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In France, a Second Patient Receives Permanent Artificial Heart
Jason Koebler (3528235) writes One of the most important goals of transhumanist medicine—possessing a perfectly healthy heart—has so far remained elusive. This week, we came a step closer when for the second time ever, a French company implanted a permanent artificial heart in a patient. More than just pumping blood, future artificial hearts will bring numerous other advantages with them. They will have computer chips and wi-fi capacity built into them. We'll control our hearts with our smart phones, tuning down its pumping capacity when we want to sleep, or tuning it up when we want to run marathons. The patient who received the first of these hearts, though he survived for 76 days, died after the heart "stopped after a short circuit, although the exact reasons behind the death were still unknown."
With wifi/bluetooth capability I feel like there's not anything that could possibly go wrong. It will be important to have it connect to the cloud in order to retrieve heart rate profiles for the day.
"This just in, hacker stops the hearts of 150 users of the artificial heart, committing the easiest mass murder in known history."
If the artificial heart stops, would that count as a "Blue Face of Death"?
I don't have any problems if it was broadcasting data, but if it's a 2-way communication (at layer 1) then they can fuck right off.
If you want to communicate, plug something in (or use near-field etc)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Good, then keep your old one working. That's an easy job.
I don't suppose the patient's last name happens to be Picard?
Then how exactly you want to control it? Artificial heart won't speed up/slow down automatically in response to oxygen needs of your body because it is not controlled by nervous system. Maybe you want wired connection with plug embedded between your ribs? I don't understand why 'wifi' means 'unsecured/unauthenticated wifi' to you.
I strongly believe that in the not too distant future the number 1 thing that people will wonder why we were so dumb as to not notice it was a horrible idea was having every goddamn thing connected and communicating.
ROM people. ROM!!! (the second ROM was written in allcaps for emphasis)
You can't remotely exploit a device without a network or public interface.
We're so obsessed with connectivity and networks these days that we are blinded to the negatives of all this connectivity - thinking they are just problems of the system to be resolved rather than inherent aspects of the system which can not be gotten rid of.
Alrighty rant(off);
v Now since, like you, I love the internet and connected thingymabobs somebody please reply and give some really good counterarguments against my thinking that IP addresses+Organs is a bad idea.
Transhumanist medicine?
There is something wrong with that term....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You know, I see stuff like this, and I think this is a terribly bad thing waiting to happen.
Great, your artificial heart has wi-fi. The firmware will become obsolete, or have security holes, or any number of ways in which this will be problematic.
It just seems like people build these things, when they have no real concept or experience with building a piece of technology which is expected to run for decades without problem.
It sounds cool, but the devil is in the details. And one definitely worries if enough details have been sorted out.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I don't suppose the patient's last name happens to be Picard?
No, heart replacement is not what is meant by The Picard Maneuver :-)
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
From the article:
"French artificial heart maker Carmat says it will not perform another human implant until it has determined the cause of death of the first patient fitted with the device."
Six months later: Implanting a new heart, despite still not knowing what happened the first time."
Because nothing is secure enough when a bug can kill you. Switches have bugs still, but at least they're easily understood (and avoided) bugs.
Furthermore, a WTF is in order. Touting how great it is that it will have wifi and whatnot, and the guy died 76 days after. First get it working right, that is, not kill the pacient, then worry about wifi.
"This just in, hacker stops the hearts of 150 users of the artificial heart, committing the easiest mass murder in known history."
They narrowly bumped out the next easiest mass murder, selling tobacco.
Then how exactly you want to control it? Artificial heart won't speed up/slow down automatically in response to oxygen needs of your body because it is not controlled by nervous system. Maybe you want wired connection with plug embedded between your ribs? I don't understand why 'wifi' means 'unsecured/unauthenticated wifi' to you.
WiFi is inherently insecure means of communication. Since anyone can eavesdrop and impersonate both sides of comm link, you can never be 100% sure that those commands to slow down your heart comes from your own smartphone or from somebody else's little device. At least with something that needs to be physically plugged in you can be sure who is the one plugging the controller in your socket.
