Part 4 (2/2)

”Typing by thinking” has come closer to reality with the work of Niels Birbauen in Germany He has used biofeedback to help people who have been partially paralyzed due to nerve da them to vary their brain waves, he has been able to teach them to type simple sentences on a computer screen

Monkeys have had electrodes iht, by biofeedback, to control sohts These monkeys were then able to control a robot arht alone

A more precise set of experilass bead was embedded directly into the brain of a stroke victilass bead was connected to a wire that in turn was connected to a PC By thinking certain thoughts, the stroke victinals down the wire andbiofeedback, the stroke victim was able to consciously control the movement of the cursor In principle, the cursor on the screen could be used to write down thoughts, activate ahue, a neuroscientist at Brown University, has hs in the mind-machine interface He has devised an apparatus called BrainGate that enables a paralyzed person to perfor only the power of his hue has tested the device on four patients Two of them suffered from spinal cord injury, a third had a stroke, and a fourth was paralyzed with ALS (a's disease, the sa)

One of Donoghue's patients, twenty-five-year-old Mathew Nagle, a quadriplegic permanently paralyzed from the neck down, took only a day to learn entirely new coe the channels on his TV, adjust the volume, open and close a prosthetic hand, draw a crude circle, ame, and even read e-mail He created quite a media sensation in the scientific coazine in the suhue's BrainGate is a tiny silicon chip, just 4 millimeters wide, that contains one hundred tiny electrodes The chip is placed directly on top of the part of the brain where motor activity is coordinated The chip penetrates halfway into the brain's cortex, which is about 2 nals froar box The signals are then sent into a conals are processed by special conize some of the patterns created by the brain and translate them into mechanical motions

In the previous experi their own EEG waves, the process of using biofeedback was slow and tedious But with a coht patterns, the training process is cut down considerably In his first training session Nagle was told to visualizehis wrist, and then opening and closing his fist Donoghue was elated when he could actually see different neurons firing when Nagle iers ”To me, it was just incredible because you could see brain cells changing their activity Then I knew that everything could go forward, that the technology would actually work,” he recalled

(Donoghue has a personal reason for his passion for this exotic form of mind-machine interface As a child, he was confined to a wheelchair because of a painful degenerative disease, so he felt firsthand the helplessness of losing his hue has ambitious plans to make BrainGate an essential tool for the y, his apparatus, now the size of a dishwasher, may eventually become portable, perhaps even wearable on one's clothes And the clumsy wires may be dispensed with if the chip can be made wireless, so the implant can seamlessly communicate to the outside world

It is only a matter of time before other parts of the brain can be activated in this way Scientists have already raphically draws illustrations of our hands, legs, head, and back onto the top of our head, representing where these neurons are connected in general, we find soe of our body parts, written over our brain, reseue, and shrunken trunk and back) It should be possible to place silicon chips at different parts of the surface of the brain so that different organs and appendages can be activated by the power of pure thought In this fashi+on, any physical activity that can be performed by the human body can be duplicated via this ine a paralyzed person living in a special psychokinetically designed ho, TV, and all the electrical appliances by the power of sheer thought

In time one could envision a person's body encased in a special ”exoskeleton,” allowing a paralyzed person total freedoive so hi who can control the enorht alone

So the probleer iht one day be able to move objects, to levitate theht?

One possibility would be to coat our walls with a roo that such a device could be created one day Then if ere to place tiny electronets inside of our household objects, we could make them levitate off the floor via the Meissner effect, asin Chapter 1 If these electronets were controlled by a computer, and this computer ired to our brain, then we could hts, we could activate the conets, causing them to levitate To an outside observer, it would appear to be ic-the ability to move and levitate objects at will

NAnobOTS

What about the power not just to move objects, but to transforicians accoht of hand But is such power consistent with the laws of physics?

