Cybernetics Prof to Attempt Computer Control of Own Limbs

Tony pickering writes "Spotted on the BBC - "Professor Kevin Warwick is to have a silicon implant inserted in his arm in an attempt to find out whether the computer will be able to move his limbs by copying signals from his brain." Possibly has some medical apps, but a little spooky nonetheless - hey, now, I can lock my body up! " The really scary part is that the next step he's going to do is emotion control. /shiver/ Check out a recent interview with Kevin Warwick, as well as more info on human chip implants.

Comments

This would be very nice...

[fornix]

...if it worked and could be controlled by thoughts or perhaps through facial movements. Christopher Reeve would love something like this, as would all the other quadriplegics and paraplegics out there. A few of the problems include:

• Sensory feedback - it's much more difficult to listen in on a nerve to find out what the hand is feeling than it is to fire the muscles. Sensation will be crucial for manipulating objects.
• Reflex arcs (muscle "stretch" sensory feedback) - if you stimlate a nerve or muscle directly, you will elicit a relex in the opposing muscles. This "stretch" reflex is mediated by the spinal cord. Voluntary movements usually suppress this reflex so that when you bend your knee, it doesn't kick back out like it does when you stretch the quadriceps tendon with a reflex hammer. These relexes will need to be suppressed somehow.

Half a ton of noise to half an ounce of science

[jsm2]

I doubt that much of use will come out of this experiment. The element of auto-suggestion is too great. We all know that Kevin Warwick really really wants this experiment to work. So, they press the button, his arm moves -- who's to say that the signal really moved his arm? Unless he's prepared to hand over complete control to the machine, and effectively paralyse himself, I'd suggest that his arm moved because he moved it.

And then we have the element of training. It's known that you can train various muscles to react to stimuli, so if the chip starts working, it seems to me that it would be hard to argue from there to the conclusion that "the right signal" had been given, still less that a chip which worked in Kevin Warwick would be transferable to anyone else.

jsm

Wouldn't work..

[Fastolfe]

We have so little ability to determine with any accuracy exactly how and where which nerves are stimulated to trigger muscle movement in all the different ways, and these are pretty much unique between different people, so one person's "recording", not only would only work for that one person, but only at that one moment. It'd be nearly impossible to reconnect the equipment so as to stimulate each of the neurons in precisely the same way they were stimulated last time. You'd have to re-do the recording.

In it's current form I can't see it being particularly useful, but if his work is successful, it could open quite a lot of doors for experimenters to more accurately determine how to effectively stimulate nerves so as to produce a desired movement.

Uses for Emotion control

[kiick]

Useful applications of "emotion control"

• treatment for clinical depression without the side effects of drugs.
• training aid (you do it right, feel good, do it wrong, feel bad). Very intuitive.
• new art media
• another communication method (this is how that makes me feel).

Of course it could be misused, but so can a coat hanger.

Other uses

[N1UGLham]

Could this also be used as an alternative to Viagra?

Re:The Blue Cramp Of Death?

[cdlu]

Well my concern is that someone of a different weight or build could create havoc to another person.
I need a certain amount of energy going a certain precise way to move my 5'9" 200 pound bulk. If I gave my programme to my friend who is 6'5" and 130 pounds, he is not going to fare too well.
Similarly, if I take his programme I will be troubled to even stand on my own.

Also, a glitch, it seems to me, could result in two muscles both being contracted simultaneously and excessively and possibly even tearing them from the bone.

Though then again perhaps it could be used to hard-code monkeys to type hamlet.... :)

Think of the possibilities...

[mmmmbeer]

Just think, someday all jocks will want to use this to let them attach bigger, stronger limbs. Then one day they pick on a geek, and take his/her lunch money. He/she goes home that night and figures out how to hack into the bad guy's implants.

Give a whole new meaning to that "Stop hitting yourself" game, doesn't it? >:-)

Don't worry

[konstant]

The idea of it making me happy all the time is just as strange as the idea of it making me upset or sad

While your more general worry about emotion-influencing technology and propaganda is a valid one, you do not need to concern yourself with the scenario in which we are permanently "doped up" by happiness chips.

The brain can only produce so much of any given neurotransmitter within a set time period. This is one of the reasons that you gradually become acclimatized to foul smells and loud noises if you remain long enough in their vicinity - you run out of the neurotransmitter that makes them perceptible to you.

