Singularity Hub

Wow!  Physorg.com reports that an artificial retina has achieved real success in bringing limited sight to the blind.  The Department of Energy estimates that 6 million Americans are blind because their retinas have been damaged by diseases like macular degeneration.  Worldwide they estimate that 25 million people have been made blind and that this number will rise to 50 million by 2020.

A company called Second Sight Medical Products in partnership with a large consortium headed by the Department of Energy is currently testing its second generation model, called the Argus II, on more than 20 individuals.  Patients that were completely blind are able to see moving objects, read very large print, and recognize several other visual cues once implanted with the Argus II artificial retina.  From the article:

A patient named Terry spotted the shadow of his 18 year-old son as he passed
by on a sidewalk. “It was the first time I’d seen anything of him since
he was 5 years old,” Terry told Artificial Retina News, a publication
of the Artificial Retina Project.

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Marcus Wohlsen from the Associated Press came out with an article on December 26, 2008 describing the emergence of do it yourself genetic engineers (biohackers) working from their basements and garages.  Biohacker Meredith Patterson is highlighted in her efforts to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.  Biohackers like Patterson may or many not have professional or educational backgrounds in biology, yet with the availabilty of affordable tools and dna samples almost anyone can now give genetic engineering a try.

Wohlsen’s article has caused quite a sensation across the net.  Years from now the article very well may be seen as the catalyst that moved amateur genetic engineering from unknown hobby to full fledged global phenomenon.  A few quick searches on google shows that the internet is virtually devoid of websites that specifically cater to the genetic engineering hobbyist.  Wohlsen’s article will only accelerate the inevitable mushrooming of several such sites in the coming years.

The ethical repercussions and potential dangers associated with amateur genetic engineering are clearly a concern for all of us.  But the simple fact is that the rise of amateur genetic engineering, like any emerging technology, cannot be stopped.  Rather than oppose this movement and push it into the much more dangerous world of black market activity, we need to embrace the movement with sensible regulation and healthy, open debate.

Carolyn Y. Johnson at the Boston Globe published a more comprehensive story in September 2008 that is also good reading.

Singularity Hub is proud to deliver the web’s most comprehensive coverage and analysis of the Singularity Summit 2008. The Singularity Summit is the premier annual event for those that are interested in the singularity. Below you will find our high level summary, followed by a link to a much more detailed description with pictures.

On Saturday October 25, 2008 I attended the Singularity Summit at the Montgomery Theatre in San Jose, CA. An impressive lineup of speakers, including Ray Kurzweil (de facto singularity advocate), Peter Diamandis (Founder/Chairman of Xprize Foundation), Vernor Vinge (famous science fiction author), and Justin Rattner (CTO of Intel) were on showcase for the roughly 500 attendees. The summit was thought provoking, inspiring, and overall a success.

The summit began promptly at 9:00am and continued throughout the day until 6:00pm with a few breaks in between and a one and a half hour lunch break. Here are the Hub’s major takeaways from the event:

1. When people become believers in a near term singularity (a singularity that may come in their lifetimes) they radically change their behavior in terms of risk tolerance, eating habits, and investment horizon. If large numbers of people begin to believe in a near term singularity this poses the possibility of enormous and potentially dangerous upheavals for society.

2. Even if a true singularity is not reached within our lifetimes the singularity summit reinforces the vision that tremendous technological change beyond our imagining is coming in the next 40 years. In the next 5 years an explosion in interest about the singularity and the pace of accelerating technology may occur.

3. According to Ray Kurzweil, solar energy is an information technology that is experiencing exponential growth. Solar energy production has doubled every year for the last 20 years and is now only 8 doublings away (that is about 10 years!) from providing nearly all of the world’s energy needs. The implications of this trend are huge and warrant careful consideration for the environment, investment, politics, etc.

4. Peter Diamandis announced that the Singularity University (SU) will be launched in the near future. The Hub’s Keith Kleiner will be a founding member of SU and we will have much more to say about SU soon!

5. According to Intel CTO Justin Rattner Intel has a solid roadmap that will ensure that Moore’s law will continue for at least another 10 years, by which time computers will be at least 1,000 times more powerful than today’s computers

6. Virtual worlds will continue to gain traction and functionality as people continue to recognize and leverage the unique advantages that these worlds offer versus the physical world.

7. Computers may be able to beat humans at chess and air hockey, but they are still a long way off from emulating human emotion and social behavior. Demonstrations today of the cutting edge in computer emulation of emotion and social ability were downright pitiful. Of course it is possible that we will make big leaps in the coming years, but today’s demonstrations were not encouraging.

