If you’re a fan of the Terminator series or
have watched Robocop, you have at some point wondered what it would be like to
be part machine. It seems wondrous to ponder about all the marvellous things
you could do with such a system.
You’d never need to carry a calculator to
college. You could Google on the go. You’d never tire and do you even lift bro?
When most people think assisted living
facility, their minds go to an old age home where people past their prime go to
live out the end of their days.But what if you could have such a system inside
you, taking care of your needs.
For some, this has now become a reality.
Take Nigel Ackland for
example:
After losing his arm in a tragic work accident, he was fortunate
enough to become the recipient of a bebionic3 arm. It connects to the muscles in his arm and
with the help of microprocessors, the arm can perform virtually any hand
position a person would need, even going so far as hand movements most people
couldn’t even imagine. This allows him to pick up objects, shake hands, use his
credit card, sign his name, change channels on a remote and even type. This all apart from his now machine
precision grip and superhuman lifting abilities. The bionic arm even has a
provision to sense when something is slipping from his arm and to
correspondingly grip it tighter.
But you don’t need to lose a limb to become
a cyborg. People have now begun to use Cybernetics to enhance their everyday
lives.
Dr. Kevin Warwikis a Professor at Reading
University, England and the founder of Project Cyborg.
Project Cyborg worked in two stages, the
first gave Dr.Warwik the ability to control electrical appliances like doors
and electrical fitting around him with Jedi like movements via a RFID chip
implanted in his hand.
He famously demonstrated himself walking
around his empty university building with the fans and lights turning on around
him depending on where he was and doors opening for him as if by magic.
Having successfully completed his goals of
stage one, he and his colleagues at the University created a neural interface
between himself and a computer. This allowed him to control a robotic arm to
mimic his movements.He then used the internet to remotely
connect to an arm in the United States mounted with sensors allowing him an
extra-sensory feel of a baseball cap. An extension to the experiment allowed him
and his wife, who was also fitted with a similar device, the first direct and
purely electronic communication between two humans.
This experiment opens up the possibility of
a human being able to connect to the Internet.
With its vast resources, you’d have the
entire world’s information at your disposal. The challenge comes as to how does
one filter out the searches to exactly what you need and receive only the items
with the most relevance. From there, it’s up to the human to make
the most appropriate decision based on the information
presented to them.
Machine learning has long been thought of
as a way to make robots as or even more intelligent than humans, but we could
use the same technology to give us the same capabilities of a machine.
The world of Bionics opens up an exciting
prospect for the future. Who knows one day you could end up asking a
friend, “Why is your arm stuck like that?”, only to have him reply, “Some
malfunction, I need to update my drivers.”
Nestor Lobo
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