This YouTube video shows off something very interesting, something I think is the wave of the future; mechanical body parts, moveable via brain waves. The mechanism reads your brain waves, and performs the action, so that (for instance), one can think “go left” when in a game online, or “curl fingers,” and the action is performed.
All of this has been coming along for some time (I still can’t find the early articles about monkeys racing cars via brain waves…), but what’s *really* interesting, in my opinion, is what’s said right at the end of the vid:
“and eventually create cybernetic body parts
that can be moved by brain power alone…”
The medical applications, of course, are astonishing: paralyzed people will gain mobility. War amputees will run again. Those with arthritis will once again hold cans, cut fruit, even pick up pins. But what about other applications? Cybernetic body parts need not be limited to natural or necessary ones; what about an extra set of hands, worn low on the back? What about eyes in the back of your head? Backpacked guns that target automatically and fire in the blink of an eye? What about driving your car – or (more likely?) controlling your phone and music, and chatting via text while driving – all via brainwaves? I’d love to have a long, prehensile tail, myself (trust me, you don’t want to know why …)
Even more exciting, this could make pseudo-telepathy possible; If a computer can read letters or words from my brain (as in the “Second Life” clip from the movie), and those words can be transmitted wirelessly to someone else – and then downloaded and read/heard …
I can’t wait! I just hope I’m not too old to learn to use this technology when it goes commercial… ;)
On a related note: this post shares a title with an earlier post of mine: Your Cyborg Future is Here (Part I), which talked about internet/instant information dependency, and my points then hold true: As tool users, innovators, we have to be very aware of the tension that exists between tool use and tool dependency. I am, of course, aware that at this point human civilization depends on technology for survival:
Humanity develops technology in response to population growth and the resultant crowding and struggle for resources. Technology… allows human societies to thrive at increasingly higher population densities and in in more inhospitable regions than ever before. This is a consistent historical trend, one which shows few, if any, signs of stopping. (“Sustainability and Technology,” Nov. 8)
However, I think there’s a fine line between creating a civilization dependent on technology, and creating people dependent on technology. There’s a fine line between using the internet, and using the internet as a substitute for thought, reason, and memory.
Perhaps even more important: there’s a fine line, and there must be, between a society that is technologically advanced, and one in which one must be technologically savvy in order to succeed. At the very least, if the latter is going to be true, we must (somehow!) find a way to insure that technological ability is correlated as much as possible to skill and interest, rather than (as it is now) to socioeconomic status. A true technological divide can only deepen the already chasmic socioeconomic differences inherent in US society – if it hasn’t already.
(Easier said than done, I know, but this is a theory blog,
not a presidential candidates’ stump speech…)
A final point: Advanced technology is fanatically important in the modern world. Technological dependency (whether it comes in media or pill format) will only take us away from the physical, the natural; and (yes, I’ll keep saying it) – if we discount our bodies, we discount what it means to be human in the first place…
(vid link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d55CJYtHKAI&feature=user)
