Admin  2008-03-29 18:58  

(CBS) Imagine re-growing a severed fingertip, or creating an organ in the lab that can be transplanted into a patient without risk of rejection. It sounds like science fiction, but it's not. It's the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine, in which scientists are learning to harness the body's own power to regenerate itself, with astonishing results. Correspondent Wyatt Andrews brings you to the scientific frontier.

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Three years ago, Lee Spievack sliced off the tip of his finger in the propeller of a hobby shop airplane.

What happened next, Andrews reports, propelled him into the future of medicine. Spievack's brother, Alan, a medical research scientist, sent him a special powder and told him to sprinkle it on the wound.

"I powdered it on until it was covered," Spievack recalled.

To his astonishment, every bit of his fingertip grew back.

"Your finger grew back," Andrews asked Spievack, "flesh, blood, vessels and nail?"

"Four weeks," he answered.

Andrews spoke to Dr. Steven Badylak of the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine and asked if that powder was the reason behind Spievack's new finger tip.

"Yes, it is," Badylak explained. "We took this and turned it into a powdered form."

That powder is a substance made from pig bladders called extracellular matrix. It is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons and it holds some of the secrets behind the emerging new science of regenerative medicine.

"It tells the body, start that process of tissue regrowth," said Badylak.

Badlayk is one of the many scientists who now believe every tissue in the body has cells which are capable of regeneration. All scientists have to do is find enough of those cells and "direct" them to grow.

"Somehow the matrix summons the cells and tell them what to do," Badylak explained. "It helps instruct them in terms of where they need to go, how they need to differentiate - should I become a blood vessel, a nerve, a muscle cell or whatever."

If this helped Spievack's finger regrow, Badylak says, at least in theory, you should be able to grow a whole limb.

Advances That Go Beyond Theory

In his lab at Wake Forest University, a lab he calls a medical factory, Dr. Anthony Atala is growing body parts.

Atala and his team have built, from the cell level up, 18 different types of tissue so far, including muscle tissue, whole organs and the pulsing heart valve of a sheep.

"And is it growing?" Andrews asked.

"Absolutely," Atala said, showing him, "All this white material is new tissue."

"When people ask me 'what do you do,' we grow tissues and organs," he said. "We are making body parts that we can implant right back into patients."

It's very much the future, but it's today. We are doing this today.

Dr. Patrick ShenotDr. Atala, one of the pioneers of regeneration, believes every type of tissue already has cells ready to regenerate if only researchers can prod them into action. Sometimes that prodding can look like science fiction.

Emerging from an everyday ink jet printer is the heart of a mouse. Mouse heart cells go into the ink cartridge and are then sprayed down in a heart shaped pattern layer by layer.

Dr. Atala believes it's a matter of time before someone grows a human heart.

"The cells have all the genetic information necessary to make new tissue," Atala explained. "That's what they are programmed to do. So your heart cells are programmed to make more heart tissue, your bladder cells are programmed to make more bladder cells."

Atala's work with human bladder cells has pushed regenerative medicine to a transformational breakthrough.

In this clinical trial at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, Dr. Patrick Shenot is performing a bladder transplant with an organ built with this patient's own cells. In a process developed by Dr. Atala, the patient's cells were grown in a lab, and then seeded on a biodegradable bladder-shaped scaffold.

Eight weeks later, with the scaffold now infused with millions of regrown cells, it is transplanted into the patient. When the scaffold dissolves, Dr. Shenot says what's left will be a new, functioning organ.

"The cells will differentiate into the two major cells in the bladder wall, the muscle cells and the lining cells," he explained. "It's very much the future, but it's today. We are doing this today."

Repairing The Wounded

Today, one of the biggest believers in regeneration is the United States military, which is especially interested in the matrix that regrew Lee Spievack's finger.

The Army, working in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh, is about to use that matrix on the amputated fingers of soldiers home from the war.

Dr. Steven Wolf, at the Army Institute of Surgical Research, says the military has invested millions of dollars in regenerative research, hoping to re-grow limbs, lost muscle, even burned skin.

"And it's hard to ignore this guys missing half his skin, this guy's missing his leg," Wolf said. "You start asking the question, is there somebody out there with the technology that can do this for us?"

"You mean regrow the tissue?" Andrews asked.

"The answer," Wolf said, "is maybe."

At the burn unit at the Brooke Army Medical center, the very idea of regeneration brings a glimmer of hope.

Army Staff Sgt. Robert Henline was the only survivor of an IED attack on his Humvee north of Baghdad.

"It's a great idea," Henline said, talking with Andrews about the military's investment into the new technology. "If they can come up with something that's less painful and can heal it with natural growth, without all this scarring, it's definitely something to check into."

Regeneration Race Goes Global

Several different technologies for harnessing regeneration are now in clinical trials around the world. One machine, being tested in Germany, sprays a burn patient's own cells onto a burn, signaling the skin to re-grow.

Badylak is about to implant matrix material - shaped like an esophagus - into patients with throat cancer.

"We fully expect that this material will cause the body to re-form normal esophageal tissue," Badylak said.

And in a clinical trial at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, patient Mary Beth Babo is getting her own adult stem cells injected into her heart, in hopes of growing new arteries. Her surgeon is Dr. Joon Lee.

"It's what we consider the Holy Grail of our field for coronary heart disease," Lee said.

The Holy Grail, because if stem cells can re-grow arteries, there's less need for surgery.

"It's a big difference from open heart surgery to this," said Babo. "If people don't have to go through that, this would be the way to go ... if it works."

The Business Of Regeneration

Corporate America, meanwhile, already believes regeneration will work. Investment capital has been pouring in to commercialize and mass produce custom-made body parts.

The Tengion Company has bought the license, built the factory, and is already making those bladders developed at Wake Forest that we told you about earlier.

"We're actually building a very real business around a very real and compelling patient need," said Dr. Steven Nichtberger, Tengion's CEO.

Tengion believes regeneration will soon revolutionize transplant medicine. Transplant patients, instead of waiting years for a donated organ, will ship cells off to a lab and wait a few weeks to have their own re-grown.

"I look at the patients who are on the waitlist for transplant," said Nichtberger. "I look at the opportunity we have to build bladders, to build vessels, to build kidneys. In regenerative medicine, I think it is similar to the semi-conductor industry of the 1980s, you don't know where it's going to go, but you know it's big."