Similarly, you could not feel happy all of the time, regardless of the signals sent to yoru brain, without an increase in seratonin production levels among other things. If you or someone you know has tried the street drug Xtacy, you will be familiar with the post-high depression that follows. The brain exhausts its resevoir of "happy painless" chemicals and consequently throws you into the opposite imbalance. Women have a similar period after giving birth.

So though a chip might constantly be sending you thrills, you could only feel them with a limited frequency. The rest of the time you likely would feel depressed. This cycle would be akin to manic/depressive mood swings and seems unlikely as a solution for long-term mind control.


-konstant

Re:Don't worry

[sjames]

The first step to long term conditioning would be to create a secondary reward based on the highs created by the chip. Repeatedly expose the subject to muzak with the chip turned on, and then turn off the chip and the muzak. After a while, workers will find muzak to be it's own reward, and will perform better to get you to turn it up. Occasionally, the chips are turned on as well to reinforce the muzak as a reward. (NOTE: the above is EVIL to be sure!).

Tough jobs and more...

[MostlyHarmless]

One place where emotion control could be used is in the army. Blank out the majority of the emotions (except for a few necessary ones) for the duration of the battle and you would probably do a lot better than your "human" opponents. In Israel, for example, women can't fight in the army; but not because of lack of strength/skill. It is because the men can't handle it. So I can think of a few emotions that people can do without during certain times.

This example could be generalized to any job that requires a high concentration level. Construction work, nuclear plants, and math quizzes :-) come to mind.

To generalize the generalization, you could use this for any project where you want to concentrate, release adrenaline, or use any other of the myriad emotions that might be desirable for a particular setting.

Cybernetics Poll

[Plasmic]

Best way to impress a woman...
- Candy
- Flowers
- Hack someone's arm
- Crack someone's arm

./hackarm --script="pick nose" --target=="Kevin Warwick"

The Terminal Man

[davie]

see "The Terminal Man," an early Michael Crichton novel.

Also made into a film starring George Segal.

Scary stuff, I read it when I was a kid. It's one of those "technology is evil" plots and seems eerily germane.

Re:Very true, but...

[sjames]

..I don't see why they couldn't just supply needed chemicals for us.

That would lengthen the 'high', but would also lengthen the crash. One balancing mechanism in the brain is that over-stimulated receptors are reduced in number making the brain less sensitive to the transmitter. Eventually, they will be reduced to the point that the megadoses of neurotransmitters leave the person more or less normal. When the doses are removed (chip/cells/ infusion pump turned off), there will be a corresponding crash until the receptors re-populate.

Since there are multiple elements involved (production side as well as receptor), it could take quite a long time to return to equillibrium.

Uses...

[Parity]

Having skimmed this comments, I just want to say - a car can be used to run people down, a microphone can be used to spy on people, a hammer can be used to cave in the skull, and did you all know a computer can be used to tabulate and cross reference personal information?

When I read the article, I thought - if it can relay signals, it can control artificial as well as real limbs, bridge gaps in the nervous system when reattaching severed limbs, and thinking about, you could 'filter out' palsies and ticks, cut off signals to motor nerves with the onset of a grand mal epileptic seizure - essentially downgrading it to petit mal...

Emotional control? Reduce anxiety (and presumably cutting off pain can be done too) for people undergoing surgery while conscious, not to mention treatment for depression, bipolar disorders, paranoid schizophrenia... any other emotion-related mental illness.

If you're worried about the big-brother possibilities, stay or become involved in politics and make sure there are laws protecting people. Personally, I think this kind of technology is a good thing.
--Parity

Also to Fastolfe

[jabber]

Solving these problems is the natural consequence of this man's research. These are still baby-steps we're taking. After he does a proof-of-concept, we'll try it with a larger group, to study how variable the signals are among different people.

I'm sure that if there is any similarity at all (and I'm sure there is, since we all use the same muscles) then a normalization can be performed on the signal. Hypothetically, we could sample signals from a large number of people, and use a consistent composite signal. Speculating further, over time, the person using the composite signal to move, could tweak it to account for height, weight and posture differences, agressiveness of their movements, precision vs speed... It's a wide open field.

I doubt that the strength of an impulse increases with proportion to physical strength. It's much like IP multicasting, I suspect. Stronger muscles means more muscle fibers, more fibers means more pathways onto which the packet | impulse is transmitted.

