Ailing Scientist Hopes to Become the World's First Cyborg (ottawacitizen.com) 68
The Telegraph reports:
Peter Scott-Morgan stands, wide-eyed and tearful. "Good. Grief." he says quietly. "I was unprepared for the emotion... It's quite extraordinary. It really is." Using an exoskeleton, Scott-Morgan is experiencing what it is like to stand for the first time in months after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2017, the same incurable condition that killed scientist Stephen Hawking.
The remarkable step, however, is just the first in the 62-year-old's bold journey to control his disease by becoming the world's first, full-fledged cyborg. "Think of it as a science experiment," he laughs. "This is cyborg territory, and I intend to be a human guinea pig to see just how far we can turn science fiction into reality." Eventually, Scott-Morgan wants the exoskeleton to encase his upper body, giving him superhuman strength and the ability to tower above "flesh and blood" humans. A mind-reading computer will be plugged directly into his brain, expressing his thoughts almost instantly. Meanwhile, his paralyzed face will be replaced by a hyper-realistic avatar that will move in time with a speech synthesizer...
Scott-Morgan says he isn't deteriorating but becoming a new version of himself — one that will eventually pave the way for a breed of humans that can augment their capabilities using technology... Instead of answering a question by laboriously typing out individual letters using a gaze tracker, in a similar way to Hawking, he will rely on the AI to provide a full and instant response. Eventually, the machine will speak for itself using phrases it has learned from Scott-Morgan — crossing a controversial line in what it means to be human....
Someday, the scientist hopes he can exist completely outside his physical body, with his personality, traits and knowledge downloaded on to a machine.
The remarkable step, however, is just the first in the 62-year-old's bold journey to control his disease by becoming the world's first, full-fledged cyborg. "Think of it as a science experiment," he laughs. "This is cyborg territory, and I intend to be a human guinea pig to see just how far we can turn science fiction into reality." Eventually, Scott-Morgan wants the exoskeleton to encase his upper body, giving him superhuman strength and the ability to tower above "flesh and blood" humans. A mind-reading computer will be plugged directly into his brain, expressing his thoughts almost instantly. Meanwhile, his paralyzed face will be replaced by a hyper-realistic avatar that will move in time with a speech synthesizer...
Scott-Morgan says he isn't deteriorating but becoming a new version of himself — one that will eventually pave the way for a breed of humans that can augment their capabilities using technology... Instead of answering a question by laboriously typing out individual letters using a gaze tracker, in a similar way to Hawking, he will rely on the AI to provide a full and instant response. Eventually, the machine will speak for itself using phrases it has learned from Scott-Morgan — crossing a controversial line in what it means to be human....
Someday, the scientist hopes he can exist completely outside his physical body, with his personality, traits and knowledge downloaded on to a machine.
Good on you (Score:5, Insightful)
But if your body was starting on a serious irreversible decline, devoting your life to pushing back in whatever way you can seems like the perfect way to find purpose in your plight. Maybe it will result in a lot of progress, maybe just a little, but it's fighting the good fight.
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Some definitions are broad, where eyeglasses make you a cyborg.
This guy has effectively lost his society-relevant body and is looking to substitute. It's not strictly "downloading your brain" when you're still using your internal bio, but our labeling is naturally focused on the world-facing bits. From where I'm sitting, the guy is a brain in a robot. I can tolerate giving him "world's first full-fledged cyborg" if they restore all human-like function. Which is still very subjective, but I mean to include t
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"Cyborg" specifically means that there's both meat-based and robotic parts. Without the organic parts it's just a robot.
Re: Good on you (Score:2)
I agree.
Actually quite a while ago I was involved in a serious motor vehicle collision where I required platic surgery involving titanium implants to reconstrct part of me face.
Family jokingly called me a cyborg, but really it's more like getting a hip replacement.
I guess I would be forgiving if a person used the term cyborg to refer to something of an implant that seems kind of futuristic, but there is definately an important distinction here.