"WiFi" was essentially considered "near field" at the time. It was never intended for use outside a single room, or to hand off to other APs. Any failing of "WiFi" is shared by "near field".
Learn to love Alaska
If I receive wi-fi enabled organs, will I be required to also get the horrible wi-fi logo tattooed on my forehead?
And of course 90% comments are whining about wifi. As if 'wifi' was somehow synonymous with 'unsecured and unauthenticated wifi'. Getting this secured is trivial compared to making a heart that will keep patient alive for years. Until it is possible to make artificial heart respond to nervous system and speed up/slow down as needed, having some control system will improve patient's quality of life.
I'd prefer that my backup heart be cloned from a baboon, grown to maturity grafted onto a third-world street urchin, just as John Galt intended.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Gives a new meaning to "blue screen of death".
(drops mic)
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Even if you can fix our hearts and our telomeres and the cancer, there are all kinds of cognitive problems associated with old age - Alzheimer's and plain ol' AAMI.
So even if you can keep your 20s body into old age, at some point you'll be unable to remember things that happened recently such as whether you put your pants on this morning, and of course to check that you're wearing pants before you leave the house. Having a prime physique will make it much less horrifying for innocent bystanders, but still...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Permanence has a pretty specific meaning here. It says nothing of duration, only that it's the last.
Getting a permanent heart that lasts 76 days is not nearly as enticing as getting a temporary heart that lasts 2 years.
WTF. The lines about controlling the heart via Bluetooth and WiFi were so inane it made me do a double-take to see if this submission was by Bennett Haselton.
You know, the heart already has intricate feedback and control mechanisms to pace itself on demand. I wouldn't trade the vagal nerve's ability to control the pace of my heart literally on a beat-to-beat basis for having a "cardiac marathon mode" exploit gateway on my smartphone.
FFS. This is just asking for people to pass out from turning their hearts down too low and suddenly standing up. We already have that with elderly patients on meds for their high blood pressure who are still defined as "hypertensive" (hint: if you don't have enough blood pressure to perfuse your brain, I don't care what some ivory tower "expert" says... you're hypotensive).
Can we fail this submission and start over without the Bennett-esque fucktarded commentary? Permanent artificial hearts (i.e. more than simply bridge-to-transplant) are a major technological accomplishment.
"Have you tried turning it off and back on again?"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If you want to communicate, plug something in (or use near-field etc)
NFC is a misnomer.
With a sensitive enough receiver, you don't need to be "near" a NFC device to hear it talking.
With a large enough magnetic field, you don't need to be "near" a NFC device to get it talking.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"From the company’s point of view, the first implantation was a success. The patient survived for 74 days within the framework of a trial where the benchmark for success was 30 days."
Something must be lost in translation here.
"We'll control our hearts with our smart phones, tuning down its pumping capacity when we want to sleep, or tuning it up when we want to run marathons." You call that an advantage ? What the FUCK ?
We (4chan) will control our hearts with our smart phones, tuning down its pumping capacity when we want to sleep (for weeks or months at a time, or randomly every 19 seconds), or tuning it up when we want to run marathons (or attend a funeral, or fix a sandwich, or enter a bathroom)
Good people go to bed earlier.
Granted security is an issue but ROM is actually a bad idea. You want a doctor to be able to tweak the device remotely rather than having risky (and delayed) open heart surgery to make changes.
Because 'murder' means only and exactly what you meant it to mean when you typed it?
Jackass.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Controlling it with a smartphone isn't going to cut it either. How often, and how quickly, does your heart rate change by more than, say, 5%? Ten times an hour? More? Do you really want to be whipping out your smartphone every couple of minutes? What if you set it wrong? What if you fat-finger yourself into a blackout? What if the phone's battery is dead? The list goes on and on. It's a terrible user experience! Ask people who wear portable insulin pumps - devices that need input tens of times per day, and can be lethal if done wrong. (Some of them can be operated via smartphone these days, too.) They will tell you, emphatically, that they don't want to interact with that damn thing any more than is absolutely necessary.
