World’s first cyborg to receive brain implant

The world’s first ever Cyborg, Professor Kevin Warwick, is just six to eight years away from another implant, this time a brain implant.

He and his team from the Department of Cybernetics, University of Reading, are investigating brain-computer links, exploring how implants in the brain can act bi-directionally.

Warwick, explains, “This probably will mean retraining neurons within the brain to alter their basic functioning. The main reason here would be for bi-directional communication. Clearly this is different to space projects. I believe it is far more important as it really changes what it means to be human.”

In 1998, Professor Kevin Warwick and his team conducted an operation to surgically implant a silicon chip transponder into Warwick’s forearm. This chip allowed a computer to monitor him as he moved through the halls and offices of the Department of Cybernetics. The monitoring utilized a unique identifying signal emitted by the implanted chip which allowed the professor to operate doors, lights, heaters and other computers without lifting a finger.

The second phase of the experiment, “Project Cyborg 2.0″, got underway in March 2002. The aim was to study how a new implant could send signals back and forth between Warwick’s nervous system and a computer. This pioneering research into neural implants led to Warwick receiving his own implant which linked his nervous system to the internet, in effect making him a human cyborg. His wife, Irina, also had electrodes pushed into her nervous system - and they both communicated via the internet in what is the first electronic brain to brain communication in history. Warwick describes it in the following excerpt from ITWales.com

I guess one of the things that I’d always been excited by all my life were the first experiments that were conducted by Sam Morse with the telegraph system, and then with Alexander Graham Bell actually coming up with the telephone system, and making that step forward. So to be in the position later on to do something, not only similar, but in some regards you could consider it as surpassing that was a fantastic opportunity.

We had my implant which linked my nervous system electrically directly with the computer and onto the internet, and my wife Irina, who also had electrodes pushed into her nervous system to link her nervous system to the computer and the internet, and we essentially linked our nervous systems together directly, electrically. We had an electrical circuit which linked us directly, so that when she moved her hand, the neural signals from her brain went from her nervous system and appeared on my nervous system, and therefore up to my brain.

So her brain signals travelled electrically to stimulate my nervous system and brain, and when she moved her hand three times, I felt in my brain three pulses, and my brain recognised that my wife was communicating with me. It was the world’s first purely electronic communication from brain to brain, and therefore the basis for thought communication.

(With content from Cybermedia News.)

Trend Alert: Going for peak performance?

A few months ago, UltraFuture wrote an article exploring Oscar Pistorius’ participation in the Olympics and extrapolated some transhumanistic scenarios. In the following article, Sheila Moorcroft of Shaping Tomorrow explores the trends at the leading edge of human performance enhancement sciences.
Sheila Moorcroft, Research Director, Shaping Tomorrow

Sporting performance and achievement are high on the agenda with the opening of the 2008 Olympics: so too are concerns about doping. With the arrival soon, if not already, of gene based approaches to enhanced performance, identifying illicit performance enhancement may become well nigh impossible. As a result, might we see a more risk oriented, no-holds barred approach to sport emerge in future?

What is changing?

Gene based therapy is primarily being developed to treat major diseases. However, a variety of techniques are also being developed that enhance the physical performance of athletes by increasing their red blood cell count or the density of muscles – possibly even specific muscles. These treatments are very difficult to identify, and some athletes may have such mutations, naturally.

Why is this Important?

Risk taking and pushing the boundaries of our personal performance are part of human nature. But, in many countries risk taking is becoming ever more difficult as authorities protect themselves from the possibility of litigation and parents become over protective of their children. This latter point is illustrated in a recent report about the extent to which children are not allowed to climb trees (50%) play conkers (21%) play chase 17% by their parents.

‘Adrenalin edge’ and extreme sports are also rising in popularity. The arrival in the UK of Free Running - an urban sport where participants use the fabric of buildings, bridges etc to ‘run’ and do acrobatics - can be seen as a response to those constraints as well as the latest in a growing line of more extreme free sports.

Mainstream sport already relies on ever greater levels of technology, analysis, training and equipment to achieve performances only ever dreamed of some years ago. If we are also moving into an era where gene based therapies could not only push those barriers further, but also be well nigh impossible to detect and people are looking for ever more risk oriented sport, will there be an argument for having one stream of sport where peak performance using any method possible – as long as it is by personal choice and seen to be safe – is the main rule?

See the original article: Trend Alert: Going for peak performance?

Pale Blue Dot

I received the box set of Cosmos as a gift five or six years ago and watched all of the episodes in 3 days. I was so re-inspired (I had watched the series and explored the Cosmos as a child) that I contacted Ann Druyan at the Cosmos foundation to discuss possibilities for employing the series in Chinese schools as a tool for education and cross-cultural scientific dialogue. IP challenges prevented any progress at that time, but Cosmos maintains a role as an inspirational source and aspirational goal in my life. The following excerpt captures some of the awesome responsibility we have as human beings for ensuring and improving our lives on this planet - a central theme running through all UltraFuture events and projects. I still put the DVD’s in every few months to take a trip on the Spaceship of the Imagination.