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Quality of life versus quantity of life. Live on your knees or die on your feet, even when it is your own worn out carcase that makes you live on your knees and far, far worse, your fear of passing on, keeping you trapped in misery. Accept it, life is a quest for the future, the universe itself alive and we are expressions of it, quantum consciousnesses bound to our normal space ride temporarily, consciousness a quantum particle state bound to the interaction of normal space particles. All just physics.
Whe
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Already exist (Score:1)
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I was more thinking of Kevin Warwick [wikipedia.org] from the 1990's.
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I was thinking of Deus Ex myself.
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Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Someday, the scientist hopes he can exist completely outside his physical body, with his personality, traits and knowledge downloaded on to a machine.
Why does a scientist, whose world views are tendencially materialistic, believe that he is any more than his physical body?
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Two men are walking in a Scottish forest, a scientist and tabloid author. In the forest they find a iPhone 4.
Which of the men is most likely to write an article entitled "iPhones spontaneously evolve in Scottish forest!"?
It may be that a scientific mind, a reasoning mind, a person who doesn't believe just anything based on what they are told to believe, will understand that most of the time incredibly complex creations are - well, created, and there is more to the story than a random arrangement of atoms t
Yeah. (Score:2)
Scientists are humans too, so they have emotions and biases and sometimes even religious upbringings. The brain is plenty complex enough to happily retain contradictory beliefs, and switch between them based on context, all the while making amazing rationalizations to itself to explain how they are not in conflict.
Philosophical physicalism, combined with atheism, produces a world view in which "purpose" is *nothing more* than a mental projection. The universe is simply there, for no reason, and everything
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It may be that a scientific mind, a reasoning mind, [...] will understand that most of the time incredibly complex creations are - well, created, and there is more to the story than a random arrangement of atoms that just so happened, for no reason.
Nobody believes iPhones appear via random arrangement of atoms; it's important however to be careful extending the analogy from iPhones to other cases. Your statement sounds close to Behe's irreducible complexity concept, which I consider a variety of the argument from ignorance.
Your statement is also misleading, because it proposes only two possible alternatives: something has been created (presumably by somebody) or else something must have showed up by random accumulation of atoms. If we know mechanisms
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> If we know mechanisms that explain the apparition of complex creations, then there is a third alternative, and postulating a creator is not necessary. And even if we don't know such a mechanism, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist - so the binary choice you propose is fallacious.
We *do* know the mechanism for the "apparition of complex creations". We've witnessed it a million times. We know exactly how the iPhone 4 got here, we know how the 2020 Dodge Charger got here. We've seen it over and over. Some
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Yep, acknowledging the obvious part still leaves an unresolved question.
Still, obvious answer is obvious, even if the answer doesn't make you giddy.
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Nope. They'd have to have planned it for over 10 million years to account for the damn fossil records we have.
Not buying it because it's just too stupid.
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Some people suggest that although it works the same way in every instance we've ever seen, for every experimwnt for which we have results, it's totally different for every case.in which we weren't watching
Oh, yes - "all swans we have seen are white, therefore all swans are white". Or, as the turkey argued on the day before Thanksgiving, "In every instance of a day any of us has ever seen, the man has fed us twice. Therefore he'll continue to do so forever".
Really, what you're proposing is the old teleogical argument [wikipedia.org] (AKA the argument from design), and you do this via a rather old-fashioned and weak inductive reasoning. Try reading some introduction to philosophy and find out about the problem of induction [wikipedia.org]. R
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Perhaps it's unclear to you what I'm saying. I'm NOT saying that nothing ever changes and there are no exceptions. Consider this set of statements:
Every ant we've ever seen has six legs.
I believe that every any we haven't inspected has 7 legs, because once upon a time someone said that was possible.
I'm saying that's extremely unscientific reasoning. I didn't say "no ant anywhere has seven legs". I said it's unscientific to assume without evidence that every case we haven't observed is the opposite of ev
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To be clear, if you want to believe that every unseen ant has seven legs, that's fine. I have no interest in arguing the point. You can take that as an article of blind faith that every uninspected ant has seven legs. That's fine with me.