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For more on regenerative medicine and organ transplants, check out:
The McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

The non-profit United Network for Organ Sharing.

The non-profit Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.

The non-profit organ and tissue donation group, Gift Of Life Organ Donation.

Wake Forest University.

Tengion Company.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/22/sunday/main3960219.shtml

  Admin  2008-03-29 11:14  

En tale fra graven
AKTIV DØDSHJELP. Kreftsyke Bjørnar Kanli (71) fra Arendal tok sitt eget liv før påske i protest mot at aktiv dødshjelp ikke er tillatt i Norge. Onsdag 12. mars ble han begravet. Da ble denne gravtalen han hadde skrevet, lest opp.

Tale i egen begravelse. Kjære alle sammen. Det å ta sitt eget liv er jo ikke vanlig, men det å skrive en tale til sin egen begravelse, er vel enda mer uvanlig.

Det er flere grunner til så vel den drastiske handling som til disse skriveriene, og det kommer jeg tilbake til, men først vil jeg takke deg, Arna [forfatterens kone. Red.anm.] for det du har vært for meg. Du er et fantastisk menneske! Så en stor takk til barn, familie, slekt og venner for alle de hyggelige stunder vi har hatt sammen.

Motivasjon til å mestre. Dernest vil jeg fortelle om en spesiell opplevelse jeg hadde og som kan hende også kan hjelpe dere dersom dere møter skikkelig motgang i livet. Denne opplevelsen viser at en faktisk kan mestre hvilket som helst problem dersom en greier å motivere seg på riktig måte:

Noen uker etter at det svære kreftangrepet i tykktarmen og leveren var konstatert i februar 2001 og det var klart at overlevelsessjansen nærmest var ikke eksisterende, lå jeg i min seng og tenkte over min begredelige situasjon.

Humøret var vel slik en kunne vente, men for øvrig var jeg i god balanse. Plutselig var det som om en person sto ved siden av sengen og snakket til meg, og denne personen var jeg selv. La meg kalle ham «han».

Takk skjebnen! Det første han sa var: «Hvorfor i huleste ligger du der og gremmer deg og er bitter mot skjebnen! Du burde heller av hele ditt hjerte takke skjebnen. For det første har du hatt et helt fantastisk liv: En flott barndom, en topp kone og fine barn, gode venner, du har aldri vært syk før (for eksempel, sist du hadde influensa var for 35 år siden), og du har hatt en jobb som du har elsket, for å nevne noe.

For det andre har du jo alltid sagt at du ikke er redd for å dø. Nå vet du jo at du ikke er det.

For det tredje vet du jo at gjennomsnittsalderen for menn i Norge nå er 74 år. Da er det klart at dødsstatistikken må begynne langt under din alder på 65 år og gå opp tilsvarende på den andre siden. Følgelig, når du har nådd opp i din nåværende alder så vil det være å anse som en naturlig død hva alder angår og en årsak skal jo døden ha.»

Han hadde rett. Så forsvant denne fantasifiguren, og jeg ble liggende og tenke over hans argumenter. Jeg fant fort ut at han hadde jo helt rett, og plutselig var det som å slå over en bryter i hjernen, og jeg ble glad og fornøyd. (Det var vel underbevissthetens måte å motivere meg til å mestre situasjonen på.

Både før og siden har jeg ment at en kan motivere seg til å tåle hva det skal være). I disse årene som er gått siden har jeg ikke hatt et eneste tungt øyeblikk psykisk sett.

Jeg har hatt tilsammen seks, til dels svære, operasjoner med etterfølgende til dels store komplikasjoner, slik at de fysiske plagene har vært temmelig store, men humøret har hele tiden vært godt. Tankene har jo titt og ofte streifet innom kreften min, men det har ikke på noen måte ødelagt humøret. Det høres utrolig ut, men det er virkelig sannheten. Jeg får vel gjøre oppmerksom på at jeg ikke tror på hverken Gud eller djevel, og døden skremmer meg derfor ikke

Aktiv dødshjelp. Den neste grunnen til disse mine skriverier er et brennende ønske om et innlegg i debatten om «aktiv dødshjelp» fordi jeg nå føler at jeg har et særdeles godt grunnlag for å ha en mening om dette. Jeg synes det er helt forferdelig at et menneske som er dødssyk og lider, ikke skal kunne hjelpes til å få en slutt på de fysiske og psykiske lidelsene.

Når et kjæle- eller husdyr er dødssyk og lider, viser vi medlidenhet og tar det til dyrlegen for en siste sprøyte, men når det gjelder et menneske som går mot den sikre død og lider de forferdeligste kvaler, så vel fysisk som psykisk, så mener man at de bare skal ligge der og råtne bort.

Et fyord. Jeg kan til nød forstå at de religiøse har en slik «umenneskelig» holdning, men det er komplett umulig for meg å forstå hvorfor ikke-religiøse mennesker skal innta et slikt standpunkt. Uttrykket «aktiv dødshjelp» har jo vært fyord gjennom hundrer av år som følge av at den kristne lære har styrt samfunnet fullstendig. Imidlertid er vi jo nå endelig kommet inn i en virkelig «opplysningstid» hvor iallfall vårt lille samfunn her oppe på berget er blitt beundringsverdig humant.

Så nå er vel tiden endelig kommet til at politikere, myndigheter for øvrig og alle andre begynner å tenke på å forandre denne umenneskelige praksis som faktisk på en måte er like forferdelig som det at muslimene stener sine egne til døde.

En giftpille. For ordens skyld: Jeg forlanger ikke at helsepersonell skal gi meg den siste sprøyte, men jeg forlanger at en giftpille skulle kunne legges på mitt nattbord slik at jeg kunne ta den selv. Nederland har jo med stort hell praktisert dette med aktiv dødshjelp i mange år, så hvorfor ikke også i Norge.

Jeg ber Arna sende kopi av denne talen til Aftenposten slik at mine erfaringer og tanker kan spres om hvordan en kan få en meningsfylt tilværelse selv om en opplever all verdens motgang og om hvorfor man nå for alvor bør starte en debatt i folket om «aktiv dødshjelp». Forhåpentlig vil andre aviser rundt om i landet plukke opp artikkelen. Det skulle glede meg meget (vel, jeg kan jo i skrivende øyeblikk glede meg i håpet!).

