Slashdot Mirror
Bionic Man May Soon be a Reality
choongiri writes "The London Guardian is reporting on the creation of replacement eyes and working hands in the race to build a $6bn human. Currently being worked on is everything from bionic eyes to an entire exoskeleton enabling the wearer to carry 200lbs. From the article: 'The 1970s gave us the six-million-dollar man. Thirty years and quite a bit of inflation later we have the six-billion-dollar human: not a physical cyborg as such, instead an umbrella term for the latest developments in the growing field of technology for human enhancement.'"
will it have that "na na na na na na na" sound?
But it's gonna drive everyone crazy making that Tf Tf Tf Tf Tf Tf sound. You go to put your arm around your date during a quiet romantic movie, and Tf Tf Tf Tf Tf Tf...
Table-ized A.I.
6bn man huh? I guess 6m don't buy you much these days...
The 1970s gave us the six-million-dollar man. Thirty years and quite a bit of inflation later we have the six-billion-dollar human
W tops that as the Six Trillion Dollar Man, due to the US Budget and Trade Deficit, all without bending steel.
Table-ized A.I.
Bannerman Smash!
it's a comic book reference... and not a very good one.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I'm not gonna admit to wanting one, no, sirree!
/. - who needs one?
Besides, this is
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I would kind of fear hackers if I had a computer-controlled hand or arm. Nasty pranks include:
* Picking nose during job interview
* Fingering your female boss
* Fingering your male boss
* Flipping off the cops
* Yanking off in the restroom in front of the CEO
* Typing hate mail to your fiance
* Throwing the ball backward during bowling
* Heavy thumb twiddling during a meeting
* Pointing to the genital area of the projected Power Point figures and figurines during a presentation
* Making the Satan sign while in a crowded elevator
* Pressing the all the floor buttons while on the elevator with others without getting out
* Sticking your hand into the cake at an office birthday party
* Grabbing a turd from a public toilet and playing airplane with it
Table-ized A.I.
Sure, having an exoskeleton that makes you stronger will continue to have utility, but will we really need bionics in, say, 20 years if new biological eyes or arms or legs can be grown using a person's own DNA?
A-Bomb
We can rebuild him, we have the technology. Damn I'm old ;)
http://religiousfreaks.com/Darryl Hannah could use an eye or two.
Yes Im serious, and no, I dont think it will replace my "pen-is mightier".
Actually it is for a fair amount of people. Transhumanism.org is a good place to start. Extropians are still around (from a recent mailing list post at least). A common thread is frustration with these types of technology being addressed only to the disabled by short-sighted people. Think for a moment how you would feel if given transhuman powers, then have them taken away. Quite disabled, right? Join our growing dream. The singularity is near.
Who needs biological when you have mechanical! Do you want a blind spot? Do you want to have to blink? Biological is in no way superior.
Yeah, it's the $6 billion dollar race towards domination through the corporatization of our bodies. It's as if raping our dreams and pillaging all of our known natural resources weren't enough, they are now sooo gung-ho to destroy the very essence of our being human. Greedy, lying, Sexist slimes, I say.
http://www.neogentronyx.com/
C'mon, Mech totally kick bionic man's ass!
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Dr Palanker reckons the system will give people 20/80 vision - normal is 20/20, you need 20/40 for a driving licence and 20/400 is the legal definition of blindness - allowing people to read large fonts and recognise faces.
And as soon as the technology gets to 20/19 or less, I'll get one if I need it or not. Bring on the cyborgization!
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
...a reality: researchers accept obscene grants for experiments that will, at best, someday result in an extremely comfortable mattress.
The biggest question : How big is his penis going to be? :-)
..don't panic
Sentience may require a few chemicals, but everything outside the brain could be replace essentially now.
Plot Summary for
"The Six Billion Dollar Man"
When ace test-pilot Steve Austin's ship crashed, he was nearly dead. Deciding that "we have the technology to rebuild this man", the government decides to rebuild Austin, augmenting him with cybernetic parts which gave him superhuman strength and speed. Austin becomes a secret operative, fighting injustice where it is found.
