Mind Control?
From Wired Magazine March 2005
Mind Control by Richard Martin
Matthew Nagle is beating me at Pong. "O, baby," he mutters. The creases in his forehead deepen as he moves the onscreen paddle to block the ball. "C'mon - here you go," he says, sending a wicked angle shot ricocheting down the screen and past my defense. "Yes!" he says in triumph, his voice hoarse from the ventilator that helps him breathe. "Let's go again, dude."
The remarkable thing about Nagle is not that he plays skillfully; it's that he can play at all. Nagle is a C4 quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down in a stabbing three years ago. He pilots a motorized wheelchair by blowing into a sip-and-puff tube, his pale hands strapped to the armrests. He's playing Pong with his thoughts alone. A bundle of wires as thick as a coaxial cable runs from a connector in Nagle's scalp to a refrigerator-sized cart of electronic gear. Inside his brain, a tiny array of microelectrodes picks up the cacophony of his neural activity; processors recognize the patterns associated with arm motions and translate them into signals that control the Pong paddle, draw with a cursor, operate a TV, and open email.
Nagle, 25, is the first patient in a controversial clinical trial that seeks to prove brain-computer interfaces can return function to people paralyzed by injury or disease. His BCI is the most sophisticated ever tested on a human being, the culmination of two decades of research in neural recording and decoding. A Foxborough, Massachusetts-based company called Cyberkinetics built the system, named BrainGate……
Roughly the size of a deflated volleyball, your brain weighs about 3 pounds. Its 100 billion neurons communicate via minute electrochemical impulses, shifting patterns sparking like fireflies on a summer evening, that produce movement, expression, words. From this ceaseless hubbub arose Ode to Joy, thermonuclear weapons, and Dumb and Dumber.
Nobody really knows how all that electricity and meat make a mind. Since Freud, scientists have wrangled over "the consciousness problem" to little effect. In fact, it's only in the past 20 years that researchers have learned how to listen in on - or alter - brain waves. Neuroscientists can record and roughly translate the neural patterns of monkeys, and thousands of humans with Parkinson's disease and epilepsy have cerebral pacemakers, which control tremors and seizures with electrical impulses.
John Donoghue, head of neuroscience at Brown University and the founder of Cyberkinetics, eventually wants to hook BrainGate up to stimulators that can activate muscle tissue, bypassing a damaged nervous system entirely. In theory, once you can control a computer cursor, you can do anything from drawing circles to piloting a battleship. With enough computational power, "everything else is just engineering," says Gerhard Friehs, the neurosurgeon from Brown who implanted Nagle's device….
For now, that engineering remains a challenge. Cyberkinetics is just one of a dozen labs working on brain-computer interfaces, many of them funded by more than $25 million in grants from the US Department of Defense, which frankly envisions a future of soldier-controlled killer robots. Before that can happen, BCIs must become safe enough to be implanted in a human, durable enough to function reliably for years, and sensitive enough to pick up distinctive neural patterns. Many physicians doubt useful information can ever be extracted from neural activity, and some who believe in the promise of BCIs worry that putting one into Nagle's head was premature, even reckless, considering less invasive technological options still on the table - electrode-studded skullcaps or devices that rest on the brain's surface. They worry that a failure could set the entire field back a decade…..
At a conference in 2002, Anthony Tether, the director of Darpa, envisioned the military outcome of BCI research. "Imagine 25 years from now where old guys like me put on a pair of glasses or a helmet and open our eyes," Tether said. "Somewhere there will be a robot that will open its eyes, and we will be able to see what the robot sees. We will be able to remotely look down on a cave and think to ourselves, 'Let's go down there and kick some butt.' And the robots will respond, controlled by our thoughts. Imagine a warrior with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine."……
For more click here
Can we say Lawnmower Man Part III? Why is it that every time an innovation or creation comes along that can help humanity the great apes have to interfere? This technology has the capabilities to one day help people walk or at least live a more pleasurable life who have been paralyzed or who suffer from some form of severe spine or brain damage. Imagine the possibilities the hope and happiness that this technoogy could bring to so many lives. Yet with all of that on the table what is the great ape talking about creating killer robots! Here we go again one of the reasons countries are so quick to go to war is that in most cases the military well the ones that actually do the fighting and dying are usually from lower ranks of their country’s society ie.. the poor, minorities and the disillusioned. While the military is usually controlled by your uber elite ie rich white men. Politics aside I am quite sure the powers that be would be less likely to start wars if it was them or their children dying in these wars besides your typical grunt soldiers and civilians who get caught in the cross hairs of these hi death (def) video games played out by arm chair politicians and generals.
So for a second just imagine a world where killer robots would fight wars instead of humans, the odds of any nation backing down really would decrease ten fold. As usual the public will go along for it is thinking that well at least it is not my baby dying in some foreign land in battle. But how long will that last?
