from:
http://www.nationalpost.com/artslife.asp?f=000411/256606&s2=life
Click Here: <A
HREF="http://www.nationalpost.com/artslife.asp?f=000411/256606&s2=life">Nation
al Post Online - artslife</A>
-----
Tuesday, April 11, 2000
Do cyborgs live among us?
Scientists blur the boundaries between 'wetware' -- the living brain -- and
computer hardware
Jay Bookman
Cox Newspapers
John Lehmann, National Post
Steve Mann, a University of Toronto professor and pioneer of wearable
computers, dons his latest cyber sunglasses, while a mannequin models an
older version. The glasses transmit images to the Internet. Mann calls
himself a cyborg saying, "The human being and the computer become elements of
each other's feedback loop ... and create something new."
The future has many birthplaces. Part of it is taking shape in the cramped
and cluttered laboratory of John Chapin.
Chapin and his team wired the brains of lab rats directly to a computer,
giving the animals an ability unknown to human beings.
When the rats got thirsty, they would use a robotic arm to bring them water.
That kind of task has become almost second nature to lab rats, but these
animals did it with flair. They operated the device with their minds alone,
moving it merely by thinking about it.
"When people first heard about this work, I'd get e-mails wondering whether
people could use a mind-controlled robot to mow their lawns," jokes Chapin, a
neurobiologist at MCP Hahnemann University in Philadelphia. "But my mind
worked differently. I was thinking about a robot that could bring me a beer."
By linking a living brain to a computer and then allowing the two to
communicate, Chapin has broken down a barrier between the animate and
inanimate worlds. He has given a living mind the power to directly affect the
outside world without having to use the body in which it is housed.
He's hardly a lone researcher.
Thousands of scientists around the world, working quietly in fields as varied
as linguistics, biology, chaos and robotics, are in their own ways blurring
the boundaries that once separated "wetware" -- the living brain -- from the
hardware of silicon-based computers. At the furthest frontier, some
scientists are building computers out of living brain cells.
Their research represents the next world-changing generation in computer
science. It promises to produce computers that seem much more human and
lifelike, and less like machines. It also will transform the relationship
between human beings and computers. They won't be tools that we operate with
our hands, as we do a hammer or a car. Instead, they will become almost a
part of us, intimately linked to our minds and bodies and greatly augmenting
human abilities to think and communicate.
At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, for example, the military's
Alternative Control Technology Laboratory has experimented with systems that
allow pilots to "fly by thought." By controlling their brain waves, human
subjects at the laboratory can steer a flight simulator left or right, up or
down, a skill that most people at the lab master in only an hour.
The term "cyborg" was coined in the '60s by NASA scientists. In a cyborg,
computer hardware has become so much a part of a human being that it creates
a new species -- part machine, part human -- with impressive new powers.
Some theorists argue that cyborgs are not a sci-fi fantasy, but already walk
among us by the millions. They believe that a person with a cellphone and
beeper on his belt and a Palm Pilot in his hand has attained cyborg status.
To many others, that's a stretch. They see their electronic gizmos as tools,
not as an integral part of themselves. But the cyborg description will become
far less strained if researchers in the growing field of wearable computing
are proven right. They are trying to tear down the second major barrier
between human beings and their electronic assistants: the size and weight of
computers.
As computers get smaller, they will become extremely portable and powerful.
Every morning, human beings of the future may don a lightweight, unobtrusive
computer just as we now slip on a wristwatch or tuck a wallet in our pocket.
That computer would give them full-time wireless access to the Internet and
to other human beings equipped with wearables, as well as to e-mail, a
cellphone and other services. At no waking moment would they be disconnected.
They would become individual nodes connected full-time to a vast computer
network shared by millions of other people.
Wearables are already used in the military and in industry. Through its Land
Warrior program, the U.S. Army will equip a platoon of soldiers with wearable
systems for war-fighting exercises this summer.
It plans to deploy 34,000 units in the field within the next few years.
Businesses are buying wearables to let employees who are out of the office or
on the factory floor have fast, easy access to a computer database or the
Internet. As the wearable product is refined through research and experience,
companies hope to eventually produce the units for sale and use as consumer
products.
Steve Mann, a pioneer in wearable computing and a professor of electrical
engineering at the University of Toronto, has been building and using his own
wearable computers since he was a high school student in Canada. He calls
himself a cyborg. In fact, Mann says that in the 20 years he has worn
computers, he has experienced a powerful synergy between human being and
silicon, which he calls "humanistic intelligence."
"In my experience, the human being and computer become elements of each
other's feedback loop," Mann explains. "They support and extend each other
and create something new."
Cyborgs such as Mann have a close counterpart in the inanimate world: the
machine equipped with human-like powers. That's the third major barrier now
under attack: making computers more like people.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on
"affective computing" -- computing that uses human emotion as a tool. If the
computer senses its human user getting exasperated or angry, for example, it
might employ the same frustration-reducing tactics that a human co-worker
would use. It might apologize or suggest that the user take a break for a few
minutes.
Likewise, software engineers are creating human-like characters that are
capable of interacting with human beings, asking and answering questions,
commenting on the weather, even flirting. They are like robots, but without
physical bodies. Instead of operating in the physical world, they will live
and work on the Internet, serving as guides and hosts on Web sites. The
characters are programmed to have personal histories and quirks, just like
human beings, and according to their creators are "emotionally and socially
intelligent."
In pursuit of artificial intelligence, scientists are building artificial
neural networks and teaching them to operate as real neural networks do in
the human brain. A few scientists, instead of building computers that act
like living brain cells, are building computers out of brain cells.
Bill Ditto, a Georgia Tech researcher in neurosilicon computing, leads a team
that has built a simple adding machine out of the neurons of a leech. In five
years, he predicts, his team will have built a much more complex machine out
of living rat neurons grown on a sheet of silicon. Such a computer might be
taught to think as living brains do.
Ditto is quick to reject any comparison to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. "It's
not like we're building something out of living body parts," he says.
"Well, OK, actually it is. It is a little Frankensteiny, I admit. But we're
not trying to create a new life form that's going to go out and do evil. We
just want to build a living computer."
Copyright � Southam Inc. All rights reserved.
-----
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