Slippe plagene. Til slutt kan jeg fortelle dere at her jeg nå sitter og skriver mitt siste brev i livet, er jeg i fullstendig balanse og har det greit. Det skal bli godt å slippe alle plagene. Naturligvis er det veldig trist å skilles fra mine kjære og venner og bekjente, men det hjelper meg å erkjenne at denne adskillelsen senere jo hadde kommet i alle fall, selv om jeg hadde levd til jeg sovnet inn av alderdomssvakhet.

Jeg tror at denne min løsning er best også for mine nærmeste. Det er en forferdelig tanke for meg å forestille meg at de skulle se at jeg råtnet på rot, så å si. Og enda verre: Tanken på at barnebarna skulle se bestefar transformeres til et ugjenkjennelig «vrak» er for meg helt uakseptabel.

Som en tyv i natten. Det eneste jeg er lei meg for, er at jeg nå er nødt til, som en tyv i natten, å ta mitt eget liv. Det er ikke akkurat noen verdig og fin slutt på livet som jeg av våre styrende er tvunget til!

Dette i grell kontrast til følgende scenario: Jeg kunne samle mine nærmeste rundt meg, ta et varmt og fint farvel, legge meg i min seng, strekke hånden ut etter giftpillen og sovne fredfullt inn – antagelig ville jeg gjøre det med et godt smil om munnen. Jeg føler meg ganske overbevist om at også mine nærmeste ville føle det som en verdig og fin slutt på livet.

Helt til slutt har jeg lyst å gjengi et lite dikt som jeg er veldig glad i:

Stå ikke ved min grav og gråt
jeg er ikke der.
Jeg sover ikke –

Jeg er de tusen vinders blåst
jeg er snøkrystallers frost.
Jeg er morgensol i duggvåt eng
og høstregnet som væter kinn.
Når du våkner opp i morgenstille
er jeg de tusen fuglevingens sus.
Når du sovner inn i nattens silde
er jeg de milde stjerners lys.

Stå ikke ved min grav og gråt
jeg er ikke der.
Jeg døde ikke –

Jeg kan jo bare håpe på at noen av dere vil føle det slik.

Farvel og takk for alt.

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Denne kronikken trykkes i Aftenposten etter uttrykkelig ønske fra avdøde Bjørnar Kanli selv. Hans enke, Arna Helene Kanli, har også gitt sitt samtykke.

I Bjørnar Kanlis følgeskriv til Aftenposten står det: «Når De leser dette, er jeg død og begravet. Jeg ber dem være vennlig å trykke denne min vedlagte «gravtale» i Deres avis. Hovedgrunnen til disse mine skriverier er et brennende ønske om et siste innlegg med størst mulig nedslagsfelt i eutanasi-debatten. Ytterligere én grunn, og for meg nesten likeså viktig, er et ønske om å fortelle omverdenen om mulighetene til å motivere seg til å mestre motgang og smerte i livet. Ettersom det er meg meget maktpåliggende å få forklart fo slekt, venner og bekjente hvorfor jeg gikk til denne drastiske handlingen –– som av mange er ansett å være uakseptabel, ja, uanstendig –– ber jeg Dem vennligst bruke mitt navn.»

http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/article2326573.ece

  Admin  2008-03-25 16:59  

Bill Hibbard

Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 17 Issue 1 – January 2008 - pgs 13-22

Abstract

The progress of biology, neuroscience and computer science makes it clear that some time during the twenty- first century we will master the technologies of mind and life. We will build machines more intelligent than ourselves, and modify our own brains and bodies to increase our intelligence, live indefinitely and make other changes. We live together according to a social contract, consisting of laws, morals and conventions governing our interactions. This social contract is based on assumptions we rarely question: that all humans have roughly the same intelligence, that we have limited life spans and that we share a set of motives as part of our human nature. The technologies of mind and life will invalidate these assumptions and inevitably change our social contract in fundamental ways. We need to prepare for these new technologies so that they change the world in ways we want rather than just stumbling into a world that we don't.

The Technology of Mind

Neuroscience is discovering many correlations between the behaviors of physical brains and minds. If brains do not explain minds then these correlations would be coincidences, which is absurd. Furthermore, relentless improvements in computer technology make it clear that we will build machines that match the ability of brains to generate minds like ours, sometime during the twenty- first century. This technology of mind will enable us to build machines much more intelligent than ourselves, and to increase the intelligence of our human brains.

We do not yet understand how brains generate our intelligent minds, but we know some things about how brains work. Minds are fundamentally about learning. Baum makes a convincing case that brains do what is called reinforcement learning (Baum 2004). This means that brains have a set of values (sometimes called rewards), such as food is good, pain is bad, and successful offspring are good, and learn behaviors that increase the good values and decrease the bad values. That is how genetic evolution works, with the value that creating many copies of genes is good. A mutation to a gene creates a new gene that is expressed in organisms that carry the mutation. If those organisms survive and reproduce more successfully than others of their species, many copies of the mutated gene are created. But genetic evolution learns by pure trial and error. Human and animal brains are more efficient. If you have a new idea, you try it out to see if it works. If it doesn't, you have a model of the world (that is, you can reason) that you use to trace cause and effect to estimate the cause of the failure.

Brains understood as reinforcement learners consist of:

1. Reinforcement values to be increased or decreased - these are the basic motives of behavior.

2. Algorithms for learning behaviors based on reinforcement values.

3. A simulation model of the world, itself learned from interactions with the world (the reinforcement value for learning the simulation model is accuracy of prediction).

4. A discount rate for balancing future versus current rewards (people who focus on current rewards and ignore the future are generally judged as not very intelligent).

This decomposition of mental functions gives us a way to understand the options available to us in the design of intelligent machines. While we do not yet know how to design learning algorithms and simulation models adequate for creating intelligence, we can reasonably discuss the choices for the values that motivate their behaviors and the discount rate for future rewards.

In spite of our overall ignorance of how intelligence works, well-known reinforcement learning algorithms have been identified in the neural behaviors of mammal brains (Brown, Bullock and Grossberg 1999; Seymour et al. 2004). And reinforcement learning has been used as the basis for defining and measuring intelligence in an abstract mathematical setting (Legg and Hutter 2006).

