GREGOR SAMSA SMILES: How Severed Cockroach Legs Could Help Us ‘Fully Rebuild’ Human Bodies.
Hugh Herr, Ph.D., co-founder of MIT’s Center for Bionics, is one of them. The first prostheses he designed were his own, after doctors told him he’d never rock climb again following a double amputation below the knees. Today, he researches ways to make replacement limbs more cyborg-like and integrated with their human hosts. His ultimate goal is what he calls embodiment, where “the electromechanics are so married to human physiology you can’t remove them.” This means a prosthetic limb would no longer be a tool you can take off, like a pair of glasses, but another part of your body that responds without you having to even think about it, more like a pacemaker. “In the future,” Herr tells Popular Mechanics, “when a person has cancer, we will be able to fully rebuild their body.”
That may sound like a lofty goal, but we’re rapidly getting closer to realizing it. When it comes to getting human physiology and mechanical parts to play nicely together, there are three main interfaces, Herr says:
- The mechanical, or how seamlessly the external limb attaches to biological components while remaining effective;
- The neural, or how to connect the prosthetic part to the brain and both give and receive feedback from it; and
- Cutaneous feedback, which largely focuses on proprioception, or the sense of knowing where in space a limb is.
Right now, most commercial prosthetics are controlled by electric signals transmitted via sensors to the muscles and nerves adjacent to the amputation site. While capable of somewhat sophisticated movements, these devices often lack a lot in terms of control and natural sensation, e.g., being able to feel that your foot is on level ground.
Reading between the lines, Kremlinology style, this sort of article, appearing at the beginning of an election year, can only mean one thing: leftist scientists are once again hoping to advance exoskeleton technology sufficiently quickly, to allow Hillary Clinton yet another shot at campaigning this year, if Biden’s adrenochrome dosages aren’t sufficiently powerful enough to get him through the campaign season. Wake up, sheeple!
When Will We Stop Worrying About Whether Old Entertainment Will Offend People?“Not only is the BFI warning that mid-20th-century spy thrillers might be offensive to modern snowflakes, but it’s also claiming that audiences found these movies offensive when they first hit theaters.”
Vrbov memories of Janko Korhel chasing the bicycle wheel … circa 1965
“We are not any smarter, kinder, wiser, or more moral than people who lived ninety years ago. We are just as likely to… remain willfully ignorant of darkness as it’s dawning” — “But we know something they didn’t know: we know that the Holocaust is possible,” says Masha Gessen
The podcast “This Is Technology Ethics” with John Danaher (Galway) and Sven Nyholm (LMU Munich) has wrapped up — its 10-episodes cover a range of topics, and concludes with an audience Q&A
“Our ability to weigh the expected good versus the expected bad [in the distant future] collapses either to zero or to so near zero as to not be worth the costs and risks of thinking in that time frame” — Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) defends the “washout argument” against longtermism
“The quantum Universe could actually be more deterministic than a classical one” — Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD) explains, in Nature
“In some ways, philosophy is more amenable to Dyslexics than other humanities fields; in other ways, it is more inimical to us” — an interview with John Henry Reilly, a philosophy PhD student with dyslexia
“The book could see me like a mirror at that moment and describe it all right back” — philosopher and legal scholar Mala Chatterjeei (Columbia) on how David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” saves her from suicide
“Pose as a figure (real or fictional or mythological) from the Greco-Roman world, who is in the position of applying for a real job in our real world of 2023” — a contest at Antigone