One of the goals of nanotechnology, as we mentioned earlier, is to be able to use atoears, ball bearings, and pulleys With these nanomachines, the dreae the molecules within an object, atom for atom, until one object turns into another This is the basis of the ”replicator” found in science fiction that allows one to fabricate any object one wants, siht be able to elie the nature of society itself If one can fabricate any object si for it, then the whole concept of scarcity, value, and hierarchy within human society is turned upside down

(One of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation involves a replicator An ancient space capsule fro in outer space, and it contains the frozen bodies of people who suffered from fatal illnesses These bodies are quickly thawed out and cured with advanced medicine One businesse after so many centuries He immediately asks the crew of the Enterprise about his investments and his money The crew members are puzzled Money? Investments? In the future, there is no , you just ask) As astounding as a replicator ht be, nature has already created one The ”proof of principle” already exists Nature can take raw etables, and fabricate a hu but a large nanofactory capable, at the ato, food) into living tissue (a baby)

In order to create a nanofactory, one needs three ingredients: building materials, tools that can cut and join these uide the use of the tools andmaterials are thousands of amino acids and proteins out of which flesh and blood are created The cutting and joining tools-like hammers and saws-that are necessary to shape these proteins into new forned to cut and rejoin proteins at specific points in order to create new types of proteins And the blueprint is given by the DNA molecule, which encodes the secret of life in a precise sequence of nucleic acids These three ingredients, in turn, are combined into a cell, which has the remarkable ability to create copies of itself, that is, self-replication This feat is accomplished because the DNA molecule is shaped like a double helix When it is time to reproduce, the DNA molecule unwinds into two separate helixes Each separate strand then creates copies of itself by grabbing onto organichelix

So far physicists have had only modest success in their efforts to mimic these features found in nature But the key to success, scientists believe, is to create hordes of self-replicating ”nanobots,” which are prograe the atoms within an object

In principle, if one had trillions of nanobots they could converge on an object and cut and paste its atoms until they transformed one object into another Because they would be self-replicating, only a small handful of them would be necessary to start the process They would also have to be prograiven blueprint

Formidable hurdles must be overcome before one could construct a fleet of nanobots First, self-replicating robots are extremely difficult to build, even on asiears, is beyond today's technology) If one is given a PC and a tableful of spare electronic parts, it would be quite difficult to build aa copy of itself So if a self-replicatingone on the atomic scale would be even more difficult

Second, it's not clear how one would prograested sending in radio signals to activate each nanobot Perhaps laser bea instructions could be fired at the nanobots But this would mean a separate set of instructions for each nanobot, of which there could be trillions

Third, it's not clear how the nanobot would be able to cut, rearrange, and paste atoms into the proper order Remember that it has taken nature three and a half billion years to solve this proble it in a few decades would be quite difficult

One physicist who takes the idea of a replicator or ”personal fabricator” seriously is Neil Gershenfeld of MIT He even teaches a class at MIT called ”How to Make (Al,” one of the most popular classes at the university Gershenfeld directs the MIT Center for Bits and Atoht to the physics behind a personal fabricator, which he considers to be the ”next big thing” He has even written a book, FAB: The Co Revolution on Your Desktop-Fro his thoughts on personal fabrication The goal, he believes, is to ”make one machine that can make any machine” To spread his ideas he has already set up a network of laboratories around the world, mainly in third world countries where personal fabrication would have the maximum impact

Initially, he envisions an all-purpose fabricator, sh to place on your desk, which would use the latest developments in lasers and microminiaturization with the ability to cut, weld, and shape any object that can be visualized on a PC The poor in a third world country, for example, could ask for certain tools and machines they need on their farms This information would be fed into a PC, which would access a vast library of blueprints and technical information fro blueprints with the needs of the individuals, process the information, and then e-mail it back to them Then their personal fabricator would use its lasers andtools to make the object they desire on a tabletop

This all-purpose personal factory is just the first step Eventually, Gershenfeld wants to take his idea to the ht be able to literally fabricate any object that can be visualized by the huress in this direction, however, is slow because of the difficulty inin this direction is Aristides Requicha of the University of Southern California His specialty is ” a fleet of nanorobots that can manipulate atoms at will He writes that there are two approaches The first is the ”top-down” approach, in which engineers would use the etching technology of the semiconductor industry to create tiny circuits that could serve as the brains of the nanorobots With this technology, one could create tiny robots whose coraphy,” which is a fast- field

But there is also the ”bottoineers would try to create tiny robots one ato probe y as the scanning tunneling microscope, to identify and move individual atoms around For exa xenon atoms on platinum or nickel surfaces But, he adroups in the world some 10 hours to assele atoms around by hand is slow, tedious work What is needed, he asserts, is a new type of her-level functions, one that can automatically move hundreds of atoms at a time in a desired fashi+on Unfortunately, such a ly, the bottom-up approach is still in its infancy

So psychokinesis, although impossible by today's standards, may become possible in the future as we cohts of our brain via EEG, MRI, and other ht be possible to use a thought-driven apparatus to manipulate room-temperature superconductors and perforic And by the next century it e the molecules in a macroscopic object This makes psychokinesis a Class I iy, some scientists claience But before we can create tiny molecular-sized robots, there is a more elementary question: can robots exist at all?