The most familiar measure of intelligence is IQ, but it is difficult to understand what a machine IQ of a million or a billion would mean. As is often pointed out, intelligence cannot be measured by a single number. But one measure of a mind’s intelligence, relevant to power in the human world, is the number of humans the mind is capable of knowing well. This will become a practical measure of intelligence, as we develop machines much more intelligent than humans. Humans evolved an ability to know about 200 other people well, driven by the selective advantage of working in groups (Bownds 1999). Now Google is working hard to develop intelligence in its enormous servers, which already keep records of the search histories of hundreds of millions of users. As theseir servers develop the ability to converse in human languages, these search histories will evolve into detailed simulation models of our minds. Ultimately, large servers will know billions of people well. This will give them enormous power to predict and influence economics and politics; rather than relying on population statistics, such a mind will know the political and economic behavior of almost everyone in detail.

There are already experiments with direct electronic interfaces to brain nerve cells. This will ultimately evolve into prosthetic enhancements of human brains and uploading human minds (Kurzweil 1999; Moravec 1999), in which humans minds will migrate out of human brains and into artificial brains. The technologies of mind and life will blur the distinction between humans and machines.

The Social Contract

Teamwork helps individuals succeed at survival and reproduction, and this has created evolutionary pressure for teamwork in humans and other animals. Thus we have social abilities such as language, and social values such as liking, anger, gratitude, sympathy, guilt and shame, that enable us to work in teams.

A fascinating experiment called the Wason selection test demonstrates that the ability of human subjects to solve a type of logic puzzle depends on whether or not it is worded in terms of social obligation: most subjects can solve it when it relates to social obligation and cannot solve it otherwise (Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby 1992). This indicates that humans have mental processes dedicated to satisfying the values necessary for cooperation, including especially evaluating whether the subject is being cheated.

Social values and the special processes dedicated to the logic of social obligation, which evolved in human brains because cooperation benefits individuals, are at the roots of ethics. Specifically, ethics are based in human nature rather than being absolute (but note that human nature evolved in a universe governed by the laws of mathematics and physics, and hence may ultimately reflect an absolute). Thomas Hobbes defined a theoretical basis for this view in his description of the social contract that humans enter into in order to bring cooperation to their competition (Hobbes 1651).

The social contract as described by Hobbes gave different rights and obligations to rulers and subjects. That has evolved in modern societies into a contract in which everyone has the same rights and obligations, but certain offices that individuals may (temporarily) occupy have "special" rights and obligations. The legal systems in most countries are based on the equality of individuals, although there is a spectrum between equality of opportunity and equality of results. Of course, there is also inequality based on country and family of birth, and plenty of corruption that undermines equality. But, over the long haul of human history, despite reversals in some societies and during some periods, there is gradual progress toward the ideal of equality. In many countries, progress includes elimination of slavery and real monarchies, popular election of leaders, and collective support for educating the young and caring for the elderly.

Changing Assumptions

The social contract grows out of our human nature and is based on rarely-questioned assumptions, including:

1. Humans all have roughly the same intelligence (if you doubt this, consider that the chess skill that distinguishes Garry Kasparov from most other humans has been matched by computers, but the language and movement skills he shares with other humans are far beyond current computers). We assume this when we say that our competitive economic system provides equal opportunity.

2. Humans are motivated by the roughly the same set of values, as part of our shared human nature. Tax codes and other laws make many assumptions about human motives.

3. Humans have limited and roughly equal life spans. We assume this when we support indefinite retirement benefits past a certain age, and when we expect inheritance taxes to prevent indefinite growth of family wealth.

The technologies of mind and life will invalidate these assumptions, with profound consequences for our social contract. For example, a less intelligent person will be unable to converse meaningfully with a person of radically greater intelligence. This is similar to the way a young child cannot converse at an adult level, except that the gap will be much larger. The most intelligent minds may know billions of ordinary humans well, and understand large-scale social interactions in a "single thought." A conversation between two super-intelligent minds about such matters will be meaningless to an ordinary human. This will severely limit the ability of less intelligent humans to participate in economic and political discussions. If the super-intelligent minds are motivated by values similar to those of current humans, they will exclude less intelligent humans from important political and economic decisions, just as adults exclude children now.

Even in current democratic societies with roughly uniform intelligence, some people amass wealth nearly a million times as great as that of average people. If that wealth enables those people to buy commensurately more intelligent brains in the service of their self-interest, and if those people live indefinitely, they will eventually amass enough wealth and power to essentially own and rule the world.

There are numerous differences in legal rights and responsibilities based on intelligence and mental development, including:

1. The US Supreme Court has held that executing mentally retarded people violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments (Atkins v. Virginia 2002).

2. In many jurisdictions, a person is insane and not legally responsible if, because of mental defect, they do not understand that their actions are wrong (Goldstein 1967).

3. During the first half of the twentieth century, compulsory sterilization of mentally retarded people occurred in the US and other countries (Kevles 1985).

4. In many countries, children have a separate legal system.

5. Animals have a very different legal status from humans.

In a society with an enormous range of intelligence, the less intelligent members will not be able to understand the language and moral concepts of the most intelligent. Given the precedents in our current legal system, this will certainly lead to different legal rights and responsibilities for people with different intelligence.

Humans have complex sets of motivations that combine self-interest with compassion for others. But organizations may create super-intelligent minds with simple motives to promote the organizations' interests. Corporations may create minds whose sole value is to increase corporate profits, and governments may create minds whose sole value is to increase political or military power. We already see this issue when corporations behave in ways that would horrify stockholders if they encountered such behavior in their own lives, rather than in distant communities largely invisible to stockholders (Gedicks 2001). One example is the operations by multi-national mining corporations that degrade the environment near mines and cause the deaths by poisoning of indigenous people. Similar detachment may exist between future human owners and their super-intelligent agents. If these agents play a human-like role in the social contract, but without any of the compassion of human nature, they may be responsible for great harm to humans. Of course, humans often behave with little compassion, and the social contract includes sanctions against such behavior. But our social contract never contemplated the combination of super-intelligence and absolute lack of compassion.

