As we’ve long tracked, the eyeborgs continue to grow in numbers amongst us …
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The Growing Eyeborg Population
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/63wEsP_nns0/1509
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Cognitive Computing: 100,000x Cost Reduction Impact
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/WGTEFeVpo6s/1505
“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.
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iLimb & Myoelectric Replacement Parts Update on the path to #SubstrateIndependence
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/kdK-Q1U2ziU/1490
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Artificial Retina Progress
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/-IfISK9cBdU/1476
MIT Retinal Implant Research Group: “The major thrust of the RLE Retinal Implant Research Group is to develop a microelectronic retinal implant to restore vision to patients with age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. The group’s implant design has unique features that improve its safety, function and performance. Efforts are currently underway to test the implant design. The group works closely with colleagues in Boston area hospitals.” DOE Artificial Retina Project: “U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Artificial Retina Project is a collaborative, multi-institutional effort to develop an implantable microelectronic retinal prosthesis that restores useful vision to people blinded by retinal diseases. The ultimate goal of the project is to restore reading ability, facial recognition, and unaided mobility in people with retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration.”
H/T SingularityHub
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Next: Neural Prosthetics
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/etWhRsDuKYA/1473
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CMU Robotics SARCOS
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/rPCvDbXFovA/1459
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The Internet of Brains: Evoking Eywa
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/9OdQ9Troy10/1418
Back in September, scientists decoded words from brain signals. It’s not a matter of if, but when inter-cortical cognition grids happens. Inter-cortical communication will completely disrupt the arc of human evolution. Odds. Are. You. Are. Not. Ready. Human. You’re every thought will be laid bare to all other minds on the grid. Lusts, fears, paranoia, confusion, all of it. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to practice judge not, lest ye be judged. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to practice putting idle synaptic cycles to better use in order to be found useful. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to think about what substrate independence really means, psychologically. The Journal of Neural Engineering’s September issue is publishing Greger’s study showing the feasibility of translating brain signals into computer-spoken words. The University of Utah research team placed grids of tiny microelectrodes over speech centers in the brain of a volunteer with severe epileptic seizures. The man already had a craniotomy – temporary partial skull removal – so doctors could place larger, conventional electrodes to locate the source of his seizures and surgically stop them. Using the experimental microelectrodes, the scientists recorded brain signals as the patient repeatedly read each of 10 words that might be useful to a paralyzed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less. Later, they tried figuring out which brain signals represented each of the 10 words. When they compared any two brain signals – such as those generated when the man said the words “yes” and “no” – they were able to distinguish brain signals for each word 76 percent to 90 percent of the time. SOURCE: EUREKALERT
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Biodigital Brain: human brain organically fused with computer chips
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/i9lceIC2JOE/1385
“Brain cells automatically connect to computer chips. They need no teaching, they just do it. I’m telling you history, my friends. You tell me, the future.” – Patrick Dixon
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Dissolving Human Embodiment & Billions of Close Personal Friends
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/sPw4_nnmQ1E/1379
The following is nowhere close to being a full transcript; just interesting snippets that I took a few minutes to capture. Quotations are Coupland, non quotations are the interviewer. “Identity’s become an entirely fluid issue, now.” “Now, not having a life is so common, it’s almost become the norm.” “The split between being biologically alive and having a life has to do with the way you perceive time and the way you perceive your information environment.” “People just aren’t getting their year’s worth of year anymore. We’ve increased the information density in our culture to the point where perception of time is now all screwy.” Interstitial: Our economy is based upon, entirely upon, fending off boredom. Leisure time is a joke. “But then it all backfired. Technology only gives you more time up to a certain point, and then time starts vanishing at this fantastic rate, like your car running out of gas.” “I used to have this fantasy that I’d go into a coma for one year and when I came out of the coma, I’d have a year’s worth of magazines and pop culture to catch up on. It’d be like information crack and really fun. But now, every day is like waking up after a year of having been in a coma.” Do you believe in randomness? “No, when something seems random, it means you’re standing too close to a very large pattern; you can’t see the pattern because you’re too close to it.” “I think many people mistake the current deluge of information diversity as being the end of history; but in a way I think it’s actually the beginning of history.” “I was looking at these photographs from the 1950′s and in them everyone was trying to look exactly 35 years old. I mean, you had these 18 year-old boys and girls and these 58 year-old men and women, and everyone was trying to look 35 years-old. So that was the age you were supposed to be inside your head back then, is 35. Now, what’s happened I think is that the mental age everyone’s trying to be inside their head is about 24; and that’s an 11 year shift.” But what about on a deeper level? “Well, I think as we’re talking about the 20th century here, I think we’re probably going to remember this period of time as being one in which the relationship between the mind and the body was completely severed.” “I remember I once read about Karen Carpenter, how she felt as though the entire world existed on the other side of a ten feet of