Below is a breakout of the entire Singularity Summit:

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Discover Magazine has just blown me away with a fascinating story on the current state of brain-computer interfaces (BCI).  The story cites numerous projects underway across the globe in which electrodes implanted into the brain are being used to detect and transmit human intentions, and the progress being achieved is incredible.  Here at the Hub we have already seen monkeys that can control prosthetic arms through brain implants.  The story from Discover Magazine shows us that such achievements are just the tip of the iceberg, and that a host of other breakthroughs in the field of BCI are turning up all over the place.

The implications for BCI are absolutely stunning.  Paraplegics will regain the ability to move their own limbs (or prosthetic limbs) when signals from their brains can be extracted and interpreted.  Stroke victims who have retained their consciousness yet lost the ability to speak will regain their voices when signals from their brains are routed to a computer that will synthesize speech.  Normal humans will gain superhuman abilities as their brain is freed of its physical prison, allowing the brain signals that comprise human thought to be projected across a wire or even wirelessly to anywhere on earth or even beyond earth.  Imagine controlling objects anywhere on earth or transmitting thoughts and images to anyone or anything simply by thinking about it.

Many will say that BCI is in its infancy and that we are hundreds or even thousands of years from reaping its benefits, but this type of thinking ignores the reality presented by the story from Discover Magazine.  Paraplegics and monkeys are already controlling prosthetic limbs and computer screens.  Those who cannot speak have already been given a very rudimentary voice.  The next 10 to 30 years is likely to offer advances in BCI beyond most people’s wildest dreams.  Look at these key quotes from the story:

The ultimate aim is not just speech but restoration of full bodily
function. If Kennedy has his way, someday the blind will see and the
paralyzed will walk—and other researchers are racing him to make those
things happen.

Miguel Nicolelis says his quadriplegic sub­jects will walk again—not in 10 or 20 years, but in just a few.

The melding of man and machine appears inevitable, Kennedy believes.
“It’s not hard to imagine that eventually somebody’s brain will be
incorporated into a robotic body,” he says. “It could grant humanity a
kind of immortality and also make us redefine what a human is.”

In a few generations, Nicolelis speculates, brain implants will be
as socially acceptable as breast implants are today. “Implants will
happen in normals when there is a benefit and they are safe,” he
states. He agrees with others that the technology will shape the
evolution of Homo sapiens, and his perspective is unmistakably
philosophical.

Today, he says, we are all in a sense locked-in, but we won’t be for
long. “With these experiments we’ve accomplished something that nobody
has noticed yet: We have freed the brain from the body. We have created
a profound new paradigm for the brain—and not just the disabled brain—to enact its will without the limitations of the biological machinery that we call a body.

“My children probably will see the day when they can sit physically
on a beautiful beach in Brazil but at the same time control a rover on
Mars, experience Mars,” Nicolelis reflects. “Their bodies will be here,
but their brains will be free.”

Related to the IEEE special report on prosthetic arms is a fascinating article on prosthetic limbs that can take their signals directly from the nerves or even the brain of the user. As reported earlier, DARPA has given $30.4 million to initiate two separate prosthetic arm projects. The first project focuses on creating a noninvasive prosthetic arm and is being spearheaded by Deka as reported here. This article focuses on the second project which is aimed at connecting the user’s true intentions to the prosthetic arm either from the brain or from nerves.

One of the major problems with current prosthetic limbs is that they signal in only one direction, yet true human limbs signal on a bidirectional basis. Not only does the brain send signals to the limb to tell it what to do, but the limb sends signals back to the brain about what it is sensing in the form of pressure, temperature, and so on. The brain uses this sensory information to send adaptive instructions to the limb, allowing for the subtle or rapid changes that define true human agility. From the article:

“Sensory feedback for prosthetics is in the embryonic stages. The best mechanism on the market today consists of a vibrating motor that buzzes against the skin more or less intensely to reflect, for instance, such force factors as grip strength. The DARPA project is gunning for much more than that: researchers want an arm that transmits sensation to the user—pressure, texture, even temperature…with 100 sensors that connect the body’s natural neural signals to the mechanical prosthetic arm to create a sensory feedback loop…”

“As it turns out, the degree of control is directly proportional to the invasiveness of the method.”

The researchers are working with different levels of invasive interaction with the user, but there are two major categories of interaction.

The first category is to connect the muscles or nerve fibers that transmit signals from the brain to the limb. Even when a limb is lost, nerve fibers from the brain still exist up to the point where the limb was cutoff and amazingly they still function years after the loss of the limb. By connecting these nerve fibers to the prosthetic arm the signals from the brain to curl a finger or to clench a fist can still be accessed by interpreting the signals being transmitted across these nerve fibers. From the article:

“In a an individual with both limbs, those nerves travel from the spinal cord down the shoulder over the clavicle and then into the armpit, where they connect to about 80,000 nerve fibers that allow the brain to communicate with the arm.”

