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Anonymous Coward writes "Bringing us one step closer to becoming centrally-controlled meatbots, Japanese scientists have developed a device that produces power from the glucose in human blood. Theoretically, this technology (aka "Dracucell") could produce 100W of power. Of course, it can't produce that much power in practice since your body stupidly wastes glucose in maintaining homeostasis. The scientists propose that this devices could be used to power implanted devices. Now how many of you Slashdotters would it take to power my laptop? I'll buy the cola!"
This actually is kinda neat. If it can run on glucose it probably can run on fructose/sucrose/lactose and a lot of other sugars..
This of course brings back bad memories of Biology and the "Citric acid Cycle" and ATP..
Dr Kazuo Eda, heading the research, said: "It is like the metabolism of food. Human bodies can process glucose and obtain energy. When glucose is oxidised, electrons can be obtained."
IANAB (I am not a biologist), but if the process our bodies use is different from how this devices creates electricity, isn't there a different waste product? Or can our bodies still use rusty glucose? Or is oxidized glucose harmless waste?
I guess we just need to combine this technology with a form of fusion, and we're really in for it. Now drink your power aid.
Mirror
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Duh.
The clones continually create blood. There's no reason to slaughter them.
Is creativity nothing more then a very basic function of an advanced brain? If we can develop such analytical adept brains, why can't another organism given time? Why can't we create one?
Even certain birds can solve puzzles using techniques that researchers never included in the equation. Nothing suggests that the human brain can accomplish tasks that we could never program a computer to do. The ideal of a "soul" is actually fable/fiction/pure speculation, and does not deserve to be included in a scientific debate.
Just my two cents.
There are those who mod thier cases and those who mod their bodies... but the lines are blurring. Soon people will be buying LED's and Dracucells to implant under their skin. Just think... You could implant a matrix of LED's in your back to operate like an animated billboard! Who will be the first beach-bum to add a cellular uplink so they can sell ad-space online?
Have you ever heard of Cybernetic Poet? Or any of the music composing artificial intelligences? They regularly produce art which human judges mistake for man-made. Sure, it's not 100% indistiguishable yet, but it appears that with more processing power comes more 'correct' output. You are showing your carbon-bias. Your brain is really no more than a neural net itself (ok, it might have some quantum computing ability,but that is far from accepted fact). It just happens to be more powerful than artificial neural nets we can put together now. And, did you know (speaking of souls) that there is an area of the brain, that when stimulated electrically, causes the person in question to feel like they are having a religious experience? This goes a long way to say that artificial intelligences might well be able to experience the same things we do, if made sufficiently complicated.
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Crudely Drawn Games
I don't know about you, but I don't consider the maintenance of homeostasis in my body to be a waste of glucose.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
In other words, on a 2000 kilocalories/day diet...
1 kilowatthour = 860 kilocalories.
2000/860 = 2.3 kilowatt hours
2300 watts-hours/24hours = 96 watts.
Pretty amazing that we humans only run on 96 watts of power.
AccountKiller
Kinda also revives the coppertop thingy from the matrix though...
Still not a significant amount of energy compared to fusion or even fission, though.
Yes, but both of these simulations work using patterns that were derived by analysis of existing works, which by definition always happens after the real creation already took place. Therefore nothing the machines produce is remotely original, they were just programmed to produce something similar by humans, who used their real intelligence to identify patterns that could be codified into a form a machine could understand. People do this too, imitating musical styles of past composers, for example. So in this way machines can be made to be sort of like people, producing new outputs from a fixed set of inputs, creating examples of rules.
The real problem arises in simulating truly creative human activities - for example the creation of an entirely new method of composing music that did not previously exist. Maybe it is an extension of something that existed before, or a synthesis of disparate elements. How do people do things like this? Much of it is based on intuition, interpreting their sensory experiences, and then creating something new. All this is difficult to define in terms of a machine. Even worse is the question, why do people do this? What motivates them? You have to simulate both the how and the why to create a truly creative entity. The machine must be able to create new sets of rules for itself, and must do so not arbitrarily, but for a reason. Aha, you say. The ability and motivation to create new rules must be defined in a sort of meta-rule! Right, all you have to do is understand the operations of conscious thought. But there is a showstopper problem with that notion - you must understand conscious thought from within your own mind, in terms of your thoughts. I reason by analogy here, but isn't there a mathematical principle that says that many systems cannot be proved from within themselves?