Air Force Colonel Steve Austin, an astronaut who had walked on the moon, is almost fatally injured in a plane crash. Many of his damaged parts are replaced by experimental bionic limbs, including his right arm, his left eye, and both legs. These bionics give him superpowers such as increased speed and strength and the ability to see long distances. To pay the U.S. Government back the $6,000,000,000 it cost to rebuild him, Austin goes to work for the Office of Scientific Investigation as an agent, investigating foreign spies, mad scientists, bombers, space aliens, and even Bigfoot.
I thought it used to be the Six *Million* dollar man. Talk about inflation...
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Although I think most people still call it the Grauniad because of it's historical propensity for tpyogarphical errors.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
A more powerful muscle was just announced. Oh, and nobody expects artificial items to "perform equivalently". They will far outpace.
Great! he can save us all when the Venus probe goes amok and returns to kill us all!
[i]Thirty years and quite a bit of inflation later we have the six-billion-dollar human: not a physical cyborg as such, instead an umbrella term for the latest developments in the growing field of technology for human enhancement.[/i] So not really the six million dollar man, but we can't come up with anything more imaginative to say, so we, being geeks yearning for the pop culture acceptance that we claim to abhor, make stretch a campy reference as far as it will go. This isn't your father's Robbie the Robot!! Ho ho ho.
Six billion dollars worth of bionic man exoskeleton prototypes is bound to make for a lot of fall guys. Thank you. I'll be playing the Venetian and Bellagio lounges all next week.
Eight years ago I broke my elbow, and now have two metal pins in there that the consultant proudly boasted cost 350UKP each, which, I worked out at the time, came to about $1000. The One Thousand Dollar Man sounds much better than The 700 Quid Bloke.
Doubtless there are slashdotters out there with more expensive hardware in them than me, and I imagine a prosthetic limb can be $10,000. But it was a nice round number for me.
And all done on the NHS (state health insurance scheme)
B
Exoskelingtons are SO Terra Nova... Bring on the mechs!
All you need to be bionic are some pots and pans and some cellotape, a wireless webcam, or a regular webcam with a long usb cable with an infra red mod strapped to your forehead, a handheld pc to see to picture from the cam, and come doc martin shoes.
What the odds that the bionic man's major arch-nemesis will be the Pope and his band of anti-human enhancement warriors?
back in 74, he only cost 6 million.
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I was recently looking into this area and I'm actually surprised that bionic prosthetic arms aren't commonplace by now. Granted, I'm a bit new to all this stuff, but for example, let's say you have an amputee who's lost his arm from about halfway between the elbow and shoulder. The median nerve is a large group of nerve cells that runs through the center and controls most of the muscles below the elbow (you'd have to tap some other nerves for elbow control). Now, with groups of needle sensors implanted in the nerve (and I'm pretty sure placement wouldn't have to be exactly on specific nerve cells, but enough needles that you'd get pretty good coverage over the various nerve cells running through the median nerve), you could then use a fairly basic neural net to interpret the signals and program the arm.
Basically, you'd train the neural net as follows: Tell the patient to bend their pinky, for example. Of course, they don't have one, but they have the knowledge of how to move one and while it wouldn't be there, the nerves would be stimulated. The neural net would then learn what the bent pinky nerve impulses are. You'd have to do various degrees of movement and different types of movements, but I'm fairly certain this would all be pretty doable.
The nerves of the arm are pretty robust and while there might be some breaks in the nerves after the sensors are implanted, the nerves would regenerate with maybe some minor crossover, but that wouldn't really matter since the real limb wouldn't be there anyway.
But like I said, this isn't my field. I could be completely off base, but it seems to me that this is pretty doable and I suspect this isn't too far off from what Kevin Warwick did to control his robotic arm. And if a single professor with some students can come up with this system, why can the prosthetic industry not do it?
my iRobot stock hits $50. THen I'll be the $1,500 richer man. Yeah big deal I know.