plexiglass. I think, in a way, that defines the current mind-body relationship.” “I think what’s happened is people have begun viewing their bodies as being fortresses, or inviolable, made out of that same sort of hard, shiny plastic as Lego; but the funny thing here is that the average human body contains ten times as many alien cells as it actually contains cells of itself. So instead of Lego, the average human body is more like Pigpen, from Charlie Brown. Remember, the way he used to walk down the street in that sort of perpetual haze of dust and germs? Well, you know, that’s people. Actually, we’re already so ridden with disease and other organisms that the whole notion of being a fortress becomes somewhat beside the point.” How does a person cope? As you’ve said, every day is like waking up from a year long coma. “Well, there’s obviously no point in trying to remember everything, because then everything just becomes trivia. Cellulose production in Lake Baikal in Russia, the contents of Tori Spelling’s clothes closet, or the weather in Arlington, Texas. What’s important is being able to locate things.” So has bulk memory replaced history? “Yeah. Sort of the way bulk shopping has replaced regular shopping. I remember back in the 70′s in history class, when teachers would say to us very sonorously, ‘He who does not remember the past is doomed to repeat it,’ and I just don’t think that’s the case anymore.” “I think that what’s happened now is that we’ve create a scenario so radically different that there’s no historical president to look back on for the situation we now face. We’re no longer condemned to repeat an endless cycle of mistakes. I think this should come as a relief, too. I mean, no more dark age followed by golden age followed by another inevitable dark age. I mean, how great to have finally broken the cycle of history, that people can actually manufacture a destiny of their own choosing?” If you could be an animal, what animal would you be? “I already am an animal.” So where does personal memory fit into all of this, doesn’t it get swamped by this super memory, things we’re creating? What about the personal stuff? “No, no, no, the personal stuff, personal memory it’s the most important thing of all. It’s the one thing that can never be taken away from you. It is you. Despite all the recent changes in our time architecture, it still takes time to create memories, it still takes time to remember them. It takes a place in which to locate the memories and a place in which to be still and remember them. It takes a lot of work to be an individual, to have an individual life and it can be scary; but then the option is to forget and to be forgotten.“ Are those your last words? “No. I’d say, hey kids! Go blow yourself up with dynamite and reassemble your bits any way you want to assemble them. Hey kids! Go and jump into that cartoon hole and find out what lies on the other side. I’d say, you know, all the time in the world, it’s right there, it’s inside you. I’d say all the world in the world … it’s right there inside you.“ “I mean, maybe you have a life and maybe you don’t, I don’t know you, but, you’re not alone.” “I remember back in the 1970′s, about the time people stopped having lives, they also began making fun of intimacy. They made jokes about people like Halston having parties at Studio 54 for his 500 close, personal friends; and so I guess the whole world is Studio 54 now. It’s just you and me, babe, and billions and billions of other people out there just like you. Billions of close personal friends.“
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Tomorrow: ASIM Experts Series on Brain Machine Interfacing
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/esPx1ec4xe4/1372
Max Hodak will give a talk in Teleplace tomorrow, October 17, 2010, at 10am PST (1pm EST, 6pm UK, 7pm CET). From CarbonCopies.org – Realistic routes to substrate independent minds. What is Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (ASIM)? In the past the transferal of minds into computer-based systems has been rather vaguely referred to as ‘uploading’. However, those hoping to advance this multidisciplinary field of research prefer to use the term Advancing Substrate Independent Minds (ASIM), to emphasize a more scientific, and less science fiction approach to creating emulations of human brains in substrates other than the original biological substrate. The term ASIM captures the fact that there are several ways in which hardware and software may be used to run algorithms which mimic the human brain, and that there are many different approaches that can be used to realize this objective. Once you implement the functions originally carried out in one substrate in the computational hardware of another substrate you have achieved substrate-independence for those functions.
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eLegs by Berkeley Bionics
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/_xHouA09LSk/
“It was so natural that’s what really gripped me. This is not a wave of the future, this is reality.” — Amanda Boxtel
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Avenues to Substrate Independence
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/niCE2TMtV2Q/
Ultimately, there will be diverse UX alternatives for substrate independence. The robotic substrate is certainly a fascinating option to consider and we not only can, but must immediately begin preparatory thinking, training, behavioral, and psychological exercises to prepare for increasingly high resolution software and hardware mediated experiences. Certainly within ten years and likely within five, we will see the convergence of the dexterity of R2 Robonaut, the mobility of AIST and Kawada’s HRP-4, the quotidian autonomy of Anybots, the brain machine interface typical of today’s prosthetic arms and legs, in addition to thin-sheet Displays as I/O Devices and internal Attention Management System HUD’s — vastly improved versions of software like Feedly and My6Sense which are designed to help surface the most salient and actionable information streaming throughout the vastness of the Internet of Things and the ever expanding Global Cognition Grid, all integrated into our 2020 Tesla built MacAvatars, powered by Google, and designed by Apple in California. ;-) We will not need “mind uploads” for this phase of self-guided, participatory, migratory evolution. Within ten years, we will see vastly improved and multi-functioned brain-machine interfaces to these device and the utterly immersive first person UX will become increasingly difficult to discern from “real life.” So don’t hold on too tight, Dorothy, or a hole the size of Kansas might get inadvertently ripped through your cute little bioconservative extremist hands. Or, in the words of the sub-legendary 38 Special, “hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna’ lose control.”
