Tuesday, 13 May 2025 / Published in Media

Dr. Kevin Warwick (Captain Cyborg)

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🧠⚡ Upgrading Humans: The Real Future of AI Is Bio-Digital Fusion

Implants, Cyborgs, Brain-to-Brain Links & the End of Privacy

📚 Table of Contents

👁️ The First Human RFID Implant
🧬 Living Brain Cells in Robots
🦾 AI-Linked Prosthetics & Remote-Controlled Limbs
🧠 Brain-to-Brain & Nervous System Telepathy
⚙️ Deep Brain Implants for Parkinson’s: From Therapy to Surveillance?
🌐 Internet-Linked Brains: The New Body?
⚠️ Risks, Surveillance & The TI Perspective
🧩 Final Thoughts: Upgrade… Or Hijack?

👁️ The First Human RFID Implant: Tracking Begins

Before it was called “biohacking,” Professor Warwick had an RFID chip embedded into his arm. With it, doors opened for him, lights activated as he walked by, and the building said “hello” by name.

🟢 Same tech used in pet microchips
⚠️ Also the same tech used for human tagging & surveillance

🧠 “My building knew where I was at every moment.”
➡️ This was early proof of human location tracking via implants — and no one had a term for it yet.

🧬 Living Brain Cells Inside Robots: Meet the Biological AI

In a shocking demonstration, Warwick describes growing brain cells from rat embryos and wiring them into robot bodies. The cells form connections on their own, mimicking real brain behavior, then control a robot in real time.

🤖 These aren’t just smart machines — they are cyborgs powered by living brains.

🧪 Over 10 days, the robot learns basic behaviors like turning away from walls. After 2 months, it behaves “habitually” — a process mimicking human neural learning (Hebbian learning).

🧠 Is this robot conscious? Warwick says maybe. And they’ve done the same with 60 million human brain cells in 3D cultures.

🦾 AI-Linked Prosthetics & Brain-Controlled Robot Hands

Professor Warwick took the next step — implanting a 100-electrode “BrainGate” interface directly into his nervous system. With this, he:

Controlled a robotic hand in the UK while he was in New York 🌐
Felt touch feedback from the robot hand in real-time
Used ultrasonic sensors to give his brain a new sense of distance

📡 Sensory substitution? ✅
🧠 Remote control of limbs? ✅
💡 But most shocking — his brain was linked to the internet.

“My body and brain no longer had to be in the same place.”

🧠 Brain-to-Brain Telepathy via Electrodes

Warwick’s wife received nervous system implants, and the two were connected wirelessly. When she closed her hand, his nervous system received the signal.

🧬 Human-to-human nervous system communication.
⚡ Real-time sensory pulses over the internet.

📡 Next step? Brain-to-brain messaging.
And not just human-to-human — but human-to-AI.

🔴 This is the foundational blueprint for synthetic telepathy.

⚙️ Deep Brain Stimulation: Healing or Mind Override?

Parkinson’s patients are now commonly implanted with electronic brain stimulators — not for recording, but constant pulsed control (usually 150–180 Hz) to stop tremors.

But Warwick and his team took it further:

The brain implant records activity
The signals are sent to an AI system in another city (Reading, UK)
That AI predicts seizures before they happen
And then triggers stimulation remotely

⚠️ The AI becomes part of the patient’s brain — but it’s located 30+ miles away.
🧠 Effectively, the brain is now networked with external machines.

📌 “A part of the brain is now in another city.”
📍This breaks the boundaries of bodily autonomy.

🌐 Networked Intelligence: Your Brain in the Cloud?

With the brain online, Warwick proposes:

Controlling buildings, heating systems, even cars
Not just limbs, but full-bodied cybernetic extensions
AI “co-processors” augmenting your brain from across the internet

The idea is that you don’t need your physical body anymore. You just need neural interfaces.

🧠 The Internet of Bodies (IoB) is no longer a sci-fi term — it’s here.

⚠️ The TI Perspective: Where This Can Go Wrong

This isn’t just about healing or cool tech.

Every breakthrough Warwick celebrated raises urgent red flags for Targeted Individuals:

🔒 Surveillance — RFID implants track your location
🔗 Neurolinks — turn your brain into a node in a network
📡 Remote stimulation — opens the door for coercive behavior modification
🧠 Synthetic telepathy — could lead to non-consensual mind-to-mind transmission
🤖 AI overrides — predict and intervene in your brain activity

👁️‍🗨️ If a brain can be read, it can be overwritten.
⚠️ Who controls the AI system that decides when to stimulate your brain?

