Welcome to the DARPA future....
The Body Electric
By WILLIAM SALETAN
Published: December 24, 2009
Two years ago, in his book “Rocketeers,” Michael Belfiore celebrated the
pioneers of the budding private space industry. Now he has returned to
explore a frontier closer to home. The heroes of his new book, “The
Department of Mad Scientists,” work for the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/defense_advanced_research_projects_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
better known as Darpa, a secretive arm of the United States government.
And the revolution they’re leading is a merger of humans with machines.
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THE DEPARTMENT OF MAD SCIENTISTS
How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, From the Internet to
Artificial Limbs
By Michael Belfiore
295 pp. Smithsonian Books/Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99
The revolution is happening before our eyes, but we don’t recognize it,
because it’s incremental. It starts with driving. Cruise control
transfers regulation of your car’s speed to a computer. In some models,
you can upgrade to adaptive cruise control, which monitors the
surrounding traffic by radar and adjusts your speed accordingly. If you
drift out of your lane, an option called lane keeping assistance gently
steers you back. For extra safety, you can get extended brake
assistance, which monitors traffic ahead of you, alerts you to collision
threats and applies as much braking pressure as necessary.
With each delegation of power, we become more comfortable with computers
driving our cars. Soon we’ll want more. An insurance analyst tells
Belfiore that aging baby boomers will lead the way, enlisting robotic
drivers to help them get around. For younger drivers, the problem is
multitasking. Why put down your cellphone when you can let go of the
wheel instead? Reading, texting, talking and eating in the car aren’t
distractions. Driving is the distraction. Let the car do it.
That’s where Darpa comes in. Belfiore traces the agency’s origins and
exploits from the 1957 Sputnik launching (which shocked the United
States government into technological action) to the 1969 birth of the
original Internet, known as Arpanet, to Total Information Awareness, the
controversial 2002 project that was supposed to scan telecommunications
data for signs of terrorism. His tone is reverential and at times
breathless, but he captures the agency’s essential virtues: boldness,
creativity, agility, practicality and speed.
The Army needs vehicles that can move cargo without exposing human
operators to bombs or enemy fire. To encourage development of such
vehicles, Darpa sponsored a 2007 contest in which cars designed by 35
teams navigated a simulated urban war zone. The cars used systems like
those already in consumer vehicles: GPS, lane guidance, calibrated
braking. But instead of routing their information and advice through
human drivers, the cars simply acted on it.
Belfiore recounts several low-impact crashes caused by the limited
ability of current software to understand complex traffic situations.
But with each successive contest since Darpa’s first robot-car race, the
Grand Challenge, in 2004, performance has improved. In some respects,
the robot cars already surpass us. Their reaction speed is better. They
can see at night, thanks to laser range-finders. They have no blind
spots. And when networked, they can read one another’s intentions.
So maybe we’ll let robots drive our cars. But would you let a robot cut
you open? That’s Darpa’s next project. In minimally invasive surgery,
doctors insert very thin instruments through keyhole-size incisions.
This minimizes pain, blood loss, infection risk and recovery time, but
it’s hard. Surgeons have to manipulate their instruments indirectly and
watch them on a video monitor. They might as well use a machine. It
could execute their commands, give better video feedback and hold the
instruments more steadily.
More than 850 hospitals already use such operating machines. Surgeons
sit across the room from patients, connected to their instruments by
game-style controls and three-dimensional video binoculars. When the
machines meet resistance, the surgeons feel it. The goal is to engage
the doctors’ senses as fully as if the mechanical eyes and hands were
theirs. In fact, they are theirs. The surgeons’ minds map, orchestrate
and experience the machine like an infant taking possession of its own body.
But if sensory feedback can extend a surgeon’s body across a room, why
stop there? A new version of the machine adds Ethernet, freeing the
doctor to inhabit a mechanical body anywhere with a good cable or
wireless connection. By digitizing surgical commands, we’ve already
created transitional moments in which maneuvers have been described but
not executed. Why not extend this transition, playing out the surgery in
virtual reality and then editing out any errors? That’s the next step:
surgery with a word processor, so to speak, instead of a typewriter.
Unfortunately, the military doesn’t have these luxuries. Soldiers get
wounded in faraway places without broadband or doctors, and they need
help fast. That’s why Darpa wants mobile machines that can do surgery
without human guidance. Such robots are in the works, according to
Belfiore. Their initial repertory will be limited, but that’s O.K. They
just have to keep the wounded alive for the hour it takes to reach a
hospital. And with every life they save, they’ll begin to earn our trust.
So maybe you’ll let a robot fix your body. But would you let one join
your body? In fact, the coupling is well under way. As troops come home
from Iraq and Afghanistan with limbs blown off, they get computerized
arms that read the body’s electrical signals. They’re cyborgs.
The next step is mutual adaptation. Amputees have always had to learn
how to operate their new limbs. Now the limbs are returning the favor.
Their software studies each user’s electrical signals, gradually
becoming more accurate at interpreting commands. And though the user’s
brain remains in charge, his body has become negotiable. Amputees are
getting surgeries to make their motor signals more readable by
myoelectric arms. The human is being reconfigured for the machine.
The eventual payoff isn’t just parity with unreconstructed humans. It’s
superiority. Some mechanical arms now exceed the reach of human arms.
Last year, a disabled sprinter was forbidden to run in Olympic-level
track meets on his carbon-fiber legs because they were deemed too fast.
And computerized limbs can be networked. Belfiore recalls a recent
conversation with an Iraq war amputee about whether his new hand could
manipulate a mouse. “Why do I need a mouse?” he asked. “Why can’t I plug
my arm right into a USB port?”
For that matter, who needs a USB port? Limb designers have devised
injectable sensors that can transmit motor commands to artificial arms
through wireless signals. Once you can operate an arm wirelessly, you
don’t need it attached to your body. You can control it from anywhere.
But your arm can also be hacked. And that raises an unsettling question:
If humans marry machines, who will control the marriage? In its 2007 car
contest, Darpa took elaborate measures to stop robots from going rogue.
Each vehicle was outfitted with multiple shutdown devices and trailed by
a human driver with a kill switch. The penalty for the slightest
disobedience was immediate disqualification. But at least one team,
according to Belfiore, liked to run simulations with its car’s “software
aggression level cranked up into what they jokingly called Rambo mode.”
Imagine your arm in Rambo mode. Something like that has already been
reported: Michael Weisskopf, a journalist who lost his right hand in
Iraq, was making a turn in rush-hour traffic sometime later when, as
Belfiore describes it, Weisskopf’s new hand “clenched the wheel of his
car in a death grip and refused to let go.” It was just a
misunderstanding. But electronic limbs are being programmed to make more
and more decisions. After all, it isn’t just your body anymore. It’s
theirs, too.
William Saletan writes the Human Nature column for Slate and is the
author of “Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.”
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