Mind Control by Richard Martin
Matthew Nagle is beating me at Pong. "O, baby," he mutters. The creases in his forehead deepen as he moves the onscreen paddle to block the ball. "C'mon - here you go," he says, sending a wicked angle shot ricocheting down the screen and past my defense. "Yes!" he says in triumph, his voice hoarse from the ventilator that helps him breathe. "Let's go again, dude."
The remarkable thing about Nagle is not that he plays skillfully; it's that he can play at all. Nagle is a C4 quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down in a stabbing three years ago. He pilots a motorized wheelchair by blowing into a sip-and-puff tube, his pale hands strapped to the armrests. He's playing Pong with his thoughts alone. A bundle of wires as thick as a coaxial cable runs from a connector in Nagle's scalp to a refrigerator-sized cart of electronic gear. Inside his brain, a tiny array of microelectrodes picks up the cacophony of his neural activity; processors recognize the patterns associated with arm motions and translate them into signals that control the Pong paddle, draw with a cursor, operate a TV, and open email.
Nagle, 25, is the first patient in a controversial clinical trial that seeks to prove brain-computer interfaces can return function to people paralyzed by injury or disease. His BCI is the most sophisticated ever tested on a human being, the culmination of two decades of research in neural recording and decoding. A Foxborough, Massachusetts-based company called Cyberkinetics built the system, named BrainGate……
Roughly the size of a deflated volleyball, your brain weighs about 3 pounds. Its 100 billion neurons communicate via minute electrochemical impulses, shifting patterns sparking like fireflies on a summer evening, that produce movement, expression, words. From this ceaseless hubbub arose Ode to Joy, thermonuclear weapons, and Dumb and Dumber.
Nobody really knows how all that electricity and meat make a mind. Since Freud, scientists have wrangled over "the consciousness problem" to little effect. In fact, it's only in the past 20 years that researchers have learned how to listen in on - or alter - brain waves. Neuroscientists can record and roughly translate the neural patterns of monkeys, and thousands of humans with Parkinson's disease and epilepsy have cerebral pacemakers, which control tremors and seizures with electrical impulses.
John Donoghue, head of neuroscience at Brown University and the founder of Cyberkinetics, eventually wants to hook BrainGate up to stimulators that can activate muscle tissue, bypassing a damaged nervous system entirely. In theory, once you can control a computer cursor, you can do anything from drawing circles to piloting a battleship. With enough computational power, "everything else is just engineering," says Gerhard Friehs, the neurosurgeon from Brown who implanted Nagle's device….
For now, that engineering remains a challenge. Cyberkinetics is just one of a dozen labs working on brain-computer interfaces, many of them funded by more than $25 million in grants from the US Department of Defense, which frankly envisions a future of soldier-controlled killer robots. Before that can happen, BCIs must become safe enough to be implanted in a human, durable enough to function reliably for years, and sensitive enough to pick up distinctive neural patterns. Many physicians doubt useful information can ever be extracted from neural activity, and some who believe in the promise of BCIs worry that putting one into Nagle's head was premature, even reckless, considering less invasive technological options still on the table - electrode-studded skullcaps or devices that rest on the brain's surface. They worry that a failure could set the entire field back a decade…..
At a conference in 2002, Anthony Tether, the director of Darpa, envisioned the military outcome of BCI research. "Imagine 25 years from now where old guys like me put on a pair of glasses or a helmet and open our eyes," Tether said. "Somewhere there will be a robot that will open its eyes, and we will be able to see what the robot sees. We will be able to remotely look down on a cave and think to ourselves, 'Let's go down there and kick some butt.' And the robots will respond, controlled by our thoughts. Imagine a warrior with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine."……
For more click here
Can we say Lawnmower Man Part III? Why is it that every time an innovation or creation comes along that can help humanity the great apes have to interfere? This technology has the capabilities to one day help people walk or at least live a more pleasurable life who have been paralyzed or who suffer from some form of severe spine or brain damage. Imagine the possibilities the hope and happiness that this technoogy could bring to so many lives. Yet with all of that on the table what is the great ape talking about creating killer robots! Here we go again one of the reasons countries are so quick to go to war is that in most cases the military well the ones that actually do the fighting and dying are usually from lower ranks of their country’s society ie.. the poor, minorities and the disillusioned. While the military is usually controlled by your uber elite ie rich white men. Politics aside I am quite sure the powers that be would be less likely to start wars if it was them or their children dying in these wars besides your typical grunt soldiers and civilians who get caught in the cross hairs of these hi death (def) video games played out by arm chair politicians and generals.
So for a second just imagine a world where killer robots would fight wars instead of humans, the odds of any nation backing down really would decrease ten fold. As usual the public will go along for it is thinking that well at least it is not my baby dying in some foreign land in battle. But how long will that last?
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