#but like beyond superhuman because machines work in a completely different way than organics do

[lord-squiggletits]

A frustrating thing about media perceptions of violence is that there are a ton of ways I want to write Cybertronians experiencing war and violence in terms of "what are the physical limits they can take" but it seems less extraordinary than it actually is because media already tends to portray even regular humans in combat with improbable or impossible abilities.

Like, how can I say something interesting about "oh Cybertronians have more stamina in battle because they don't bleed [in my headcanon] which means getting cut won't inevitably take them out of a fight in a few minutes" except when was the last time mainstream action media ever took bleeding into account. What about the fact that Cybertronians can break limbs or lose them completely and just get a replacement put on, but human characters losing limbs or getting prosthetics are rarely shown getting physical therapy or anything that would come with losing a limb. Even something as basic as "Cybertronians can be in direct combat for hours without tiring" falls flat when so many media portrays human combat as this crazy thing where people have the stamina to do flips and shit for minutes on end which isn't accurate at all.

#squiggposting #the first thing you learn about fighting (in research or in practice) is that fighting is fucking tiring #and that the smallest of injuries can fuck you up badly #see humans suck because there's a lot of pain points or vital structures on our body that are very exposed and easily targeted #but to me the appeal of cybertronians is that they. they don't have those weaknesses or at least can take far more punishment #it's hard for me to look at human anatomy the same way any more once i was taught that stabbing someone in the inner thigh #can bleed them out in seconds #or you can throat chop someone and crush their windpipe and make them basically suffocate #humans are so fragile man it's kind of terrifying #anyways. basically what i am saying is that all cybertronians by default are superhumans in terms of athletic ability and stamina #but like beyond superhuman because machines work in a completely different way than organics do #machines can hypothetically run forever as long as they're given fuel but organics just can't do that

[babbleuk]

Can Computers Be Implanted in Human Brains?

The following is an excerpt from GigaOm publisher Byron Reese’s new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. You can purchase the book here.

The Fourth Age explores the implications of automation and AI on humanity, and has been described by Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe as framing “the deepest questions of our time in clear language that invites the reader to make their own choices. Using 100,000 years of human history as his guide, he explores the issues around artificial general intelligence, robots, consciousness, automation, the end of work, abundance, and immortality.”

One of those deep questions of our time:

Instead of building a external general intelligence unit, would we instead augment our own brains with computing power? In this excerpt from The Fourth Age, Byron Reese considers the implications of direct interaction between computers and our brains.

Instead of building conscious computers, can we perhaps augment our brains with implanted computers? This doesn’t require us ever to crack the code of consciousness. We just take our consciousness as a given and try to add appendages to our existing intellect. This feels substantially less alien than uploading ourselves to the machine. You can imagine a prosthetic arm, for instance, that you control with your mind. In fact, you don’t really have imagine it, it already exists. Building more and more things that interact directly with the brain—say, an artificial eye—seems plausible. Eventually, could entire computers be fitted into the brain?

Elon Musk advocates a solution like this. He wants to create a neural lace for our brains, a way to directly sync our brains to the digital world. He explains:

The solution that seems the best one is to have an AI layer [added to your brain] that can work well and symbiotically with you. . . . Just as your cortex works symbiotically with your limbic system, your third digital layer could work symbiotically with you.

What Musk proposes is way beyond the brain-controlled prosthetic described at the start of this chapter. He is talking about your thoughts and memories comingling with digital ones. This would be where you think a thought like, “How long is the Nile River?” and that query is fed into Google Neuro (wirelessly, of course), and a quarter of a second later, you know the answer. If this ever happens, expect the ratings of Jeopardy! to fall off a cliff. In addition, the historian Yuval Noah Harari speculates on what else to expect:

When brains and computers can interact directly, that’s it, that’s the end of history, that’s the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. . . . We have no way of even starting to imagine what’s happening beyond that.

