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By the end of this month, Kevin Warwick hopes to be a cyborg . If all goes as planned, in late February the University of Reading, U.K., professor of cybernetics will have surgery to connect nerves in his arm with wires leading to a "smart card"-sized collection of microprocessors. The wires will pick up signals from his central nervous system and relay them via a radio transmitter to an external computer that will record the patterns. Warwick hopes the device will pick up discrete signals from the nerves depending on his movements, his sense of touch, and even his mood, and then send those signals back to his nerves to see if they can mimic the movement or the sensation. Warwick's wife plans to have a similar implant so the two can try to communicate through computer-mediated signals.
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Warwick and others in the cybernetics community envision a world in which humans are able to expand their senses to hear ultrasonic sounds or see infrared wavelengths. "It's tremendously exciting. Can we in the future link extra memory into our brains? Why shouldn't we do something like that?" he asks.
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Such questions are premature, says Peter Fromherz of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. "Warwick is a very interesting person. But what he's doing is scientifically crazy," he says.
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Others think Warwick's experiment should not be allowed to proceed. (It does not require permission from a formal ethics board, as Warwick is experimenting on himself.) Political scientist Langdon Winner of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, for one, calls the experiment "profoundly amoral. Enhancing one's information-processing ability by connecting chips to the nervous system marks a very fundamental change in what human beings are." Should it become possible, he says, "then it is a matter for theologians, politicians, and citizens to address."

Originally posted by C Elegans
(Does anyone know how much of a copyrighted material one is allowed to quote at a public message board? Grrr - IMO all scientific information should be free , not only summaries and abstracts.)

Originally posted by Dottie
This is great news, I wonder if he is looking for any more test subjects.

Originally posted by Ode to a Grasshopper
[BIIRC, there is some sort of brain implant being developed that will enable people to manipulate computers via thought just as easily as if using a mouse. So far it's only been tested on monkeys, though. [/b]

Originally posted by Ode to a Grasshopper
IIRC, there is some sort of brain implant being developed that will enable people to manipulate computers via thought just as easily as if using a mouse. So far it's only been tested on monkeys, though.

Nature 416, 141 - 142 (2002)
Brain-machine interface: Instant neural control of a movement signal

MIJAIL D. SERRUYA, NICHOLAS G. HATSOPOULOS, LIAM PANINSKI, MATTHEW R. FELLOWS & JOHN P. DONOGHUE

The activity of motor cortex (MI) neurons conveys movement intent sufficiently well to be used as a control signal to operate artificial devices, but until now this has called for extensive training or has been confined to a limited movement repertoire. Here we show how activity from a few (7–30) MI neurons can be decoded into a signal that a monkey is able to use immediately to move a computer cursor to any new position in its workspace (14° [times] 14° visual angle). Our results, which are based on recordings made by an electrode array that is suitable for human use, indicate that neurally based control of movement may eventually be feasible in paralysed humans.

Originally posted by CE
This is very good news for people with neurological impairments!

Originally posted by Jace
Interesting stuff CE, I read something about this in New Scientist I think (that is about as far as I go into science journals). What is your angle on this?

My understanding is that the cyborg stuff is not too far removed from any other computer input device with the execption of the workings being implanted. You would still have to go through a bio mechanical routine to provide the input.

I don't know anything about the technology behind the monkey esp device. It sound like something out of a realy bad Clint Eastwood movie (Firefox).

Originally posted by C Elegans
I'm not sure of the definition of "cyborg", I used the word simply because they used it in the report. As I understand it, a cyborg would be a person who uses technical, non-biological implants as a means to improve both physical and mental capabilites, and professor Warwick's implant should fulfill these criteria if they work as he has hoped, albeit in a very small scale.

That definition sounds accurate to me, so I guess this would make Warwick a type cyborg, just to such a small extent, but it has to start somewhere, ne? I guess I've just gotten to used to things like the Borg, the Gunnm manga, and Ghost In The Shell.

Ghost In The Shell actually has an interesting concept stemming from the idea of cyborgs. Going on the idea that everything you hold in your brain is information, which isn't too much different from a computer, it would theoretically be possible for the brain to be replaced completely by cybernetics, or maybe just to an extent. In Ghost In The Shell, cyborgs could easily connect to each other's minds to communicate in a way similar to the idea of telepathy. They could also connect to, basically, the internet and get information even more easily and more instantly than we're able to now with things like DSL and Cable.

I do not know how likely it is for things like there are in Ghost In The Shell to come to be, but it does seem like this thing Warwick is working on is one of the early steps towards that type of thing being reality.