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

Wow...

[swordboy]

Right now, I'm wondering how we can use this to grow the appropriate meat chunks based on a user's input...

Re:neuromancer

[Torgo's Pizza]

That's like asking if anyone has ever used Linux on Slashdot.

Hope he never comes to Canada

[SuiteSisterMary]

Better not try to fly from Newfoundland to Toronto, if he knows what's good for him.

Re:Hope he never comes to Canada

[ender81b]

100 wires embedded in his wrist
also doesn't sound like a good idea.

would YOU want a computer to always know what your wrists where doing? Didn't think so =)

Marriage

[FissileDog]

"...Or the beginning of an (unholy) marriage of man and machine?"
I still can't marry a boyfriend (man and man).
Get your priorities right.

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???

Old News

[viper21]

We all know that little kids in Japan already have Sony Playstations grafted into their bodies.

Button sensors in fingertips, a video pipeline into the optic nerves, etc.

It's a big secret, but we all know they are doing it. The reason Sony can't provide a 1000x performance increase to the PS3 is because of the limitations of the human nervous system, not because of some silly thing like computing limitations. You just wait for umbilical attachments for kids so they can work in parallell.

"Mommy, Billy jumped off the couch after a dragon and hurt my belly button!"

I can just imagine the lawsuits.

We are Sony. You must be assimilated. Do not buy XBox, Do not buy Gamecube. Wait for PS3k

-Scott

Boy, did that movie suck?

'Batlike 6th sense'

[PopeAlien]

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.

Hmm.. I've heard that when somebody loses one sense (sight, hearing, etc) the other senses grow stronger to compensate. So the obvious question is: Would this work the other way around? If you add a 'sixth sense' would the strength of your five basic senses be diminished? Would they become 'lazy'?

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'

[Puk]

Your brain specializes large chunks of itself to deal with the various senses, and just adding in some new input without having that chunk of brain matter to process it isn't going to do much.

But that leads to an interesting thought. While what you say is largely true once you are an adult, your brains starts largely unprogrammed with how to process optical and auditory input. It learns what is effective and how to decode the outside world's input into useful internal information. I assume most of this learning is done when young, but I bet some of it continues later on. So if you inserted this information into the brain, eventually it should train itself to use it as just another sense/input -- probably faster if you are younger.

This, of course, leads to a debate on who it would be moral to test it on, and I'm not sure there are any good answers to that. I certainly don't have any.

On a related note, I remember watching a presentation at school on a comparison between the basic structures of a image using some sort of network (sadly, I forget the details) trained on raw images and the basic structures used by vision-related groups of neurons. They were amazingly similar. No, this didn't fool me into thinking we have any clue how the brain works. :)

-Puk

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.

Re:'Batlike 6th sense'

[iabervon]

You're not going to get more cortex just by getting more input. The parts of your brain that would go to processing this input would no longer be available for their original tasks. So it's not so much them getting 'lazy' as getting less of your processing power.

Of course, getting existing brain structures to re-specialialize in order to deal with this input is probably very difficult in an adult. Fortunately, we have depth perception already, so we at least have structures for the processed data.

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:'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

Re:'Batlike 6th sense'

[Uberminky]

a human who uses his 5 senses together in a new way

I don't know anything about bats. But what you say sounds a lot like something I've been thinking about lately. It's incredibly common, but we probably don't think about it much: subconsciously combining our senses to create new "senses". Here's a great example: wetness. You don't have any wetness sensors. But if you stick your hand in a box and brush it up against something that's wet, you know it's wet. How? Your "cold" sensors (or temperature, or whatever) fire, your tactile sensors register certain patterns, your hairs are matted down (more tactile feedback).. and you infer subconsciously that your hand is wet. You could be wrong (just like you can be mistaken in your judgements of the sources of sounds, etc), but odds are you correct. If you rub your fingers together and they catch, slip, and vibrate in a certain way, and your muscle feedback says there's a certain resistance signature, you're probably wet. You can't help but feel it: it's a new sense.

Sorry for going a bit off-topic. Seems kinda interesting to me anyway...

2 hr operation

[stoolpigeon]

His claim that a 2 hr operation proves this is not a publicity stunt does not carry a lot of weight w/me.

The girls at most any local strip club have been through more surgery than that- and it has nothing to do w/noble intentions.

.

electric circuts?

[Hadlock]

as i understand it, pain/heat/cold sensory input is sent through the nerve endings as chemical/electrical pulses. wouldn't this sort of electrode "paralyze" his hand, removing him of all feeling, or at the very least; give him that "oh shit my arm went all tingly when i fell asleep on it again" feeling? i know the latter has to do with lack of blood-flow, but it seems like his sense of touch will be at a serious disadvantage.

on a second thought; do you have "upstream" nerve channels (hand to brain), and "downstream" (brain to foot) nerve channels? or do they just use the same neural pathways?

this is good for "terapalegics" (3 limbs missing?), but might this have any applications for scroleosis, or MS? (my friend was recently diagnosed, and a co-worker just had back surgery, i know not much more about the disease)

This guy is a wanker

[FurryFeet]

Check out The Register's coverage of Warwick. This guy is a publicity hound, with little (if anything) to show that justifies all this hype.

Re:neuromancer

[McBeth]

Neuromancer is definitely _not_ the first book in the Cyberpunk Genre. While Gibson did coin the phrase, several books had been written before Neuromancer. A book that everyone would agree as being cyberpunk, and pre Neuromancer, is "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. It was published in 1981, three years before Neuromancer.