There are many who say this can’t be done. Steven Pinker sums up some of the difficulties:

Brains are oatmeal-soft, oat around in skulls, react poorly to being invaded, and suffer from inflammation around foreign objects. Neurobiologists haven’t the slightest idea how to decode the billions of synapses that underlie a coherent thought, to say nothing of manipulating them.

Three breakthroughs would be needed to accomplish a meaningful merger of people and machines, and they may not be possible. First, a computer must be able to read a human thought. Second, a computer must be able to write a thought back to the brain. And third, a computer must do both of those things at speeds substantially faster than what we are presently accustomed to. If we get all three of these, then we can join with computers in a cosmically significant way.

The first one, a machine reading a human thought, is the only one we can even do a little. There are several companies working on devices, often prosthetics, that can be controlled with the mind. For instance, Johns Hopkins recently had a success creating a prosthetic hand whose individual fingers could be moved with thought. A male subject, who had his hands, was set to undergo a brain-mapping procedure for his epilepsy. The researchers built a glove with electronics in it that could buzz each finger. Then they placed a sensor over the part of the subject’s brain that controls finger movement. By buzzing each finger, they could specifically measure the exact part of the subject’s brain that corresponded to each finger. It worked! He could later move the fingers of the prosthetic with his mind. However, this would work only for his brain. For you or I to accomplish the same feat would require a similar procedure.

Another Johns Hopkins project involves making an entire artificial arm that can be controlled by the brain. Already, about a dozen of them are in active use, but again, they involve surgeries, and the limbs currently cost half a million dollars each. However, Robert Armiger, the project manager for amputee research at Johns Hopkins, said, “The long-term goal for all of this work is to have noninvasive—no extra surgeries, no extra implants—ways to control a dexterous robotic device.”

These technologies are amazing and obviously life-changing for those who need them. But even if all the bugs were worked out and the fidelity was amped way up, as a consumer product used to interface with the real world, they are of limited value compared with, say, a voice interface. It’s cool, to be sure, to be able to think “Lights on” and have them come on, but practically speaking it is only a bit better than speaking “Lights on.” And of course, we are not anywhere near being able to read a simple thought like that. Moving a finger is a distinct action from a distinct part of the brain. Thinking “Lights on” is completely different. We don’t even know how “Lights on” is coded into the brain.

But say we got all the bugs worked out, and, in addition, we learned how to write thoughts to the brain. Again, this is out in science fiction land. No one knows how a thought like, “Man, these new shoes are awesome” is encoded to the brain. Think about that. There isn’t a “these shoes are [blank]” section of the brain where you store your thoughts on each pair of shoes you own. But let’s say for a moment that we figure this out and understand it so well that we can write thoughts to the brain at the same speed and accuracy as reading something. This too is nice, but little better than what we have now. I can Google “chicken and dumpling recipe” and then read the recipe right now. There is already a mechanism for data from the eyes to be written to the brain. We mastered that eons ago. Even if the entire Internet could be accessed by my brain, that’s little better than the smartphone I already own.

However, let’s consider the third proposition, of speed. If all this could be done at fast speeds, that is something different. If I could think, “How do you speak French?” and suddenly all that data is imprinted on my mind, or is accessible by my brain at great speed, then that is something really big.

Ray Kurzweil thinks something like this will happen, that our thinking will become a hybrid of biological and nonbiological processes, and he even puts a date on it:

In the 2030s we’re going to connect directly from the neocortex to the cloud. When I need a few thousand computers, I can access that wirelessly.

It goes without saying that we don’t know if this is possible. Clearly your brain can hold the information required for proficiency in French, but can it handle it being burned in seconds or even minutes? There are some biological limits that even technology cannot expand. No matter how advanced we get, an unaided human body cannot be made that can lift a freight train. Perhaps it won’t have to be written to our brain, but our brain can access a larger, outer brain. But even then, there is a fundamental mismatch between the speed and manner in which computers and brains operate.