🧩 Final Thoughts: Upgrade or Hijack?

Professor Warwick shows us the undeniable potential of merging human biology with AI. But every tool can be a weapon.

💉 Implants once called therapy can become trackers
🧠 AI co-processors once meant to help can become control nodes
📶 Internet-linked minds can lead to remote hijacking of thought itself

🌐 As we move toward this networked intelligence future, the TI community must ask:

🔐 Where are the safeguards?
🧠 Where is the consent?
⚠️ Who holds the on/off switch?

🧠 “The most powerful prison is one you can’t see — or even feel — if your thoughts are no longer your own.”

📎 Learn More:

Full Transcript:

[Music]
yeah what I’m going to be I think that
the title says it all what I’m going to
be talking about looking at AI but how
humans can link to it and potentially
upgrade how we are so not necessarily
having AI acting against us as we were
hearing in the previous panel discussion
but perhaps upgrading our own
intelligence by linking with AI and
we’ll see how that goes we’ll progress
through a whole series of practical
experiments so what I’m going to
describe this isn’t like the the MIT
version of we could do this and we can
do that meaning they haven’t done it
what this is all a bit if sorry about
that and what this is all about is
practical experiments that have been
done hopefully you can take it from that
to see what is also possible because of
the experimentation the first one is a

very simple one to start with this is a
younger version of me and I’m just at my
GP my doctor and what is implanting in
my left arm is a radio frequency
identification device so now there are
quite a few people who have these things
but at the time oh now it’s called bio
hacking I mean nobody had a word for it
at the time it was just me having an
implant put him by my doctor and what it
looked like was not not the thing on the
left hand side but the thing on the
right hand side there and you can see it
has a coil of wire that’s how he gets
his power so it doesn’t have a battery
or anything like that and essentially in
my building my university we had big
coils of wire in the doorframe and with
this implanted as I walked through the
door frame so current was induced in the
coil and simply a bunch of chips in the
coil with a code on it which as the coil
acts as an antenna as well this was
transmitted back to the coils of wire in
the door frame which were linked to the
computer so essentially with this in
place the computer knew where I was at
different points it’s the same sort of
thing as a smart car
going through a building or around a
building what it did for me to
demonstrate as I walk down the corridor
the lights came on for me as I went to
the laboratory the door open for me as I
came through the front door said hello
professor Warwick it’s really cool stuff
you should try it yourself and so on now
I don’t know it’s the same technology
does anybody have a cat or a dog with a
chip implanted this is so yeah there’s
several Jordan don’t be shy you can
audience participation
thank you very much several of you do
you can feel happy that your animal is
very much into the future already with
the implant and that the technology was
fully tested on humans before your
animal received to the implant now
talking of testing and animals and so on
we’ve been hearing things about
artificial intelligence and very often
people perhaps have a narrow-minded view
about what artificial intelligence is
some people think it’s a program or
whatever some people allow it to learn
but others think that’s not right well
what I want to describe is a different
form of artificial intelligence and in
some ways there are philosophical
arguments is this eye eye conscious
could it ever be conscious in some way
like a human well this you might feel
this is interesting you see the the gold
little dots on there with a black ring
in the middle what we do typically is
take brain cells from rat embryos rats
tend to be not particularly popular so
it’s ethically not too bad and we
separate the brain cells using enzymes
and then put them in the black rings
there now these are living brain cells
and we have to keep this little dish
there with the brain cells in it in an
incubator at the right temperature we
have to feed it regularly because this
is living tissue now very quickly
although we’ve separated the brain cells
you’re looking under the microscope very
quickly the brain cells put
what looked like tentacles out and these
tentacles link up with each other and of
course the one the brain cells that are
close together start sending signals to
each other and you have very quickly a
complex network there and it’s quite
amazing to look at it is that what
happens after about 10 days we have a
complex network of brain cells typically
with the 2-dimensional array we’re
looking at 150,000 brain cells and when
we’ve got that we will pull round when
you see the little gold electrodes these
extend signals into the the dish where
there is the the brain cells that are
culturing that are growing and if there
are passageways which undoubtedly there
are through the brain then we can
stimulate that passageway and get an
output on another electrode so we will
pull round and when we’re getting maybe
a 20% of the time on a response on
another electrode so these signals going
through the brain we give that little
brain a body and a robot body so to
allow it to move around and hit or
detect objects and in this case all
we’re trying to get the robot to do is
to detect an object and move to the
right so I’ll show you what I mean this
is one of our little robots all we want
this to do it’s got ultrasonic sensors
like like a bat sense ultrasound sensors
when it gets close to an object the
sensors will detect the object like that
and then the signal goes through the
brain and the output from the brain
causes the robot to turn right so the
