Researchers have been improving upon BrainGate — a brain-machine interface that allows users to control an external device with their minds — for years, but what you see here is the most advanced incarnation of the implant system to date. It is nothing short of remarkable.
The author’s site lists this article as Waiting for the Bionic Man, so maybe Wired applied some kind of proprietary troll-baiting re-title algorithm to bump up the irritated enthusiast click through rate, or something: “A True Bionic Limb Remains Far Out of Reach.” Whatever. @MikeChorost‘s report is a fanstastic reality update to the previous post and indeed, all the content of this blog. We need much more of this to Get There!
From the article:
- Hypothetically, a neurally controlled prosthesis would begin with a brain interface, a chip capable of picking up complex signals from the user’s brain.
- A computer would translate those signals into orders for the arm—”move up,” “bend my elbow,” “turn my wrist.”
- Motors in the joints would move the arm smoothly in response to commands from the computer.
- Sensors in the arm would feed information on its position and movement through the computer and into the chip in the user’s brain.
“The next programming paradigm is life science. We’re going to create a living world, this century.” Andrew Hessel
Finally, someone else articulating this truth with the scientific authority that might be better heard and received.
“We believe that humankind is currently on the verge of a complete collapse of it’s value structures. We believe that the world needs a new social formation that can be based around the ideas of transhumanism. New Humanity. We need revolution, but we don’t need a bloody revolution, we need technological revolution.” – Dmitry Iskov
Your homework for the leisurely holiday weekend is at Caltech DNA and Natural Algorithms Group.
There are three major scientific mysteries of the natural world (via DNA.Caltech.edu):
"The answer is yes, and all it takes is a few small DNA molecules."
If 2+2 occurs in the cosmos and nobody adds them, is the sum still 4?
“The conscious part is like a stowaway on a trans-atlantic steamship that is taking credit for the whole journey, without acknowledging the engineering underfoot. So, it’s like when you have and idea and you say, ‘oh, I just thought of something,’ it wasn’t you who thought of it, your brains been working on that for days or weeks, behind the scenes; churning things, consolidating information, trying things out; [pop!] finally it serves it up to you and you say, ‘hey, I’m a genius!’ But it wasn’t you that thought of it, right?” - David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.
Oh, oh, now what, 19th century intellectual property status-quo defenders, “Protect IP Act,” and SOPA? Neurobiology says you don’t even get credit for what you thought was your own ideas! Nope! It’s all Open Source, Creative Commons. Sorry about that.
"Convention, by it’s nature, adheres to itself and rejects what is not conventional." – Daniel Kish
As we’ve long tracked, the eyeborgs continue to grow in numbers amongst us.
“The species has evolved to this point in time, but who says that’s the end of the line?” – David Jönsson
“Cognitive computing chips aim to reduce the cost of extracting information from ever changing spatial-temporal environments around us by an order of 100,000. Imagine the impact,” humans.
Nature Nanotechnolgy reports:
the conductivity of the biofilm can be tuned by regulating gene expression, and also by varying the gate voltage in a transistor configuration. The conductivity of the nanofilaments has a temperature dependence similar to that of a disordered metal, and the conductivity could be increased by processing.
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