No, you want the device to have its own closed loop mechanisms for controlling heart rate. The heart doesn't respond solely (or even primarily) to the nervous system. It responds to blood pO2, pCO2, and other chemical signatures in the blood. These characteristics, too, can be used as the feedback signals for the internal control system. The use case described in the summary - commanding it into certain pre-programmed profiles - is conceivable, but I don't think you necessarily want to rely on that.
Then how exactly you want to control it? Artificial heart won't speed up/slow down automatically in response to oxygen needs of your body because it is not controlled by nervous system. Maybe you want wired connection with plug embedded between your ribs? I don't understand why 'wifi' means 'unsecured/unauthenticated wifi' to you.
It seems that considering all the other hurdles, an internal pulse-oximeter and manometer would be an easy feature to build in. No doubt it will have some sort of feedback loop with the body, but perform better when a profile is loaded knowing what to expect (say, extended running vs extended sitting around). To your point about security, the real problem isn't that it is well designed today, but is it considered well designed still in ten years? Wifi protocols have a pretty serious history of security-breaking vulnerabilities discovered after only a few years of use (see WEP and WPA first gen) so it would be good to know that a new organ won't be obsoleted in 10 years and need replaced else it become a security risk.
Encryption, message signing ... does it ring any bells? And why exactly do you think that artificial heart would even accept command to slow down below safe level? Even ignoring communication security, you would not want to give your patient easy way to kill himself by mistake.
True, there is "Planned Parenthood".
> That first patient, a 76-year-old man suffering from terminal heat failure, died March 2.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
"Near Field" is a very specific thing. Whatever you're thinking of there, certainly isn't what I'm talking about - the near field of 2.4ghz would be around 1/10 of a meter away and no further.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I didn't say NFC. I said Near Field. "Near Field" is a very specific thing.
If your antenna is more distant than the near-field you are not in the near-field, but in the far-field. You can probably figure out how to communicate, I'd imagine that the real trick is synchronizing your oscillator (but this is a solved problem - radios do it all the time) but certainly any schmuck with a laptop or smartphone wouldn't be able to do it - you're going to need extra equipment.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
At least with something that needs to be physically plugged in you can be sure who is the one plugging the controller in your socket.
tell that to anyone that has ever appeared on Jerry Springer and didn't know who their child's father was...
Currently, heart disease is the SECOND most common cause of death in the world. I do believe that artificial hearts are going to be the future. But when this first goes mainstream things are going to get ridiculous. Where do I start?
Are popstars going to come up with songs about giving you the IP to their heart?
Are people going to find a heartbleed vulnerability ironic?
Can you leave the heart to someone else in your will?
Will you give the Crypto Key to your heart to the person you love?
Will a DDoS on an implanted heart be called a distributed heart attack?
Will an upgrade to a newer model be called a change of heart?
If you configure your heart rhythm to follow the interaction with a person. Will you tell them "I have my heart set on you?"
If you break the security protocol, are you breaking people's hearts?
If you download the Pledge of Allegiance into your implant, will you know it by heart?
If my heart's kernel gives an error message, will it be from the bottom of my heart?
Thank you, I'll be here all week. I've got more, but I don't have the heart to continue right now.
VCU and Stanford (and probably some other centers) have had total artificial hearts (TAH) in patients a lot longer than this (years longer). The difference is the indication. Currently TAH are not approved by the FDA as a "destination device" only a "bridge to transplant." Of course with super high titers that a lot of these patients have the TAH is practically a destination device anyway. The same thing happened with the VADs (ventricular assist devices) until they were around long enough to be approved as destination devices. The bottom line is that the media and medical information do not mix. What a waste of a story.
Maybe we finally found a use for a smartwatch.
When it comes to a WiFi or bluetooth-enabled heart, how good is your security? This could be very "interesting", and I don't mean in a good way...
