I'd have to say YES. We all know how it is with the trickle down effect of
technology. Much of this stuff is developed in Defense Department labs, and only
reaches the civilian side after years, and after it has either been perfected and put
into use, or discarded as ineffective. Cyberhumans probably do walk among us, just as
I believe human cloning is going on as well.
On Fri, 14 April 2000, Kris Millegan wrote:
>
> 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.
"Welcome to the desert of the real." Morpheus, in The Matrix
"My God it's full of stars!" Dave Bowman, in 2001: A Space
Odyssey
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