You can, by blind faith, believe that every complex mechanism, system, and system of systems for which you didn't witness their creation just kinda happened. By accident. That's fine. I have no interest in arguing with you about your faith.
Your faith that all ants have
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In every observed case of a complex mechanism being created to fit a need, that mechanism was designed
If by "created to fit a need" you mean "designed", then your statement is true, but also a tautology. If you don't consider evolution to be "design" then your statement is incorrect because the vast majority of complex mechanisms we've observed are evolved biological mechanisms rather than "designed" ones. If you do consider evolution to be "design", then we're back around to tautology territory.
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You've watched complex organisms evolve? Wow! How did you observe that?
Or are you saying that you guess that's what happens when you don't observe. Although every time you DO observe the creation of any complex system, you also observe a person creating it.
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I've seen algorithms designed to work on evolutionary principles work to solve real problems. That demonstrates that the principles are sound. In nature itself, natural selection has definitely been observed although I'm sure that you'll argue that the traits that become dominant were there all along. Mutation, however is definitely a real thing. Many types of mutation have been observed to occur in various types of organism. We observe viruses and bacteria mutating all the time. Some of those mutations qui
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So the answer is no, such an event as never been observed. You've seen things that you think are consistent with the possiblity. That's one explanation that isn't obviously ruled out. Kinda like if you hear hoofbeats, it could be zebras. Zebras would be consistent with the evidence of hoofbeat sounds.
Another explanation that is also just as consistent with the observable facts (you know, the science) is that most/all/some unobserved events happen in the same way that all of the observed events do! Look
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So the answer is no, such an event as never been observed.
The answer is actually that it has been observed, but only in short lifespan simple organisms with a high tolerance for surviving mutation because we've only had the theory of evolution for about 160 years and we've only really understood DNA for about 67 years, so we haven't exactly had much opportunity to witness complete genetic speciation through mutation in complex animal. We have definitely witnessed it though. You'll really have to be specific about what evidence you would actually accept.
You've seen things that you think are consistent with the possiblity.
Ye
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> Not sure what your point here is exactly. You can consider that a form of design, certainly, but that's mostly just messing around with phenotypes. Mutations in the hybrids can certainly lead to speciation
There's no random mutation necessary - you cross a orange and a pomelo, you get a grapefruit. You cross an orange and citron, you get a lemon. You cross a key lime with a lemon, you get a Persian lime. No need to guess, you can try it out yourself and see that it works. Not "random mutations might"
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There's no random mutation necessary - you cross a orange and a pomelo, you get a grapefruit. You cross an orange and citron, you get a lemon. You cross a key lime with a lemon, you get a Persian lime. No need to guess, you can try it out yourself and see that it works. Not "random mutations might", you follow the recipe, on purpose, and you get the result you intended.
You're oversimplifying here quite a bit. It doesn't work like a recipe. The genus Citrus has 18 chromosomes. When you breed them together you get a hybrid, but you're going to have 9 chromosomes from each parent, selected randomly from one strand or the other. So, there are something like 262,144 possible genetic offspring between any two given Citrus fruits. The real number may be lower because on of the parents might have some chromosomes that are identical to the other chromosome in the double helix, how
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Thanks very much for the discussion. I'm in a crappy mood, irritable, because my doctor has me on multiple steroids. For that reason, I'm going to limit my reply, so as to hopefully avoid being an asshole, or sounding like an asshole. I do appreciate the conversation.
> should note that the Siberian Husky is very specifically not a different species than other dogs. However, if you think of it as just a dog, rather than its breed, then it's certainly speciated from other varieties of canids. It happened
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Regardless of definition of "species", clearly a Siberian Husky is different thing than a fox right?
The simple answer to that is yes. On the other hand, classification of living things is about sets. We all learned kingdom->phylum->class->order->family->genus->species. Then below that we have breed. So, to extend your argument, a Siberian Husky is clearly a different thing than a Pug or a Chihuahua as well. Unless by "thing" we mean species, then a Siberian Husky is the same thing as a pug or a Chihuahua. We could also say that a Husky is a Spitz, so we could say that a Husky is the sam
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> Off the top of your head, do you know how bubble wrap is made? When I first pondered that question I came up with several possible ways it could be made and looked up how it's actually made after. My main theory on how it's probably made was basically correct.