"One of the most important goals of transhumanist medicine"
It was an advance of good old-fashioned medicine. It's not a victory for transhumanism every time someone does something new and interesting. It will be a victory for transhumanism when a transhumanist actually does something, rather than simply claiming credit for their movement every time science moves a tick forward.
Would you rather have a USB port on your side?
You have to receive bug fixes somehow.
Maybe the heart uses OpenSSL to encrypt its communication. Even an artificial heart can bleed...
Every sperm is sacred,
every sperm is great,
if a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate!
The goals of transhumanism require networking. Intelligence itself requires networking.
Consider: a single neuron cannot think. Thinking is the activity of a network of neurons. And furthermore, the limits on the expressive power of your thoughts are determined, in part, by the number of processing nodes (neurons) available. There are some problems that you will never be able to solve, or even visualize, with a single brain.
Yes, putting one's toaster on the internet seems to be a far cry from collaboratively researching a compelling scientific enigma. But ultimately they are two different instances of the same phenomenon, and this phenomenon is the basic defining attribute of intelligence as it manifests in the real world.
Rant all you like, people will gleefully throw themselves ever-deeper into such methods of interconnectivity, because doing so has a net effect of increasing their capacities and deepening their experiences. And this interconnectivity will not stop at our toasters, nor at our artificial hearts. The currently-in-development mind-machine-interface will allow us to put our brains on the Internet, without needing cell phones as intermediaries. Then, the singularity will be attained.
Just you wait. The Borg are coming. We will create them, and not by accident. We will rush to that future with reckless abandon.
If I sell someone a kitchen knife, and they use it to stab themselves, am I guilty of murder?
If I sell someone tobacco and tell them "smoking this causes cancer and other health problems," and they smoke it anyway, how am I guilty?
If I stop selling tobacco, someone else will. If we make it illegal to sell tobacco, then all the money (real-world economic power) will flow into the hands of the criminals who sell it anyway. And these criminals have no qualms about directly murdering people to get their way.
If selling tobacco makes you complicit in the death of those who use it, then making a highly-desired commodity illegal makes you complicit in all the deaths caused by the black market that your laws create.
Does it come with a kill switch?
The safe level varies based on the patient's physical activity at the time. Imagine that they're out swimming and someone uses their smartphone to set their heart to "going to bed" flow rate. And if the heart has a safety feature where it can read the neural signals for heartbeat speed, then why would it need to be externally controllable anyhow? Wireless access just seems like an unnecessary complication to the system.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The Nausicaan dom-jot cheaters are strangely absent, as well.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The heart in TFA is self-regulating. It has sensors that monitor assorted vital stats and automatically adjust the heart rate as needed. According to TFA it's sophisticated enough that if your loved one enters the room the artificial heart will speed up, just like a real heart would do. The Transhumanist journalist seems to think that's a good start, but it would be even better if you could use a cellphone to override the automatic pulse so you could prevent yourself from getting over-excited, or force it into overdrive because you know you're about to go for a run / have sex. I don't know. I think my real heart does just fine in those situations. For "calming you down" I don't think induced bradycardia should go on the list. If that belongs on any list, it would be the top 10 ways to make you think you're dying.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I've always wanted to play Flatliners.
My 802.1x secured wifi from the 802.11b era is still quite safe thank you very much. Not all wifi has been insecure, there are ways to do it in a less secure manor but that's not what we're talking about here. Just because you can break layer 2 encryption doesn't mean you get the data unless that is the only security mechanism being deployed.
Good job breaking WPA, it wasn't hard and we knew that when deploying it. That's why we require certificate based authentication on top of the username and password you enter the first time you connect to wifi. It was only a pain when the iphone was first released without a mechanism to add certificates. All the other phones at the time of course had no issues. Windows mobile, Palm, Blackberry, no problem. Much easier today as well as now even the iphone supports internal CAs. It's even easy to deploy as you can end the phones ID in a product like Airwatch or XenMobile any of the other MDMs out there to approve a specific device and enroll a new certificate for it.
