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Today
we interface with computers primarily at arm’s length.
Sure, the current standard keyboard-mouse-monitor set up
is a damn sight more convenient than the line printers that
we computing old-timers once used to communicate with lumbering
mainframes. Touchscreens, drawing tablets, sound cards and
MIDI musical instrument interfaces are awfully nice too.
Direct computer interfaces to EEG and EKG machines save
lives. Voice-based computer control will be great once the
technology improves a bit.
But wouldn’t it be nice if the integration were tighter
than all this? What if you could control your computer just
by thinking? What if the PalmPilot in your pocket sensed
the electrical flow in your brain? What if you could think
“Yo, PalmPilot, what’s Mike Smith’s address??”
and have the address appear in your mind? What if you could
hear a melody in your head, and by the pure power of your
thought cause that very same melody to emanate from your
stereo speakers? What if you could envision a picture in
your mind, transmit it to your PalmPilot, then beam it to
your friend’s PalmPilot, and straight into their brain?
What if you could connect your visual centers to an infrared
camera, allowing you to actually see in the dark? What if
a mathematician could reference a powerful computer algebra
program like Mathematica, purely by power of thought –
what kind of human-computer collaborative calculations could
they do? What if you could reliably and directly sense your
partner’s subtle emotional shifts and unspoken desires
during the act of love?
The power of brain-computer integration is obvious, and
the danger at least equally so. What happens when the neurochip
crashes? What about when some crazy hacker releases a virus
into your mind? In the 2050 Olympics, will athletes whose
reflexes are enhanced by brain-embedded chips be allowed
to compete? In 2100, will bringing a directly-brain-linked
PalmPilot-type device to a math test be considered cheating,
or will it simply be expected?
The first steps toward the cyborgization of humanity are
already well underway. Disabled people wear bionic limbs
with onboard microprocessors; the severely paralyzed can
communicate by using special brainwave detectors to control
their computers. British computer scientist Kevin Warwick
has embedded chips in himself and his wife that will allow
them to directly sense each others’ emotions, by transmitting
to one another the nervous system stimuli indicating emotional
states. A Japanese firm sells chips intended to be embedded
in old people – to enable a person to track their
senile grandparent should they wander off. One step at a
time, the boundary between human and computer gets thinner
and thinner.
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The
Cyberlink system, and its application to enable
communication by the severely disabled
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The
pioneer cyborgs of today are not computer geeks but rather
disabled people. The wooden legs and Captain Hook style
hands of ages past are replaced by bionic limbs, with embedded
computers, directly patched into the body’s nerves
for effective and responsive control. Cochlear implants,
allowing the deaf to hear, get better and better each year.
Scientists have constructed crude systems that pipe video
camera output into the visual cortex – successors
of these systems will allow blind people to see, and furthermore
to see in the dark using infrared cameras, thus in some
ways seeing better than the conventionally sighted. Today
the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation features a biologically-blind
guy with a bionic super-eyepiece. In a few decades this
sort of thing will be a reasonably common sight in the streets
of New York.
A fascinating example of cyborg technology helping the disabled
is the Cyberlink system, created by the Brainfingers Corporation
(www.brainfingers.com). Cyberlink reads your eye movements,
facial muscle movements, and forehead-expressed brain wave
bio-potentials, and from a synthesis of these inputs it
creates a signal to send to a computer. You don’t
have to type or click to control your computer – you
just have to think, or roll your eyes a little. A life-transforming
device for those whom injury or congenital defect has deprived
of the normal power of bodily motion. And a first step toward
a new way of interacting with computers for all of us.
The forehead is a surprisingly outstanding place to gather
biosignals. All you need is a simple headband with three
plastic sensors on it. The headband connects to a
Cyberlink interface box, containing a signal amplifier and
some signal processing software, which in turn plugs into
a standard PC serial port. After some practice, you can
figure out how to send commands to the computer, using a
combination of eye movements, facial muscle movements, and
thoughts.