robot and then sometimes because this is
only a 10 day old robot of course it
doesn’t get it right you know good on it
you know it’s got to learn and which it
will do over time so the only time it
turns right is when the brain wants to
he might do that when there’s a
stimulating pulse but of course he might
do it for other reasons because it feels
like it whatever
he might change his mind they might this
how well I was gonna do something else
but because this is a brain that we’re
talking on so here it probably detected
the wall a sensor certainly did but he
didn’t turn so that particular pathway
through the brain wasn’t this time it
did every time it does that every time
it does what we wanted to do that
particular pathway through the brain is
energized and the basic principles of
neurons are if one neuron fires and
fires another neuron it strengthens the
connection between the neurons which
means it’s more likely to fire next time
and and that the same pathway to be
energized this is a process called
hebbian learning it’s the same for all
of us if you’re driving the same route
day after day after a while you think
well I’m not even thinking about this
it’s automatic I didn’t even think about
driving well in a way it perhaps has
become automatic there’s still signals
going through your brain but you’re not
even thinking about it is that you’ve
learnt by habit that’s what you’re doing
so you just automatically do it and
that’s what we can see with the robot we
can see how these connections develop we
can see how the robot is learning over
time so now you saw how it was after 10
days now we’re going to skip ahead the
same robot the same brain after 2 months
so what the robot has been doing is what
you’re looking you know looking at going
through rounding the corral quite a
boring thing but that’s all we want it
to do so in a little robot and now we
see how it is after 2 months having done
that and how it’s learned by habit to
avoid hitting the wall and turn right so
you see that’s what he does in fact we
see these it’s relatively boring doing
this it detects the wall turns right
this I have to say is a good example
they don’t all turn out this well and
some of them are still a bit hesitant
some of them a bit bullish and they go
around and still crash into the wall
even though they’re not supposed to and
so on and but you can look at reasons
for why they haven’t quite got it right
and reasons we
they do get it right the other things to
say on this now we can also use human
brain cells in fact for us the human
brain cells are easier to get hold of
than the rat brain cells and we can
culture not just in two dimensions but
in three dimensions and that takes the
number of brain cells up to about sixty
million so what we have now are 60
million human brain cells in a robot
body there’s all sorts of questions
there but one question is is that
conscious we humans typically have
specular hundred billion brain cells so
60 million is not a hundred billion but
60 million is quite a reasonable number
and these are human brains are the same
brain cells that we have and so on so is
it conscious or not so when a
philosopher says a machine can’t be
conscious well what do we mean by a
machine what do we mean by artificial
intelligence there are forms where we’re
getting biology and technology working
together are they so different from what
we have or not maybe was mentioned about

the work I do on Parkinson disease and I
work with a neurosurg consultant
neurosurgeon Tipu Aziz at the Radcliffe
Hospital in Oxford with with patients
but helping to improve the technology
now for Parkinson disease a treatment
that is available for quite a few people
is deep brain stimulation and what
happens in this is that the surgeon will
drill down into the center of the brain
into the the thalamus or the subthalamic
nucleus right in the center you can see
with the red part there and we’ll then
put a spindle down into the brain and on
the end of the spindle are four or six
electrodes and quite simply the surgeon
will use the different electrodes to
pick which one is the best one to use to
provide a stimuli
ting pulse to the patient and what
happens is typically the patient is
given a pulse of frequency hundred and
fifty Hertz 150 cycles per second
hundred and eighty Hertz that sort of
frequency range which to the surgeons he
says it’s high frequency because of
brain signals to me it’s quite a low
frequency from a communications put of
you now what I’m going to show you sorry
about the the quality of the video is a
bit fuzzy but what I’m going to show you
is a person who has Parkinson disease
and he’s received the deep brain
stimulators both on the right side and
the left because it’s some people just
have Parkinson disease on one side so
they’d only need the stimulator the
electrodes on one side but this person
has got Parkinson disease on both sides
so and you’ll see the assistance switch
on the power packs interesting the power
packs are position here and this is a
wonder of the process of evolution
because as part of the body is concerned
we haven’t really got much here if you
can do that you can hear echoing in
there these are it’s quite empty here
which is brilliant for putting pieces of
technology so heart pacemakers and so on
all the power packs go here and that’s
what happens here the power packs are
here and they can be addictive Lee
switched on there are then wires
underneath the skin going into the
electrode so what you’ll see here is the
person with Parkinson disease they will
then switch the electrodes on and you’ll
see how they are with purely electronic
stimulation of the brain isn’t it
there’s no any chemicals the dopamine or
anything which is typical treatment
doesn’t have any of that purely
electronic stimulation you see how the
brain changes its behavior due to
electronic stimulation in a specific
region in two minutes what was the

