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Category: cyborgs – Page 130

My new and first article for The Daily Dot. It’s about transhumanism and the Immortality Bus tour:

BY ZOLTAN ISTVAN

Even though I was born after the 1960s, I’ve always been fascinated with that era. Some people credit Ken Kesey’s cross country bus trip aboard colorfully painted “Further” as helping to create a generation of hippies. Of course, my Immortality Bus (shaped to look like a coffin) wants to stir up the national consciousness as well, aiming to usher in its own cultural shift. Whereas the ‘60s were about peace, love, drugs, and sex, I believe the next decade will be about virtual reality, implants, transhumanism, and overcoming death with science. For futurists like myself, that’s quite an intoxicating mix.

The fact is that a lot of radical tech, science, and medicine are already here in America. Consider that today the paralyzed can walk via exoskeleton suits, the blind can see via bionic eyes, and the limbless can grab a bottle of water and drink with artificial limbs that connect to their nervous system. Additionally, lifespans are increasing for people all around the planet. Science is rapidly making the world a better place, and it’s starting to eliminate suffering and hardship for billions of people.

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While scientists have had success in the past printing structures like “bionic ears,” a clear path to making functional internal organs and tissue hasn’t really emerged. However, researchers at the University of Florida in Gainesville have developed a way of printing complex objects in gel, a method that could help pave the way to 3D-printed organs in the future.

The hard thing about printing intricate organic structures like blood vessels and complicated organs is that they collapse under their own weight before they solidify. The gel here, which is made of an acrylic acid polymer, acts as a scaffold to hold the structure in place during the printing process. That approach has already allowed the team to print with organic materials — and even make a replica of a human brain.

Printing in gel isn’t an entirely new idea. And, of course, the method isn’t perfect. For one thing, using inorganic gel as a scaffold can’t keep organic tissue alive. For another, printing very small objects could lead to some particles slipping through the material. However, it’s certainly a solid step forward on the way to printing organs for patients in need someday.

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For decades after its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA, the central research and development organization of the Department of Defense—focused on developing vast weapons systems. Starting in 1990, and owing to individuals like Gorman, a new focus was put on soldiers, airmen, and sailors—on transforming humans for war. The progress of those efforts, to the extent it can be assessed through public information, hints at war’s future, and raises questions about whether military technology can be stopped, or should.

Gorman sketched out an early version of the thinking in a paper he wrote for DARPA after his retirement from the Army in 1985, in which he described an “integrated-powered exoskeleton” that could transform the weakling of the battlefield into a veritable super-soldier. The “SuperTroop” exoskeleton he proposed offered protection against chemical, biological, electromagnetic, and ballistic threats, including direct fire from a.50-caliber bullet. It “incorporated audio, visual, and haptic [touch] sensors,” Gorman explained, including thermal imaging for the eyes, sound suppression for the ears, and fiber optics from the head to the fingertips. Its interior would be climate-controlled, and each soldier would have his own physiological specifications embedded on a chip within his dog tags. “When a soldier donned his ST [SuperTroop] battledress,” Gorman wrote, “he would insert one dog-tag into a slot under the chest armor, thereby loading his personal program into the battle suit’s computer,” giving the 21st-century soldier an extraordinary ability to hear, see, move, shoot, and communicate.

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My first article for TechCrunch. The story is on disability & transhumanism:

Radical technologies around the world may soon overhaul the field of disability and immobility, which affects in some way more than a billion people around the world.

MIT bionics designer Hugh Herr, who lost both his legs in a mountain climbing accident, recently said in a TED Talk on disability, “A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitation, but can transcend disability through technological innovation.”

His words are coming true. Around the world, the deaf hear via cochlear implants, paraplegics walk with exoskeletons and the once limbless have functioning limbs. For example, some amputees have mind-controlled robotic arms that can grab a glass of water with amazing precision. In 15 or 20 years, that bionic arm could very well be better than the natural arm, and people may even electively remove their biological arms in favor of robotic ones. After all, who doesn’t want to be able to do a hundred pull ups in a row or lift the front end of a car up to quickly change a flat tire?

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A 28 year old man who has been paralysed has been given a new sense of touch following a new breakthrough that saw electrodes places directly into the man’s brain.

The research and clinical trial has been carried out by DARPA, the US Military’s research agency. Essentially, the man (who has not been named) is now able to control his new hand and feel people touching it because of two sets of electrodes: one array on the motor cortex, the part of the brain which directs body movement, and one on the sensory cortex, which is the part of the brain which feels touch.

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