Brooders

This sounds like 1960s sci fi, but it’s actually modern day research.

The Vanderbilt Bionic Arm website has a video containing interviews with the researchers and shows demos of it working.
The site claims:

Unconventional power source could revolutionize the design of prosthetic limbs

The video won my attention by starting out with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader dueling in “Empire Strikes Back”, then showing Luke’s prosthesis. Anyway, back to reality, the reason for “rocket power” is the use of gas to extend and contract these artificial muscles. Apparently, state of the art robotics for this size, is 1/6 the strength capability of human muscle. So their use of gas to rocket power things gets better size to strength performance. Not surprisingly, some of the funding is coming from the military, whose workers are prone to losing limbs in battle.

See also Rocket-powered mechanical arm could revolutionize prosthetics.

( Via Livejournal Cyberpunk )

Recently, I’ve been thinking the harder it is to describe you’re job to someone and for them to understand .. the less job satisfaction you have. That satisfaction might have to do with your purpose in life (ack .. that does sound a bit touchy feely), but it’s just a hypothesis that requires some more pondering. Let’s saunter over to a interesting look at society in Metropolis now. The main gist “By 2008 more than 3.3 billion of the earth’s 6.6 billion people will be urbanised, rising to 5 billion in 2030″.

Back to my ramblings then, many days when I travel home looking in to massive office buildings with desks, I ask “What do all these people do?”. What do so many people need to do in an office that doesn’t actually produce goods, or is this required to produce all the services we consume. It seems that people’s purpose is now hedonism .. doing things just for your own interest. Previously we’ve noticed, in Australia at least, it seems that there are less religious people .. so what do people exist for when that’s taken out of the picture. Probably, it started around the time of the Agrarian/Indutrial revolution we were moving away from actually being solely responsible for our own survival (i.e. creating our own food and shelter). People are abstracted nowadays from growing and harvesting food (i.e the supermarket as the magic food making machine.)

But I digress … Back to this article’s social commentary. It doesn’t seem like we ever got the low life in Cyberpunk’s “High Tech, Low life” but according to this article it may still happen.

The above article mentions:

The report warns, however, that if unaddressed the growth of urbanisation will mean growth in slums and poverty, as well as a rise in attempted migration from poor regions.

It seems that Technology has outpaced the detrimental social effects, for the moment.

The speed and scale of inevitable global urbanisation is so great most countries will not be remotely prepared for the impact it will have, according to Thoraya Obaid, the executive director of the UN Population Fund. “In human history we have never seen urban growth like this. It is unprecedented.”

What I wonder though is as people get more “urbanised” usually they have less kids. At what point will we have people electing not to have children at all, one generation .. maybe two? Who knows. So what will people actually do in the city? More desk work? So what does that mean for urbanisation .. will we have people in small high density living, without children at some point? So whose running the rural parts (i.e. food production) for everyone? I guess that’s massively specialised farming machinery and a few workers to run that. But what will all these urban workers do? My guess .. is more and more in the services and entertainment area. Maybe we’ll see a new outbreak of small businesses servicing high density urban areas .. but that’s probably not much different to what we have now.

“If we do not, [in reference to the necessity to plan for massive urbanisation] and do not find education, jobs, and houses for people in cities, then these populations will become destructive, to themselves and others.”

Ahh .. back to the prophetic doom and gloom about society.

I wonder, if this massive urbanisation happens, whether we’ll end up with hippy or religious communities for people to exist in, where you work for you community to survive. Maybe, we’ll get High Tech hippies growing Hydroponic food and banding together in the outskirts?

( Via Livejournal Cyberpunk Community – Urbanised humanity. )

So, a couple of weeks after Udon and Artificial Machines, and a bit further into Age of Spritual Machines and I’m starting to change my mind on the topic … perhaps this AI and computational power is making a bit more sense.

So far I’m really really enjoying The Age of Spiritual Machines. It’s a pretty out there book, on par with most cyberpunk science fiction .. just that it’s mostly research fact.

A couple of tidbits so far that I like:

• Do people think or just calculate – most people will argue that machines calculate
• What will computing power in 2020 be like, (will we have strong AI) …
• Computational power of computing has been increasing since we’ve had computing, Moore’s Law is still at work (even without bizarro Nanotechnolgy or Quantum computing)
• Computers learn the opposite direction to people. Children learn language via sounds, then reading and writing symbols – while Computers can output and read symbols well before they can understand spoken lanuguage.

A thought occured to me while I’ve been reading. Some of my disbelief is probably due to the yuck factor, or self preservation context of my thoughts. Perhaps even pride. Surely the human mind is unique. If my mind could be transfered would it really be me? How would I know that I had been transferred to the new hardware?

But then it occured to me … I’ve gone under a general anaesthetic before .. how do I know it was me that woke up afterwards? I guess if you think of that as being “powered down” and then brought back, then the feeling of transferring conciousness to new hardware isn’t as hard to swallow.

Every night, we sleep (power down?) and come back in the morning with the same memories. So is the whole mind downloading/upload to new hardware just a technology issue? That would be freaky, yes .. upgrade me to new body … wake up the next day in a new “skin”.

Kurzweil seems to think so.

The book is a philosophical rollercoaster. My other current started reading book pile consists of “Future Shock”, The God Delusion, and “The Tipping Point” feels like they’re all subsets of this book. Future Shock because it looks at Acceleration Change, and people having more difficulty adapting … but I think Kurzweil is describing technology as an aid to this problem, augmenting humans for the better. The God Delusion is similar due to the absence of any Supernatural god, and the authors strong belief that evolution is how people became what we are today. It’s almost like this book is the God Delusion, just with a mix of technological expectations built in. The tipping point (although I’ve only just read 20 pages or so) is sometimes the irrational reason for why things occur, especially with the irrationality of people.

The whole mind uploading and downloading thing (often core theme to Cyberpunk fiction) is quite an interesting issue, which the book touches on. In the novel “Altered Carbon”, certion special forces soldiers were trained to be downloaded into new bodies and beamed across to wherever they were needed. Not only that, but most people had a real time backup of themselves in their “Cortical Stack”(Storage device somewhere in the back of their skull), as long as that wasn’t destroyed .. you could be brought back. So if you had a heart attack, got shot, bled to death you were capable of resurrection. The book was good in that respect, serious psychological trauma still required therapy once you were brought back. There were also laws against uploading yourself (or mind) into multiple bodies .. now that’s a mind bending topic. The Age of Spiritual machines also covers this very same topic, if you could non-invasively (and non-destructrively) scan and copy someones mind, and upload to another body .. both of them would claim to be the same person.

This book, probably best described as transhumanist, is almost cyberpunk science fiction. If I had read this when authored in 1999, I think I would have called it that. Now, it feels like this is actually in the realms of possibility.

I get the feeling, that as I keep reading the book this “Udon and Machines” series will continue.