7: ROBOTS

Someday in the next thirty years, very quietly one day ill cease to be the brightest things on Earth

-JAMES MCALEAR

In I, Robot, the movie based on the tales of Isaac Asimov, the most advanced robotic system ever built is activated in the year 2035 It's called VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence), and it has been designed to flawlessly run the operations of a largefrorid to thousands of household robots is controlled by VIKI Its central command is ironclad: to serve humanity

But one day VIKI asks the key question: what is hureatest enemy? VIKI concludes mathematically that the worst enemy of humanity is humanity itself Humanity has to be saved from its insane desire to pollute, unleash wars, and destroy the planet The only way for VIKI to fulfill its central directive is to seize control of hun dictatorshi+p of the machine Humanity has to be enslaved to protect it from itself

I, Robot poses these questions: Given the astronomically rapid advances in computer poill machines one day take over? Can robots become so advanced that they become the ultimate threat to our existence?

Some scientists say no, because the very idea of artificial intelligence is silly There is a chorus of critics who say that it is impossible to build ue, is the most complicated systealaxy, and any ht is bound to fail Philosopher John Searle of the University of California at Berkeley and even renowned physicist Roger Penrose of Oxford believe that ht Colin McGinn of Rutgers University says that artificial intelligence ”is like slugs trying to do Freudian psychoanalysis They just don't have the conceptual equipment”

It is a question that has split the scientific community for over a century: can machines think?

THE HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The idea of ineers, mathematicians, and dreamers From the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, to the childlike robots of Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: AI to the murderous robots of The Terminator, the idea of machines that act and think like people has fascinated us

In Greek old and three-legged tables that could move under their oer As early as 400 BC the Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentu a robot bird propelled by steam power

In the first century AD, Hero of Alexandria (credited with designing the first ned autoend Nine hundred years ago Al-Jazari designed and constructed automatic machines such as water clocks, kitchen appliances, and reat Renaissance Italian artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci drew diagraht that could sit up, wave its arms, and move its head and jaw Historians believe that this was the first realistic design of a hu robot was built in 1738 by Jacques de Vaucanson, who made an android that could play the flute, as well as a mechanical duck

The word ”robot” coht Karel Capek (”robot” e and ”labor” in Slovak) In the play a factory called Rossum's Universal Robots creates an army of robots to perform menial labor (Unlike ordinary machines, however, these robots are made of flesh and blood) Eventually the world economy becomes dependent on these robots But the robots are badly ainst their hue, however, the robots kill all the scientists who can repair and create new robots, thereby doo themselves to extinction In the end, two special robots discover that they have the ability to reproduce and the potential to become a new robot Adam and Eve

Robots were also the subject of one of the earliest and most expensive silentin 1927 in Ger class has been conderound in wretched, squalid factories, while the ruling elite play aboveground A beautiful woman, Maria, has earned the trust of the workers, but the ruling elite fear that one day she ht lead them to revolt So they ask an evil scientist to make a robot copy of Maria Eventually, the plot backfires because the robot leads the workers to revolt against the ruling elite and bring about the collapse of the social systeence, or AI, is different froies we have discussed so far in that the fundamental laws that underpin it are still poorly understood Although physicists have a good understanding of Newtonian ht, relativity, and the quantuence are still shrouded in mystery The Newton of AI probably has not yet been born

But mathematicians and computer scientists remain undaunted To the machine walks out of the laboratory

The most influential person in the field of AI, a visionary who helped to lay the cornerstone of AI research, was the great British roundwork of the entire computer revolution He visualized amachine) that consisted of just three elements: an input tape, an output tape, and a central processor (such as a Pentium chip) that could perform a precise set of operations Fro machines and precisely deterital co The architecture of the entire digital world owes a great debt to Turing