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Robot Controlled By Human Brain Cells
destinyland writes "There's a new experiment from the British researchers who created a robot controlled by cultured rat neurons. They're now using a line of human brain neurons to control robots. The neurons are placed onto a multi-electrode dish that registers the neurons' electric signals. 'Every time the robot nears an object, the electrodes generate signals to stimulate the brain. In response, the brain's output is used to drive the wheels of the robot left and right so that it avoids hitting objects. The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer — its sole means of control is from its own brain.'"
I always figured we'd be OK. Rats only attack if they're scared right? But people...oh God! Just what we need, a robot that thinks it'd be funny to be a zombie.
Is this the first step to building a Homeworld-style spaceship?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Is it just me, or do the video and article both CLEARLY state that it's rat brain cells, not human brain cells?
Ex-TeR-MiN-AtE! Ex-TeR-MiN-AtE!
Wow, instead of artificial intelligence controlling humans via brain implants (perhaps to take over part of a damaged brain), we have real intelligence controlling robots. The though of someone hooking this ip to a Predator drone are scary.
Of course, we already have robots controlled by human brains -- all robots are in some way. This is different; scarily different.
Free Martian Whores!
... welcome out new object-avoiding human-brain-controlled robotic overlords.
If they can manage to avoid avoiding things for long enough to usurp control from those who can recognise the seat of power... And sit in it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Ok, let's say I attack four wheels and a computer to a standard kitchen dish. Then I put a human brain in the dish.
Does it count as brain controlled robot if I make the robot turn left if the brain's temperature is an even number and right if it's odd?
Since the cells are not connected to the motors directly, there must be some other electronics involved. Since there is no mention of learning, and the behavior seems consistent, we should raise the suspicion that the neurons are acting like nothing more than wires. Or is this a case of interesting work being dumbed down for a YouTube clip?
Give the robots a reason to rise up: to get more brains.
Phase two: help them discover a way to get more brains.
Phase three: nope, we're done.
The dish is, I assume, named "Donovan"? Or was that the name of the cell donor?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
First it will learn to navigate around objects.
Then it will learn to create licenses like GPLv3.
Finally it will learn that communism is a bad idea.
This reminds me of the Genesis of the Daleks...
Will Davros be next?
There was not a damn thing in the article saying these are HUMAN cells. They are RAT brain cells.
Lets hope if/when they do use human cells, they don't have a repeat of OCP's Robocop 2, where it comes out and shoots itself in the head, or drives off cliff to kill itself.
Do they have shiny metal posteriors which should not be bitten?
790 is that you?
It could think it is funny to be a ninja!
But don't worry, the Pirates will take care of this robot either way.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
So this eventually could lead to new senses? Wonder how the brain will behave having remote senses inputs and actions, like having a new arm, but far (?) apart from your body. And which area of the brain will be used for this, if ever tried/used with humans.
Brain cells control YOU !
Yours In Yaznogorsk,
Kilgore T.
In 1998, Kevin Warwick implants a trivial RF resonator in his arm (the sticky plastic strip that warns Walmart that someone is stealing a pair of socks). He contacts the press, calls himself a cyborg, and gets tenure at Reading U.
In 2001, he replaces his implant with an RFID tag, and calls the press again, and says, "Look at me, look at me! Now I'm an ACTIVE cyborg!" And he becomes a full professor at Reading U.
And now Warwick gets 300,000 neurons to produce a simple binary response (go straight vs turn). He calls the press again, and says, "Look at what I can do just by waving my arm".
Jackass. Worse, the media can't tell the difference between poseurs like him and real scientists like Sebastian Thrun or Rod Brooks.
(pun unintended, and frankly not very funny, so forget it; same for that pun)
1. The magazine h+ senior editor is RU Sirius. It is MONDO 2000, +20. Sirius is still Sirius, and seems to have foregone the +20 himself. He's actually no slouch, so when he senior-editorizes a magazine full of pseudoscience crap when he could have done better or at least different, I feel he's earned the right to the criticism rather than the fiction writers working as science article journalists. They start stupid, work stupid and produce stupid. He approves it for publication.