But what on Earth is the "london guardian"?
The Guardian used to be called the Manchester Guardian, then it moved to London where it was called simply The Guardian. There's no such thing as this 'london guardian' you're talking about.
I've got the spirit, lose the feeling.
Please her good! Get your bionic penis today!
With this new power the non-geeks will bow at our feet! We are greater they are lesser! All I would need is a replacement of every limb I have to make me stronger... I am just thinking now about how much faster I could type... 1000 words per minute! WHA HA HA HA!
I'd be careful with these terms.
Heres the definition I got from wikipedia:
"The term cyborg, a portmanteau of cybernetic organism, is used to designate an organism which is a mixture of organic and mechanical (synthetic) parts. Generally, the aim is to add to or enhance the abilities of an organism by using technology."
Now the first sentence means its an organism thats both flesh and machine. This means the machine should be an innate part of the organism, to the level its not the organism anymore without the machine. I suppose pacemakers and artificial hearts will make the person a cyborg. However the second part means use of technology makes the organism a cyborg. That means wearing contact lenses makes me a cyborg.
Now 'bionic eyes' which really is a small screen in your helmet, and the kind of exoskeletons that we've seen from military contractors are really add-ons that the user will remove at night before going to bed. Even prosthetics are generally removed (fake teeth) at bedtime, which disqualifies the organism from being a cyborg in the first sense of the word. If you accept the second sense, then I'm the 6 dollar man.
I'd choose to use the first meaning of the word, and I'd include people with artificial hearts there. We already have Borgs around us and its completely normal. No use using funky words to oversell an article... "Exoskeletons a reality" will be a better fit, only if the skeletons are being actively marketed already. We've seen tonnes of exoskeleton articles "vaporware" for years in slashdot, now theyre using words where they dont belong to shock the crowd more. OK OK I get it show me a real soldier in combat in an exoskeleton already!
(and I'll tell you its still not the Borg that has existed for years among us).
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Well the general attitude in Europe is that we shouldnt step in and prevent such things but let them run their natural course (I believe this myself, mostly). Ofcaurse Nuclear Weapons are dangerous, but IMO that is the only case where a country has the right do do anything. If another country's leaders are killing their people, it is the people that needs to rise up and do something, not some external power. All in all the only time I (and many other europeans) agree to do anything about these things is if we are 100% sure that we ourselves are in danger from it. We were not in danger from Saddam any longer, the UN were looking out for him, Milosevic was an internal country dispute (which IMO another country should not go into), dont remember details about Khaddafi. We shouldnt police other nations, they will never get it right if we do and most of the world will end up hating us for doing it (like the USA now). Most of the world isnt ready for democrazy and it isnt right to force them to use it as it just destabilize the country. The Iraqies isnt ready for Democrazy fx, it is easy to see by the way they react to choices, they still need to be told what to do (not because they are less intelligent but because of cultural stuff). Sure the Germans started 2 World wars but even then we (most of europe) handled that the exact same way we handle stuff now, only do something if it is actually worth doing. For example my country (Denmark) did not try to defend against the German armies when they invaded (they took over the entire danish nation in less then a day) because we couldnt win and it would harm us more to try then not (from this we were able to negotitate some deals with the germans thereby allowing our Goverment to retain somewhat control for most of the war, the jews were safeguarded by our government a good deal of the war aswell plus some other stuff). We did on the other hand have a resistance movement which were much better at fighting the germans the our meager army would have been.
Argh FUCK forgot to put it on plain text :/.
Well the general attitude in Europe is that we shouldnt step in and prevent such things but let them run their natural course (I believe this myself, mostly). Ofcaurse Nuclear Weapons are dangerous, but IMO that is the only case where a country has the right do do anything. If another country's leaders are killing their people, it is the people that needs to rise up and do something, not some external power.
