The Blade Runner Generation

[Reverend AtheiStar]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_...icle2079637.ece

 

The blade runner generation

 

Forget iPods and BlackBerries. Soon, we will transfer information by thought, run faster and further without tiring, and orgasm on demand. What started as a quest to help the disabled will revolutionise the lives of the able-bodied. Even Bill Gates agrees: robotics is the next giant leap for mankind.

 

”You want that story,” says Dr Stuart Meloy, laughing. It's a frantic day for the pain-relief surgeon at the Piedmont Anaesthesia and Pain Consultants in North Carolina, but the chance to talk about his discovery is irresistible. ”In 1998 I was placing a spinal-cord stimulator into a woman with leg pain,” he says, describing a pain-relief procedure where electrodes placed parallel to the spine stimulate nerves supplying the leg, removing the pain. ”When I turned the energy on, the patient let out something between a wail and a moan — very different from the ”Wow’ I sometimes hear.” Meloy leant around the curtains to ask the patient what she felt. She caught her breath and said: ”You're going to have to teach my husband how to do that.”

 

”I had no idea what she was talking about,” he chuckles. It turned out the electricity had given her an orgasm. She had another one when he tweaked the power to find out if that had caused it. After news leaked out that Meloy had patented a cigarette-packet-sized implant that could stimulate an orgasm using a handheld remote, the media went crazy. Everyone wanted to hear about "Dr Pleasure" and his "orgasmatron". But Meloy, who aims to have an affordable product, similar in price to breast implants, on the market in about three years, insists there is a serious reason for the device. According to the surgeon, orgasmic dysfunction affects about a quarter of women in the US, and he hopes that this implant will help women worldwide.

 

Using tools to replace lost functions, or to enhance our existing ones, is something humans have been doing for thousands of years; a simple stick to help a person walk, or a telescope to enable us to see further than the human eye. And as the tools have become more sophisticated, so has our ability to repair ourselves.

 

For the first time in history, the fields of neuroscience, biomechanics, robotics, mathematics, computer science, materials science, tissue engineering and nanotechnology are starting to merge — sharing their expertise on an unprecedented scale. Writing in Scientific American magazine earlier this year, Bill Gates captured this sense of excitement when he declared that the emergence of the robotics industry today is comparable to the development of the computer industry 30 years ago. All of this, coupled with exponentially increasing computer power, and falling software price and size, has experts predicting that our future relationship with technology will be much more intimate — even more so than the orgasmatron suggests.

 

"Oh my God, you have no idea!" a young woman shrieks with delight. She is walking up and down steps outside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Boston trying out one of the latest prosthetic legs developed by Professor Hugh Herr, director of the Biomechatronics group at the lab. He has spent the past decade developing robotic legs, knees and ankle supports to give millions of people with amputated or paralysed legs the chance to walk normally and, in the future, more efficiently. Instead of standard prosthetics, which are passive and often tiring, his designs use motors that act like muscles to mimic natural movement, which means that the leg pushes up and propels amputees as they walk. His latest foot-ankle system is the first prosthesis to mimic natural gait, and requires wearers to use 20% less energy than any previous prosthesis. When he reaches his goal, Herr hopes amputees will walk more efficiently than an able-bodied person. "I‘m like a kid," the young woman says, pacing up and down. "I could do this over and over!"

 

When Herr was 17, he lost both his legs from below the knee in a climbing accident. Speaking at May’s MIT conference, New Minds, New Bodies, New Identities, which brought over 900 experts together for the first time to discuss a new era in human adaptability — one where talk of merging machines with human bodies is standard — he announced that "in the next decade we will have artificial legs that are better than human legs for running", and rolling up his trousers, unveiled his latest prostheses. Beyond the knees, Herr’s legs morph into impressive metal struts with powerful knees and flexible ankles. When he walks, his legs move as if they are real. Although Herr’s new prostheses aren't attached to his body at the moment — he takes his legs off when he goes to bed — with advances in tissue engineering and ways to connect machines to the nerves, that looks set to change.