There is also a fourth thing, which, if possible, is beyond a “big deal.” If we were able to achieve all three of the things just discussed and in addition were able to implant a conscious computer or an AGI in our brains, or otherwise connect to such a machine, and then utilize it to augment our cognitive abilities, then, well, the question of where the human ends and the machine begins won’t really matter all that much. If we can, in fact, upgrade our reasoning ability, the very attribute that many believe makes us human, and improve it by orders of magnitude, then we would truly be superhuman. Or maybe it is better to say that something will be superhuman and that thing will own and control your body. There may no longer be a “you” in any meaningful sense.

It is hard to contemplate any of this given where we are now. The brain is a wonderful thing, but it is neither hard drive nor CPU. It is organic and analog. Turning the lights on with your brain is not just a simpler thing than learning French in three minutes, it is a completely different thing. Those who believe you will be able to learn French that way do so not because they have special knowledge about the brain that the rest of us don’t have. They believe it because they believe that minds are purely mechanistic and that technology knows no upper limits at all. If both of these propositions are true, then, well, even the sky is no longer the limit.

Despite the evident difficulty in merging computers and people, there are numerous projects under way to try to do some of the things we have just covered. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a project whose program manager describes as attempting to “open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics” by implanting a device in the human brain that can convert brain activity into meaningful electronic signals. The agency is dedicating $62 million to the effort as part of its Neural Engineering System Design program. And it is in no way the only one working on such a project. Several other groups, both public and private, are probing the limits of what is possible.

To read more of GigaOm publisher Byron Reese’s new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity, you can purchase it here.

from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2018/05/15/can-computers-be-implanted-in-human-brains/

#Gigaom

[technicaldr]

The World’s Most Famous Real-Life Cyborgs

Tiptoeing around humans with machine parts

People imagine cyborgs usually as mean creatures combining some human and superhuman features in a robotic body. Movie characters such as the Terminator, Darth Vader or the Borgs in Star Trek come to mind. But you do not have to go as far as Star Wars to get in contact with cyborg-like features or characteristics. According to the usual definition, a cyborg combines organic and mechanic body parts. Yet, some scientists stretch this understanding. They include people with cochlear implants, cardiac pacemakers or even contact lenses. In a way, it is valid: the human body is augmented with technology, and the two works together to improve human capabilities.

 As technological innovations in the field of medicine and healthcare multiply day by day, it will be more and more usual to augment our bodies with the help of machines. It makes us faster, stronger or more sensitive to the environment. This means that the boundaries of “human-ness” are stretched raising serious ethical questions. Here, I introduce you real-life cyborgs, who show us the current boundaries of the coexistence of man and machine in one person. And they might also mark the way how to find a balance between the two.

1) Neil Harbisson

With an antenna implanted into his head, he looks like a giant ant led from behind by a piece of bread on a stick. Coupled with his light mop haircut he looks like the main character would in a Wes Anderson sci-fi if he ever directed one. Harbisson is actually an artist born with achromatopsia or extreme colorblindness meaning he could only see in black-and-white. At first, he received his specialized electronic eye, his “eyeborg” to be able to render perceived colors as sounds on the musical scale. He is capable of experiencing colors beyond the scope of normal human perception: Amy Winehouse is red and pink, while ringtones are green.

Harbisson has been living as a cyborg for more than 10 years already. He believes that humans have a duty to use technology to transcend themselves and that it will happen in the future. It will start with a third eye on the back of the head or an implanted sensor indicating whether there is a car behind you.

2) Dr. Kevin Warwick

He has been known as “Captain Cyborg” and teaches at the University of Reading as a cybernetics professor. Warwick has experimented with different electronic implants since 1998 such as installing a microchip in his arm which lets him operate lights, heaters or computers remotely. As dedicated as he is, Warwick also gave an implant to his wife, so that when someone grasped her hand the man was able to experience the same sensation in his. It is jaw-dropping and awkwardly scary at the same time.

He is the founder of Project Cyborg using himself as the guinea pig on a mission to become the world’s most complete cyborg. Beyond his work on himself, he is involved in AI research. He faced serious criticism in 2014 over claims that the “supercomputer” called Eugene Goostman passed the “milestone” Turing-test for Artificial Intelligence.

