Lifeboat Foundation

Are we ready for cyborgs? More specifically, people with implants that enhance beyond the superficially cosmetic and into the realms of evolved beings?

Jorge Pelegrín-Borondo (Universidad de La Rioja), Eva Reinares-Lara (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos) and Cristina Olarte-Pascual (Universidad de La Rioja), in cooperation with Professor Kiyoshi Murata, from Meiji University in Tokyo, believe society is ready for this melding of (hu)man and machine.

The Spanish academics’ report “Assessing the acceptance of technological implants (the cyborg): Evidences and challenges” has just been released in the scientific journal Computers in Human Behavior. The report shows a significant proportion of those surveyed are comfortable with the coming cyborg modifications. The group are also collaborating with other academics across the world, including Professor Kiyoshi Murata, for a comparative cross-cultural study roundtable at the 2017 ETHICOMP conference this summer in Turin, Italy.

Continue reading “Are We Ready for Cyborgs? The Tech Is on Its Way” »

A new well written but not very favorable write-up on #transhumanism. Despite this, more and more publications are tackling describing the movement and its science. My work is featured a bit.

On the eve of the 20th century, an obscure Russian man who had refused to publish any of his works began to finalize his ideas about resurrecting the dead and living forever. A friend of Leo Tolstoy’s, this enigmatic Russian, whose name was Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, had grand ideas about not only how to reanimate the dead but about the ethics of doing so, as well as about the moral and religious consequences of living outside of Death’s shadow. He was animated by a utopian desire: to unite all of humanity and to create a biblical paradise on Earth, where we would live on, spurred on by love. He was an immortalist: one who desired to conquer death through scientific means.

Despite the religious zeal of his notions—which a number of later Christian philosophers unsurprisingly deemed blasphemy—Fyodorov’s ideas were underpinned by a faith in something material: the ability of humans to redevelop and redefine themselves through science, eventually becoming so powerfully modified that they would defeat death itself. Unfortunately for him, Fyodorov—who had worked as a librarian, then later in the archives of Ministry of Foreign Affairs—did not live to see his project enacted, as he died in 1903.

Continue reading “Transhumanism: More Nightmare Than Dream?” »

Humanoid robots may enhance growth of musculoskeletal tissue grafts for tissue transplant applications.

Over the past decade, exciting progress has been made in the development of humanoid robots. The significant potential future value of humanoids includes applications ranging from personal assistance to medicine and space exploration. In particular, musculoskeletal humanoids (such as Kenshiro and Eccerobot) were developed to interact with humans in a safer and more natural way (1, 2). They aim to closely replicate the detailed anatomy of the human musculoskeletal system including muscles, tendons, and bones.

With their structures activated by artificial muscles, musculoskeletal humanoids have the ability to mimic more accurately the multiple degrees of freedom and the normal range of forces observed in human joints. As a result, it is not surprising that they offer new opportunities in science and medicine. Here, we suggest that musculoskeletal robots may assist in the growth of musculoskeletal tissue grafts for tissue transplant applications.

Scientists have figured out how to inject a conducting solution into a rose cutting, and have it spontaneously form wires throughout its stem, leaves, and petals to create fully functioning supercapacitors for energy storage.

The so-called e-Plant was able to be charged hundreds of times without any loss on the performance, and the team behind the invention says it could allow us to one day create fuel cells or autonomous energy systems inside living plants.

“A few years ago, we demonstrated that it is possible to create electronic plants, ‘power plants’, but we have now shown that the research has practical applications,” says one of the team, Magnus Berggren from Linköping University in Sweden.

Continue reading “This ‘Cyborg Rose’ Grows Functioning Electronic Circulatory Inside Its Stem and Leaves” »

Wiring our brains up to computers could have a host of exciting applications – from controlling robotic prosthetics with our minds to restoring sight by feeding camera feeds directly into the vision center of our brains.

Most brain-computer interface research to date has been conducted using electroencephalography (EEG) where electrodes are placed on the scalp to monitor the brain’s electrical activity. Achieving very high quality signals, however, requires a more invasive approach.

Integrating electronics with living tissue is complicated, though. Probes that are directly inserted into the gray matter have been around for decades, but while they are capable of highly accurate recording, the signals tend to degrade rapidly due to the buildup of scar tissue. Electrocorticography (ECoG), which uses electrodes placed beneath the skull but on top of the gray matter, has emerged as a popular compromise, as it achieves higher-accuracy recordings with a lower risk of scar formation.

Continue reading “This Neural Probe Is So Thin, The Brain Doesn’t Know It’s There” »

Slate book columnist Mark O’Connell’s new book To Be a Machine, which is specifically about #transhumanism, is out tomorrow. So there’s a ton of reviews out in major media. The last chapter in the book is about my work. Here are 3 reviews just out on the book. ALSO, I highly encourage you to BUY the book to help transhumanism grow. Mark’s book is the first book specifically on the movement with this kind of international attention, and the better the book does the first week, the more people will know about transhumanism: http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/25/14730958/transhumanism-mar…biohackers &

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-rev…e34127614/ &

http://www.themillions.com/2017/02/mark-oconnell-doesnt-want…rview.html

Continue reading “‘They want to be literally machines’: Writer Mark O’Connell on the rise of transhumanists” »

Since the early seventies, scientists have been developing brain-machine interfaces; the main application being the use of neural prosthesis in paralyzed patients or amputees. A prosthetic limb directly controlled by brain activity can partially recover the lost motor function. This is achieved by decoding neuronal activity recorded with electrodes and translating it into robotic movements. Such systems however have limited precision due to the absence of sensory feedback from the artificial limb. Neuroscientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, asked whether it was possible to transmit this missing sensation back to the brain by stimulating neural activity in the cortex. They discovered that not only was it possible to create an artificial sensation of neuroprosthetic movements, but that the underlying learning process occurs very rapidly. These findings, published in the scientific journal Neuron, were obtained by resorting to modern imaging and optical stimulation tools, offering an innovative alternative to the classical electrode approach.

Motor function is at the heart of all behavior and allows us to interact with the world. Therefore, replacing a lost limb with a robotic prosthesis is the subject of much research, yet successful outcomes are rare. Why is that? Until this moment, brain-machine interfaces are operated by relying largely on visual perception: the robotic arm is controlled by looking at it. The direct flow of information between the brain and the machine remains thus unidirectional. However, movement perception is not only based on vision but mostly on proprioception, the sensation of where the limb is located in space. “We have therefore asked whether it was possible to establish a bidirectional communication in a brain-machine interface: to simultaneously read out neural activity, translate it into prosthetic movement and reinject sensory feedback of this movement back in the brain”, explains Daniel Huber, professor in the Department of Basic Neurosciences of the Faculty of Medicine at UNIGE.

Providing artificial sensations of prosthetic movements.

Continue reading “Brain-machine interfaces: Bidirectional communication at last” »

Team OB just won the Robotics for Good Award in Dubai. Over 1,600 technologies for good applied and after competing against the top 10 best assistive technologies the judges chose our bionic hands! Now we have the funding to push our hands through the final stages of medical testing and finally get them to everyone who needs one.

Not too shock by this given other transplant patient’s stories of memories, etc.

There are a lot of outrageous claims being made within the halls of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Whether exaggerations, wishful thinking, the dreams of the egocentric and megalomaniacal to be immortal, or just drumming up funding for a never-ending round of “scientific investigation,” the year 2045 seems to always be cited as a target date.

Continue reading “Company Claims Brain Transplants Could Bring Back the Dead by 2045” »