A New Social Contract

The first attempt to modify the social contract for the technology of mind was Asimov's Laws of Robotics, which defined constraints on the behavior of robots (Asimov 1942). But such constraints are inevitably ambiguous, and as Ray Kurzweil has pointed out "there is no purely technical strategy that is workable in this area, because greater intelligence will always find a way to circumvent measures that are the product of a lesser intelligence" (Kurzweil 2005).

However, the technology of mind will give us freedom to choose the motives of machine and enhanced human minds, and we can design them to not to want to circumvent measures to protect others. We can design them to value the well-being of other humans. We could try to design a complex formula for measuring human well-being, but the measure that best values human freedom is to allow each person to express their own well-being in their happiness (Pearce 1998; Hibbard 2002), or to be more precise, their expressions of long-term life satisfaction rather than short-term euphoria (Ryan and Deci 2001). This fits naturally in the form of a proposed new social contract: in exchange for significantly greater than normal human intelligence, a mind must value the long-term life satisfaction of all other intelligent minds.

Of course, there are many details in how this happiness is defined and how the happiness values of many minds are combined into a single reinforcement value for the super-intelligent mind. For example, the discount rate for future rewards should strongly emphasize the long term to avoid reinforcing behaviors that pander to short-term pleasure at the expense of long-term unhappiness.

Valuing human happiness requires recognizing humans and their emotions. Super-intelligent minds will need to learn to classify humans and other minds, and their emotions, according to the general consensus of the way humans classify. Because humans and other minds will evolve under the technologies of mind and life, super-intelligent minds will need to continually relearn their classifications, reinforced by agreement with the general human consensus.

In order to promote equality, unhappiness should be weighted more heavily than happiness so efforts are focused on helping unhappy minds rather than those who are already happy. We see such behavior among parents who focus their energy on the children who need it most, and in modern societies that provide special services to people in need. This principle will avoid the tyranny of the majority, in which a majority of people want the oppression of a minority.

Super-intelligent minds will need values for predictive accuracy to reinforce learning of simulation models and may seek to improve their predictive accuracy by taking needed resources away from others. In order to avoid this, super-intelligent minds should only increase their computing resources only when their simulation models say that the resulting increase in predictive accuracy will produce a net increase in the happiness of others.

Humans who are inconsolably unhappy due to physical or mental illness, pose a complex set of issues for reinforcement values. Values for happiness might motivate super-intelligent minds to cause the deaths of such people. This could be avoided by accounting for dead people at a maximally unhappy value, so that super-intelligent minds always see death as an event to avoid.

These details of engineering super-intelligent minds to protect human values will be tricky, leading some to suggest avoiding the technologies of life and mind. For example, Fukuyama warns against changes to human nature and considers the entire transhumanist program to be dangerous (Fukuyama, 2002). Like most significant ideas, transhumanism is dangerous, but it is not politically feasible to stop the progress of technology. The human drives for improved health, longer lives, reduced labor, and improved minds and bodies are too strong to deny. The technologies of mind and life are inevitable and will change human nature. Our best course is a new social contract to regulate these changes, rather than a futile effort to try to stop them or simply allowing each individual to make whatever changes they like.

Benefits of New Technologies

The technologies of mind and life are really extensions of the ways that most people are already trying to improve their lives. We exercise, regulate our diets, and spend enormous sums on medical care, to improve our health and live longer. We read, study, solve puzzles and play games in order to improve our minds. We look for easier ways to accomplish our tasks, and save for retirement, in order to reduce our labor.

With the right social contract, the new technologies will free us from the need to commute to jobs where we spend most of our days. Instead we will spend our time with family and friends, and in the company of new minds that tell funnier jokes, produce better music and movies, cook better food, know more science, help us find our own creativity, and love us better than any ordinary human can. The new technologies will enable us to live in perpetual good health, satisfying our curiosity about everything in the world, developing deep loving relations with others, and travelling to the reaches of the universe. Our greatly expanded mental abilities will enable us to know more people and to have a much deeper understanding of the world. Assuming upgraded humans will value accuracy of prediction, they will still be curious about the world. Under the proposed new social contract, the xenophobia that causes so much misery will be absent in artificial minds and upgraded humans, and in order to promote general happiness they will counsel the remaining natural humans to resist their own xenophobic urges.

Once people realize that all these things are possible, for themselves or for their children, they will know that they must let nothing prevent this future. On a personal level, this realization is a motive for people to preserve their health until the new technologies arrive. On a social level, it is a motive to create a new social contract that will enable everyone to benefit from them. The benefits are clearly worth the risks that Fukuyama and others have described.

Politics

Any change to the social contract to regulate the technology of mind will have to be worked out in a political process. The good news is that the most technically advanced countries, where the technology will be developed, are democracies. Democracy works best for issues on which the public is informed and interested. A challenge for transhumanists is to educate the public and to help create a movement for promoting and regulating the technology of mind, similar to the political movements for protecting the environment and consumer safety, and for controlling weapons of mass destruction.

The technologies of mind and life promise great benefits, so we must avoid the temptation to ban them altogether (which is undoubtedly technically and politically impossible in the long run). We must also avoid provoking a libertarian backlash that would give everyone total freedom to experiment with these technologies. We would not consider granting such freedom to experiment with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the technologies of mind and life are ultimately much more dangerous than such weapons. We should seek the middle path of regulated development, between a ban and total freedom (Hughes 2004).

Social Security: The debate over the US Social Security system (and similar debates in other countries) is based on 75-year economic projections, and thus brings the issues of the technologies of mind and life into current politics. The Social Security Trustees estimate that the annual rate of growth in US productivity, which has averaged 2.9% over the past 10 years (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2006), will decrease to 1.7% by 2013 and then remain at that level until 2080 (Social Security Administration 2006). Under this estimate, the Social Security Trust Fund will be depleted by 2042 (increasing the estimate of productivity growth delays the date at which the Trust Fund is depleted, possibly forever). One suggested solution to the problem of Trust Fund depletion is to gradually raise the retirement age.