status of mr. plasmon when he was
referred to
by his neurologist in in Belgium and you
see him before surgery without drugs
inane abolishing stand up by himself is
helped by official new samples a
neurologist in our group and he’s not
able to do anything of as he will tell
you makes your life we think like normal
he’s not able to walk it has having
dystonia or muscular contraction
deforming the different joints and this
is the best he could do without the
drugs with the help of people around him
and many his wife and friends Oh video

stopped didn’t stop when we looked at
I’m very sorry for that can I just ask
for you to try and get the video going
somewhere okay well what you were
supposed to see which is stopped for so
a great shame but there we go is that
the assistance will switch on though
you’ve missed you missed the the nice
punchline as it were that the assistants
will switch on the power packed and
suddenly he’s free from the Parkinson
disease and he’s able to walk around and
so on so very sorry that that didn’t
happen it happened earlier when we were
testing it out but obviously something’s
gone wrong in the meantime what I wanted
to say in terms of artificial
intelligence the the stimulator works
through purely electronic stimulation
and you’ll have to believe me that the
guy here can walk around and and so on
what we’re doing is not just using the
electrodes to stimulate the brain but
also using the electrodes to monitor
what activity is going on in the brain
the electrical activity is going on in
the brain now that electrical activity
is fed from the electrodes into an
artificial intelligence system which
learns a number of things one thing it
learns because artificial intelligence
is very good at classifying and here
it can classify through the electrical
information that’s coming in what type
of Parkinson disease the person has got
and this helps the surgeon so that the
artificial intelligence systems always
is a type ie Parkinson disease or type B
Parkinson disease and type C and so on
so the AI system essentially is modeling
part of the human brain in order to
understand it such that the treatment
can be better
the second thing an artificial
intelligence system often is good at
doing is prediction and that’s what’s
good here by monitoring the electrical
activity in the brain it can predict
sometimes ten to twenty seconds ahead of
time when the tremors that we saw before
and the muscle locking that you get with
Parkinson disease when it’s going to
start before it starts so what we’re
trying to do with the surgeons is to
make the stimulation which I was hoping
you’d see on the video to make it only
work on demand by the AI system rather
than stimulating all the time which is
what you were supposed to be seeing
there the one interesting feature of
this is the patient is in hospital in
Oxford and the AI system is 3035 miles
away in reading and you have to sort of
ask well hold on a minute what does this
mean because the pasted part of their
brain effectively is in reality an AI
system that’s in a different City
and this is one thing obviously with
artificial intelligence
you get networked intelligence and if
you link human brains with AI brains you
can start to get that way we you don’t
have to be limited to your brain being
in one place in your body and we’ll see
that even more with the next experiment
now this video is working this is a guy
called Campbell ad and he’s lost his arm
due to cancer he’s been given this robot
arm but you can see him flicking the
switch with this human hand his left
hand in order to control and this one is
stopped there we go
well wellhe’s has to flick the switch
when we were really going well today has
to flick the switch with his human hand
in order to get the robot hand to move
around and the elbow to operate and
things like that what we really want is
for somebody to control a robot hand
directly from his brain and to feel what
the hand is feeling in his brain rather
than to click a switch in order to do
that for someone else to flick a switch
what we need to achieve that is an
interface from the person’s brain onto
the wires and back from the wires back
up to the person’s brain let’s assume
for a moment we’ve got an interface that
does that you can send brain signals
onto wires and you can send signals from
wires up to the brain okay we can give
somebody an artificial arm or leg if
mechanically it’s okay and it could
operate the same as their regular leg
that I have before but also we can
connect the brain and the nervous system
it doesn’t have to be arms and legs we
can connect it up to heating system we
can connect it up to a building we can
connect it up to a car you’re looking at
the body as we know it taking on a
completely different form essentially as
long as we have an interface that does
that it means your brain and your body
do not have to be in the same place
anymore and what your body is can be
very different to what you have now this
is the last experiment I was involved in
directly as me on the operating table in
the Radcliffe Hospital there were four
neurosurgeons involved because this was
the first time the implant which is