Otherwise, you get 'creative' machines as they are now, clever, highly trained parrots. Nothing more.
I will proceed further from 'interesting' into 'making people angry', and inform you all that my opinion is that artificial intelligence that has the creative capacity of humans will never exist. This is because I believe humans were endowed with their creative capacity by their Creator, but not given enough analytical ability to understand their creative abilities well enough to truly replicate them. Maybe if you have the mind of God you can create the mind of a human, but how can you create the mind of God if you cannot even make the mind of a human? I guess this ties into the concept of a soul, the part of our experience that we are aware of, but unable to analyze from within our experience.
The ideal of a "soul" is actually fable/fiction/pure speculation
No, the reality you perceive is your own pure speculation. The fact that you percieve and speculate is incontrivertible proof of your soul/essential existance, proof available to you and no one else. This makes it subjective in any manifestation, and thus is, as you've stated, not subject to the objectivity of science. So you're half right, half wrong. Remember, I think therefor I am. A statement that hasn't been successfully debated since its conception.
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
The ideal of a "soul" is actually fable/fiction/pure speculation, and does not deserve to be included in a scientific debate.
I agree with all you had to say but that last part. Depending on how the soul is being defined, it does have it's rightly place in scientific debate. As self-awareness, consciousness, or personality, the soul is studied and even tested for in the field of psychology.
Breaking a bit from what is conventionally considered science, philosophers debate the nature and existence of the soul to no end. While they have little to no physical phenomena to categorize and study, it would be incorrect to think that more often than not their methods are unscientific.
Of course nothing can help support the idea of the soul as "that which makes humans special and unique in all the universe", other than some artless interpretations of the Bible.
But "pure" science is not without its weaknesses. Take the creation of the universe for instance. How can the methodologies of science alone ever hope to explain the origin of the big bang, when the laws of physics may not have existed in the form that we know them, if at all? We can't simply expect science to explain everything eventually, or we've abandoned science and invented another faith to take it's place.
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." ~Albert Einstein
>The process the researchers have come up with probably uses the same effect to produce a current.
I wonder if this research can lead into the electricity in -> ATP/Glucose out.
People powering PDAs with a little blood or spit is cute, people running on electricity no farms, no food, no obesity, etc would be revolutionary.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you plan to simulate the human brain, make sure you simulate the IO in a manner the simulation can access naturally. Nothing would suck more than being a fully functional simulation trapped in a deaf and dumb computer system.
"I think, therefore I am" doesn't mean much if nobody else knows...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
How would this sort of thing work with regards to burning your excess fat? does the human body convert stored fats into glucose before it utilizes them for energy? would plugging a machine like this into you allow you to eat essentially ANYTHING, and the only difference is the amount of power it could syphon off? i'm seeing a massive potential for these devices in the weight loss industry...
Perhaps the answer to the problem of teenagers dropping bricks from motorway and railway bridges is to sue Tetris.
I've read through some of the comments, and I have seen jokes refering to diabetes, but no serious comments. I'm personally a little disappointed. I have a friend who's lived with diabetes through most of her life, and it is NOT FUN!
I can't count the times when she's passed out from too much or too little sugar in her blood. I can't even count the number of times she's told me how she's laid back in bed having a reaction, not doing anything about it because she just wants the nightmare over with. Luckily, she has a family that cares too enough for her to not let her do that. A device that would efficiently control the glucose levels, without daily and usually unreliable amounts of insuline injections, would be a godsend for her. Diabetes isn't just some disease that you can live with and not worry. For people with the disease, it literally is a daily struggle. They find ways to live with it, but they can't lead a normal life. She has blood clots in her eyes from the sugar build up. Wounds take about twice as long to heal on her. She's lost teeth because they are rotting from the inside. She's been told by doctors that she will be lucky to make it to 50. A lot of people think that "oh you just need to take a shot every once in a while. What's so bad about that?" Unless you have the disease, or know someone who does, you can never really know the horrors it brings.
Forget human batteries. Lets start focusing on real life-saving applications.