An At-Home Science Kit for Making Cyborg Roaches - Is it Ethical?

aeon magazine - 11.19.13 by Brandon Keim

There’s no bright line, at least not then, between empathising with animals and with people. I’m thankful that, in the end, my caterpillar-caring side prevailed over my ant-frying tendencies, and wonder if the instructive virtue of empathising with insects might outweigh whatever educational gains can be had from steering them with an iPhone.

Credit: Backyard Brains

Between the ages of six and eight or so, when I was old enough to run around outside but too young to have cooler things to do, I spent quite a bit of time with insects. Not that I was especially into entomology or even science. Bugs were just something fun and animate to play with: I kept caterpillars, feeding them fresh leaves and cleaning their jars every few days, nourishing them to moth-hood. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, I spent entire summer vacation mornings killing ants, spraying them with window cleaner, setting them on fire, or coaxing them to fight in bottles.

If that sounds sadistic, let me say that it wasn’t done with a cruel spirit, or any memorable pleasure at the ants’ discomfort. It was just something to do, and I don’t think my experience was especially unusual, at least not among boys of my generation. Quite a few guys I’ve known can relate similar stories. Magnifying glasses are a fairly universal feature.

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How Will You Compete for Jobs with Cyborgs?

Scope - 11.04.13 by Bruce Goldman

Call me obstinate. To the best of my knowledge, I’m still 100 percent human. But in ten or twenty years, at the rate things are going, how will I be able to be sure you are, too?

A few weeks ago, I blogged about the past half-century’s startling advances in computer competence. Referring obliquely to the Turing test, I mused, “Makes me wonder: Just how long will it be before we can no longer tell our computers from ourselves?”

A week later, as fate would have it, I showed up in a classroom on Stanford’s quad for a discussion between UC-Berkeley philosopher John Searle, PhD, and Stanford artificial-intelligence expert Terry Winograd, PhD, concerning a similar-sounding but subtly deeper question: “Can a computer have a mind?”

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Are full-fledged cyborgs just around the corner?

Gizmodo - 10.21.13 by Adam Clark Estes

The (very long) quest to build an artificial brain can be divided up into two parts: recreating the brain's architecture and perfecting artificial intelligence.

The dream of the cyborg is coming true at an exhilarating rate. As humans gets better and better at making machines, we keep attaching those machines to our bodies to make ourselves better humans. It seems at times that the only question left is if we can put a human brain in a robotic frame. Actually, it's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when.

This week, social psychologist Bertold Meyer's been traveling around the country with a contraption that looks like a cross between a Halloween mask and Johnny Number Five. It's the subject of a new documentary by the Smithsonian Channel called The Incredible Bionic Man. Meyer makes for a great spokesman, since he was born without the lower part of his left arm and now wears a bionic prosthesis. He is, by definition, a cyborg—but only partially.

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Getting Biologics and Electronics to Talk to Each Other

Kurzweil News - Dec. 3. 2012

Would it be possible to integrate biological components with advanced robotics, using biological cells to do machine-like functions and interface with an electronic nervous system — in effect, creating an autonomous, multi-cellular biohybrid robot?

Researchers Orr Yarkoni, Lynn Donlon, and Daniel Frankel, from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Newcastle University think so, and they’ve developed an interface to allow communication between the biological and electronic components*, described in an open-access article in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics journal.



One of the major challenges in developing biohybrid devices is in the interface between biological and electronic components. Most cellular signals are simply not compatible with electronics.  However, manipulation of signal transduction pathways is one way to interface cells with electronics.

So the researchers genetically engineered protein cells from a Chinese hamster ovary to produce nitric oxide (NO) in response to visible light. Here’s how:

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Will you be able to upload your consciousness into an artificial body?

Popular Science - 3.2.12 by Clay Dillow

Bottled Consciousness? Gaetan Lee via Wikimedia

When Steve Jobs passed away last year, a joke bounced around--not that there was anything particularly funny about it--that the man who had done so much to shape modern technology hadn’t really died at all, but rather had figured out how to upload himself into the Mac OS so he could live on with us, and with his products, forever. The notion was ostensibly so far out as to be ridiculous. But not everyone sees it that way.

At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method for simply uploading a person’s consciousness into a surrogate ‘bot. He thinks he can get beyond the first phase--to transplanting a working brain into a robot--in just ten years, putting him on course to achieve his ultimate goal--human consciousness completely disembodied and placed within a holographic host--within 30 years time.

Pushing aside all the extremely difficult technological challenges for a moment, there are a couple of important to considerations tied up in Itskov’s vision. First, while the later phases of his project are so far out as to seem ridiculous, phase one is totally feasible (in fact it’s already being done). From there, the leap to phase two--human brainpower transplanted into a mechanical robot--is a quite a leap. But if we are willing to allow that it might be possible even within the next 30 years, then we have to consider a further possibility: that many people alive today--like the twenty-something author of this piece--could be confronted with this kind of technology in their lifetimes.

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Brain incorporates tools into body map - Cyborg adaptations no problem?

Editor's note: Your brain knows where all the parts of your body are at any given moment. This is why you can catch a ball without looking at your hand. There are nerve sensors at your joints that measure angles so that your brain is aware of your body's configuration, moment to moment. This study demonstrates that your brain will incorporate the tools you use into your mental body map, which has implications for the cyborging of your body.

Brain could adapt well to cyborg enhancements: NewScientist - June 23, 2009, by Linda Geddes

The human brain may be able to include cyborg implants in its representation of the body (Image: Jeff J Mitchell / Getty)

When you brush your teeth, the toothbrush may actually become part of your arm – at least as far as your brain is concerned. That's the conclusion of a study showing perceptions of arm length change after people handle a mechanical tool.

The brain might also readily incorporate cyborg additions – a cyborg arm or other body part – into its body schema, says Farné, "and possibly new body parts differing in shape and/or number, for example four arms."

The brain maintains a physical map of the body, with different areas in charge of different body parts. Researchers have suggested that when we use tools, our brains incorporate them into this map.

To test the idea, Alessandro Farné of the University of Claude Bernard in Lyon, France, and colleagues attached a mechanical grabber to the arms of 14 volunteers. The modified subjects then used the grabber to pick up out-of-reach objects.

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