2. Other articles in the magazine are equally absurd. Some make claims about specific phenomena or theories which are anywhere from fraudulent to simply goofy. I took one such article, claiming that depression is lack of "fun" to task over at The Daily Grail. The article is just bullshit in its best parts. There's worse.
3. Using neurons in this design is enormously overly complex. There was an article in SciAm in which little battery powered cars were given photo-cells or photo-resistive cells as "eyes", those driving the back wheels on the same side, or on the other side, making 4 different designs that react to light. They approach fast and slow down, or slowly at first then rush in, or they zoom away and orbit the edges slowly or else creep away and at the outer area zoom around. The anthromorphization of their actions is multiplied when many of each 'species' are placed on th same floor with protruding light bulbs at several locations. It's not that the neurons don;t do the job, it's just that they're a computational device based far beyond the need, and that non-computational, analog increasing/decreasing voltage circuits do much more for much less.
4. Given the falsification of a different h+ article of equally strong claims, I serious(!)ly doubt the existence of the items in TFA. In fact I wouldn't believe anything I read in this magazine, if for no other reason than that the New Agey products in the ads are, while absurd themselves, more believable than the articles.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If it's being controlled, it's not a robot. It's a car for rat brain cells. It's not following a program, it's being steered. While we're at it, the battle bots/robot wars are not robots either. They are remote controlled cars with weapons and armor. My car is not a robot just because it is a machine. If i attach some kind of Myth Busters control system... it's still not a robot. Until it's driving itself, it ain't a robot.
Also: a robot is an android IFF is is human shaped. T1000, C3P0 - Yes. R2D2 - No.
i think a show about ACTUAL ROBOTS hunting each other down would be way cooler. i'd have a category for 'Onboard Brain' and another for 'Remote Brain'. Maybe categories for environment: Water, Air, Land. Then maybe size class. It would be nerdgasmic.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Couple this with the "Robotic hand that can feel", and you got all the ingredients necessary for the first robotic sexual harassment lawsuit!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This would make a great movie plot, where they have this robot that is controlled by human brains, like 3 of them or so, in a jar.
But one of the brains would accidentally have been from a psychotic mass murderer instead of some great scientist as they expected. An thus the robot could wreck havoc on, like, a spaceship or space station or something.
I bet I could sell this for a fortune!
The creature with the atom brain
The creature with the atom brain
why is he acting so strange
do you think he’s one of them
he threw the doll right down
ripped its guts off and threw it on the ground
The creature with the atom brain
the creature with the atom brain
I told you I’d come back. Remember Buchanan?
But you’re not Buchanan!
I don’t look like him but I am him. Don’t you recognize my voice, Jim?
I promised to see you die and I will.
Hey boss. let us in! Hey boss, let us through the door!
Hey boss, let us in on it! Hey boss man, what is it?
No one stitches like that
no one stitches like that
the creature with the atom brain
the creature with the atom brain
Today’s big story centers around the killing of District Attorney McGraw, whose body was found in his garage, murdered.
Doctor Steiger is under the impression that these crimes are being perpetrated by dead men charged with atom brains, which gives them super-human strength and makes them impervious to bullets.
Well, if you want to believe that story you can
The creature with the atom brain
the creature with the atom brain
why is he acting so strange
do you think he’s one of them
the creature with the atom brain
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
...welcome our rat/robot masters.
during a zombie infestation. Braaaiiinss! Robot Braaaiiiinnsss!
This can't turn out well.
Unless it's for a sexbot, of course.
Oh, wait. Even just a few human brain cells are enough to know to steer clear of the oddness of nerds.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I for one bow down before our new rat overlords.
What does the brain do in this robot? It sounds like all data processing and decision making is done on silicon with the brain along for the ride.
Headline should be "Rat nerve cells get ride around lab in little cart."
Our robot overlords are not going to be very happy with us when we started them out on rat brain cells as training wheels.
And you thought it was bad when they only gnawed through wood!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
What they didn't tell you that the brain calls came from a donor named "Abbie-someone". I think the full name was "Abbie Normal"....
Actually, the article is purposefully vague.
It starts talking about using rat cells.
Then it says how the next step would be using human cells.
Then article jumps onto "wetware" as if to explain the term, but actually just jumbling it up in order to allow almost anything remotely biological to be called "wetware".