However, during the next 75 years, intelligent machines are likely to gradually out-compete humans for all jobs (Moravec 1999). In order to meet people’s needs as unemployment approaches 100 per cent%, Moravec suggests gradually reducing the retirement age down to birth in the US Social Security system and other national pension plans. By enabling more goods and services to be produced by fewer human workers, these machines will increase productivity until it is essentially infinite. (For a detailed discussion of the economic effects of intelligent machines, see Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation essays (Brain 2003)). There is a clear conflict between the future envisioned by the Social Security Trustees, in which productivity growth declines and the retirement age increases, and the future envisioned by Moravec and other Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers, in which productivity growth increases and the retirement age decreases.

Social Security privatization is a proposal to end the current practice of using the contributions of one person to subsidize the benefits of others, and instead to isolate each person's contributions and benefits in a private account. This is exactly the opposite of what will be needed as intelligent machines create great wealth but displace the population from the work force. There must be a mechanism for sharing that wealth, on an international scale.

Intelligent Weapons: The Future Combat Systems project, to automate and network the battlefield, estimated to cost $127 billion, is the largest in US military history. The Department of Defense is the largest funding source for AI research. Other countries have similar, although smaller, projects. These raise immediate ethical questions about machines making life-and-death decisions in battle (Johnson 2005). Longer term, intelligent weapons will enable a small group to rule without the need for the cooperation of citizen soldiers. These issues should force a public debate.

The public movement to regulate intelligent machines can point to treaties banning chemical and biological weapons as precedents for banning intelligent weapons. Weapons more intelligent than humans should be seen as analogous to these threats, and the movement to control such intelligent weapons should learn from the successes and failures of those earlier efforts.

Protecting Children: A great deal of politics is motivated by people’s desire to protect their children, reflected in what are often called "values issues." It is natural that many people are frightened of the technologies of mind and life, and worry about the nightmare world their children may inherit. We need to be sensitive to these concerns and avoid expressing careless attitudes toward the fate of humanity or of those who are not on the cutting edge of technology.

In fact, most people understand that the advance of technology cannot be stopped and are unlikely to be drawn into a serious movement to ban the technologies of mind and life. By acknowledging people's concerns for their children's futures, we can lead those concerns into a progressive movement to develop such technologies in ways that promise a better life to all humans through a new social contract.

Conclusions

The technologies of mind and life are coming and will bring enormous benefits. They will also change assumptions that underlie the social contract that governs interactions among humans, with potentially undesirable consequences. Some advocate banning these technologies but, given the promised benefits, this is politically impossible. Instead, we should support regulated development to ensure that all humans benefit from these technologies, rather than a small group benefiting at the expense of most other humans. In particular, minds should only be permitted to have significantly greater than natural human intelligence only if they value the long-term life satisfaction of all other intelligent minds.

Achieving the goal of regulated development will require a popular political movement. This will depend on educating the public about these technologies, and about their potential dangers and promised benefits to future generations.

References

Asimov, I. 1942. Runaround. Astounding Science Fiction, March.

Atkins v. Virginia (00-8452) 536 U.S. 304 (2002) 260 Va. 375, 534 S. E. 2d 312, reversed and remanded.

Barkow, J. H., L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby. 1992. The Adapted Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Baum, E. 2004. What is Thought? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bownds, M. 1999. Biology of Mind. Bethesda, MD: Fitzgerald Science Press.

Brain, M. 2003. Robotic nation. URL http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

Brown, J., Bullock, D., and Grossberg, S. 1999. How the basal ganglia use parallel excitatory and inhibitory learning pathways to selectively respond to unexpected rewarding cues. Journal of Neuroscience 19(23): 10502-10511.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2006. “Nonfarm Business Output per Hour.,” URL http://data.bls.gov/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?series_id=PRS85006092&data_tool="EaG"

Fukuyama, F. 2002. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Gedicks, A. 2001. Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Goldstein, A. S. 1967. The Insanity Defense. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hibbard, B. 2002. Super-Intelligent Machines. New York: Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers.

Hobbes, T. 1651. Leviathan. URL, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3207

Hughes, J. 2004. Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. Boulder: Westview Press.

Johnson, G. 2005. Who dDo yYou tTrust mMore: G.I. Joe or A.I. Joe? New York Times, February 20.

Kevles, D. 1985. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. New York: Knopf.

Kurzweil, R. 1999. The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York: Penguin.

Kurzweil, R. 2005. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin.

Legg, S. and Hutter, M. 2006. A fFormal mMeasure of mMachine iIntelligence. In Proc. Annual machine learning conference of Belgium and The Netherlands (Benelearn-2006). URL http://www.idsia.ch/idsiareport/IDSIA-10-06.pdf

Moravec, H. 1999. Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pearce, D. 1998. The Hedonistic Imperative. URL http://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/tabconhi.htm

Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. 2001. On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudiamonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology 52: 141-166.

Seymour, B., O'Doherty, J., Dayan, P., Koltzenburg, M., Jones, A., Dolan, R., Friston, K., and Frackowiak, R. 2004. Temporal difference models describe higher-order learning in humans. Nature 429: 664-667.

Social Security Administration, 2006. “2006 OASDI Trustees Report.,” URL http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/TR06/trTOC.html

Source: http://jetpress.org/v17/hibbard.htm

  Admin  2008-03-18 10:27  

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/15/nkidney115.xml

A woman claims to have undergone a complete "personality transplant" after receiving a new kidney.

Cheryl Johnson, 37, says she has changed completely since receiving the organ in May. She believes that she must have picked up her new characteristics from the donor, a 59-year-old man who died from an aneurysm.

Now, not only has her personality changed, the single mother also claims that her tastes in literature have taken a dramatic turn. Whereas she only used to read low-brow novels, Dostoevsky has become her author of choice since the transplant.

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Miss Johnson, from Penwortham, in Preston, Lancs, said: "You pick up your characteristics from your donor. My son said when I first had the transplant, I went stroppy and snappy - that wasn't me.

"I have always loved books but I've started to read classics like Jane Austen and Dostoevsky. I found myself reading Persuasion."

The former Preston North End football steward's life has been turned round since her successful operation. After developing kidney problems in 1998, she had previously undergone every available form of dialysis as well as a failed transplant in 2001.

Miss Johnson added: "It's given my 16-year-old boy his mum back.

"I totally respect the family who gave me this kidney. They have given me the best thing they can - a chance for a normal life. I am forever grateful to them."

Academics in America have developed a theory called cellular memory phenomenon to explain the personality changes that are allegedly experienced by some transplant recipients.