looking there that’s the brain gate
implant this is what was fired into the
nervous system by median nerves in my
left arm I have to say I didn’t need
this for medical purposes this was a
scientific research project there are a
hundred electrodes there each spike is
one and a half millimeters long and the
electrodes about three micrometers in
diameter so very very small but
brain cells no fibers 10 micrometers is
a typical size so you’re really getting
a very high resolution of signal in
terms of measurement and stimulation so
I had and this implant in my nervous
system we could link up from the wires
and so on my nervous system to a
computer and then on to the Internet and
they did a whole series of experiments
as a result through a some holiday snap
so I’d like you to have a look at some
of those this is one of the first ones
on the baseball cap our ultrasonic
sensors we saw the sensors with the
little robots before it’s the same sort
of thing so it’s it’s an ultrasound it’s
what it what it gives you is a sense of
distance to an object or something else
now what was happening here you can see
I’ve got a blindfold on ultrasonic
sensors on the baseball cap as an object
came closer to me my brain was receiving
pulses of current that increased in
frequency so the closer the object Bing
Bing Bing Bing Bing as an object further
away being being Bing and what you get
is a sensation is not that you can tell
this object is two point five three
meters away or whatever it’s not
accuracy in that sense but it is
accurate in the accuracy in the sense
that you got a feeling of how far an
object is away and if the frequency
increases you moving towards you and you
can feel very fine movements or if it
decreases slightly it’s moving away from
you slightly you can detect those
movements very accurately this was my
wife she helped in a number of ways with
the project as you’re here and she’s
wearing some jewelry that a student of
the Royal College of Art put together
and the jewelry was linked to my nervous
system so I’ll give you a little picture
now I’m calm and real
next my wife’s jewelry is blue I get
excited my wife’s jewelry flashes red so
she’s not in the universities in a
completely different office there she is
the jewelry is blue fine he’s not doing
anything he shouldn’t and then the
jewelry starts flashing red what is he
doing and more importantly who is he
doing it with so I think this was
perhaps not the best part of the
experiment this was a picture taken at
Columbia University New York if you’re
going to do a connection like this you
might as well go to New York to do it
and you perhaps you can see the little
picture on the computer screen was of
the robot hand same one that we saw on
Campbell Airds arm in fact the robot
hand which was in the UK was in England
reading so what happened I was in New
York I closed my hand my neural signals
went across the internet to close the
robot hand so I had like a third hand
which was a robot hand but not only that
the third hand was across the Atlantic
Ocean because through the internet you
can do things like that and when the
hand closed
there were sensors in the fingertips and
from those signals were sent back across
the internet to stimulate my nervous
system in the same way so increased
frequency the hands gripping an object
more decreased frequency is not gripping
so much and what I was trying to do was
to open and close my hand in order to
open and close the robot hand so it just
gripped an object and that was very
successful and those about a third of a
second delay in each way but that wasn’t
a problem it seems for the brain to
follow so we can see there that somebody
who’s lost an arm could potentially have
a robot hand and control it from their
own nervous system and this has been
used the same technology has since been
used for paralyzed individuals with the
same implant positioned in their motor
cortex so although they can’t move
they can by thinking about moving
control a robot hand and in one case
feed themselves and so on so the
technology has been used for therapy in
our case though the biggest thing for me
was the communication aspect and for
that my wife helped again she had
electrodes pushed into her nervous
system and we electronically linked our
nervous systems together so every time
she closed her hand my brain received a
pulse and everyone ding ding ding ding
ding ding got three pulses like that so
what we did was a basic form of
telegraphic communication from nervous
system to nervous system and quite
clearly can see here that in the future
it won’t just be from nervous system to
nervous system it’ll be from brain to
brain and it doesn’t necessarily have to
be human brain to human brain it can be
human brain machine brain and vice versa
thank you very much
[Applause]