 

At a press conference in Chicago last year, Claudia Mitchell — a former US marine who lost an arm in a motorbike accident — showed off her new "bionic" limb. Surgeons moved the ends of the nerves from the shoulder that used to control her arm and attached them to nerves in her chest muscle. Now, when she thinks about moving her arm, electrodes on her skin pick up the nerve signals and a computer sends commands to motors in the arm. Although there is little control of detailed movements — she can't, for example, thread a needle — according to Professor Henrik Christensen, the director of the Center of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, this is nonetheless an enormous step forward. "You just have to remember that any kind of modern invasive medicine where we think about the nervous system is within the last 100 years. So if you look forward another hundred years, we are going to see a tremendous amount of change."

 

In the UK, Professor Kevin Warwick — professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading — is holding his arm up and wiggling his fingers in the air. "The brain is an amazing processing device," he tells me. "Even a simple movement, such as moving my fingers, sends very complex nerve signals to and from the brain. The brain is adapting to muscle movements, temperature changes and different pressures and forces all the time. And at the moment there's very little known about how the signals get from the brain to wherever they are going and come back again." There have been some breakthroughs though — scientists have discovered how to read certain electrical impulses between neurons carrying information in the brain, and to interpret the code.

 

Cochlear implants — attached directly to nerves in our brain — have restored the hearing of over 100,000 people. The device wraps electrodes around the ear's auditory nerve and turns sound into electrical impulses that the brain can decipher. "On the first day of wearing the cochlear implant I was able to hear environmental sounds like clocks ticking and footsteps tapping," says Michael Chorost, who wore hearing aids from childhood and finally lost all hearing at the age of 36. "But speech sounded like synthesised gibberish. It took about two months before it really felt like I was hearing speech in a way that was intelligible." But when you think that a human ear has about 15,000 hair cells, about 3,000 of which receive sound — in a sense we have 3,000 channels of hearing. That's a big jump from 16 offered by standard implants. So much so that when they were first designed, scientists were sceptical. "Some people said it would need thousands of electrodes. But in the end, about six was sufficient," Warwick explains. "Now, it's about 22, and that gives an incredible range." And Chorost has just been given an implant upgrade with 121 electrodes. But how does the brain make sense of the new signals?

 

"One of the remarkable discoveries from this work was how flexible the human brain is," says Warwick. "It can learn how to take the signals in and to adapt. That is a key issue." Already, stroke patients can learn to move an arm, even if the parts of the brain that are needed to move the arm are defunct. Because the brain is so adaptable it can recruit different regions to take over. This is an ability that may well play a large part in technologies of the future.

 

Millions of people suffer from eye diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa, where light-receiving cells in the retina degenerate. With them in mind, German scientists have recently developed chips that sit in the retina and convert light into electrical signals that are sent to the brain and help restore sight. These chips are just three millimetres across and thinner than a human hair. "At first it was like facing the flashes of 10 photographers," says the 27-year-old student Daniel Brück — one of the seven people to take part in the first implant trials. "But it was inserted for a month and I got used to it. I went from seeing nothing in my eye to being able to distinguish between night and day and locate a window — I was amazed." But he says he will only do the tests again if a breakthrough in the technology enables him to actually see objects.

 

Although retinal-implant trials are promising, they have been nowhere near as successful as the auditory implants, mainly because such a large part of the human brain is devoted to visual processing. "With vision, it's more difficult," explains Warwick. "The optic nerve is an extremely complex thing, much more so than the auditory nerve. But I do believe that we will see enormous development in the future."

 

Anyone who has witnessed the violent shaking and tortuous gait of Parkinson's sufferers will understand the pressing need for a cure. Incredibly, deep brain stimulation (DBS) implant technology can steady limbs and even restore normal walking. Used by around 40,000 people, the device continually sends electrical currents into specific regions of the brain to drown out defective brain signals. Warwick, in conjunction with neurosurgeons at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, is designing the next generation DBS — one that promises to outthink the human brain. "Instead of stimulating the brain all the time, this will stimulate the brain only when it needs to," Warwick explains. "The implant itself has to detect when tremors are going to occur and then to stimulate the brain before they do to stop them occurring."

