Transhumanism & Cybernetics News and Discussions

[Yuli Ban]

A medical student in India has come under scrutiny after he was allegedly caught cheating with a micro Bluetooth device believed to be surgically implanted into his ear, a college official said.

It was the student’s final attempt on Monday to clear the exam after repeatedly failing it since getting admission into the college 11 years ago.

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[wjfox]

Highly religious Americans more skeptical of human enhancements such as brain implants, gene editing

May 4, 2022

Humanity may be on the cusp of a variety of innovations – including brain chip implants, gene editing and exoskeletons – that could allow people to dramatically enhance human health and abilities. But many Americans, especially those who are highly religious and identify with certain Christian traditions, express discomfort with these possibilities, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.

Among U.S. adults with a high level of religious commitment, 81% say that the widespread use of computer chip brain implants for faster and more accurate information processing would be “meddling with nature and crosses a line we should not cross.” In contrast, Americans with a low level of religious commitment are evenly divided on this question: 50% say that brain chip implants cross a line that should not be crossed, and 49% more closely identify with the notion that “we are always trying to better ourselves and this idea is no different.”

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2 ... e-editing/

[wjfox]

Elon Musk says humans could eventually download their brains into robots — and Grimes thinks Jeff Bezos would do it

Sat, Apr 9 20221:21 AM EDT

Elon Musk says a lot of seemingly fantastical things. For example: The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO seems to believe that humans will eventually be able to live forever, by downloading their brains into robots.

“I think it is possible,” Musk, 50, recently told Insider. “Yes, we could download the things that we believe make ourselves so unique. Now, of course, if you’re not in that body anymore, that is definitely going to be a difference, but as far as preserving our memories, our personality, I think we could do that.”

By Musk’s account, such technology will be a gradual evolution from today’s forms of computer memory. “Our memories are stored in our phones and computers with pictures and video,” he said. “Computers and phones amplify our ability to communicate, enabling us to do things that would have been considered magical ... We’ve already amplified our human brains massively with computers.”

[...]

In a 2019 Wall Street Journal essay, Michael S.A. Graziano, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Princeton University, wrote that mind uploading would require two pieces of technology: an artificial brain, and a scan of a person’s brain that could “measure exactly how its neurons are connected to each other, to be able to copy that pattern in the artificial brain.”

Creating the artificial brain, Graziano noted, would be relatively straightforward. “But to upload a human brain, we probably want a scanner that doesn’t kill the subject, and we would need it to scan about a hundred million times as many details,” he wrote. “That technology doesn’t yet exist. The most wildly optimistic predictions place mind uploading within a few decades, but I would not be surprised if it took centuries.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/08/elon-mu ... obots.html

[raklian]

Elon Musk says humans could eventually download their brains into robots — and Grimes thinks Jeff Bezos would do it

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/08/elon-mu ... obots.html

If Jeff does it before we understand the fundamental nature of consciousness, he's taking an awfully lot of risk.

For someone who built SpaceX and Telsa which was very difficult to pull off, Elon seems to be somewhat ignorant about how intractable figuring out what makes consciousness tick is.

As much as I admire him for his achievements thus far, I find his claim that we need to make our species multi-planetary because we need to "expand the light of consciousness" terribly misguided. He didn't have to make it about consciousness. The survival of our species as the primary motivation would have been sufficient.

Anyhow, I'd rather extend my lifespan than upload my mind or consciousness to a different substrate because it's a sure bet to keep your consciousness intact for now.

[Vakanai]

Hope this is the right place to post this. Thought it was pretty interesting.

[Yuli Ban]

Forget your bulky AR headsets, smart contact lenses are coming to place augmented reality displays right there on your eyeball. Last week, Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins volunteered to test the first feature-complete prototype of his company's design.

Smart wearables are all about super-portable convenience, and until scientists can plumb an AR display directly into your visual cortex, the smallest and most portable form factor we can imagine is that of a contact lens. Mojo Vision has been working on a smart contact lens design since 2015, and its latest prototype Mojo Lens packs in a pretty impressive amount of gear – especially for something that has to live behind your eyelid.

For starters, it has the world's smallest and highest-density display capable of showing dynamic content – a green monochrome MicroLED display measuring less than 0.5 mm (0.02 in) in diameter, with a resolution of 14,000 pixels per inch. It's got an ARM Core M0 processor, a 5-GHz radio capable of communicating at ultra-low latency, and enough accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to track your eye movements with extreme precision, allowing the image to stay stable even as you move your eyes around.

The lens is worn with the bulk of the electronics positioned next to the nose, preserving the outer edges of your peripheral vision Mojo Vision

[Nanotechandmorefuture]

Forget your bulky AR headsets, smart contact lenses are coming to place augmented reality displays right there on your eyeball. Last week, Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins volunteered to test the first feature-complete prototype of his company's design.

Smart wearables are all about super-portable convenience, and until scientists can plumb an AR display directly into your visual cortex, the smallest and most portable form factor we can imagine is that of a contact lens. Mojo Vision has been working on a smart contact lens design since 2015, and its latest prototype Mojo Lens packs in a pretty impressive amount of gear – especially for something that has to live behind your eyelid.

For starters, it has the world's smallest and highest-density display capable of showing dynamic content – a green monochrome MicroLED display measuring less than 0.5 mm (0.02 in) in diameter, with a resolution of 14,000 pixels per inch. It's got an ARM Core M0 processor, a 5-GHz radio capable of communicating at ultra-low latency, and enough accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to track your eye movements with extreme precision, allowing the image to stay stable even as you move your eyes around.

The lens is worn with the bulk of the electronics positioned next to the nose, preserving the outer edges of your peripheral vision Mojo Vision

That dude meant lazers in their eyes! This uses 3 of them to superimpose AR right into the eyes.