It’s the combination of inputs that makes Cyberlink
so powerful, as compared to competing products. For quite
some time researchers have been playing around with using
EEG waves to control computers. But the skull is thick,
and the electromagnetic waves that come through it are diffuse
and hard to interpret. They represent averages of brain
activity over broad regions. If it were possible to measure
the electrical potential of an individual neuron in the
brain, then incredibly fine-grained directly-thought-powered
computer control would be possible. But this isn’t
feasible yet, and so combining EEG with other sources of
information is currently the best way to go.
Newbie Cyberlink users generally get started with subtle
tensing and relaxing of the forehead, eye and jaw muscles.
With more experience, a shift is made to using predominantly
brain-based signals. Often mental and eye-movement signals
are used to move a cursor around, and facial muscle activity
is used to turn switches on and off. A US Air Force study
showed that subjects’ reaction times to visual stimuli
were 15% faster with Cyberlink than with a manual button.
For people without reliable muscle control, after a little
more effort purely thought-based signals can be used to
control every aspect of a computer’s behavior.
The process of learning to use the system isn’t always
easy. For the completely paralyzed, it can sometimes take
months. On the other hand, once success is achieved, the
results can be transformational and amazing. It’s
an awkward, clunky way to manipulate a computer, but it’s
an infinite improvement on not being able to communicate
at all.
A more frivolous application of the Cyberlink was created
by Dr. Andrew Junker, the originator of the Cyberlink System,
together with composer Chris Berg. It allows you to create
music through the power of thought. Volume, pitch and velocity
can be controlled, along with other factors such as the
degree of melodic and rhythmic complexity of the sounds
produced. Yes, it’s still a long way from the point
where you can compose a new symphony in your head, and at
the same time, miraculously hear it coming out of your computer
speaker. But we’re at the first step along this tremendously
exciting path. The same technology that allows the fully
paralyzed to communicate, will increasingly allow us to
communicate the sounds, sights, feelings and thoughts that
are trapped inside us.
Medical work helping the disabled is arguably the contemporary
vanguard of cyborgization … but one British computer
science researcher is making a play to gain this title for
himself. Dr. Kevin Warwick, who titled his recent autobiography
I, Cyborg, has embarked upon a radical and ambitious program
of experimental self-cyborgization. The scientific techniques
he’s using are not particularly innovative, but his
willingness to use himself as a guinea pig has made the
headlines more than once; and who knows, his gutsy self-modificatory
research may yet lead to breakthroughs.
Warwick’s
first self-cyborgization experiment, in 1998, was mild in
terms of the potential scope of human-computer synthesis,
but nonetheless radical with respect to contemporary human
experience. What he did was to turn himself into a human
remote control. He had a tiny glass container full of transponders
implanted into the skin of his arm, and had controls set
up so that when he walked through doorways, the lights would
turn on; when he walked into his study, his computer would
boot up; and so forth.
Pragmatically, there’s not so much difference between
what he did here and simply carrying an advanced remote
control in one’s pocket, or strapped around one’s
waist. But there’s a major philosophical difference.
The controller was in his body, it was a part of him, not
something he was carrying around and could pick up or put
down.
His musings on the experience seem rather more dramatic
than what was actually accomplished. “After a few
days,” he said, “I started to feel quite a closeness
to the computer, which was very strange. When you are linking
your brain up like that, you change who you are. You do
become a 'borg. You are not just a human linked with technology;
you are something different and your values and judgment
will change."
"I didn't feel like Big Brother was watching, probably
because I benefited from the implant: The doors opened and
lights came on, rather than doors closing and lights turning
off. It does make me feel that Orwell was probably right
about the Big Brother issue -- we'll just go headlong into
it; it won't be something we'll see as a being negative
because there will be lots of positives in it for us."
His next experiment, however, seems significantly more interesting.
As I write these words in February 2002, the new operation
is just now taking place. Check www.kevinwarwick.com to
see the results. This time it’s no mere implant in
the arm, it’s a genuine connection his nervous system.