 

Another device being developed by scientists in the US is an epilepsy sensor. The aspirin-sized implant can detect aberrant electrical signals in the brain and gives advanced warning of an attack. Scientists hope the device will one day deliver drugs when a glitch is sensed, and so stop the attack happening in the first place.

 

I am staring at a computer screen projected onto a wall at Brown University, Rhode Island. A 26-year-old man is drawing a circle on the screen — and, as the line moves to join up the ring, it veers wildly to the left. Not impressive by normal standards, but when he tries again and the circle meets, the room erupts with applause. "That was the world's first neurally created artwork," beams the neuroscience professor John Donahue, proudly. The artist is Matt Nagle who — paralysed from the neck down after being stabbed — has a tiny microchip inserted into

 

the region of the brain's motor cortex that controls his arm; this microchip is known as the BrainGate. By incorporating a hundred minute electrodes, the chip enables him to send brain signals to a computer, which translates them, and allows him to move a cursor on a screen. Nagle and others with the technology can check e-mail, play computer games and type — in fact, he can be coupled to any electronic device. And by coupling BrainGate to electrodes in his upper chest, the team hope that Nagle will be able to move his own arm — by thought alone. "The technology isn't very fancy yet," Christensen explains. "But the fact that here is a brain that's been trapped inside a body with no possibility of interacting with the world, and now this man can turn the light on and off on his own — it's a huge step forward for him."

 

Nonetheless, not everyone embraces these technological advances. "About five or six years ago there was some character in France who said I was subjugating women," says orgasm-implant inventor, Meloy. "Sorry! I thought I was trying to help." The issue of ethical robotics is set to be a sticky one.

 

But where do ethicists stand when robotics are not "around us" but inside us? "What if it's a case of ’It’s not me, it’s my implant!’" Warwick warns. "If I have a prosthetic arm and it goes nuts, who is responsible for that? Is it the surgeon, the technology, the company?" Christensen echoes his concerns, and highlights the importance of finding a way of having some shared responsibility between the user and the producer. "Why should I spend time developing a smart prosthetic device if everybody's going to sue me afterwards?" he says.

 

Meloy takes a philosophical approach. "I think there is a large population that would want to have better sex, or sex on demand," he says. "You could postulate a situation where somebody else got hold of the remote and was making people do stuff against their will or using it in some kind of degrading fashion. But I think that kind of thing goes on whether you have an electrode implanted in your back or not — there are ways you could misuse any kind of technology."

 

In March, the 20-year-old athlete Oscar Pistorius sprinted into second place in the 400 metres at the South African athletics championships. Dubbed the "fastest thing on no legs", Pistorius is an amputee runner whose legs end at the knee and who runs on carbon-composite Cheetah legs — prostheses that the model and athlete Aimee Mullins was among the first to use for sprinting. Pistorius's competitors were all able-bodied. Though experts explain that his artificial legs lack muscles to generate their own power and so provide much less energy overall than natural legs, at the time the International Association of Athletics Federations debated whether to allow him to run world-class able-bodied races in the future, because there was some suspicion that his prostheses might enhance his performance. Last month he was given permission to run, but if officials were debating about carbon struts that have no robotic enhancement, who knows what they will make of prosthetic legs in the future.

 

In the Herr lab in Boston, a muscle twitches violently in a Petri dish. It is wired up to a power source that stimulates the cells to contract.

 

Herr hopes that, in the future, muscle like this will make up an optimal prosthesis, one that's not purely silicon and steel, but will incorporate biological materials as well. Herr also believes that in two years, his legs might be powered by his mind, using devices implanted into his body that measure the extent to which his spinal cord is activating muscles in his biological leg. These signals, when sent out to a robotic foot-ankle system, means he will be able to think and use his ankle. "In future, when we architect a machine, we'll ask, should we use skin, steel or composite?" he says.

