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.

Comments

Captain Cyborg Strikes Again

[Anonymous Coward]

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???

Re:'Batlike 6th sense'

[Dephex Twin]

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

Re:'Batlike 6th sense'

[mattbelcher]

Warwick also hopes to wire himself up to a ultrasonic sensor, used by robots to navigate around objects, to give himself a bat-like sixth sense.

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.

Done. Didn't work

[Shotgun]

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.

Re:'Batlike 6th sense'

[ImaLamer]

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.

Re:Beware of Kevin Warwick

[amarodeeps]

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.

Re:'Batlike 6th sense'

[Dephex Twin]

His memory enhancements are only lookup based voluntary systems, so they aren't integral.

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

Why?

[marnanel]

Uh, I don't get it. Why?