I'll wait for the better versions instead thanks lol.

[Yuli Ban]

[caltrek]

Robotic Sensors Could Help Transform Prosthetics
August 1, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) A pioneering project to develop advanced sensors for use in robotic systems, could transform prosthetics and robotic limbs.

The research project – led by University of the West of Scotland (UWS), Integrated Graphene Ltd, and supported by the Scottish Research Partnership in Engineering (SRPe) and the National Manufacturing Institute for Scotland (NMIS) Industry Doctorate Programme in Advanced Manufacturing – aims to develop sensors which provide enhanced capabilities to robots, helping improve their dexterity and motor skills, through the use of accurate pressure sensors which provide haptic feedback and distributed touch.

Professor Des Gibson, Director of the Institute of Thin Films, Sensors and Imaging at UWS and project principal investigator, said: “Over recent years the advancements in the robotics industry have been remarkable, however, due to a lack of sensory capabilities, robotic systems often fail to execute certain tasks easily. For robots to reach their full potential, accurate pressure sensors, capable of providing greater tactile ability, are required.
“Our collaboration with Integrated Graphene Ltd, has led to the development of advanced pressure sensor technology, which could help transform robotic systems.”

Made from 3D graphene foam, which offers unique capabilities when put under mechanical stress, the sensors use a piezoresistive approach, meaning when the material is put under pressure it dynamically changes its electric resistance, easily detecting and adapting to the range of pressure required, from light to heavy.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/960374

[caltrek]

When Will I Be Able to Upload My Brain to a Computer?
by Guillaume Thierry
September 17 , 2022

Introduction:

(IFL Science) READER QUESTION: I am 59 years old, and in reasonably good health. Is it possible that I will live long enough to put my brain into a computer? Richard Dixon.

We often imagine that human consciousness is as simple as input and output of electrical signals within a network of processing units – therefore comparable to a computer. Reality, however, is much more complicated. For starters, we don’t actually know how much information the human brain can hold.

Two years ago, a team at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, US, mapped the 3D structure of all the neurons (brain cells) comprised in one cubic millimetre of the brain of a mouse – a milestone considered extraordinary.

Within this minuscule cube of brain tissue, the size of a grain of sand, the researchers counted more than 100,000 neurons and more than a billion connections between them. They managed to record the corresponding information on computers, including the shape and configuration of each neuron and connection, which required two petabytes, or two million gigabytes of storage. And to do this, their automated microscopes had to collect 100 million images of 25,000 slices of the minuscule sample continuously over several months.

Now if this is what it takes to store the full physical information of neurons and their connections in one cubic millimetre of mouse brain, you can perhaps imagine that the collection of this information from the human brain is not going to be a walk in the park.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/when-will-i ... ter-65375

[Nanotechandmorefuture]

To answer the poll: At this moment no thanks because the cybernetics and everything does not seem appealing.

Later on once life extension tech gets better or I just get bored I'll start with a little cybernetics to extend life. Hopefully by then space travel will be at least to the moon so as to start using that sort of assistance to do some cool things

[Yuli Ban]

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

It isn't just us gays and trans that will be banned in a religious fascist America but all progress into this and most of medical science. It will truly suck ass.

[Vakanai]

It isn't just us gays and trans that will be banned in a religious fascist America but all progress into this and most of medical science. It will truly suck ass.

Let's hope there'll be no religious fascist America then. The Republicans are trying very hard to make it happen, and their 2025 plan is basically "we kill democracy first because we can't fairly compete with the Dems in a diverse America" but they really can't compete in a more diverse America - I think in the long run they will fail and be diminished. We'll have religious fascist states unfortunately for a while, but the country as a whole will never fall to the conservative wet dream.

[Powers]

I think in the long run they will fail and be diminished. We'll have religious fascist states unfortunately for a while, but the country as a whole will never fall to the conservative wet dream.

I wouldn't be so sure about that - nuances and all.

[Vakanai]

I think in the long run they will fail and be diminished. We'll have religious fascist states unfortunately for a while, but the country as a whole will never fall to the conservative wet dream.

I wouldn't be so sure about that - nuances and all.

Depends on what one defines as long run I guess - I'm thinking in the terms of decades here, like 40 years upwards of 60 years. Much of the older generations kind of need to die off to get rid of the Republicans core base, and then slowly we'd have to dismantle the things that keep them in power, the intense gerrymandering and voter suppression for example. But long run ultimately they will fail - they're unpopular with the youth, with the educated (hence their seeming war on education now), with minorities. Mostly they skew older, white, and male, and most of the younger crowd they do attract is white and racist.
But again, they're going to be there, a pain, for decades. They're going to continue going more and more fascist, and most red states are going to be pretty bad if you're not white straight cis male. I'm in Alabama myself, and I am not looking forward to the future of my state.

[weatheriscool]

Italian exoskeleton gets disabled users walking and standing
By Ben Coxworth
February 23, 2024

A new robotic exoskeleton could allow people who have lost the use of their legs to stand up and even walk. It may also help get them walking unaided again, by guiding their movements and holding them up as they take part in rehabilitative therapy.

Known as Twin, the Italian-designed lower-body exoskeleton was unveiled this Friday during a press conference held at the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan.

It's currently still in prototype form, and is being developed by scientists from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) and the Istituto Nazionale Assicurazione Infortuni sul Lavoro (National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work).

Made for use by patients with reduced or nonexistent motor ability in the lower body, it moves their legs via motors located at the knee and hip joints. Those motors are powered by an onboard battery, which should reportedly be good for about four hours of use per one-hour charge.

https://newatlas.com/robotics/twin-exos ... -standing/