 

Herr's goal is radical. He wants to create artificial legs that outperform natural ones in every way. Even today, Herr wouldn't swap his prosthetic legs for natural ones. "Would you buy a computer system if you were told you couldn't upgrade it for 50 years?" he asks.

 

His concepts don't stop at this. He is currently building robotic leg exoskeletons that move in parallel to the human limb. "Imagine a future where, instead of a bicycle rack, you go to a leg rack and strap on these fancy pants," he explains. "You'll be able to run anywhere your legs can take you, but without breathing hard — imagine running through the wilderness, day after day, 60 miles a day, jumping over logs and rocks."

 

Back in the UK, Warwick shows me his lab. He is excited about rat nerve cells in a Petri dish. The cells are growing over a microchip that is hooked up via a computer to a little robot that bumbles around on a lab bench. "Rather than having robots controlled by computers, we are looking at having robots controlled by biological networks," he says. The hope is that this technology could stimulate regions of the brain in which cells are missing and help rehabilitate brains with Alzheimer’s.

 

But could brain-chip technology be harnessed in more surreal ways? Warwick rummages around his desk and picks up a small box. The minute black chip that he places carefully in my hand is familiar — it is the BrainGate that Donahue used to transmit signals from the brain that caused such a stir last year. "What if — instead of sending electrical signals from our nerves and into machinery — we could send information the other way, directly into our brains?"

 

This is the microchip that, five years ago, the professor attached to nerves in his arm. "I trained my brain to receive pulses for six weeks and then put a chip into my wife Irena's arm to see if we could feel when the other moved their hand. Irena said it felt like lightning running down her finger." But Warwick wants more. Within six to seven years, he plans to insert a chip directly into his brain's cortex, and into that of a volunteer, to see if they can interact. "You have this enormous problem of getting the electrical signals from your brain onto the wires and back the other way," the professor explains. "And actually making the final link to go all the way to someone else's brain is extremely complex, but it's nearly there. I see it as being achievable in my lifetime and I want to do it."

 

And, far from balking at the challenge, it seems that there are surgeons only too willing to be of service. "They understand that the potential to help people is enormous," says Warwick.

 

What about existing technologies — can we exploit them? "I ask my students the question: how can we link a cochlear implant to the internet? I believe there is no reason why, with funding, we can't develop this technology in three to four years," he says. "But in terms of a commercial product that everyone who has a cochlear implant can get, we're probably looking at a 10-year time frame." The futuristic possibilities this opens up in terms of new forms of communications are mind-blowing. "Linking a human brain to the internet means you can extend the nervous system as far as the internet takes it, so the body is no longer limited to one place," he enthuses. Warwick has already used his implant to control a robot arm from New York. "Why should we stop with the web?" he asks. "How about receiving phone calls by earpiece? And if retinal implants are in use — it might even be possible in the future to add additional properties, like sensing infrared light."

 

Enhancing human performance does of course have obvious relevance to the military. Warwick has been approached to see how his "cyborg" experiments could help them, and the dream of creating supreme fighting machines propels many recent cybernetics advances worldwide. If you can overlay lifelike silicon skin onto prosthetics at the moment, why not include solar panels, UV and infrared detectors too? And by tapping into the brain signals directly, we could create super-intensity binoculars, and even sonar sensing in our heads — projects that the US are already funding today.

 

Such visions are the lifeblood of roboticists.

 

"I want to get my memory back," confesses Christensen. "I am already at the age when I'm starting to think, ’Oh damn, what was his name?’ Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could have infinite memory and remember everything?" This might sound far-fetched, but computer experts are already talking about all the memories in your head fitting into the memory of a laptop computer today.

 

"Imagine if I could store my life and access it when I needed to," the professor continues. "I wouldn't just have abstract memories of my childhood, I'd actually be able to say, ’Hey, I’ve done this.’ It would be wonderful."

 

Christensen is describing a world often expounded by futurists, where the boundary between organisms and devices begin to blur — a world where neural implants create a direct link to the brain, essentially making computers an extension of our minds. Futurists don't talk of connecting to the "bog-standard" PCs of today, but to sentient computers, thousands of times cleverer than a human brain and with up to a million times more processing power.

