Remote Controlled Mice Today, Remote Controlled Humans Tomorrow [Book Excerpt]

You possibly can not ought to wait until the year 2154 in your own remote-controlled body. In this week’s excerpt, Mark Stephen Meadows discusses wetware technology and how the science-fiction of Avatar is readily becoming science fact.

During a radio interview in December of 2009, I was asked, ” Do you suspect the vision of Avatar is something we’ll see ?” I paused for a second and made my Jake Sully wish list. What can we have the desire to make Avatar happen, roughly?
First is data transfer; you need to be in a position to drive the system at a distance. The myoelectrics and BMIs can work locally, and we’ve also seen that they may work at a distance. So, remote control; we’ve seen the U.S. Army driving UAVs this manner. Check.
Second is output. That you need to think to impress the interface. You’ll be lying down in a tank and you’ll be rigged up to a few variety of myoelectric or BMI (or combination thereof) interface. We’ve seen Cyberdyne and Honda both driving robots this type. Check.
Third is input. Pumping the arms and legs is something, but there’s an even bigger trick of moving sensory data into your head. Moving data into your little vampire-coffin isn’t the difficulty, but getting visual data into your eye could possibly be. We’ve learned slightly about retinal implants and cochlear implants functioning today, so it appears visual or auditory information might be converted from analog to digital, or vice versa, and can be sent into and out of the brain. Now, whether we emerge as having to wreck the surface to get it there is another question, but with that magic 144 years of future stirred in, let’s call it a check. So those are the outlines for a remote neuroprosthetic.
Fourth is the system-the avatar itself.

***

I ought to pause for a moment and inform you about among the weirdest things I’ve stumble upon in my travels, that is the notion of exactly what is needed for item number four. It’s called a hybrot.
Within the early 1990s, quite a lot of scientists managed to determine a dialogue between a computer simulation and a wad of neurons in a Petri dish. Literally, the technique is named ” dynamic clamping” and it works by taking a cluster of brain cells and soaking them in chemicals to tease them apart. Then, by chemically welding them to an electrical circuit board, you may measure the input membrane potential from one neuron and inject the output (the current from that neuron) into another. Hijacking the current, that you may then interface it with an ordinary computer. It’s an easy idea which presents a reasonably reductionist view of the brain as a linking of inputs and outputs. The dynamic clamp method may be extended from the cellular level to the systems level, artificially monitoring and constraining the relationship between the neural system, the computer, and the behavior. It’s wetware hacking.
Dr. Ben Whalley from the University of Reading within the UK has created a hybrot that splices rat-brain neurons to a small robot, which navigates via sonar. Dr. Whalley is teaching the system to guide itself so that it avoids obstacles and walls in its little home. Or box. Or maze. Or wherever a rat-brained hybrot lives. The blob of about 300,000 nerves was plucked from the neural cortex in a rat fetus and chemically treated to dissolve the connections between the individual neurons. These were then re-spliced so that sensory input from the sonar would allow the system to be informed, adapt, and at last recognize its surroundings.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have controlled a rhinoceros beetle with radio signals and demonstrated it in a flight test at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) 2009 conference.
And in 2007, at Chicago’s Northwestern University, Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi and other researchers chemically welded the brain of a lamprey eel with a robotic hockey puck. The hybrot can track a beam of light in a laboratory dome. The eel’s brainstem is soaked in a saline solution, receives input from light sensors, and directs the wheels where and when to head. I will’t even guess at that thought process. I assume it’s like a tiny bull chasing a matador’s cape. Note that these are eels, rats, and beetles which are being used. None of them are creatures that we eat. While obviously a brutal crew, these researchers have the délicatesse to bypass making bunny-hybrots, or kitty-hybrots. None of the hybrots made today are critters we expect of as friends or household pets. No, there is a marketing line that these researchers mustn’t ever cross, and it can be defined by publicly held ethics. As the years go by, the researchers will likely be allowed to head further up the food chain, but not for some years will human brain material get within the stew. And when it does, ethical questions of free will and volition would certainly have fallen to the wayside in favor of mechanistic arguments of defense and safety. So how deep can this go? Biotechnology can reach pretty far down.
As if integrating hardware and wetware wasn’t enough, in May of 2010 it was announced by the J. Craig Venter Institute they’d used a man-made genome to manipulate bacteria, which amounts to building software for a living organism. If that may be done, then it implies that other genomes can be created, including a human genome that may be combined with the genome of different systems, comparable to, well, anything that runs on genes and chromosomes, that’s most anything that’s living.
We are now arriving at a degree during which hardware, wetware, and software aren’t any longer being break up, nor even hacked, but actually blended. Is this the long run for what’s depicted inside the movie Avatar? Having somewhat lamprey-eel toro toro in his cage is somewhat different than jumping onto the back of a big red dragon from your medium-size green dragon, or making love in a glowing garden, but with these thoughts in mind, did I feel ” the vision of Avatar is something we’ll see one day?”
” After all ,” I replied. ” I see no this is why not.” Check.

Mark Stephen Meadows is the author of I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life and Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative. The award-winning co-inventor of four patents on the subject of artificial intelligence and virtual worlds, he is a respected international lecturer and the founder of Echo & Shadow and HeadCase Humanufacturing-companies involved with artificial intelligence. He divides his time between North America and Europe.

© 2011 Mark Stephen Meadows – excerpted with permission of Globe Pequot Press, Guilford, CT

Source

This post is tagged: analog to digital, cochlear implants, radio interview, remote control, retinal implants, science fiction