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The Future of Mind Control of Physical Objects
mattnyc99 writes A month ago we discussed the accomplishment when researchers got monkeys to feed themselves with a robotic arm controlled by their brains. But after all the recent successful experiments with brain-computer interfaces, will the technology ever make it out of the lab and into hospitals — or even into our hands, for the closest thing imaginable to The Force? Popular Mechanics takes a look at the future of mind-machine control, speculating on several theoretical applications once brains can adapt to devices via direct communication between, say, synapse and prosthetic. Quoting the field's leading neuroscientist: 'For the foreseeable future, the main benefit is for rehabilitation. But the research is showing that the brain can act independently of the body. One day, you could be sitting in an office and controlling a device from across the room — or in another building. And it's not just flicking a switch. It could be a nanotool that's moving through a tiny environment, and you can control it and see what it's seeing.'"
With the assistance of my arms and hands, I find my mind can control all sorts of physical objects very easily.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
If I had the option, I would opt to have my brain placed in a jar attached to a robot body in the event that my heart gave out or something.
I have to imagine there is someway to keep the brain alive chemically. If an artifical blood-like fluid could be manufactured that carried oxygen and nutrients to the brain, and some sort of electro-stimulus interface could transmit visual and audio data, it seems plausible (in a cartoonishly plausible way) that we could survive the deaths of our bodies and live on for several more decades as purely intellectual beings; an existence I would enjoy almost as much as my current existence. And don't get the impression that I'm willing to discard my body because I'm hopelessly fat and sedentary. I love my body. I have a black belt, I workout out at the gym, and I am physically active. But when those capabilities go away, I would love to live on and experience the intellectual future.
That's not what she said.
Brain-computer interfaces need to be implanted and active before the child learns to speak. Some feedback needs to be given to the child in terms of flashing lights the child can see. Adults will take many years of training to approach what a child will learn during their early stages of development.
I would hazard a guess that the most inane of enhancements will have the most impact. Instantaneous access to a simple calculator and 50 gigs of ram/flash storage alone would enable uncanny abilities in humans. The ability to carry on simultaneous conversations with N other similarly enhanced humans, or even the concept of conversation using wide symbols rather than very narrow and slow bandwidth communications protocols such as speech would also have a huge impact on society.
This research has been going on for far too long with the squeamish ones of you holding it back waiting for non-invasive. Requiring non-invasive is like trying to build a Tempest device to access a computer inside a faraday cage instead of just putting in an Ethernet card and running a cable out.
The number of uses an enhanced human will use the implant for will make the rest of us all look like deaf and dumb quadriplegics by comparison. Having an interface in place before an injury would greatly shorten the rehabilitation time of an unfortunate amputee.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
I was thinking more along the lines of the military when he said the implications. We already have planes that can fly without a pilot (UAVs). If a person could wholly be inside a plane mentally (in a sense), imagine the increased control one could have, without the limitations of G-forces on a pilot's body or the fear of real death. And the military definately has the budget.
The Force in Star Wars is only a thinly veiled reference to The Tao.
Not so much referring to the Tao (The Way), which in it's purest form is not a "force" at all.
The Force of Star Wars fame is actually referring to Ch'i (or Qi in current transcription), which is referred to in the Tao Te Ching. It is also known as Ki in Japanese thought, and is equivalent to Prana in Hindu thought. Native American thaught also has something similar.
The concept predates Taoism by quite some time.