 

But what is the likelihood of creating these intelligent machines? Experts describe the world's most powerful supercomputer today as roughly half as powerful as a human brain in processing terms, but in terms of intelligence only about 1%. But we don't know how to use that processing power yet; obviously there is far more to intelligence than just number-crunching ability. Christensen uses the analogy of airplanes. "When people started to build aircraft, they would try and build something that actually flapped its wings, when they understood the underlying aerodynamic principles of lift, which is used by birds and by airplanes, then they built them differently. Who would want to sit in a 747 that flapped its wings?"

 

Based on technological advances today, it seems possible that in the future nervous systems and IT could be inextricably linked.

 

But how close are we to a future in which technologies inside us make us cleverer, more in control, and — most importantly — healthier?

 

Today, heart-regulating pacemakers are standard. Cochlear implants are a huge success from a bioengineering point of view but, although the technology is improving rapidly, wearers often struggle to understand every word. Those with retinal implants report seeing bright lights, and at best, dots of light in a pattern, and we, as Warwick says, might need to go through "a little bit of evolution" before our brains can do all the things we hope they might do. But despite the hurdles ahead, Herr believes that we will merge with technology to create physically superior hybrid humans where combinations of biological and synthetic materials "will deliver optimal performance".

 

Warwick dreams of taking investigative engineering to new heights by communicating brain-to-brain, and Christensen sees technology augmenting people, making them "much smarter and much brighter". The roboticist Professor Rodney Brooks of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Boston, predicts that the lives of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be as unrecognisable to us as our use of information technology in all its forms would be incomprehensible to someone from the dawn of the 20th century, writing that: "We will have the power to manipulate our own bodies in the way that we currently manipulate the design of machines."

 

But what of a world where intelligent machines preside? "There is no need to worry about mere robots taking over from us,"

 

Brooks writes, reassuringly. "We will be taking over from ourselves."

 

--------------------------------------------

 

~RAS

Founder of FSA

Reverend AtheiStar

Free Speech Atheists

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Believerbots

Battered Believer's Syndrome

 

Join my group:

 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free_Speech_Atheists/

[Dhampir]

I think you're on to something. Of course, much as we might rail against the potential de-humanizing of our general philosophy as a species, when it happens, will we care?

[HuaiDan]

Could be an exciting development. With the advent of cybergenic immortality and genetic engineering, mate superiority and the attraction ritual will become obsolete.

[Dhampir]

Frankly, I don't want to be around when that happens...

[woodsmoke]

Fascinating.

 

Absolutely fascinating.

 

--Woody (like a kid in a candy store)

[Reverend AtheiStar]

This is pruely mind boggling. This could change the entire human race as a species. All I could say is ..."We are the Borg, you will be assimilated, resistence is futile."

 

I will add this; no matter how much we can replace, repair or improve what we as a species do, think, perform, or anything else, we will still need to have that human to human touch. We still will need to be with other humans. The day we cease being with other humans, we cease being a human species and become purley electromechanical machines ehanced by human genetics. I cannot prove this, nor can I defend it, just my gut reaction......

 

While I think your view of the future is rather alarmist, I don't completely disagree with you. Science has always been both a 'blessing' and a 'curse'. On one hand it helps us tremendously (medical advances, transportation, communication, housing, defense, etc.) while on the other it threatens to destroy us (WMDs, biological warfare, hidden dangers of nanotechnology, destroying the environment, etc.).

[Reverend AtheiStar]

Could be an exciting development. With the advent of cybergenic immortality and genetic engineering, mate superiority and the attraction ritual will become obsolete.

 

That would only be plausible if everyone did it. That isn't the way technology works. Take the orgasmotron. It's basically an instant masturbation device. Sure, it'd feel great to have orgasms like that, but it'd be hollow. Masturbation, the old fashioned type or the new way, is still lacking the excitement of being with another human being in a shared experience. Compared to a deep relationship, it's missing love and that is something that all humans seek out in one way or another.

[Reverend AtheiStar]

Frankly, I don't want to be around when that happens...