Was your main theory "the molecules randomly arrange themselves that way, for no particular reason"?
Probably not. Probably your theory was that someone designed it for a purpose, then passed those designs along machinery other beings that actuall
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I'll just add that whenever I get time to look up a video about bubble wrap, when I see the machine that is HOW the bubble is made, I personally won't assume the machine came about randomly and just happened to make bubble wrap. Seeing the how, I'll suspect there is still a who and a why.
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Was your main theory "the molecules randomly arrange themselves that way, for no particular reason"?
No. Why would it be? It's clearly a manmade product of fairly low structural complexity. Everything I know makes it obvious that it was made with machines that formed sheets of plastic and stuck them together. When I look at the vastly more complex anatomy of a mammal, it's obvious that it's based on the same basic structure as other mammals. Generally all of the same bones and muscle groups and organs are there. Some bones have atrophied in some cases, and some bones have fused or reshaped or been duplicat
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I'll just add that whenever I get time to look up a video about bubble wrap, when I see the machine that is HOW the bubble is made, I personally won't assume the machine came about randomly and just happened to make bubble wrap. Seeing the how, I'll suspect there is still a who and a why.
Of course you won't, because it's obviously man-made. Chances are good that the video you found is even titled something like "how bubble wrap is made". Sort of a dead giveaway. Maybe consider something trickier. Like if you find a stone that appears to be a stone arrowhead. Lots of kids find interesting rocks and like to think that they're stone arrowheads, but they usually turn out to just be pointy rocks that aren't made by anyone for any particular purpose with the how being that natural processes just
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Btw, thanks for the bubble wrap video idea.
It was a relaxing way to end a stressful day, so I could sleep.
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It's a good hope for the distance future. To conquer death in that manner would be the greatest achievement. Ever. Simple as that. But I do not see any way it will be possible in his lifetime, and there is on the faintest possibility of it in mine.
It's certainly possible in theory. Merely an engineering challenge. But it requires advancements in imaging, computational neurology and computer engineering that are so far in advance of anything available today, we can only begin to speculate on how they might b
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Perhaps he's one of those people who thinks that if your axe handle breaks and you replace it, and then your axehead breaks and you replace it, you still have an axe.
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Of course you still have an axe, maybe you meant to say, the same axe
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You're right, of course, but I actually omitted that word on purpose. I'm not sure remaining the same has to necessarily be on one's immortal agenda. At some point, the upgrade process might sacrifice sameness (change who/what "I" means) in exchange for performance or durability/reliability or something. Wouldn't you like to smugly tell someone, some day, "I've gotten 2415 times smarter since then"?
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Perhaps he's one of those people who thinks that if your axe handle breaks and you replace it, and then your axehead breaks and you replace it, you still have an axe.
Heh, the old Ship of Theseus [wikipedia.org] paradox; I'd like to point out that you yourself do get parts replaced all the time, for example every time you cut your hair and it grows back. Are you still the same person you were when you went to the barber?
I think Terry Pratchett put it very well in The Fifth Elephant:
This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a l
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> Someday, the scientist hopes he can exist completely outside his physical body, with his personality, traits and knowledge downloaded on to a machine.
Why does a scientist [...] believe that he is any more than his physical body?
What you should be asking yourself is, "What is your physical body?"
The scientific answer is that it is a complex biological machine built of smaller biological machines (cells).
Now we are talking about transistioning from a biological entity toward become a non-biological entity.
The new question to ask yourself is, "What if one-by-one the functionality of those smaller machines were replaced by non-biological mechanisms performing the same task?"
If it functionality behaves in an identical manner throughout
kudos for a step in the right direction (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately he (and I) were born a few generations too early for this stuff. He'll have a somewhat improved quality of life. For someone facing a locked-in-body situation, that's a VERY big deal. However, the idea of him installed in a better-than-human cyborg shell, ain't gonna happen in our lifetime or my kids lifetime. Maybe 3 generations from now. Mmmmmmmaybe if we're lucky, but if I had to bet I would put my money on the 1-2 century time frame. I actually know how actual research makes actual progress. It's just not that fast.