If you want to define cyberpunk by the themes in the books more than the physical act of flying around in computers with your mind, people like Alfred Bester, Roger Zelazny, and Philip K. Dick are definitely precursor-cyberpunk. Hell you could make a good case for Plato and Descartes.

If Vernor Vinge weren't such an _okay_ writer, and a pompous buffoon, I'd be more willing to give him the title.

Emotional Spam

[stoolpigeon]

From the register article:

"But wait, where there's a sponsor, there's a commercial opportunity. Tumbleweed, a specialist in secure communications, is providing the technology "vital to ensure the safe transmission of our nervous system signals via the internet," Captain Cyborg says"

They say they want to send "feelings" over the web.

I can't wait until they start sending out emotional spam. I haven't really bought into any of the "enlarge your penis" emails. But if they carry with them a great sense of inadequacy...

who knows?

.

Man in the middle nerve hacking?

[lysurgon]

Hmm... this sounds like nervous system hacking to me. It's kind of a "man in the middle" type infiltration for recon purposes. Makes one wonder exactly how the communication that lets me type this message is getting passed around my body.

If we can decode the human nervous system, that would be a huge step. I'm not sure if it's a good one or bad one, but a step.

However, I don't know how successful we will be at integrating computers and the body. As far as I understand it, the nervous system while based on electrochemical energy circuits, is not a binary system. Each nuron has many possible states, not just on/off. These various neuron states cause different neurotransmitters to be released at synnapses (where they connect) and somehow a super-complex net of this leads to consciousness. Hopefully this research will eventually shed some light on that "somehow".

In the mean time, the most succeess will probably come from just letting the human body adapt to computerized input, like that optical sonar implant they did a while back.

Offtopic: I did some research on neurotransmitters recently. It's fascinating stuff... makes one realize that taking drugs is really just a crude (though often entertaining) way of hacking your own body/mind. But then agan, so is any activity you take designed to have some effect of yourself.

Beware of Kevin Warwick

[amarodeeps]

Despite the fact that some of you feel The Reg. to be unnecessarily sarcastic or (tongue and cheek) sensationalistic, I think they've hit it spot on with their take on Prof. Warwick. He seems to be pretty much into it for the 'look-at-me-I'm-original' factor, but he doesn't seem to have much scientific credibility when it comes right down to it. Here is a good Reg. analysis from 2000, after his the big story in Wired came out about him: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/29/9250.html.

His attempts to become a cyborg from what I understand consisted of little more than putting a chip in his body which would open a door as he walked towards it. How is this that different from: having the chip in your pocket, sticking it to your arm with some sort of patch, etc. My roommate's cat has a chip implanted in her to find her in the case of her running away. Is she a cyborg kitty??

As far as this new venture is concerned, Warwick seems to have the idea that using this kind of technology to help paralyzed is his idea, or has never been done. Think again, Professor Warwick (I really this is somewhat different but seems to be essentially the same idea, stimulating nerves to create movement in people struggling with paralysis...my point is merely that Warwick is not the brilliant loner on the revolutionary fronts of scientific acheivement that he makes himself out to be...there are people doing real science all over who don't need the gratification of being in the media--this is a non-story).

Check out this link for further information: http://www.kevinwarwick.org.uk/.

Re:Beware of Kevin Warwick

[TinheadNed]

As a student of Kevin Warwick, now having had him as a lecturer for two years, I would like to say that, yes, he is a bit of a prat. But he's a nice guy. The Department of Cybernetics is one of maybe two in the country, and it is a bit publicity orientated. My AI lecturer just asked me if I was going to try to market my neural network project, and I don't think he was joking.

And the rest of the Department is not against going on the radio to tell Warwick he's completely insane. The fact that the electrodes he's having fired into his arm have never been removed from live animals (let alone humans) before adds a little zest to the whole operation. Aside from gangrene and other infections that could get in from the hole in his arm he now has that could destroy his use of his hand.

And there are a lot of uses for this implant if it works. Admittedly most were thought up afterwards, but there are uses. It's just a little overmarketed. He's a bit weird but he's not as serious as some people think he is. I think he's just trying to shock people to get their attention

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.

Warwick::Scientist -- NewKidsOnTheBlock::Musicians

[NFW]

Lest the previous post be mistaken for a troll, check out Warwick Watch and a less flattering Wired article from which the following quote was poached:

"Put forward in fiction, these ideas can be quite interesting, but to see these ideas put forward by someone who's supposed to be a serious theorist...."

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.

New Scientist calls it a "Gimmick"

[Curious__George]

New Scientist has this article under the headline: Nerve Implant Experiment "a Gimmick", but you can't help but wonder if it is jealousy at the media attention that the guy garners more than bad science that has other scientist against this guy.

Curious George

Why?

[marnanel]

Uh, I don't get it. Why?

In other news,

[Snafoo]

Mr. Warwick has just undergone his most extensive and painful 'cyber-surgery' to date. After a gruelling twenty-hour operation, cutting-edge 'cyber-medicine' has managed to give Warwick a prosthetic clue.
The electronic 'micro-chip' helps regulate Warwick's desperate appetite for publicity. Scientists hope that one day, clueless people everywhere will be able to benefit from this technology, including such celebrities as George Bush and the Church of Scientology.