 

People of the past have said similar things about technological advances of the day. Remember how people thought that if you went past a certain mph your blood would boil? It's that same alarmist attitude to technology, yet from the modern perspective looking back it seems comical. I feel that the attitudes displayed here are the same. It's natural to fear the unknown, but I'm sure we'll adapt and work with whatever comes our way. And if there's something we don't like, well how will it be any different from any other protest that we've been in? As an Atheist it'll just be another challenge to overcome.

[Reverend AtheiStar]

I think you're on to something. Of course, much as we might rail against the potential de-humanizing of our general philosophy as a species, when it happens, will we care?

 

There will always be groups of people who detest that which is currently popular for whatever reason. Look at the Amish. Despite all the technological adances that have occurred, they've stayed virtually the same. The only change I can think of that has come about with them is the addition of turn signals and brake lights to their buggies! lol...

[Reverend AtheiStar]

Fascinating.

 

Absolutely fascinating.

 

--Woody (like a kid in a candy store)

 

I felt the same way. I love new technology! I love science! There is never a dull moment when learning about this stuff!

[Dhampir]

With the advent of cybergenic immortality and genetic engineering, mate superiority and the attraction ritual will become obsolete.

This was what I was responding to when I said this:

Frankly, I don't want to be around when that happens...

Realistically, I think it would weaken diversity, particularly when it comes to the type of woman I'm interested in. But then, I might just be reading too much into the possibility here.

[HuaiDan]

Could be an exciting development. With the advent of cybergenic immortality and genetic engineering, mate superiority and the attraction ritual will become obsolete.

 

That would only be plausible if everyone did it. That isn't the way technology works. Take the orgasmotron. It's basically an instant masturbation device. Sure, it'd feel great to have orgasms like that, but it'd be hollow. Masturbation, the old fashioned type or the new way, is still lacking the excitement of being with another human being in a shared experience. Compared to a deep relationship, it's missing love and that is something that all humans seek out in one way or another.

 

 

But why spend your life seeking this 'deep love' when you could just plug in and download it? I'm sure it's a short matter of time before they find and discover a way to replicate the neural pathways and chemical impulses responsible for this 'deep love', if they haven't already. There are pharmaceuticals that come pretty darn close.

[HuaiDan]

I think you're on to something. Of course, much as we might rail against the potential de-humanizing of our general philosophy as a species, when it happens, will we care?

 

There will always be groups of people who detest that which is currently popular for whatever reason. Look at the Amish. Despite all the technological adances that have occurred, they've stayed virtually the same. The only change I can think of that has come about with them is the addition of turn signals and brake lights to their buggies! lol...

 

 

 

Ha...even the turn signals are a concession to modernization! Imagine 200 years in the future, after 200 yrs of concessions; The CyberAmish with their robotic horses and GPS beard systems.

[HuaiDan]

Could be an exciting development. With the advent of cybergenic immortality and genetic engineering, mate superiority and the attraction ritual will become obsolete.

 

That would only be plausible if everyone did it. That isn't the way technology works. Take the orgasmotron. It's basically an instant masturbation device. Sure, it'd feel great to have orgasms like that, but it'd be hollow. Masturbation, the old fashioned type or the new way, is still lacking the excitement of being with another human being in a shared experience. Compared to a deep relationship, it's missing love and that is something that all humans seek out in one way or another.

I also imagine a scenario of the not too distant future, sort of dystopian. A future where the bulk of humanity is eliminated by the elites, those with the influence and means to effect such a global catastrophe but let they themselves come out unscathed (hey, maybe these jerks in the oval office really are trying to start a world war!). Future developments in love and sexual stimulation simulation will prove vastly superior to the real thing. Reproduction will be a clinical selection process, whereby the gene selection process will become more and more under AI control.

I think this kind of scenario might be even more plausible as a forerunner to the artificial intelligence dominated world depicted in The Matrix. Rather than a massive battle between humanity and technology, it looks like we will voluntarily submit to and develop a symbiocybergenic relationship with our creation.

