Why is Casey Harrell looking for a cheetah?
AI and humanity
In 2020, Casey Harrell lost the ability to speak.
Harrell is an activist and one of the early brain and computer interface adopters. ALS, a disease of the nervous system that causes those suffering from it to lose power over their own bodies, took away his voice.
So, as the New York Times put it in their story about Harrell, a computer-brain interface “made an end run around Mr. Harrell’s disease, relying not on his weakened facial muscles but rather on the parts of his motor cortex where he was first laying down the instructions for what to say.”
The readiest comparison is with Stephen Hawking’s electronic voice. Yet the researchers have gone much farther: reclaiming Harrell’s voice from the disease.
Using the same tools underlying artificial intelligence, Harrell’s implants read his brain’s activity and then send that message out a set of speakers. The sound is woven from recordings of Harrell’s speech. Instead of the foreign, electronic voice they might expect, listeners hear Casey Harrell’s voice restored.
At first, Harrell’s vocabulary was just 50 words. On the second day, that expanded to 125,000 words. Comparisons are difficult here, but this is vaguely similar to anyone else's vocabulary. There are 196,601 words in one common Scrabble tournament dictionary and over 276,000 in another.
Out of those 125,000 words and the practically infinite combinations this implies, why was Harrell’s second sentence, “I’m looking for a cheetah”?
According to the Times, the researchers watching a recording after the fact thought that there must be a problem. A “string of words so odd” that the brain implants must have misread Harrell’s intentions.
No, not failure, incredible success. Harrell’s daughter had just arrived home in a cheetah outfit. Here’s the Times again:
“I’m looking for a cheetah,” came his second-ever unprompted line… the line was an early signal that the implant could recognize even Mr. Harrell’s most idiosyncratic lines: His daughter Aya had just come home, dressed in a cheetah onesie, and her father wanted to take part in her fantasy. “Sweet daughter of mine,” he continued, “I have been waiting for this for a long time.”
This is why building the infrastructure to support the development of artificial intelligence technologies matters.
For many, their exposure to artificial intelligence has been solely text or image generation. These are useful new tools like Excel spreadsheets, automating away dreary hand calculations. At the same time, there will be spectacular scientific discoveries and a thousand unforeseen and unforeseeable benefits from AI’s development.
Costs too, of course! Progress has never been free. Technology cannot solve all of our problems. Still, our technological advances have been a fundamentally liberatory human endeavor. This is why the worryingly common idea that AI is not worth developing or that the energy infrastructure it requires is unnecessary is ultimately vacuous, unimaginative, and corruptive.
Inventions first spur panic, then acceptance, and finally fade out of our attention. Artificial intelligence has been no exception. The potential for AI to unlock medical innovations like Casey Harrell’s recovered voice could be just the beginning. The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry went to a trio of scientists applying artificial intelligence toward medical breakthroughs. The return of Harrell’s voice unquestionably improves his life. Yet he and the 30,000 others with ALS in the United States are still losing control over their own bodies to the disease. With this in mind, our early results with AI paint a picture of a future where we can restore the voices of those afflicted and their full autonomy.
That’s a future worth building.