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Is Mech Already Better Than Meat?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/wUstqT6H7ek/
With a new pair of meat hands “One year after double hand transplant, progress elusive” we learn that it takes three to four years of intensive therapy to bring replacement meat hands online, because the nerves have a long way to grow. In contrast, with a new mech arm, back in 2003 we, “graft existing nerve endings from his shoulder onto the pectoral muscle on his chest. Those nerves grew into the muscle after about six months. Electrodes on the graft can now pick up any thought-generated nerve impulses to the now-absent limb and transmit those to the mechanical prosthesis, controlling the movements of the arm. And in 2008, of her new mech arm and hand, Claudia Mitchell says, “it feels more real than I ever expected.”
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Clunky, Rudimentary Prototypes for Substrate Independence?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/1gc7qecaL4o/
Some of our post-protoplasmic tenements may be meat, some may be metal, some may be silicon, some may even attempt the vastly more inconceivable leap to pure software, or even into the pure light of quantum computational fields. Regardless of one’s intolerance for hype or inclination for reading too much into the posthuman tea leaves, one thing is for certain: this experimental era of mashups and multi-substrate hybrids over the next few decades will be both exciting and at times troubling to behold. We’re participating in our own evolution, for better or worse.
Pandora’s box is open. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Pick a favorite cheesy B-movie metaphor if you like, the progress manifest in seemingly innocuous projects like the “advanced telepresence robot created by Silicon Valley robotics start-up “Anybots” is already analogous to prototype bicycles with wings found in Orville and Wilbur Wright’s earliest garage. Are video-phone sticks on wheels absurdly crude, compared to remote embodiments we’ll consider humdrum by the 2020's? Of course. At the same time, we err to dismiss them as inconsequential. No, the human drive toward applied, adaptive futuretechture is made of this very ho-hum stuff. In any and all cases, the impulse toward richer, more integrated remote presence and extra-corporeal embodiment experiences continues accelerating.
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The Fate of the Meat World
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/czvoFY3P8FM/
The fate of the meat world View more presentations from Humanity+.
“Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.” — Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)Wirehead Hedonism | Reproductive Revolution | Abolitionist.com | Superhappiness.com | BLTC
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BCI: Thought2Text at 1 Letter Per Second
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/4KOhCjbjmdI/
Singularity Hub reporting: The world’s first patient-ready and commercially available brain computer interface just arrived at CeBIT 2010. The Intendix from Guger Technologies (g*tec) is a system that uses an EEG cap to measure brain activity in order to let you type with your thoughts. Meant to work with those with locked-in syndrome, or other disabilities, Intendix is simple enough to use after just 10 minutes of training. You simply focus on a grid of letters as they flash. When your desired letter lights up, brain activity spikes and Intendix types it. As users master the system, a few will be able to type as quickly as 1 letter a second. Besides typing, it can also trigger alarms, convert text to speech, print, copy, or email.
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What a Bird Brain: Or, Why Neurons Are Amazing
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/_lnJ6m-3i4A/
This morning I watched a bird — I believe a finch — in the back yard. He was making use of the bird house, which is quite small, featuring perhaps a 3/4″ hole for a front door.
This bird arrived on the perch with about a 4 inch long stick in it’s beak. Obviously, getting that in the front door didn’t go too well. Many birds are known tool users and problem solvers, and this very tiny clump of neurons knew enough to execute an Olympic, 2-inch horizontal perch hop with 1/2 twist, rotating 180 degrees and craning a tiny neck by sufficient additional measure to insert the long end of that stick into the house, then squeeze past and move inside to drag the stick inside.
Now, to my mind, that’s one hell of a computation problem to solve, so I took a minute to check out how the hell birds do that. Wikipedia is usually a good starting place: It seems that birds use a different part of their brain, the medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale (see also nidopallium), as the seat of their intelligence, and the brain-to-body size ratio of psittacines and corvines is actually comparable to that of higher primates. Interesting. So, just because the neocortex is the location of our highest human brain functions, that doesn’t necessarily place any restrictions upon neuronal capabilities in other regions or configurations, in general. This seems like an interesting avenue of inquiry for machine intelligence, because compared to what little computers can do today in terms of visual context construction, it would be quite a compliment to call any computer a total “bird brain.” Maybe when it comes to machine intelligence, or even modeling substrate independence for any kind of intelligence, we should consider learning to fly, before we walk.
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