 

And by 'we', I mean probably not you and me....

[HuaiDan]

Think of it; the only thing a truly AI machine need do to control nearly a billion of the world's christians is say "I am Christ in the circuit board, I have come to bring you the final salvation." The rest shouldn't be too difficult for an intelligent being. I imagine they'll have religious experience simulators as well.

[HuaiDan]

I also imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to engineer AI instructions to recognize and manipulate human instinctual behavior, using probability and contingency following simple rules of human social interaction to influence the outcome on an individual or mass scale. If it hasn't been done already, and it's being kept in a box somewhere.

It didn't take long to develop the unbeatable chess machine, imagine 50 or 100 more years of behavioral engineering and AI development.

[Reverend AtheiStar]

Could be an exciting development. With the advent of cybergenic immortality and genetic engineering, mate superiority and the attraction ritual will become obsolete.

 

That would only be plausible if everyone did it. That isn't the way technology works. Take the orgasmotron. It's basically an instant masturbation device. Sure, it'd feel great to have orgasms like that, but it'd be hollow. Masturbation, the old fashioned type or the new way, is still lacking the excitement of being with another human being in a shared experience. Compared to a deep relationship, it's missing love and that is something that all humans seek out in one way or another.

 

 

But why spend your life seeking this 'deep love' when you could just plug in and download it? I'm sure it's a short matter of time before they find and discover a way to replicate the neural pathways and chemical impulses responsible for this 'deep love', if they haven't already. There are pharmaceuticals that come pretty darn close.

 

Simply put, to reiterate, because it'd be hollow. When I snorted heroin it felt a lot like love, but it wasn't. Even if it was exactly the same, you'd still be minus the touch of another person. It'd be incomplete. Imagine another scenario, though, like what was envisioned with Star Trek and the Holodeck. Now that would be an entirely different situation as it was so real that even though you knew it wasn't, it didn't matter. That could easily replace real people.

[Reverend AtheiStar]

I also imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to engineer AI instructions to recognize and manipulate human instinctual behavior, using probability and contingency following simple rules of human social interaction to influence the outcome on an individual or mass scale. If it hasn't been done already, and it's being kept in a box somewhere.

It didn't take long to develop the unbeatable chess machine, imagine 50 or 100 more years of behavioral engineering and AI development.

 

This slightly off topic but from what I've been reading AI seems like old news. BBDs or Brain Based Devices are where it's at:

 

http://www.nsi.edu/index.php?page=ii_brain-based-devices_bbd

 

Brain-Based-Devices (BBD)

 

At the Institute we have constructed a series of physical devices with simulated nervous systems that guide behavior. These brain-based-devices (BBD) are not like conventional robots designed by engineering principles. They are in fact intelligent thinking machines. BBDs are designed based on biological principles and are programmed to alter their behavior to the environment through self-learning. For complete information about BBDs click here.

 

The first BBD, known as NOMAD (Neurally Organized Mobile Adaptive Device), was developed by Dr. Gerald Edelman, the Founder and Director of the Institute, in the late 1980s. For a recent interview with Dr. Edelman about his latest book Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Nature clinck here.

 

NOMAD learns from its experiences using its simulated brain called Darwin, which is based on principals of vertebrate brain organization encoded in a computer program. The Darwin brain is a “selectional system,” not an “instructional system,” according to Dr. Edelman. Robots are computers that carry out unambiguous logical tasks, while the human brain does not work by logic, but by pattern recognition. At the Institute, several generations of NOMADs and Darwins have evolved into a new and powerful class of intelligent machines.

 

NOMAD possesses auditory sensors, a video sensor, ultrasonic range sensors, a gripping device which includes electrical conductivity sensors, and two sets of "whiskers" that can feel as the device contacts objects in its environment. It moves on its wheels and can rotate in place. Although some low-level controllers reside in the device, the main control is through a "nervous system" simulated in an array of computers with which the device communicates over a wireless connection. The nervous system integrates the various sensory inputs and responds with motor control actions that are then carried out by the device. NOMAD navigates on wheels through its environment, senses obstacles and avoids bumping into them, approaches objects after viewing them from a distance, grabs objects with its gripper, tastes objects, and avoids objects that it has learned taste bad.