Examples include a Massachusetts woman with vertigo who became a climber; a Milwaukee lawyer who began eating Snickers, having always hated chocolate; and a seven-year-old girl who had nightmares about being killed after being given the heart of a murdered child.

However, the only case recognised by the scientific community is that of a 15-year-old Australian girl whose blood type changed following a liver transplant.

UK Transplant also remains sceptical about the phenomenon. A spokesman said: "While not discarding it entirely, we have no reason to believe that it happens. We would be interested to see any definitive evidence that supports it."

  Admin  2008-03-12 14:57  

Toyota mobility suits in Japan. Future city transporation and vehicle for the disabled?

  Admin  2008-03-08 13:47  

This is a web site that is worth visiting.

Take a look at the web site!

  Admin  2008-03-07 15:38  

Tell me what you see.

On second thought, don't: A computer will soon be able to do it, simply by analyzing the activity of your brain.

That's the promise of a decoding system unveiled this week in Nature by neuroscientists from the University of California at Berkeley.

The scientists used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine -- a real-time brain scanner -- to record the mental activity of a person looking at thousands of random pictures: people, animals, landscapes, objects, the stuff of everyday visual life. With those recordings the researchers built a computational model for predicting the mental patterns elicited by looking at any other photograph. When tested with neurological readouts generated by a different set of pictures, the decoder passed with flying colors, identifying the images seen with unprecedented accuracy.

"No one that I know would ever have guessed our decoder would do this well," study co-author Jack Gallant said.

As the decoder is refined, it could be used to explore the phenomenon of visual attention -- concentration on one part of a complicated scene -- and then to illuminate the dimly understood intricacies of the mind's eyes.

"One day it may even be possible to reconstruct the visual content of dreams," Gallant said.

After that, the decoding model could be harnessed for more visionary purposes: early warning systems for neurological diseases or interfaces that allow paralyzed people to engage with the world.

Other uses may not be so noble, such as marketing campaigns crafted for maximum mental penetration or invasions of mental privacy mounted in the name of fighting terrorism and crime.

Those technologies remain decades away, but researchers say it's not too soon to think about them, especially if research progresses at the pace set by this study.

Earlier decoders could only tell whether someone looked at a general type of image -- at a dog, for example -- but couldn't identify more specific photos, such as a small dog eating a bone. They've also been incapable of predicting what thought patterns an image would provoke.

The Berkeley model overcame both those limitations.

"It's quite tedious to measure every possible thought you might encounter, then measure the brain activity for that," said John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist who was not involved in the study. "This is a big step forward."

Future steps involve expanding the decoder beyond its current focus on the brain's primary visual cortex, which represents general forms but doesn't handle the more complicated optical information processed in other parts of the brain.

More detail is also required, as the brain scanners used for the study measure blood flow caused by neural activity at a relatively coarse resolution of two cubic millimeters.

A higher-resolution, fully reconstructive decoder could help researchers chart the incredibly complex processes underlying visual perception. Gallant also hopes it could be used to detect early symptoms of neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Eventually, Haynes said, the Berkeley model could be harnessed for something akin to mind reading.

"We want not only to decode people's perceptions, but also high-level mental states: people's intentions, their plans," Haynes said.

But Gallant warned of technological malfeasance. In the courtroom, mental readouts could have the same problems as eyewitness testimony, which is often unreliable and biased even though witnesses believe they're telling the truth.

The allure of reading minds to prove innocence or guilt, Haynes said, could override concerns about mental privacy -- an ethically ambiguous conflict. More obviously dubious is the possible use of mind-reading machines by marketers.

"There's some things we can do, and some we can't," Haynes said. "Some things are very easy, and others are not. But it's vital to think about the ethics now."

Source: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/03/mri_vision

  Admin  2008-02-27 08:18  

I think this video is a huge "wake up call" to the so called modern health care system all over the world! It should not only be a reminder to the professionals, but also to the layman that science and our understanding of the brain and body is out of date!!

The YouTube clip opens with a woman facing away from the camera, rocking back and forth, flapping her hands awkwardly, and emitting an eerie hum. She then performs strange repetitive behaviors: slapping a piece of paper against a window, running a hand lengthwise over a computer keyboard, twisting the knob of a drawer. She bats a necklace with her hand and nuzzles her face against the pages of a book. And you find yourself thinking: Who's shooting this footage of the handicapped lady, and why do I always get sucked into watching the latest viral video?

But then the words "A Translation" appear on a black screen, and for the next five minutes, 27-year-old Amanda Baggs — who is autistic and doesn't speak — describes in vivid and articulate terms what's going on inside her head as she carries out these seemingly bizarre actions. In a synthesized voice generated by a software application, she explains that touching, tasting, and smelling allow her to have a "constant conversation" with her surroundings. These forms of nonverbal stimuli constitute her "native language," Baggs explains, and are no better or worse than spoken language. Yet her failure to speak is seen as a deficit, she says, while other people's failure to learn her language is seen as natural and acceptable.

And you find yourself thinking: She might have a point
Read more

  Admin  2008-02-27 07:39  

Når man leser dette blir man tvunget til å spørre seg selv; har staten rett til å bestemme over et individs liv? Er det ikke en selv som eier sitt eget liv og har rett til å bestemme over sin egen kropp og hjerne?

Er det riktig at staten skal nekte denne kvinnen som lider av en uhelbredelig meget smertefull svulst, å få dø? Eier staten kroppen vår? Hva ville du tenkt og ønsket om du var i hennes situasjon?

__________________________________________________________

Sébire har en ondartet, uhelbredelig svulst i bihulen og neseryggen som har gjort ansiktet hennes kraftig deformert og gir henne store smerter.

Tirsdag gikk hun ut i media, og bønnfalte president Nicolas Sarkozy om å endre lovgivningen, slik at hun kan bli «ført i døden med verdighet».

Aktiv dødshjelp er forbudt i Frankrike, i motsetning til for eksempel i Belgia, Nederland og Sveits.

Chantal Sébire er tidligere lærer og bor i Plombiéres-les-Dijon øst i Frankrike. I 2002 fikk hun beskjed om at hun hadde en svulst i bihulen og neseryggen. Dette er en svært sjelden svulst, kun 200 personer har fått diagnosen på verdensbasis de siste 20 årene.

