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1. Introduction
In the years ahead we will witness machines with intelligence more powerful than that of humans. This will mean that robots, not humans, make all the important decisions. It will be a robot dominated world with dire consequences for humankind. The question is - Is there an alternative way ahead?
Humans have limited capabilities. Humans sense the world in a restricted way, vision being the best of the senses. Humans understand the world in only 3 dimensions and communicate in a very slow, serial fashion called speech. But can this be improved on? Can we use technology to upgrade humans?
The possibility exists to enhance human capabilities. To harness the ever increasing abilities of machine intelligence, to enable extra sensory input and to communicate in a much richer way, using thought alone. This possibility is made possible in the form of Cyborgs. A Cyborg is a Cybernetic Organism, part human part machine; it thrives on the inputs both from the living senses and from the machine interface, which acts as an enhancement module.
Dr. Kevin Warwick heads the Cybernetics Department at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom and has taken the first steps on this path, using himself as a guinea pig test subject receiving, by surgical operation, technological implants connected to his central nervous system.
In this seminars, I intend to throw some light on, how exactly the cyborgdom is achieved and what are the future aspects and prospects? Are we witnessing a true revolution in human futuristics or is it going to be just a flight of fantasy? That the future will tell. But for now let us understand what Cyborgs are all about?
2. The Cyborg Ancestry
The world's first cyborg was a white lab rat, part of an experimental program at New York's Rockland State Hospital in the late 1950s. The rat had implanted in its body a tiny osmotic pump that injected precisely controlled doses of chemicals, altering several of its physiological parameters. It was part animal, part machine.
The Rockland rat is one of the stars of a paper called "Cyborgs and Space," written by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960. This engineer/psychiatrist double act invented the term cyborg (short for "cybernetic organism") to describe the vision of an "augmented man,"
From the start, the cyborg was more than just another technical project; it was a kind of scientific and military daydream. The possibility of escaping its annoying bodily limitations led a generation that grew up on Superman and Captain America to throw the full weight of its grown-up R&D budget into achieving a real-life superpower. By the mid-1960s, cyborgs were big business, with millions of US Air Force dollars finding their way into projects to build exoskeletons, master-slave robot arms, biofeedback devices, and expert systems.
It wasn't only the military that was captivated by the possibilities of the cyborg. Now there was the possibility of making better humans by augmenting them with artificial devices. Insulin drips had been used to regulate the metabolisms of diabetics since the 1920s. A heart-lung machine was used to control the blood circulation of an 18-year-old girl during an operation in 1953. A 43-year-old man received the first heart pacemaker implant in 1958.
In fact robots, automata, and artificial people have been part of the Western imagination since at least as far back as the Enlightenment. Legendary automaton builder Wolfgang von Kempelen built a chess-playing tin Turk and became the toast of Napoleonic Europe. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein built a monster out of body parts and activated it with electricity. Even the Indian national epic, the Mahabharata, composed about 300 BC, features a lion automaton.
One thing makes today's cyborg fundamentally different from its mechanical ancestors - Information. Cyborgs, Donna Haraway explains, "are information machines. They're embedded with circular causal systems, autonomous control mechanisms, information processing - automatons with built-in autonomy."
3. The Concept: Information Feedback
In 1948, Norbert Wiener wrote Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine. The book was nothing if not ambitious. Wiener, an MIT mathematician, saw amazing similarities between vast groups of different phenomena. Catching a ball, guiding a missile, running a company, pumping blood around a body - all seemed to him to depend on the transmission of "information," a concept floated by Bell Laboratories' Claude Shannon in his founding work on information theory. More specifically, these processes seemed to depend on what the engineers had begun to call "feedback."
Wiener took the name cybernetics from the Greek kubernetes, meaning "steersman," and the image of a classical helmsman, hand on the rudder of a sailing ship, perfectly captures the essence of his idea. Palinurus, approaching the rocks, gets visual information about the ship's position and adjusts course accordingly. This isn't a single event but a constant flow of information. Palinurus is part of a feedback loop, his brain getting input from the environment about wind speed, weather, and current, then sending signals to his arms to nudge the ship out of danger. Wiener saw that the same model could be applied to any problem that involved trying to manage a complex system and proposed that scientists use the same framework for everything.
Wiener's followers saw cybernetics as a science that would explain the world as a set of feedback systems, allowing rational control of bodies, machines, factories, communities, and just about anything else. Cybernetics promised to reduce "messy" problems such as economics, politics, and perhaps even morality to the status of simple engineering tasks: stuff you could solve with pencil and paper, or, at worst, one of MIT's supercomputers.
For initials, we can treat the body as just a meat computer running a collection of information systems that adjusts themselves in response to each other and their environment. So if you wanted to make a better body, all you had to do was improve the feedback mechanisms, or plug in another system - an artificial heart, an all-seeing bionic eye. It's no accident that this strangely abstract picture of the body as a collection of networks sounds rather like that other network of networks, the Internet; both came out of the same hothouse of Cold War military research.
Cybernetics has two important cultural residues. The first is its picture of the world as a collection of networks. The second is its intuition that there's not as much blue water between people and machines as some would like to believe. These still-controversial concepts are at the bionic heart of the cyborg, which is alive and well, and constructing itself in a laboratory near you.
4. Analogy with the Human Nervous System
In order to observe and correlate, the Information Feedback concept with the actual way in which our neural communications take place, we should take a glimpse into the way the Human Nervous System is arranged.
4.1) How is the human nervous system organized?
The human nervous system contains:
• A Central Nervous System (CNS) - where information is processed. Our central nervous system consists of the brain and the spinal cord.
• A Peripheral Nervous System (PNS) - a highway which allows signals to travel between the CNS and the body's receptors and effectors.
For now, we do not have to bother ourselves with the way in which the CNS operates. What we should know is that, it acts as a Central Processing Unit (CPU), and so processes all the inputs it receives from the PNS, which are known as stimuli and translates them into the Outgoing signals for the PNS, also known as response. Thus, for every Stimulus there is a corresponding Response.
Now, as far as the way these neural signals, originating from the brain are transmitted to and from the muscles and the peripheral organs, the PNS provides the medium. The nerves of the peripheral nervous system behave like major road systems, carrying traffic in and out of the Central Nervous System. Afferent or Sensory nerves carry information from sensory receptors into the CNS and Efferent, or Motor nerves carry information from the CNS out to effector organs. The efferent system has two more sub-divisions - the somatic and autonomic systems. These differ in their functions rather than their structure or position in the body.
The Nerve Conduction is in the form of Nerve Impulses which are Spikes of electromagnetic potential initiating from about -80mV then sharply rising to +60mV and then declining to +20mV. These Nerve Impulses travel along the Nerve Fiber and thus reach their destination electrically.
Since the Nerve Conduction is in the form of Electrical Signals, this opens up a possibility of intercepting, interpreting and processing them with the help of Machine Interfaces. As the Machines can process all kind of electrical signals, so we can have a Microchip Implant intercepting the Neural Impulses at the nerve endings, transmitting them to a Database, correlating them to existing data and modulating it to a desired effect.