All in all the only time I (and many other europeans) agree to do anything about these things is if we are 100% sure that we ourselves are in danger from it. We were not in danger from Saddam any longer, the UN were looking out for him, Milosevic was an internal country dispute (which IMO another country should not go into), dont remember details about Khaddafi.
We shouldnt police other nations, they will never get it right if we do and most of the world will end up hating us for doing it (like the USA now). Most of the world isnt ready for democrazy and it isnt right to force them to use it as it just destabilize the country. The Iraqies isnt ready for Democrazy fx, it is easy to see by the way they react to choices, they still need to be told what to do (not because they are less intelligent but because of cultural stuff).
Sure the Germans started 2 World wars but even then we (most of europe) handled that the exact same way we handle stuff now, only do something if it is actually worth doing.
For example my country (Denmark) did not try to defend against the German armies when they invaded (they took over the entire danish nation in less then a day) because we couldnt win and it would harm us more to try then not (from this we were able to negotitate some deals with the germans thereby allowing our Goverment to retain somewhat control for most of the war, the jews were safeguarded by our government a good deal of the war aswell plus some other stuff). We did on the other hand have a resistance movement which were much better at fighting the germans the our meager army would have been.
Edited version...
So it was better to just "wait" and let Hilter get so strong that WW/II killed 62 MILLION people, rather than stop him early when he started invading other countries?
Somehow, I think the Jews would disagree with your philosophy.
I have to admit, I do admire you for actually *admitting* that Europe sits back and does nothing until they're forced to actually act. "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing." True words, those.
Imagine if I could carry 200lbs...
Oh wait, I can. Granted, not for long distances, but I hardly find this impressive. Heck, my wife lifts more than that on a nearly daily basis. Now, one of the guys in my office can squat nearly 600 lbs, THAT is impressive. And yet, somehow, he manages to do it without any technological enhancement.
hand + eye = "Bionic Man May Soon be a Reality"?
Ghost in the shell is pretty much where I see us ending up soon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_shell
Talk about giving birth to good ideas...
b ot_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-04-15-ro
I wonder if they can add complications such as put the doll in a coma, or a series of convulsions, or program it to give out Exorcist-like wails and moans. If she hurls up a noxious, caustic, corrosive pea green soup-like fluid, I wonder how the students will react.
Now, if they make one of Kess' mother, having delivery occur while the mother is wrist-strapped to an overhead rod as the infant emerges from her back.
=======
I guess some guys may proclaim: "Now THAT'S a REAL Doll...", but then ask, "How many serial ports or USB ports does she come with? How much range of motion in her joints? How many decibels in her piezo throat? Will she make coffee?...."
Others might ask, "Does RealDoll.com have plans to replicate bleeding and moaning mannequins?" (In the interests of equal opportunity, the male dolls should moan and bleed, too... The sky's the limit; only your lack of imagination is in the way...)
Give it a few year and we'll have people ordering robot love like in the movies and films...
Probably these won't work for the carpool lane, though. Well, unless you program it to drive, and YOU are the passenger... well, if your state allows a non-sentient driver behind the wheel of a vehicle on public roadways...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
"Hold on, we have a chmod 777 here..."
b ot_x.htm
(See: "code 777" reference at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-04-15-ro
and enjoy... THIS is a real-world use of non-human implants...)
"We have the technology... The waiting list... The Patents... We can PRE-build her..." could be the "Gaumard Scientific Co. Inc." opener for their marketing and training products...
But, I wonder if she can respond (Kill Bill-Style) to any male nurses humping her...
DOH! word image: "native"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I think a lot of people all around are short-sighted when it comes to transhumanism. Why are life expectancies around 80? It should be a few billion, depending on what physicists say about heat death. And I'm grateful to all the disabled. They get to test the stuff I'll use later.
Wasn't a bionic hand all it took to create Skynet? I think we're screwed.
He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.
When's the last time you had to clean your digital camera? Certainly not every few seconds. And you didn't address the blind spot, something no camera has.