Something like this would just need a similar strong authentication mechanism allowing for multiple devices and an autonomous mode that is sane. If your phone dies it gives you half pump capacity to ensure that you'll walk home or wherever and plug in or use an alternative device to manage it. I could see it coming with a dedicated device not unlike an ipod touch that you could keep someplace important and use your phone the majority of the time. Of course all of this is kind of moot, once the heart works properly you can work on the problem of linking it to the nervous system so that it doesn't require intervention on the regular.
Yeah, now replace tobacco with weed and you have yourself the real world example of what happens. Of course the tobacco industry has a long history of pretty creative advertising that I've seen work on people plenty of times. They see someone smoking a cigarette and really enjoying it in a movie and then bam, that person wants to smoke one themselves. I agree its a personal choice that person makes though. I see someone driving fast in Need for Speed I'm not necessarily going to go out and do the same, you can bet I sure want to though.
for a certain French starfleet officer to one day receive his permanent artificial heart.
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
Except there's no accomplishment because the longest-lasting "permanent" artificial heart has lasted a whopping 76 days.
And they're trying to sell it as an accomplishment. Pff....
with sufficiently good antennas, "no further" becomes very hard to enforce.
I should clarify. The near field, being defined as a multiple of wavelength, is still only that far. But the signal doesn't just stop there; interception of "near field" communications from substantial distances has already been done.
I want it controlled by a sensor that monitors the oxygenation level of the blood.
All that certificate security is moot as of heartbleed.
Also, there are plenty of ways to fuzz the link and DoS (crash) the device. I wouldn't want that possible with my heart.
I do *not* want my heart to have wi-fi. Or any other interface. Ever. If there's anything that should be a fit once, never meddle with again it's an artificial heart.
Are you able to perform the inverse though (send data to it) in a way that isn't "detectable" - specifically if it was intended for reactive near-field?
The real danger isn't so much the receipt of information as it is the ability to send data to it (commands, fuzzing, etc)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
that's a good question. How feasible is it to build a widget that can tell the difference between transit time and (remote) processing time?
Those will be days when hacking will be far more profitable than any physical mischief. You won't need to physically kidnap people anymore. Imagine a ransomware malware which gets into your heart? Crazy things become possible if they are ever stupid enough to make something too controllable by other devices. Also, I can see a black market for hearts coming for life: both the artifical ones being sold for a very high prices and, while they aren't as good as a real one, people selling their real heart for money and fitting an electronic one.
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
Why not control it via the nervous system? It's already wired for it. If we aren't there yet, it could adjust via something like oxygen levels in your blood, or whatever means pacemakers use for control.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Comments aplenty and not one Star Trek reference? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry_%28Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation%29)
Gee, someone trying to kill me without a trace needs a better antenna? Guess I'll opt out on this one...
hacker stops the hearts of 150 users of the artificial heart
No need for hackers, a bug will do it
I guess collecting on it would be a problem.
Encryption, message signing ... does it ring any bells?
All of which is meaningless if the cell phone is compromised. Most indications are that, these days, even without viruses, most cell phones are already intentionally compromised straight from the factory. This really is a job for a dedicated device.
Well, the neat part about operating in the reactive near-field is the reception is detectable. I'm not 100% on how it works, but I remember that much from studying for my ham license.
I don't know if it's possible to fake that phenomena.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
You don't make any sense. If your town assassins' guild goes out of business because murder becomes illegal, the lawmaker are responsible for the remaining black market murders?
that's pretty cool. In that case, it seems like it would be much harder to fake being a legit device nearby. Thanks for the info :)
However, whom do you trust for making such important software? I certainly wouldn't trust Microsoft nor Apple to provide it. Open Source all the way. I don't want no backdoors in the software that controls such important bodily functions. Imagine you get a dodgy patch via MS update... Anyway, I think we're still far from really useful trans-human tech. This is just still more or less sensationalism. The man died after 76 days. Short circuit? You can't have short circuits happening, but transplant rejection is the most important to deal with. Have they managed to make transplants that no-body [pun] rejects after a certain time?
Oh! I think I remember what goes on, now. The antennas are inductively coupled. If that helps!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...