Interestingly, Ms. Druyan told me that she and Carl were good friends of Ray and Charles Eames - designers and creators of Powers of Ten - the inspiration film that served as the first entry in this UltraFuture blog.

Will technology revolutionize boinking?

Back in March I met Taehoon Kim, founder of Nurien - a South Korean 3D Virtual Social Networking platform set to launch in Asia September-October 2008, and in the US early 2009. Nurien has taken rendering avatars to a completely new level, modeling hair movements, bone structures and even the fibres of materials with complex physics algorithms. The result is a ’super-real’ visual experience that promises to create powerful affinities with the user who creates the avatar, and the friends who meet them online. We are approaching the time when it will not be uncommon to hear of people who have fallen in love with avatars.

Nurien is designed as a platform for meeting friends, blogging, showcasing fashions and participating in dance competitions, quiz shows, runway shows  and other social games. Undoubtedly, however, there are other possibilities and applications that will strive to evolve a platform as ‘rich’ as Nurien’s into what may result in a discreet and relatively risk-free social space. The following article explores the future of sex, and looks at how new and emerging technologies may impact our concepts of, and demands for, physical pleasure.

By Brian Alexander for msnbc.com

Call it lack of imagination, but my fantasy of sex in the future is almost entirely based on Anne Francis wearing a metallic mini-dress in the movie “Forbidden Planet.”

Others are not so constrained. As recent news reports indicate, we’re at that 1939 “World’s Fair” moment in which there’s just enough new technology out there to spark some creative thinking about the shape of boinking to come.

When visionaries like Natasha Vita-More, an artist, futurist and transhumanist, look through mental telescopes, they talk about neuro-macrosensing and millions of nanobots coursing throughout the body communicating with different cells, sending signals to the brain so the whole body acts as a sensory communications system.

That ought to make sex feel pretty good, but you’ll have to wait. Such things are a long way off. But other changes are coming much sooner. A few have already arrived.

Earlier this month, Palatin Technologies announced that a trial of its new drug for post-menopausal female sexual dysfunction succeeded in rejuvenating desire in women who had little of it. The drug, a so-called melanocortin agonist, acts through the central nervous system.

Other companies have tried to gain approval for sex-stimulating drugs, mainly testosterone, but have failed so far. Still, whether this new one ultimately proves successful, its development indicates that the age of pharmaceutically enhanced sex is almost upon us. (Available impotence drugs like Viagra do not really enhance sex, they just make it possible.)

“One thing we will see is increasing awareness of and control over the neurochemical basis of lust and desire,” says James Hughes, a futurist philosopher and author at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., who has written extensively about the future of sex.

As I wrote in an earlier Sexploration column about the science of love, researchers are beginning to understand how human emotions like bonding and love are influenced by the body’s chemicals. Drugs to increase levels of these will eventually be created. Synthetic oxytocin, the chemical thought to help create human bonding, already exists.

This raises the possibility that marriage doldrums could be treated with something more effective than a new Ferrari or fling with the UPS guy.

Love in cyberspace
Other recent news reports have examined the virtual world of Second Life.com, an online community that has grown to about 371,000 people since it began in 2003. Second Life is not only about sex - you can buy and sell property and do pretty much whatever you can do in real life.

Read more

The Ethnosphere - Wade Davis

I was first introduced to the work of Wade Davis as an undergrad studying international relations in Canada. This video may take some time to load, but it is an incredible presentation absolutely worth waiting for. Davis is a National Geographic “Explorer in Residence”, and spends considerable energy working on the Society’s “Ethnosphere Project” - a project committed to preserving ethnic diversity. Davis documents and shares fascinating stories of the ingenuity and resourcefulness of indigenous peoples around the world. He argues that the complex global challenges facing the human race require a broad knowledge base and deep wisdom from which to draw inspiration and innovative solutions. He believes that the loss of ethnic diversity, most clearly seen in the rapid loss of linguistic diversity, depletes the richness our cultural heritage and weakens our pool of collective wisdom.

Wade Davis has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, he holds degrees in anthropology and biology, and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies and to Borneo where he lived among the nomadic Penan in the forests of Sarawak.In recent years Davis’s research efforts have taken him to East Africa, Tibet, Polynesia, Mali, equatorial West Africa, New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland. Author of ten books, including The Serpent and the Rainbow, One River, and Light at the Edge of the World, he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lowell Thomas Medal (Explorers Club) and the Lannan Foundation $125,000 prize for literary nonfiction. In 2004 he was made an Honorary Member of the Explorers Club, one of 20 so named in the 100-year history of the club.

His film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, a four-hour series shot in Rapanui, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Nunuvut, Greenland, and Peru, that aired internationally on the National Geographic Channel in the spring of 2007. Phantastica, a two-hour special inspired by his books One River and The Lost Amazon, will air in spring 2008 on The History Channel. Davis recently completed a third film project, a 3-D IMAX film, Water Planet: A Grand Canyon Adventure, which will appear in the spring of 2008.