He’ll receive a tiny collar, circling around the bundle
of nerve fibers at the top of his arm, which will read the
signals from his nervous system and send them to the computer.
This isn’t all that different from what happens when
a bionic leg is connected up to a disabled person. But the
purpose of the experiment is different.
Part of it is simple: he’ll test whether, by waving
his arms appropriately, he can control his computer in various
ways. A kind of extension of the Cyberlink methodology to
the whole body – but without anything like the Cyberlink’s
special forehead device; the control entirely from under
the skin. “In the very near future,” he says,
“we should be able to operate computers without the
need for a keyboard or a computer mouse. It should be simply
possible to type on your computer just by writing with your
finger in the air."
And the implant will also receive signals from the computer.
So he can shake his hand around, “save” the
corresponding electrical signals on the computer, and then
later play back the signals into his arm. And what happens
then? Will his arm shake around involuntarily? What will
happen to the computer-generated signals, when they voyage
back up to his brain?
The aspect of the experiment that has attracted the most
media attention involves his wife, Irina, who has agreed
to receive an identical implant – assuming Kevin’s
initial experience with the implant goes OK. Man and wife
will then directly share electricity, nervous system to
nervous system. If he feels angry and tensed up, and passes
the corresponding electrical signals to her, will she feel
the same thing?
One British tabloid labeled this new implant a "love
chip" – the kind of publicity that Warwick seems
to love, but causes grimaces on the faces of bionics researchers
and others working in more traditional cyborg-tech domains.
But, media hound though he indisputably is, Warwick is still
a scientist at heart, and so he had to correct the love-chip
idea. “Emotions such as anger, shock and excitement
can be investigated because distinct signals are apparent,”
he clarified. “[M]ore obtuse emotions such as love
we will not be tackling directly.”
Not yet, at any rate. Not with computer sensors hooked up
to the arm. To master love you may need the holy grail of
cyborgization -- the fabled cranial jack, the two-way link
from the computer to the brain.
In any case, he makes no bones about what he sees for the
future. When asked who’s going to be running the show
in 2100, his reply was: first AI programs, then cyborgs,
then humans.
But as usual with advanced technology, the scary aspects
are offset by the humanitarian aspects, which go far beyond
assisting the disabled. “What,” Warwick asks,
“if we could develop signals to counteract pain?”
Or, perhaps, deliver pleasure? A lucrative future business
to say the least.
Cyborgization
now is primitive. Just like airplanes were in the time of
the Wright Brothers, when various pundits declared: “Sure,
you’ve made a plane fly, but you’ll never make
one fly as fast as a car can drive.” But neither neuroscience
nor computer technology and microminiaturization show any
sign of slowing down. Rather, they’re speeding up.
As cyborg technology advances, more and more techno-conservatives
will rise up in arms with ethical complaints. But who can
really complain about giving sight to the blind, giving
hearing to the deaf, creating bionic arms and legs, giving
communication skills to the horribly disabled who can’t
communicate in any other way, allowing paraplegics or quadriplegics
to control their bodies again? The research will get done
because of the tremendous humanitarian applications. And
then the Kevin Warwicks of the world – more and more
of them as time goes on, adults who as kids spent endless
hours watching cyborgs on Cartoon Network – will put
the technology to use in other ways, ways that will make
the techno-conservatives very uncomfortable.
There seems little doubt that eventually nearly every human
being will be linked in directly with one or more electronic
devices. And if the interfacing isn’t as smooth as
one would like, may this not eventually be solved by genetic
engineering? Why not tailor a new generation of humans for
easier human-computer integration? Why keep operating on
people to insert chips into their brains, when you can genetically
engineer people who have nice handy chip ports on the backs
of their head? If some people have trouble harmonizing their
thought processes with the calculational processes of their
digital symbiotic partner, then what’s the solution?
You can improve the digital half of the equation, but why
not also the human half? Human thought processes can be
genetically re-engineered to make more natural use of onboard
calculators, computers, and petabyte in-brain memory modules.
Oh brave new world, that has such cyborgs in it?
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