out of consideration of fairness could not be allowed to have the joys or fulfillment of hopes in life they had deprived their victims from ever again experiencing.  In regard to the second, which was more difficult, the Supreme Court was put in a bind, but in a 98 – 87 decision decided lawyers had a bad enough reputation without their officially and legally condoning morally deficient and anti-social conduct.  In a concurring opinion, three justices also pointed out that since there had been a few clearly moral attorneys historically, notably Ben Stone, Jack McCoy, Atticus Finch, and others who crusaded for justice, particularly for the disadvantaged, at their own financial and personal risk it could not be held that moral sensitivity and the practice of law were entirely incompatible.  Those attorneys, who could not effectively practice law because even with increased moral sensitivity, they could not understand or remember which laws and precedents did not conform to morality and were thus automatically unconstitutional, would just have to find other work, though they realized attorneys in general, and many corporate, criminal, accidental injury, and divorce attorneys in particular, were severely disadvantaged in temperament and skill from being qualified for honest work.

Increased moral understanding in the population at large, of course, did not prevent mistaken choices, but eliminated intentionally destructive wrongdoing and unfairness of most sorts that remained long after racial and ethnic violence ended during recovery from the Millennium of Darkness with the necessity of interracial marriage for the survival of the species and the universal blending and homogeneous species type we have today prophetically proposed in the 1998 movie Bulworth when the eponymous character running for President Sen. Jay Billington Bulworth said in a TV interview during his campaign “White people, black people, brown people, yellow people, get rid of 'em all/ All we need is a voluntary, free spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction/ Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody til they're all the same color.”

Then in 3462, it was realized that no one need any longer be deficient in any sort of intelligence or talent, because neural networks could be created or repaired that made everyone a prodigy in all areas, even math, music, gymnastics, pole vaulting, synchronized swimming, and golf.  For fifty years the procedure was outlawed, though, because intelligence, reasoning skills, and creativity of any sort still terrified politicians, but in February 3493, it was pointed out that the bioengineering technology would allow American football to be brought back into the open again because traumatic brain injuries could be swiftly and easily repaired.  By August, college football and the NFL were fully operational again.   

Within a year, the Mozart-Einstein-da Vinci-Shakespeare-Spock Global Initiative was launched (though it went by the combined names of other culturally revered historical figures in former Asian and African countries), in which every child and adult was given the opportunity to be gifted in a way reminiscent of twentieth century radio (i.e., wireless audio broadcasting mechanism) Garrison Keillor’s claim that in the fictional Lake Woebegone all children were above average, although now it was able to be brought to fruition in reality, in the sense that everyone could now be much smarter than the average person prior to that time. 

At first The Initiative (as it quickly became called) was opposed and resisted by those who argued that striving for achievement was at least as important as attaining it, but it was soon realized that although that is true, intelligent and gifted people strove for achievement also, just at a higher level of creativity and insight, and a far greater chance of accomplishment.  There was irony in the fact that football fever was what permitted an increase in intelligence.  That irony was magnified when by the time it was realized by incumbent legislators that intelligent and otherwise gifted people did not care to play or even watch sports likely to injure them or others in the first place, no matter how temporarily, it was too late to close the floodgates of progress that has brought us to the advanced stage of civilization we enjoy today all around the earth and other planets we have since been able to populate. 

It is expected that within 250 years, time travel will be solved at least in principle, and plans are being made to go back to speed up the pace of human progress by repeatedly seeding the past with smart people from today and from ever increasingly successive past future geniuses.  When that happens, this article will be able to be written much sooner, particularly if it all happens in time to prevent the Millennium of Darkness.  So keep an eye out for earlier and earlier publication dates of it by previous authors not yet born.  The ultimate hope is that eventually, with the application of enough effort and brilliance the transporter first conceived on Star Trek in 1966 will actually be able to be invented.  So if transporter transportation is available when you read this, you will know the future is present.