Tag Archives: The Singularity

Singularity watch: Through computer, brain can direct a robot

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From my Boston Globe column this week:

Wearing what looks like a swim cap wired with electrodes, you can “command’’ a robot to move left, right, and forward by looking at corresponding areas on a computer screen, the Northeastern researchers say.

Here’s how it works:

Each quadrant on the user’s computer screen represents a different command and flashes at a different frequency.

Staring at a particular quadrant causes the user’s visual cortex to emit a corresponding frequency, which a computer translates into a directional command.

The system then wirelessly transmits those commands to the laptop on the back of the robot. (The user can track the robot’s whereabouts by using a Skype video connection with the laptop.)

via Through computer, brain can direct a robot – The Boston Globe.

Rehab: Northeastern's "smart gloves" retrain hands, fingers

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Photo: Horia Varlan/Flickr CC

From my Boston Globe column this week, Northeastern’s latest robotic-mechatronic assistive aid (a breathtaking amount of GNR –genetics, nanotechnology and robotics — research, here):

“Given America’s growing ranks of aging boomers and wounded vets, it looks like the folks at Biomedical Mechatronics Laboratory (www.robots.neu.edu) at Northeastern University have a moneymaker on their hands.

Last week, the lab reported progress on its smart-gloves technology, the ATLAS Bimanual Rehabilitation System, which stroke patients can use to retrain their arms, hands, and fingers.”

via Smart gloves help patients regain control (below the fold).

Pentagon shooter aimed to create synthetic life

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Photo: Zoe/Flickr CC

Mad scientist proposed creating self-assembling nanobots and “smart dust” with DNA.

This week’s anti-government, lone gunman, John Patrick Bedell, is another perfect poster boy for the government’s crackdown on the pro-pot and 9/11 truth movements.

Bedell, who was killed at a subway entrance to the Pentagon, was bent on according to the LA Times,

“revealing the truth behind the 9/11 “demolitions.”

Bedell also bore a grudge against the authorities, who busted him with weed at his California home some time ago.

But the mad scientist’s greatest passion may have been bringing about the Singularity — that future point in human evolution, predicted by Ray Kurzweil and others, when genetics, nanotechnology and robotics become a single science, reality and virtual reality become indistinguishable, and people become immortal.

Bedell, in 2006, proposed blending DNA with standard, integrated circuits, to create self-propagating “smart dust,” tiny, self-propagating — indeed, living — sensors and robots that could provide governments will blanket surveillance capabilities.

And in this way, Bedell shares something with another gun-wielding nerd in the news: UAH shooter, Amy Bishop, designer of a cyborg mechanism, the Neuristor.

Here’s Bedell’s proposal for the DNA-integrated circuit hybrids:

via Pentagon shooter apparently doubted 9/11 facts in Web posting – latimes.com.

Click here for a primer on synthetic biology.

Interested in tech from the Hub? Check out this week’s User Friendly

Scientists link abuse and early aging

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Dr. Audrey Tyrka finds a direct connection between abuse and telemore length. Photo: Brown University News Office

You really can blame your parents for everything. A Brown University doctor (and #1 on the Heretic’s 2009/2010 list of “scientists actually doing something useful”) reports that mean, shitty parents could be condemn their kids to shorter lives.

I looks like they used a small sample, but it’s a start:

For this study, the scientists looked at 22 women and nine men between ages 18 and 64. Some of the subjects had no history of childhood maltreatment, but others said they had endured either moderate or severe mistreatment as children.

The adults who endured mistreatment as children varied in terms of the type of trauma they reported. They suffered individually from emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse.

via Possible Link Studied Between Childhood Abuse and Early Cellular Aging | Brown University Media Relations.

Washington Post: The sorry state of virtual worlds

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Not looking to good? CC/Annabeth Robinson

Not looking too good: A PS3 Home avatar takes a moment to herself. CC/Annabeth Robinson

A Washington Post columnist notes the seemingly hard times that have befallen inworld-types, in a bit about Sony’s “Home”:

Google, for example, is pulling the plug on Lively, a virtual environment it launched earlier this year. And news service Reuters is shuttering a virtual bureau it had opened in the once-buzzworthy Second Life. In a farewell note posted last month, reporter Eric Krangel confessed that he found using the service “about as fun as watching paint dry.”

via Mike Musgrove – PS3′s Virtual Home Is Inhospitable – washingtonpost.com.

But things are about to take a turn for the better in virtual worlds.

My 2009-2012 prediction (it’ll happen somewhere in there): Every internet user will acquire (or be assigned) an avatar of his own.

Nanobamamania!

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University of Michigan materials scientists boasted this month that they “fuse art, science, technology and politics.” DARPA and the National Science Foundation (i.e., you and I) helped pay for it. And this nanotech stuff ain’t cheap!

Photo: John Hart, University of Michigan

John Hart, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, made the mini-Barack Obama likenesses with his colleagues to raise awareness of nanotechnology and science.

Each one contains about 150 million carbon nanotubes stacked vertically like trees in a forest. A carbon nanotube is an extraordinarily strong hollow cylinder about 1/50,000th the width of a human hair.

“Developments like this are an excellent way to bring the concepts of nanotechnology to a broader audience,” said Hart, who made the portraits with his colleagues by working late on a Friday evening. “Also, we thought it would be fun.”

More nano-art here

Singularity watch: New technologies as likely to to enslave as liberate

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We might not want to live forever (emphases, below, are mine). Libertarian author David Friedman appears to be arguing in a new book (which I will be reviewing in the coming weeks) that the future will be an adapt-or-die type thing:

David Friedman, author of such books as The Machinery of Freedom and Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, now looks at a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. “If it can be done, it will be done,” David Friedman has said. “So the interesting thing to me is not what should you stop but how do you adapt.” We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it now.

via Cato Institute: Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World (Book Forum)