At a tech forum in Beijing last week, a Chinese company unveiled a "homegrown" brain-computer interface that allowed a monkey to seemingly control a robotic arm just by thinking about it. In a video shown at the event, a monkey with its hands restrained uses the interface to move a robotic arm and grasp a strawberry. The system, developed by NeuCyber NeuroTech and the Chinese Institute for Brain Research, involves soft electrode filaments implanted in the brain, according to state-run news media outlet Xinhua. Researchers in the US have tested similar systems in paralyzed people to allow them to control robotic arms, but the demonstration underscores China's progress in developing its own brain-computer interface technology and vying with the West. Brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, collect and analyze brain signals, often to allow direct control of an external device, such as a robotic arm, keyboard, or smartphone.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied to automate cyber security activities and processes including cyber investigation and digital forensics. However, the use of such models for cyber investigation and digital forensics should address accountability and security considerations. Accountability ensures models have the means to provide explainable reasonings and outcomes. This information can be extracted through explicit prompt requests. For security considerations, it is crucial to address privacy and confidentiality of the involved data during data processing as well. One approach to deal with this consideration is to have the data processed locally using a local instance of the model. Due to limitations of locally available resources, namely memory and GPU capacities, a Smaller Large Language Model (SLM) will typically be used. These SLMs have significantly fewer parameters compared to the LLMs. However, such size reductions have notable performance reduction, especially when tasked to provide reasoning explanations. In this paper, we aim to mitigate performance reduction through the integration of cognitive strategies that humans use for problem-solving. We term this as cognitive enhancement through prompts. Our experiments showed significant improvement gains of the SLMs' performances when such enhancements were applied. We believe that our exploration study paves the way for further investigation into the use of cognitive enhancement to optimize SLM for cyber security applications.

If you've ever wished your brain was more user-friendly, neurotechnology might seem like a dream come true. It's all about offering you ways to hack your brain, getting it to do more of what you want and less of what you don't want. There are "nootropics" -- also known as "smart drugs" or "cognitive enhancers" -- pills that supposedly give your brain a boost. There's neurofeedback, a tool for training yourself to regulate your brain waves; research has shown it has the potential to help people struggling with conditions like ADHD and PTSD. There's brain stimulation, which uses electric currents to directly target certain brain areas and change their behavior; it's shown promise in treating severe depression by disrupting depression-linked neural activity. Oh, and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are working on brain-computer interfaces that could pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words in real time, which could one day allow you to control your phone or computer with just your thoughts. Some of these technologies can offer very valuable help to people who need it.

If, through biotechnology, we could drastically enhance ourselves--such that our ability to absorb and manipulate information was unlimited, we experienced no disquiet, and we did not age--would we? For advocates of radical enhancement, or "transhumanism," answering "yes" is a no-brainer. Accordingly, they press for the development of technologies that, by manipulating genes and the brain, would create beings fundamentally superior to us. Transhumanism is far from a household term, but, whether or not they use the word publicly, its adherents are in places of power, especially in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, the world's richest person, is devoted to boosting "cognition" and co-founded the company Neuralink toward that end.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to make the human race smarter. Raymond Kurzweil has made predicting the Singularity -- when artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence -- a cottage industry. Is AI going to make us all smarter, or are we already as smart as we can handle? This TechRepublic Premium ebook compiles the latest on cancelled conferences, cybersecurity attacks, remote work tips, and the impact this pandemic is having on the tech industry. Some of our issues are cognitive, such as our inherent inability to estimate exponential functions.

Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near peaked my interest when he posited his reasoning for why there is likely no intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. By a mere matter of odds, most of us assume (likely myself included) that there simply must be some kind of super-intelligent species "out there somewhere." One of the many postulations made (the book is more than worth reading), is that species might – at the point of attaining a certain degree of capacity or intelligence – destroy themselves. Could be bombs, could be nanotechnologies, could be super-intelligent computers – but something batters them back to the stone age – or worse. In thinking recently on topics related to ethical enhancement and human enhancement in general, I came to the notion that this "self-extermination theory" might pan out in some other interesting and less considered ways.

Adapted from Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks by Phil Torres. Our species has made Earth its home for about 2,000 centuries, but there are strong reasons for believing that the current century is the most dangerous. The question is whether the threat level today will continue to grow, stay the same, or shrink. Some monitors of human progress are hopeful about the third possibility. They believe that if humanity survives the next century or so, the risk of existential disaster will decline, perhaps to an all-time low.

The titles of the seven symposia were Ambient Intelligence for Health and Cognitive Enhancement, Applied Computational Game Theory, Foundations of Autonomy and Its (Cyber) Threats: From Individuals to Interdependence, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Integrating Symbolic and Neural Approaches, Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, Socio-Technical Behavior Mining: From Data to Decisions, Structured Data for Humanitarian Technologies: Perfect Fit or Overkill? The highlights of each symposium are presented in this report. Ambient intelligence (intelligence embedded in the environment) is a system and an information technology that can adapt to human activities in the living environment. As characteristics of ambient intelligence, its system or information technology (1) is embedded in the environment; (2) can recognize the situational context of the subject; (3) can be personalized to the subject; (4) can change in response to the subject; and (5) can anticipate desires of the subject. One of the potential applications in ambient intelligence is health care.

At the World Government Summit in Dubai in February, Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said that people would need to become cyborgs to be relevant in an artificial intelligence age. He said that a "merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence" would be necessary to ensure we stay economically valuable. Soon afterwards, the serial entrepreneur created Neuralink, with the intention of connecting computers directly to human brains. He wants to do this using "neural lace" technology – implanting tiny electrodes into the brain for direct computing capabilities. Various forms of BCI are already available, from ones that sit on top of your head and measure brain signals to devices that are implanted into your brain tissue.

EMILY BORGHARD has a computer inside her skull, but you wouldn't know it to look at her. A small bump behind her left ear, the only external evidence of her implant, is partially covered by a tuft of hair that's still growing in from the last time she had the batteries changed. Before Borghard received a brain implant, she was having as many as 400 "spikes" of seizure-like activity a day, along with multiple seizures. This unrelenting storm of abnormal neural activity turned her teenage years into a semiconscious nightmare. She couldn't drive a car, attend classes or be left alone for more than half an hour.