What would need to be done of course, is a mapping of junctions between the transmission nerves and the local nerve 'subnets' and injecting the signal there rather than to the muscle itself...

The first step is decoding the neural signal, and we're seeing that start now. Next is sensory stimuli. That should make things like Brainstorm and Wm. Gibsons sensorium concept possible.

Every time I hear news of this sort (or nontech or you name it) I'm reminded of the old Chinese blessing: "May you live in interesting times". We certainly do.

Re:Also to Fastolfe

[cdlu]

"May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese _curse_. :)

This leads me to my next question (not the quote), do you think that this technology (as an AC pointed out farther down, this article was posted in Januray) could be used as a pain reliever by sending false signals over the sensory nerve cells?

Aww mom, the Warwick chip made me do it!

[gad_zuki!]

Warwick's last experiment is largely a joke. All it did was make him traceable throughout a building. The only difference between this and house arrest technology is that Warwick is wacky enough to put the transmitter under a flap of skin instead of tied around his leg. Big Brother? He's already here, at least for criminals.

This new experiment is a lot riskier and a lot more fascinating. Maybe I'll be able to get a 'type 100wpm' chip eventually, except of course it'll be a nerve recording of Warwick typing his out new book...

"Damn they sent the wrong chip, I wanted 'Ninjitsu' not '101 ways to please your man in bed.'" "Pop it in, a new skill never hurt anyone."

A little oversight on the technology

[blakestah]

There is a little oversight on the technology by this professor.

There are already recent high profile experiments by John Chapin's group in Philadelphia in which rats are trained to control lever arms by activating parts of their brains in which electrodes have been placed.

Other cortical implants in primary motor cortex of humans show a lot of promise for quadrapelegics to be able to control robotics around them. The last I saw humans were quite able to make LED displays light up in certain patterns, and it is a small step from there to controlling robotics. In both cases a small number of bits of information is measured from the CNS and converted to simple movements.

But the converse, computer control of humans, is in a much much more primitive state. Likening the ability of implanted chips to enable the lights to be turned on, to giving the computer control of your limbs is at this point a crack pipe dream, and there is far more advanced work going on than this press release. For example, advanced bionics makes cochlear implants that allow high fidelity sound reception. There is comparable work on retinal implants at a much less advanced state.
But the problem is much more advanced, since the human arm has more than a few bits worth of degrees of freedom, and its natural control from motor cortex to movement is not even close to fully understood.

As for controlling emotion, that would be a far simpler problem, since there are a few well localized centers of neuromodulators, and implanted stimulating electrodes already exist. It will be fairly easy to make someone hostile and aggressive, or sleepy, or passive, or edgy. Making
someone alert and intelligent would be much harder. There would be a lot of unreversible psychosis caused in the pilot experiments, so don't expect them anytime soon.

Emotion control is scary

[nano-second]

I think the earlier experiment where the computer followed him around campus and could turn lights on for him sounded cool. (although as mentioned, the big brother aspect is scary). But what really scares me is the emotion control.

I so wouldn't want a computer to control my emotions... how could I really feel that I was being "myself". And although it's not really related, it starts making me worry about a future where our thoughts are controlled by more than just propaganda. I think it's interesting research, but what the heck would you _really_ want to do with an emotion controlling computer??

The idea of it making me happy all the time is just as strange as the idea of it making me upset or sad... the natural range and flow of emotions is part of what makes us who we are and part of what makes us human. What would be the application of this? If any one has any ideas about a positive application, I'm interested. My paranoid mind can't think of anything that's not sinister, right now.
---

Re:Emotion control is scary

[gad_zuki!]

First of, even if you have the tech you'll never be able to feel as high as you want to. If the tech becomes that potent it'll be treated just like a narcotic and made illegal. "It's making our kids crazy," screams an angry mother.

This sounds like it'll have potential as a treatment for chronic anxiety or depression.

You can't get goofy off prozac you know.

Interesting, but...

[Upsilon]

How useful is this really? Now, having an artificial limb that could be controlled by your computer (i.e. your brain) would really be something. However, all this involves is sending electrical signals into your limbs. A computer is controlling you. Is there really any purpose to this? None that I can see. I suppose that there might be some people with neurological problems that might benefit, but there are already similar (although less full-featured) systems in existance for exactly that purpose. This experiment is cool, but I don't see much scientific merit to it. It doesn't demonstrate anything we don't already know, it just does so in a very flashy and unnecessarily involved way. Is this guy more interested in real cybernetics research or becoming a media sensation.

