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Warwick Gets a Few More Wires
teamhasnoi writes "CNN reports that a British university professor has been fitted with cyborg technology. (100 wires embedded in his wrist) This apparently enables his nervous system to be linked to a computer, encoding movements like wiggling fingers and feelings like shock and pain, and recorded for the first time. Is this the end of VCR+? Or the beginning of an (unholy) marriage of man and machine?" Warwick has been doing this for five years now.
Captain Cyborg shoots down from the skys and enters the realm of bullshit...yet again! And what happens? the entire mainstream media decides he's obviously an expert in his field and listens!!!
Do they know the rest of the Cybernectics profession cringes with embarrassment every time Captain Cyborg appears on the back of a cereal packet???
You know while all of this type of cybernetic stuff is kind've cool, I have to believe that $715,000 on a few gadgets is a bit extreme. Look at it this way, I have two daughters who's computing power, mobility, task ability, etc ad infinitum is vastly superior to anything we will see for some time. I think I have a few hundred dollars in each of them (what insurance didn't pick up and including vaccines, etc), and I had a hell of a lot of fun creating them. Yeah, working with servos and transistors is some fun, but I like to make my future chore doers the old fashioned way. ooooo -- penguin dung
Well if you take the Canadian airport "fiasco" with the other cyborg from a few days back as evidence, it seems that, yes, normal senses do become weaker by having this "crutch" (since the guy then needed to be wheeled into the plane and has since been having trouble functioning normally... could be the shock as well though).
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
The strangest thing about this statement is that bat's only have 5 senses, just like humans. Echolocation is just an ingenius use of hearing.
Shockwave Flash movies are the greatest thing to happen to non-sequitur humor since Japan.
Watched the discovery channel a while back. Had a piece about these devices that implanted wires to help paralyzed people walk. Problem was that the wires break/wear-out. The paralyzed people end up with hundred of wire filaments lacing their legs where the few good nerves are. The xrays looked like steel wool. They reported that it tended to be painful but surgery to remove the thousands of little pieces of broken up wires was just too difficult.
Beware of combining organic and non organic substances. The living things break and rebuild themselves constantly, in fact it is part of their design. Metal wire are not organic.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Millions of pets are lost, missing or stolen. No one wants to discover that one of those "lost pets" may be their own. Unfortunately, it happens to 1/3 of all pet owning families. More tragically, only 10% of "lost pets" are ever identified and returned home, which is why you should have your veterinarian safely and permanently identify your pet with an AVID Chip to protect him from being lost or stolen.
The AVID Chip is a tiny computer chip about the size of a grain of rice which has an identification number programmed into it.
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines yet?
Echolocation has been credited as being a sixth sense by many biologists.
The reason is that there is ping sent to get the pong. Seen by many as a use of two senses evolving into another extra sense.
If I'm a human who uses his 5 senses together in a new way [Zen students have done this for years] some may also argue that I've created a sixth sense. The trick isn't using thought or conscious behavior, the trick is having that sense go on it's own. [like bats... the bat isn't thinking: "ill send the ping and the pong blah blah..." He just does it]
So you are right, but Carl Sagan himself [Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors] said that echolocation is another sense.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Just to clarify: I wasn't trying to suggest that Reading University or the Department of Cybernetics there is a bunch of morons, or that they don't know what Warwick is up to--certainly not. In fact, I think they keep such a prat as Kevin Warwick on because he makes money for them. That's very intelligent, if cynical. :-)
Of course, maybe he's damn good at something, I don't know really. But based upon his media exposure, all he seems to be good at is drawing attention to himself.
Right, I wasn't thinking really it was integral per se, more of a crutch that was suddenly taken away from him.
As for the glasses, I remembered a comment about him going to a store, and causing some fuss, and how he would take off his glasses and put them on repeatedly (the poster was downplaying that he really wore them constantly). But I could be wrong.
In any case, I still think it seems very likely that any augmentation of this kind could become a crutch (therefore dulling other functions/senses).
Not that this is bad, necessarily. We have it happening already.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Uh, I don't get it. Why?
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
"I have to thank Professor Kevin Warwick at the Cybernetics Department of Reading University. He was very generous with his knowledge during the research period of this book. Professor Warwick is the first human being to insert an active computer chip into his body, directly connected to his central nervous system. Proof that this story is not science fiction."
Two things which spring to mind when comparing this book with Prof Warwick's self aggrandising waffle are that...
Yes, but if you get a sense returned as an adult, the chances for the neural paths to develop are greatly reduced. Witness traumatic brain injury in children ( age 9 or so) compared to same scale of injury in adults. Considering that a treatment for children for severe seizures is removing a brain hemisphere, you'd never do that to an adult.