So we are living on the edge of the future. Some professors and graduate students here Brown have developed BrainGate, a chip that can be inserted into the brain which reads and translates the electromagnetic impulses of the brain and uses these messages to do things, like move the mouse on a computer screen or turn on lights. This is beneficial for the lab’s guinea pig: he’s a 20-something quadriplegic- just about the same age as the people who are working on the chip in his brain.
The Japanese have developed a similar chip- just by thinking about it, the demonstrator can open and close the hand of a robotic arm, sitting on a table behind a plexi-glass divider. BrainGate technology allows a person to check email, surf the web, and turn on electrical appliances (all those that can be coordinated by a computer system) with just a thought. This was done by first of all recording the brain waves and electrical impulses put out by the brain, and then devising an algorithm to make sense of all of the different signals so that they could be understood. “Move left hand” is a signal that requires an electrical signal to be sent from the brain to the nerves in the hand, a signal that can be picked up by the chip and reinterpreted to do whatever the researchers want it to do.
The researchers at Brown have also recently constructed what they call the first “real, genuine fake cells”. That is, they’ve constructed cells that approximate the look of real cells, but are made of polymer plastics. They are used to provide a platform on which tissues can be grown outside the body, or with which regeneration of certain kinds of cells (like nerve cells or smooth tissue cells) could be stimulated inside the body.
One research group just succeeded in manufacturing nanostructures using a DNA code to deliver the building blueprints for what they want it to make: zinc oxide nanowires. Nanowires are attached to the top of carbon nanotubes through a process where a single DNA strand attracts a complementary strand of specific bases and the researchers combine this with heat and gold in a process that I don’t completely understand, then they bake it for a while and kaboom, nanowires grow according to the instructions provided by the researcher-assembled DNA strand. This break through represents the first time scientists have been able to use an organic molecule to help them build nanostructures. This is an important step because not only are we creating something that self-assembles, but we’ve also found a way to include complex instructions (which is hard for machinery to do but is what life has been doing excellently for billions of years) In the future, we could potentially use the amazing coding power of DNA, together with the light-sensing properties of some proteins, and other organic molecules’ sensitivity to temperature, pressure, and a range of other stimuli, as a way to make sophisticated detectors and perhaps even computer circuitry.

Crazy, huhn? We are living on the edge of the future. We are blurring the line between machine and man. We are crisscrossing the line between life and semi-living assembly lines. Is that so different than using oxen to drag our plows or dogs to fetch our papers?

It could be that the robots of the future will not even look like traditional robots at all, but have skin that looks like ours, cells that look like ours, even reproductive capacities like ours, the details specified by us instead of by God. They could have processors that, instead of storing information in chemicals and cells and pathways or even zeros and ones it could be stored as a series of quantum packets, the information storage regime of the future.

At Commencement they had a speaker who told us that during our years at Brown, our professors were going to lead us to the edge of a cliff. It was up to us whether or not we decided to jump off, she said. That’s a rather interesting way of putting it…. The older grad students reassured us that yes, we would feel like jumping off a cliff because of our professors by the end of 5 years.
But I think the phrase works well when we consider the way that the future is upon us. The age of AI is fast approaching, and there is nothing that the warnings of Hollywood movies can do to stop it. We’re at the edge of the cliff. Are you going to jump?

Wow, that is very scifi-ish. I think I'll be pushed off the cliff.
» dave on 2006-10-30 01:26:38

haha, whoops, how did I manage to recommend my own thing?
» Zanzibar on 2006-11-13 10:57:34

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