"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973)
Right now the most amazing unclassified stuff is probably the prosthetic limbs coming out of DARPA funding and the mind-machine interface work that Dr. Nicolelis is doing with the goal of having a paralyzed person kick the first ball at the FIFA 2014 Soccer World Cup on June 12, 2014, in São Paulo, Brazil.
From the New York Times' Bits blog:
Last week, engineers sniffing around the programming code for Google Glass found hidden examples of ways that people might interact with the wearable computers without having to say a word. Among them, a user could nod to turn the glasses on or off. A single wink might tell the glasses to take a picture.
But don’t expect these gestures to be necessary for long. Soon, we might interact with our smartphones and computers simply by using our minds. In a couple of years, we could be turning on the lights at home just by thinking about it, or sending an e-mail from our smartphone without even pulling the device from our pocket. Farther into the future, your robot assistant will appear by your side with a glass of lemonade simply because it knows you are thirsty.
Researchers in Samsung’s Emerging Technology Lab are testing tablets that can be controlled by your brain, using a cap that resembles a ski hat studded with monitoring electrodes, the MIT Technology Review, the science and technology journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported this month.
The technology, often called a brain computer interface, was conceived to enable people with paralysis and other disabilities to interact with computers or control robotic arms, all by simply thinking about such actions. Before long, these technologies could well be in consumer electronics, too.
Some crude brain-reading products already exist, letting people play easy games or move a mouse around a screen.We've had a few posts on Dr. Nicolelis:
NeuroSky, a company based in San Jose, Calif., recently released a Bluetooth-enabled headset that can monitor slight changes in brain waves and allow people to play concentration-based games on computers and smartphones. These include a zombie-chasing game, archery and a game where you dodge bullets — all these apps use your mind as the joystick. Another company, Emotiv, sells a headset that looks like a large alien hand and can read brain waves associated with thoughts, feelings and expressions. The device can be used to play Tetris-like games or search through Flickr photos by thinking about an emotion the person is feeling — like happy, or excited — rather than searching by keywords....MORE
UPDATED--"A leading neuroscientist says Kurzweil’s Singularity isn’t going to happen...."
Maybe He Didn't See the Part Where the Monkey Controlled a Robot on the Other Side of the World With Its Little Monkey Brain
"In Scientific First, Researchers Link Two Rats' Brains via Computer" (What's next, the paralyzed walk?)
Update: Not Everyone is Impressed With Dr. Miguel Nicolelis' Latest Intercontinental Mind-Meld
And re: DARPA going back to our first year on the www we've been begging:
Here's something that got misplaced in the link-vault.And a year later:
(does anyone have a program to manage a rolling inventory of 20K links, spread over a couple servers and four PC's? We're looking for some sort of Brain-Computer Interface thingy. DARPA?...
We've got too many feedreaders and terminals and I really need DARPA to get cracking on the mind-machine interface link/bookmark retrieval thing. All this whining is due to a misplaced link.And a couple times a year since then.
We've got 45,000 of the suckers in the link-vault so I can probably jury-rig a post without it....
We're now up to a quarter million bookmarks in the link-vault and 1400 feed-readers and terminals and still no interface.