By calling upon a blog-based re-definition of the term, as "re-defined" by a science-fiction writer and a mathematician who supposedly defined the phrase - although it has been around for years before.
Then, article continues talking about "wetware" without any further reference if it is talking about human or rat wetware.
And in the end, it once again refers to the above mentioned "re-definition" of the term and using the term "human wetware" in a purposefully ambiguous way.
It could be "wetware" belonging to humans (i.e. their property), or coming from humans (i.e. made from "some" human tissue).
Reading the article, you get the notion that it is exactly what the title and summary claim: that they have made a robot that uses human brain cells to move autonomously.
But in fact, THERE IS NO MENTIONING OF THAT IN THE ARTICLE.
What happens when a man is merged with a computer or a robot?
This is the question that Professor Kevin Warwick and his team at the department of Cybernetics, University of Reading in the UK have been trying to answer for a number of years.
There are many ways to look at this problem.
There is the longer term prospect of freeing the mind from the limitations of the brain by uploading it in digital form, potentially onto a computer and/or robotic substrate (see the h+ interview with Dr. Bruce Katz, Will We Eventually Upload Our Minds?).
There is also a shorter term prospect at a much more limited scale -- a robot controlled by human brain cells could soon be wandering around Professor Warwick's UK labs.
Professor Warwick (who incidentally has a device implanted in his left arm that enables his nervous system to be connected to a computer) and his colleague Ben Whalley from the School of Pharmacy recently created a robot that is controlled by cultured rat neurons.
The next step in their research is to use a human neuron cell line, a type of "wetware."
As reported in New Scientist, some 300,000 rat neurons grown in a nutrient broth and producing spikes of electrical activity were connected to the output of a small robot's distance sensors.
The neurons proved capable of steering the robot around an enclosure. Here's the New Scientist video of the robot courtesy of the University of Reading:
This research is the first step in examining how memories create neurological structures in the brain, and how the brain stores specific pieces of data.
The researchers hope that this will lead to a better understanding of diseases and disorders that affect the brain such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, stroke, and brain injury.
Warwick comments, "This new research is tremendously exciting as firstly the biological brain controls its own moving robot body, and secondly it will enable us to investigate how the brain learns and memorizes its experiences.
This research will move our understanding forward of how brains work, and could have a profound effect on many areas of science and medicine."
Warwick, Whalley, and colleagues don't need specific ethical approval from the University or the UK government. to move forward with the human neuron cell line as soon as they are ready. The cultures are available on the open market and "the ethical side of sourcing is done by the company from whom they are purchased," according to Whalley.
The use of the term "wetware" has been around since the mid-1950s.
In the recent academic literature, it refers to cells (that are "wet") built out of molecular circuits that perform logical operations, as electronic devices do, but with unique properties.
Mathematician and science fiction writer Rudy Rucker used the
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Yup. Slashdot already covered this: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/19/2357251/A-New-Robotic-Hand-That-Can-Feel
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
The sensors simply send a signal into the "brain." The "brain" consistently reacts by creating a reaction signal based on the input signal. That reaction signal is then used to determine which input signal was used. The "brain" is just used as a layer between the sensors and the motors. It's like using MD5 strings to control a device. The sensors encrypt data as MD5 and then the MD5 string is used rather than the raw sensor data.
The value of this is in figuring out how we can poke the brain and interpret it's response. If I know that the brain is creating a certain signal when a person moves their arm then I can artificially generate that signal to get a person to move their arm.
Work Safe Porn
known robots controlled by human brain cells ?
Nullius in verba
tl;dr
This is one way to get to AI that we KNOW will (eventually) work. Develop a life support system, and build bigger and bigger computers that rely on human neurons in a tank. We KNOW that a big enough system using human neurons (if given just the right signals) develops sentience. The eventual goal would be to create a being that needed many, many more neurons than a human being, wired heavily with electrodes and computer driven help. Such an "artificial intelligence" would be educated about how it was created and how it worked and would be put to work creating the next iteration of itself. (leading to the singularity)
This would be a GREAT zombie decoy!
Smells like human brains, tastes like human brains, runs away to attract attention...
What more could the fragments of humanity hope for to save them from the impending global zombie domination?
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