Re:Interesting, but...

[Yarn]

How about having the brain in one place, and the body in the other? and be able to switch bodies. Of course, you'd need either FTL comms, or lag correction (pushlatency!)

As for the media sensation, I'm not sure. I've not actually seen any hard science published by him, and I do get the feeling he's only one of the leaders in the field, but he's famous because he takes risks.

Re:Interesting, but...

[N1UGLham]

On the contrary, I think it could be quite useful to a large number of disabled people. There are so many things that we don't understand about the nervous system (including the brain). Who's to say that, for instance, that this couldn't prevent people with MS? Or possibly prevent at least the physical and damaging side of seizures for people with Epilepsy (anyone read the Terminal Man by Michael Crichton?). Or act as a "circuit breaker" of sorts to, for example, domestic abusers. Whenever they became enraged, the chip could immobilize their limbs, preventing them from harming another human. Not to mention my aforementioned Viagra alternative. If this technology was harnessed for the use of good, I see it as having great potential. --------

The Blue Cramp Of Death?

[jabber]

Alright, so if I understand correctly, he'll move his arm as the computer monitors the signals, and then he'll play the signal back to see if the arm moves without him willing it to...

Interesting. Certainly mobility facilitation for the disabled is a great idea. Christopher Reeves could walk again. Proper form instruction and monitoring in a variety of sports would probably be another interesting application. Then there's ergonomic studies.

Of course, being the technophile that I am, I'd wire up another species to see what it feels like to move like a cat or shark.

Re:The Blue Cramp Of Death?

[cdlu]

I don't think so. As I understand it, the users need to be able to record the signal and then play it back. If they can't do a particular motion, they won't be able to do it again, as they couldn't record it.

So this will only help if you keep a storage bank of all your different possible motions so that if you are disabled later you can be...err..reloaded.

Re:The Blue Cramp Of Death?

[jabber]

How about having me do the recording, and having someone's disabled legs doing the playback?

I know that there's a whole new pinoccio nightmare in there, with people becoming (potentially) one another's marionnettes (sp?), but...

With small enough samples of motion impulses recorded by 'surrogates' like pro-athletes, actors and dancers, the disabled could choose sample sequences that suit their mobility needs.

And the overly-rich could buy mobility-upgrades, to move like Baryshnikov or Tyson whenever they want to. Check out Jon Williams (?) Hardwired.

So what happens when.....

[Accipiter]

Great. This is cool research, but what are the implications here?

"Well hello. My name is John Smith. I have computer controlled limbs. Let me just walk through this Airline Metal detector." Poor guy would look like he's having a seizure. Plus, what happens when someone finds out how to broadcast signals to interfere (and possibly take over) the computer controlled nerve impulses? Gee, let me immobilize you and take your wallet.

When we can live in a harmonious society, this would be perfected technology. Until then (i.e.: Not damn likely), there's gonna be problems. Hey, don't get me wrong. This is damn cool stuff, but look at what could go wrong.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Digital Nervous System

[drivers]

I always wondered what the hell Bill was talking about when he said Digital Nervous System.

Curse?

[jabber]

I thought the curse was: "May you get all that you deserve".

Now THAT is a creepy proposition. ;)

Curse.

[cdlu]

Yeah. Sheesh, I can think of a few governments and corporations (which have more power anyway) that would be scared silly confronted with that proposition :)

Admirable courage...

[TheDullBlade]

I love to hear about researchers willing to be their own subjects. I think nothing does more to speed the pace of technological development.

Mercerism

[jabber]

Alright, who here DIDN'T think about Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" when you read that??

Just set your mood for the day, and 'have a nice day' will become a thing of the past. Creepy.

Phreaking everyone is more like it

[jabber]

You all remember the article a while back, about Palm Pilot IR ports being used to intercept and play back car-lock codes, right?

The prospect of some phreak making me walk into traffic with his PDA is sure to give me nightmares tonight. That, coupled with having him make me HAPPY while I get personal with a speeding bus...

But that's ok, at the rate we're going, I'll just be cloned up from the molecules by nanites in time for lunch.

Re:funny

[TheKodiak]

Do you not see the difference between loading the gun on the BBC and loading the gun in a compound surrounded by 2 feet of concrete?