3) Jesse Sullivan

Sullivan worked as an electrical linesman when in May 2001, he suffered a life-threatening accident: he was electrocuted so severely that both of his arms needed to be amputated. This, however, led to him to become the world’s first “Bionic Man”. The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago offered him to replace his arms with robotic prosthetics, which opportunity he gladly took. He was fitted with a bionic limb connected through a nerve-muscle grafting.

He has control over his limb with his mind: when he thinks about lifting an arm, for example, certain muscles in his chest contract instead of muscles in his original arm, and the prosthetic replacement interprets this contraction as an instruction to move in a certain way. Moreover, he can also feel temperature as well as how much pressure his grip applies.

4) Nigel Ackland

He worked as a precious metals smelter until his accident at his workplace involving an industrial blender. This led to a severe crush injury of his right forearm. He underwent six months of operations and infections before deciding to have a below elbow amputation.

Over the years, he tried several prosthetic types, but finally, he received a bebionic3 hand. With its help, he can independently move to grip even delicate objects. He controls the arm through muscle movements in his remaining forearm. The range of movement is truly extraordinary. He can independently move each of his five fingers to grip delicate objects, or even pour a liquid into a glass.

5) Jerry Jalava

The Finnish programmer had a terrible motorcycle accident when he lost his left ring finger. It was just a week after he bought his new motorbike that he accidentally hit a deer. Right after it happened, he lit a cigarette when he realized that he misses the upper half of his finger.

Then he decided against a traditional prosthesis and rather went for something “useful”: a 2GB USB port was embedded into his prosthetic. It doesn’t upload any information directly into his brain though. He is the perfect example of how you don’t need to be a robotics mastermind to become a cyborg…

6) Cameron Clapp

Until his life-changing accident, Cameron lived the life of the “California teens”: he loved to surf, skateboard and hang with friends. He was 15 when he wandered over to some railroad tracks near their house and passed out after drinking with his brother moved by the 9/11 tragedy what happened around that time. When a train passed, he, unfortunately, lost both of his legs plus an arm.

He got fitted with a couple of prosthetic legs controlled by his brain with the help of a microprocessor. Since then, he has become an athlete and an amputee activist. His advice to struggling patients? “Surround yourself with good people… good doctors, therapists, family, and friends. Set reachable goals, work hard and maintain a good attitude.”

7) Professor Steve Mann

The Canadian tech-crazy professor designed a headset that is outfitted with a number of small computers and through it, he can record and play video and audio. He was one of the, if not the first, cyborgs in the world. Mann definitely experimented first with wearable computing in high school in the 70s. At MIT he literally bristled with equipment, wearing 80 pounds of computing equipment to class.

Mann was allegedly also the victim of the world’s “first cybernetic hate crime” in 2012: he was at a McDonald’s restaurant in Paris with his family when three different McDonald’s employees attempted to forcibly remove his “Digital Eye Glass” from his head.

8) Claudia Mitchell

Mitchell is the first woman to have a bionic arm and just as in the majority of the listed cases, her transformation into a cyborg life was also due to an accident. Although she spent four years in the Marine Corps she did not lose her arm during military service but in a motorcycle accident. She lost her left arm completely.

She told several newspapers that she used to peel bananas using both feet and one hand before she received her bionic arm. The robotic limb comes from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago just as in the case of Jesse Sullivan and was developed for $3 million. She cried when she first peeled a banana one-handed. 

9) Stelios Arcadio

He is also known as Stelarc. He is a performance artist who believes that the human body is obsolete. To prove this, he has had an artificially-created ear surgically attached to his left arm. In another show, he hooked up electrodes to his body to allow people to control his muscles through the Web.

He has his particular views how humans should look at technology and the symbiosis of the two. In an interview, he said that “we shouldn’t have a Frankensteinian fear of incorporating technology into the body, and we shouldn’t consider our relationship to technology in a Faustian way – that we’re somehow selling our soul because we’re using these forbidden energies. My attitude is that technology is, and always has been, an appendage of the body.”

Technical Dr. Inc.'s insight:

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