Making a connection
posted in News, Science |One of the staples of a certain subset of science fiction stories is the Singularity (sometimes called the “TechnoRaputure”)–the point at which technological change, married to computers, starts coming so quickly and heavily and becomes so very intertwined with our lives and consciousness that it’s almost impossible for people before the Singularity to comprehend what it’s like living after the Singularity.
One aspect is to be so interconnected with computers–using, say, brain-computer interfaces–that humanity is enhanced by the computer use to being almost super-human.
Be that as it may…it’s an interesting concept.
Right now, we already have plenty of people whose short-term memory is fading because it’s not in use anymore–they use the computer to store that information, and leave their brains free from that clutter. (Think speed-dialing, email programs that store people’s email addresses so you don’t have to remember them, calendaring programs to keep important dates handy.) This is all done with computers being “outside” us.
What will it be like when the computer is more of an extension of ourselves than an outside appliance?
So I keep looking at news stories about human-computer interfaces with a certain amount of interest. OmegaDad and I, for instance, really, really want the RetinaCam, an always online camera embedded in your eye that you can turn on in the blink of an instant, so that all those wonderful pictures that you never get, you can now get. (Get it?)
They don’t have the RetinaCam yet. But a company called “Eye-Fi” recently came out with a wi-fi-enabled digital camera chip. This is way kewl.
Then there’s the recent news of the guy who has been paralyzed for years, unable to speak. Boston University researchers, working with guys from a company called Neural Signals, Inc., have been working with Eric Ramsay on translating the signals in his brain into real speech. Right now, they think they have gotten to the point where they recognize 80% of the signals in his speech centers, and they hope to hook this information into a computer speech synthesis program soon. This is amazing.
More on the brain-computer interface front: a research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has come up with a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI)–a helmet type doodad that records brain signals–that allows someone to control a Second Life avatar. Just by thinking about moving forward, you get your SL avatar to move forward. Think about turning it one way or the other, and it moves that way. Whoa.
Much to my dismay, I’m unable to find any references to the next item, which makes me think I’m searching on the wrong terms. I know it was on ScienceBlogs recently, but not within the past week or two. This makes it hard to locate, sigh. Anyway, there was a music concert where the instruments or the music (can’t remember which) was controlled by the audience’s brainwaves. I think. Agh! I should have bookmarked it when I first saw it! Anyway, that was another way kewl approach to computer-human interfaces.
Tomorrow: Linky Love; Monday: Prostheses galore!