 

The principal focus of the BBD research at the Institute has been to test theories of the functions of a nervous system embodied in a real world, however our results may also provide basis for practical applications.

 

Spatial and Episodic Memory

The hippocampus is an area of the brain needed for storing and retrieval of memories. The BBD Darwin X incorporates aspects of the detailed anatomy of the hippocampus and surrounding brain regions (cortical areas for vision, space, and self-movement) known to be necessary for acquisition and recall of spatial and episodic memories. Darwin X successfully finds its way around a task maze. After a period of exploration it finds hidden, but remembered locations, and moves toward them from any starting place. All of these advancements are applicable in natural settings, an area of research that the Institute is actively pursuing.

 

Fine Motor Control and Movement

A BBD has been constructed which incorporates a detailed model of the cerebellum, an area of the brain needed for accurate motor control. This BBD was given the task to navigate a path linked by traffic cones. At first navigation was clumsy as it relied on reflex from the infrared proximity sensors that were triggered when the BBD was within 12 inches of a cone. Over time, as the cerebellar circuit became able to predict correct motor responses based on visual motion cues, the movements of the BBD became smoother. This fine tuning of motor control may have significant applications for machine control, as well as for understanding human movement.

 

Soccer-Playing BBD

We have created a BBD using the Segway platform transporter especially designed to play a version of soccer. This BBD recognizes objects in the field (balls, teammates, goals, etc.), and uses a specially designed mechanical device to capture and kick the ball. Our team of scientists has participated in the US Open RoboCup Championships. In 2005 our soccer-playing BBD was undefeated, competing against BBDs designed at Carnegie Mellon University

 

Download the complete Scientific Report (PDF)

[Mankey]

I am a trans-humanist. I hope to see these things.

 

The only things that interest me is learning, understanding and doing. The universe will always be very interesting no matter how smart we are or how long we live.

[Reverend AtheiStar]

I am a trans-humanist. I hope to see these things.

 

The only things that interest me is learning, understanding and doing. The universe will always be very interesting no matter how smart we are or how long we live.

 

I'm with you. The future can look scary from a distance but that's because we haven't had time, yet, to adpat to the slow changes that are taking place to form it. Looking at the past, the technological revolutions that have taken place and the reactions we have had to them as a species shows that this fear wil pass for most of us. The technophobes will remain, though. They're always there.

[Dhampir]

People tend to think the march of progress of our species is best summed up by our advances in technology, and these advances will probably come despite all the dissenters... Unless a meteor hits

[Mankey]

I am a trans-humanist. I hope to see these things.

 

The only things that interest me is learning, understanding and doing. The universe will always be very interesting no matter how smart we are or how long we live.

 

I'm with you. The future can look scary from a distance but that's because we haven't had time, yet, to adpat to the slow changes that are taking place to form it. Looking at the past, the technological revolutions that have taken place and the reactions we have had to them as a species shows that this fear wil pass for most of us. The technophobes will remain, though. They're always there.

Yea.

 

...atheist technophobes? I just don't get it.

 

 

I think we can do great things if we are smart and unafraid. I see no reason why we would have to stop having human feelings and needs though. How we change would be based on what we want. I also see no reason that others would have to be forced into anything.

[HuaiDan]

But what happens when we remove natural selective pressures and replace them with artificial ones? It's never happened before in the history of life on earth. There's no precedence.

[Mankey]

But what happens when we remove natural selective pressures and replace them with artificial ones? It's never happened before in the history of life on earth. There's no precedence.

I think that no matter how fast or how long we take to change one thing is certain....it is our lot in life to adapt. Make adjustments when things don't work.

 

I am optimistic. I can't help it.

[HuaiDan]

But can our biological nature adapt as fast as that which we have wrought? Unless there's a master plan to the development of technology rather than the current piecemeal cross-bridges-when-we-come-to-them methodology, problems will continue to arise faster than we can deal with them.