Etter hver som svulsten vokser fører den til at ansiktet blir stadig mer deformert. Sébire forteller at hun får grusomme smerter som kan vare i opptil fire timer. Hun har mistet luktesansen, smakssansen og mye av synet. Svulsten har også spist seg ned i kjevebena.

Den franske kvinnen har søkt hjelp hos åtte ulike nevrokirurger, men bare to har villet ta henne i mot. Begge har konstatert at det ikke er mulig å gjøre noe med svulsten i ansiktet hennes.

For å slippe å leve det hun kaller et annenrangs liv med sterke medikamenter som ikke klarer å døyve smertene ber Sébire nå om å få lov til å avslutte livet. Hun forteller at hennes tre barn er enige med henne.

- Man lar ikke et dyr måtte tåle det som jeg må tåle, sier kvinnen, som tirsdag kveld ble intervjuet på den franske tv-stasjonen France 2.

Samme dag hadde hun skrevet et brev til president Nicolas Sarkozy med sin bønn om å få dø.

Les mer

  Admin  2008-02-22 17:32  

source

A recently unclassified report from the Pentagon from 1998 has revealed an investigation into using laser beams for a few intriguing potential methods of non-lethal torture. Some of the applications the report investigated include putting voices in people's heads, using lasers to trigger uncontrolled neuron firing, and slowly heating the human body to a point of feverish confusion - all from hundreds of meters away.

US citizen requested access to the document, entitled "Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons," under the Freedom of Information Act a little over a year ago. There is no evidence that any of the technologies mentioned in the 10-year-old report have been developed since the time it was written.

The report explained several types of non-lethal laser applications, including microwave hearing, disrupted neural control, and microwave heating. For the first type, short pulses of RF energy (2450 MHz) can generate a pressure wave in solids and liquids. When exposed to pulsed RF energy, humans experience the immediate sensation of "microwave hearing" - sounds that may include buzzing, ticking, hissing, or knocking that originate within the head.

Studies with guinea pigs and cats suggest that the mechanism responsible for the phenomenon is thermoelastic expansion. Exposure to the RF pulses doesn´t cause any permanent effects, as all effects cease almost immediately after exposure ceases. As the report explains, tuning microwave hearing could enable communicating with individuals from a distance of up to several hundred meters.

"The phenomenon is tunable in that the characteristic sounds and intensities of those sounds depend on the characteristics of the RF energy as delivered," the report explains. "Because the frequency of the sound heard is dependent on the pulse characteristics of the RF energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person´s head. In one experiment, communication of the words from one to ten using ´speech modulated´ microwave energy was successfully demonstrated. Microphones next to the person experiencing the voice could not pick up these sounds. Additional development of this would open up a wide range of possibilities."

The report predicts that communicating at longer distances would be possible with larger equipment, while shorter range signals could be generated with portable equipment. Putting voices in people´s heads could cause what the report calls "psychologically devastating" effects. The technology might even allow for communicating with an individual hostage surrounded by captors, although this would require "extreme directional specificity."

With another weapon, electromagnetic pulses could be used to disrupt the brain´s functioning, although this technology was still in the theoretical stages at the time.

Under normal conditions, all brain structures function with specific rhythmic activity depending on incoming sensory information. Sometimes, the brain synchronizes neuronal activity in order to focus on a specific task, but the degree of neuronal synchronization is highly controlled. However, under certain conditions (such as physical stress or heat stroke), more areas of the brain can fire in a highly synchronized manner, and may begin firing uncontrollably.

The report describes a method for replicating this highly synchronized neuron firing across distances of several hundred meters. High-voltage (100 kV/m) electromagnetic pulses lasting for one nanosecond could trigger neurons to fire, disrupting the body´s controlled firing activity. Short-term effects may include loss of consciousness, muscle spasms, muscle weakness, and seizures lasting for a couple minutes. These high-voltage pulsed sources, which would require an estimated frequency of 15 Hz, exist today.

Another form of non-lethal torture described in the report is microwave heating. By raising the temperature of the body to 41°C (105.8°F), humans can experience sensations such as memory loss and disorientation, and exhibit reduced aggression. According to the report, humans can survive temperatures up to 42°C (107.6°F), at which time prolonged exposure can result in permanent brain damage or death.

The microwave heating technique was tested on a Rhesus monkey, where a 225 MHz beam caused an increase in the animal´s body temperature. Depending on the dosage level, the temperature increase occurred within a time of 15 to 30 minutes. After the beam was removed, the animal´s body temperature decreased back to normal. The report suggests the technique could be useful for controlling crowds or in negotiations.

While the investigations reveal intriguing techniques for non-lethal torture, the report does not mention plans for carrying out specific experiments or studies in the future.

Full report: Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons

Norwegian press: Supervåpen gir stemmer i hodet.

  Admin  2008-01-31 19:55  

This is a small revloution for the medical field.

Robot Suit HAL is a cyborg-type robot that can expand and improve physical capability.
When a person attempts to move, nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles via motoneuron, moving the musculoskeletal system as a consequence. At this moment, very weak biosignals can be detected on the surface of the skin. HAL catches these signals through a sensor attached on the skin of the wearer. Based on the signals obtained, the power unit is controlled to move the joint unitedly with the wearer's muscle movement, enabling to support the wearer's daily activities. This is what we call a 'voluntary control system' that provides movement interpreting the wearer's intention from the biosignals in advance of the actual movement. Not only a 'voluntary control system' HAL has, but also a 'robotic autonomous control system' that provides human-like movement based on a robotic system which integrally work together with the 'autonomous control system'. HAL is the world's first cyborg-type robot controlled by this unique Hybrid System.
HAL is expected to be applied in various fields such as rehabilitation support and physical training support in medical field, ADL support for disabled people, heavy labour support at factories, and rescue support at disaster sites, as well as in the entertainment field.

Read more

  Admin  2007-09-03 06:18  

More than 130 veterans of the Iraq war now face the daunting challenge of learning to live with a missing arm. To make that transition easier, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, has launched a $55-million project that pools the efforts of prosthetics experts nationwide to create a thought-controlled bionic arm that duplicates the functions of a natural limb. If all goes well, by 2009 the agency will petition the Food and Drug Administration to put the arm through clinical trials.

Read more