Nothing but respect. Make the most of it, buddy! For the good of the species!
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I don't think it'll be no progress for 3 generations (60-80 years) then BAM you have it. Also, we can't take this progress for granted unless there's a big push for it, of which he is clearly a part of. Probably, the way medicine in general evolves, some advance may buy someone only an extra 10 years (or extra 10 appreciated years), but then in that 10 years there may be some other advance. So it can be a race. I respect him for running bravely.
No such thing as an "incurable disease". (Score:2)
It's just a term born out of god complex arrogance.
In reality, it's a disease we cannot cure *yet*, because, and that is what such god complex people would never admit, *we don't know how, yet*.
And the reason calling it "incurable" is harmful, is because it terminates thinking about how it could be cured. Like "god did it" terminates scientific curiosity.
And that is what breeds half-assed pseudo-cures that merely hide the symptoms, and should only be treated as temporary stopgaps. From cyborg bodies to bloo
Mabye just nutritional -- too much selenium? (Score:2)
https://www.drfuhrman.com/elea... [drfuhrman.com]
"Selenium. There is evidence that high selenium levels are linked to diabetes, high triglycerides, prostate cancer, cardiovascular disease, and impaired immune and thyroid function. A healthy nutritarian diet contains adequate selenium, so selenium supplementation is not advised. For people eating a conventional diet with plenty of processed foods, studies have shown that selenium supplementation may have some protective effects, however these studies also show more detrimen
No, it's not. (Score:2)
Barefoot, when normal people say that a disease is incurable, the qualifier "given our current state of technology" is implied. The simple statement that a disease is incurable is not, in and of itself, a prophesy that it will never be curable. It is just a practical avoidance of needless qualifiers that are already obvious to everyone.
There is no god-complex behind such a statement, just practical brevity. Any arrogance here is just projection on your part.
It should be equally obvious that diseases that
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I don't think you realize what a disease is. It's indicative of something that has happened and it can't be fixed. For example Covid-19. Covid-19 is the disease you get from the Sars-cov-2 virus. The virus has caused damage to the lungs via blood clots and now parts of the lung are dead. Dead is dead. You can't ever get that back. You can live with it. Same with heart disease. You can't reverse that. Same with Kidney Disease.
That's the high level view. There's a lot more to it than that. Many kinds of disea
An exoskeleton cannot replace internal muscles (Score:2)
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Or just an extra bionic hand to squeeze one of those face bag breathing things [google.com]
Too earl (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s sadly too early to blow money on cyborg tech, we need to develop artificial muscle technology first. We need to develop something that is at least as energy efficient and compact as human muscle. Note, human muscle arenâ(TM)t even the best muscle in nature so this shouldnâ(TM)t be considered asking for much. We are spending very little money on artificial muscle, bulky and noisy motors are useless for cyborg or exoskeleton technology. Why do you think nobody has yet developed a hand
The Russians beat him... (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
sick stuff
Boomers (Score:1)
Determined to outdo themselves at every step in their quest to have it all, and make everything about them. Nothing new here, just another version of the same damn story I've been hearing for the entirety of my 46 years. It's never not been about them and their gargantuan hubris.
API Access? (Score:2)
I'd like to see the neural link going in, and the physical manifestations (move servo, draw this image on the screen) going out. It would be super interesting to see what type of abstractions will be created to make programming in this environment easy, especially if I can get API access. I have a feeling that it's going to be like learning how to walk all over again, while his neural net made out of actual neurons is going to be doing the learning.
TV (Score:2)
I bet it will cost >> $6 million
So, nothing. (Score:2)
So, it's just a bunch of "eventually". AI not advanced enough to accomplish most of that. Good luck, though. While everyone else scrabbles to survive, you can chill in your exoskeleton. Yay, wealth.
Not the first to want it. (Score:2)
cool (Score:2)
sounds awesome. hope it works out for him!