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Humanity is on its way to melding mind and machine

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From DATELINE ZERO – Whenever people get freaked out by the likelihood of machines becoming far more intelligent than humans are, future optimists like Ray Kurtzweil are quick to point out that machines are unlikely to turn on us humans because there will be little difference between the two.

This is a prospect that I had never considered until I read Kurzweil’s book from 2000, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.

It makes sense that the line between man and machine will become very blurred. This is already begun to happen. Oscar Pistorius, known as the “Blade Runner,” is an Olympic runner without organic legs — they are bionic. After successful initial trials,” doctors now hope the ‘bionic eye’ could be used to treat around 20,000 people in the UK.” And what’s a cochlear implant, but a bionic ear?

Also likely, human intelligence will become heavily ‘upgraded’ through artificial means. Already, huge leaps in mind-machine interfaces have been made. Here’s just a few recent examples:

Nature News: A brain–computer interface allows paralysed patients to play music with brainpower alone. [via Technoccult]

A pianist plays a series of notes, and the woman echoes them on a computerized music system. The woman then goes on to play a simple improvised melody over a looped backing track. It doesn’t sound like much of a musical challenge — except that the woman is paralysed after a stroke, and can make only eye, facial and slight head movements. She is making the music purely by thinking.

This is a trial of a computer-music system that interacts directly with the user’s brain, by picking up the tiny electrical impulses of neurons. The device, developed by composer and computer-music specialist Eduardo Miranda of the University of Plymouth, UK, working with computer scientists at the University of Essex, should eventually help people with severe physical disabilities, caused by brain or spinal-cord injuries, for example, to make music for recreational or therapeutic purposes. The findings are published online in the journal Music and Medicine.

Wired: Nerve-Electronic Hybrid Could Meld Mind and Machine.

Nerve-cell tendrils readily thread their way through tiny semiconductor tubes, researchers find, forming a crisscrossed network like vines twining toward the sun. The discovery that offshoots from nascent mouse nerve cells explore the specially designed tubes could lead to tricks for studying nervous system diseases or testing the effects of potential drugs. Such a system may even bring researchers closer to brain-computer interfaces that seamlessly integrate artificial limbs or other prosthetic devices.

“This is quite innovative and interesting,” says nanomaterials expert Nicholas Kotov of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “There is a great need for interfaces between electronic and neuronal tissues.”

To lay the groundwork for a nerve-electronic hybrid, graduate student Minrui Yu of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues created tubes of layered silicon and germanium, materials that could insulate electric signals sent by a nerve cell. The tubes were various sizes and shapes and big enough for a nerve cell’s extensions to crawl through but too small for the cell’s main body to get inside.

When the team seeded areas outside the tubes with mouse nerve cells, the cells went exploring, sending their threadlike projections into the tubes and even following the curves of helical tunnels, the researchers report in an upcoming ACS Nano.

“They seem to like the tubes,” says biomedical engineer Justin Williams, who led the research.

The singularity is near!

Related past articles: 
Ian Morris, Stanford professor: “Your children will see man merge machines”
Self-aware machines that could “exceed human intelligence”



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