There is no spoon.A European Consortium-sponsored team of researchers from the Graz University of Technology in Austria and the University College of London are making things interesting. Seems that the Graz group is really good at measuring brain signals via implants or electrodes while the Londoners build a kickass VR. Put 'em together and what do you get? A virtual environment in which people can control simulated physical actions with nothing more than their imagination. See that guy? Imagine you're shaking his hand. Whoops! You are!
The applications, as you can probably imagine, are many.
"After having a healthy volunteer test the system, the researchers asked a man paralysed almost entirely from the neck down to try it out.He was asked to walk up to different virtual characters and wait for each character to say hello. The subject was able to do so about 90% of the time."
Unsurprisingly, the patient's response to the exercise was positive.
This seems pretty intense, especially considering the term "mind control" is thrown out a few times as a way of describing what the patients are doing in this virtual environment. The technical accuracy is there, I guess, but I think the term carries quite a bit of baggage for most of us. The usage here is intended to highlight the mind that is controlling, rather than the mind that is being controlled. But as the brain signal interpretation/speed improves and the VR becomes more lifelike due to ever-increasing processor-speeds and memory storage capabilities, who knows what the limits are to what such a set-up could accomplish, for good or ill. I mean, hell, I can't move my arm without thinking about it moving, either, so at what point does it get difficult to tell the difference? Philip Dick, here we come.
But not for a while. The brain-computer interface here remains crude in that you have to be able to see to participate in the VR, so that's got a ways to go. But if, at some point, the visual circuit can be hacked, and the VR piped directly to the brain via a more assimilated and subtle BCI, then what?
The article has lots of good links including pages for the Graz team, the UCL team and PRESENCCIA, the consortium sponsoring the whole thing.
(Picture and quote from NewScientist.com)
Labels: posthuman
posted by dan @ 1:12 PM
4 Comments:
arnold schwarzenegger's from graz. on his birthday they put big "Happy Birthday Arnie" billboards up along the A9 highway.
it seems fitting that the star of such famous distopian films was wrought from the very place that ushers in the posthuman future we have dreaded since we first met todd nadenichek.
now that he's our ruthless governator, consider the omen's prophecy: "from the eternal sea he rises, creating armies on either shore; turning man against his brother, until man exists no more"
how were we to know man wouldn't die, but merely shed his pre-posthuman flesh.
I have to say that I like thinking about the posthuman world. For instance, if I'm the guy without the control of my body from the neck down, this is cool.
If I'm a guy who went to Iraq and I'm missing a limb and my options are a hook or something that's getting gradually to a point where it can essentially replace my lost nervous system (and thusly move me to a place where my actual physical limb can be replaced with something aside from a hook), this is also cool.
www.boingboing.net occasionally has some interesting posts along these lines, including a guy talking about how his hearing aids have to be dialed down so he can't hear conversations 100 ft away as though they were right next to him.
I admit that I'm excited about the future of human augmentation. I'm also terrified of it. Bill McKibbon also wrote a great book (Enough) about this stuff, and why it's sketchy.
Imagine being a couple's first kid and being augmented with that year's bio tech. Imagine your little brother being augmented with bio tech 2.0. He's literally better then you. You don't have a chance. You're outmoded basically from birth, like an old laptop.
But then again, you can shoot lasers from your eyes. I can't. I'm jealous.
it won't be so bad.
even when Dudes 2.0. take over the world, those of us left in Dudes Beta will still have our old-timey charms. who among us doesn't miss Oregon Trail? we will be kitsch personified, literally.
we'll all be snatched up as pets by Dudes 2.0 hipsters.
The Cowboy's point about the kitsch appeal of preposthumans is well-taken and probably accurate. We'll be like 8-track players and velvet smoking jackets.
As for the other questions, I'm with you stridey. Thinking about posthumanity makes me very excited, but almost always makes me think, also, of annihilation. It's very hard for me, and most people, to imagine a technologically enhanced and distributed consciousness that is me, and that isn't necessarily identifiable with my body. Wild stuff.
There's no doubt that this PRESENCCIA stuff is cool. If you're paralyzed or an amputee, or even if you're just dan and the idea of a mutable VR environment powered, in part, by your own imagination sounds effing sweet. It does. Bodily limitations aren't limited to paraplegics and amputees. I can't do a kip-up or a flying side kick, or extend my arms like Dhalsim in Street Fighter, and the thought that there might one day be a world where, if I can imagine it, I can do it, is excellent. Like any technological advance, it all comes down to who controls it, and how they use it. While loaded with promise, the subtext of these advances also includes precursors of the Matrix, a trick, the realization of Gnostic-style prison that we actually can't tell we're in. Or maybe I'm just being paranoid.
As for Son 1.0 and Son 2.0, what about upgrades? Or what's keeping son 1.0 from hacking himself and souping himself up? Or, if we're really going to be posthuman, why are these kids STILL relying on their bodies to define who they are, anyway? Your body is a prosthesis of a kind, and what the hell is up with those bastards who are virtuoso pianists at age 4? I understand that nurture plays some role, but hasn't their basic hardware outmoded me in its own way?
In any case, posthumanity is awesome, and I am forever indebted to Todd for making it a part of my life.
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