Category Archives: Sci-Fi
The Luke Arm
In 2005, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sought out the greatest inventor in the country. Too many soldiers were coming home from Iraq with missing limbs, and DARPA was determined to give them the best treatment and technology available. They approached prolific inventor, Dean Kamen, and gave him the challenge of building a lightweight prosthetic arm within 2 years that would have enough dexterity to allow the wearer to pick up and a grape without damaging it. Kamen was initially deterred by the ambitious timetable, but eventually decided it had to be done. At his DEKA Research labs, Kamen and his team developed what they called the “Luke Arm” within 18 months. The device is named after Luke Skywalker who, after losing a duel with Darth Vader in “The Empire Strikes Back”, was given a prosthetic arm that appeared so tightly integrated with his real body that he could trivially operate his new hand just as he did before.
Tight integration means there must be many ways for the user to easily send commands to the prosthesis so that it becomes a natural extension of their body. The Luke Arm can be controlled by nerves, muscles, and foot pedals. A new user can comfortably control the artificial limb after just 10 hours of practice. The arm, loaded with processors, also has haptic feedback. Pressure sensors on the fingers send signals back in the form of vibrations, so the wearer can tell how hard they are grasping an object (a requirement for passing DARPA’s “grape test”). So far, DARPA has invested over $70m in the venture. The arm will be commercialized once the FDA conducts clinical trials and grants approval.
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The Replicators
In 1970, noting the extreme cost of space exploration, the physicist Freeman Dyson proposed a wild idea: send a machine into space that is capable of building copies of itself from materials it finds. This would provide an unlimited production and exploration capacity for a finite cost.
Although just a thought experiment, Dyson’s idea is not as crazy as it sounds. In the early 1980s, NASA funded a series of investigations into cheap space colonization which involved building self-replicating factories on the moon. It’s theoretically possible, but robot factories building more robot factories poses a huge maintenance problem. After all, you’d need an army of repair robots to fix things when they break down. And, who repairs the repair robots?
Eric Drexler, a proponent of nanotechnology, describes a more elegant solution. He envisions tiny, molecular “assemblers” that can build copies of themselves and other items of greater complexity — a bottom-up version of the self-replicating factory idea. He also notes that such technology, if not tamed properly, could replicate out of control consuming all the resources on the planet resulting in the so called Grey Goo Scenario.
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| Copyright Shane Willis |
Thought experiments aside, some researchers have succeeded in building primitive, yet practical self-replicating machines. Adrian Bowyer from the University of Bath developed a rapid prototyping machine called RepRap that can make most of the parts necessary to build… another RepRap machine.
Bowyer’s RepRap project is now replicating “in the wild”. On November 30, 2008, the first user outside the lab used one of the machines to produce and sell a set of RepRap parts to someone else. Being a prototyping machine, RepRap is not limited to copying itself. It has been used to create ordinary objects including a coathook, a pair of sandals, and a fly swatter. The potential for such a machine is vast and is fortunately not likely to turn the world into goo anytime soon.
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The Rapture of the Geeks
If you plot all the important events that have occurred in the history of planet Earth on a chart, you’ll notice an interesting trend. The time between these events appears to get shorter and shorter as you get closer to the present day.
According to a group of scientists led by Ray Kurzweil, around the year 2045, the time between major technological advances will be so short that humanity will experience a cataclysm called the technological singularity. Machines will become more intelligent than humans and start to program themselves to become even more intelligent, creating a sort-of “intelligence explosion.” Nanotechnology will be completely integrated into our brains, enhancing us into a trans-human state. Kurzweil has even founded a non-profit institution, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, to investigate the the impending phenomenon and gathers various scientists and futurists together each year at the Singularity Summit.
Naturally, there are many skeptics. The Pulitzer-Prize winning academic, Douglas Hofstadter, who regularly attends the Singularity Summit has said, “I don’t think it’s inconceivable that some kind of singularity entity could eventually have superior intelligence to humans, but I’d be very surprised if anything remotely like this happened in the next 100 to 200 years.” The futurist, Theodore Modis, has claimed that technological innovation is actually in decline. Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, makes some interesting observations of Kurzweil’s charts of the singularity: according to the mathematical model, the singularity should be happening NOW, not in 40 years. Further, one could make the same statement at any point in history. During the industrial revolution, for example, one could have claimed that a singularity should have been happening THEN.
The major claim from the Singularity Institute is that it is not possible to make predictions about what will happen after the singularity occurs. Once humans “cross over,” we will forever be changed, integrated with technology, absorbed by it, or destroyed by it. No one can know. However, Kurzweil believes we will become immortal. Our minds will no longer be dependent on our bodies. We will be able to download, migrate, enhance, or repair our minds at will, forever living within the cradle of high technology.
This idea, along with the insistence that the world is fundamentally going to change on a specific future date, has caused some to point out similarities between the technological singularity and The Rapture, and so it has been called “The Rapture of the Geeks.” Kurzweil is considered a longevity expert and has written about it in his book “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.” The idea is, if you can just live just long enough to make it to the singularity, then you’ll live forever.
It should come as little surprise that the idea of the technological singularity is based heavily in science fiction. Vernor Vinge wrote several sci-fi novels about the concept and first introduced the term “singularity” to describe it (taking it from the field of physics). Its a compelling idea, and the dystopian future of robots taking over is such a familiar theme that the idea of the singularity is easy to accept on the surface. It’s clear we live in a unique time period in the history of the planet. But, whether such publications should sit on the shelf of popular science or science fiction is still open to debate.
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