The second category is to entirely skip the nerve fibers and link directly into the neurons in the brain. From the article:

“Finally, the most extreme solution is meant for people whose bodies no longer offer any means for interfacing to the artificial limb, for whom even nerve-rerouting surgery may not be an option”

“When electrodes penetrate directly into the motor cortex, embedded electronic circuits intercept the motor neurons firing their instructions and, with the help of complex algorithms, translate the related signals into a language that can control the mechanics of the arms.”

In this piece from the IEEE special report on prosthetics we learn about Deka’s amazing noninvasive prosthetic arm. As noted earlier, DARPA gave $30.4 million to fund two projects for the next generation of prosthetic arms, one noninvasive and the other invasive. Deka is pursuing the noninvasive project which does not require any surgical access to anything inside the body such as nerves, muscles, or neurons.

Deka’s next generation prosthetic arm, called the Luke Arm (named in homage to the prosthetic arm used by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars) has overcome many of the signficant problems with the outdated prosthetic arms that are currently available. About the state of current prosthetic arms:

“…after the initial shock of amputation wears off, usually within a year or two, patients stop wearing their prostheses. Even extreme levels of amputation don’t much curb this tendency. Wearing the burdensome prosthetic is simply not justified by the small amount of assistance it provides…”

This accompanying video summarizes the project and is well worth your time!

In Feb 2008 IEEE Spectrum released a fantastic special report on some of the latest work being done on prosthetic arms.

The special report covers a lot of ground, but mostly focuses on DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program:

“The program was created in 2005 to fund the development of two arms. The first initiative, the four-year, US $30.4 million Revolutionizing Prosthetics contract, to be completed in 2009, led by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., seeks a fully functioning, neurally controlled prosthetic arm using technology that is still experimental. The latter, awarded to Deka Research and Development Corp., Kamen’s New Hampshire–based medical products company (perhaps best known for the Segway), is a two-year $18.1 million 2007 effort to give amputees an advanced prosthesis that could be available immediately “for people who want to literally strap it on and go.” Kamen’s team designed the Deka arm to be controlled with noninvasive measures, using an interface a bit like a joystick.”

Because there are only about 6,000 prosthetic arms needed per year, the market has not been big enough to justify the large investment required to make next generation prosthetic arms. As a result it is amazing to note that commercially available prosthetic arm technology has not changed much in 100 years and is stuck in the “stone age”! Meanwhile prosthetic legs have seen significant investment and are extremely advanced and capable today.

The DARPA funding has literally changed the game by providing the investment necessary to propel prosthetic arms into the current era and beyond. In subsequent posts I will highlight some of the more notable aspects of this report.

Michael Chorost published an article in MIT Technology Review about a networked pill from a company called Proteus Biomedical. The pill, called Raisin, releases a sand grain sized microchip into the body in addition to releasing the prescription.

This microchip is activated on contact with water in the body and sends electrical currents through the body as its form of communication. That’s right…no wireless signal, just electrical currents that are picked up by a receiver that is patched onto the body or as a subcutaneous insert.

There are two major advantages that this networked pill will offer. First, it will allow doctors to monitor whether patients are actually taking the medication in the quantity and frequency that they are supposed to by checking the logs from the receiver. Second, doctors can monitor physiological parameters such as heart rate before, during, and after taking the medication to better understand the impact of the medication on the patient. Some quotes from the article:

“…the dosages of drugs used for heart failure are derived from large
clinical trials and may not meet a particular patient’s needs. “Imagine
a situation where drug ingestion is tracked, and heart pressure before,
immediately after, and later are known,” says Saxon. “That represents
real, individualized, tailored drug therapy.”

“So far, Proteus has raised $60 million from investors including the
Carlyle Group and Kaiser Permanente Ventures, and it has filed more
than 250 patents. Clinical trials with human users began earlier this
year, to test the functionality of the IEM and sensors. The company
hopes to have the system on the market in 2011.”

Below is an interesting video of Michael Chorost speaking at Google June 30, 2008. Michael spends about half of the video explaining the amazing cochlear implant that has enabled himself and more than 100,000 deaf people around the world to regain their hearing. In the other half of the video Michael explores the future of man and machine, which is the focus of his upcoming book “World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humans and Machines”. A few interesting themes from the video:

1.  There are only 100,000 people with cochlear implants in the world, yet there are 500,000 deaf people in the United States alone. It really is a shame that the gift of hearing is technically available yet not being given to the millions of deaf people around the world for due to cost and other reasons.

2. Michael describes the internet as a worldwide mind that we are all able to access and update. He explains how he felt disconnected from this “mind” when his blackberry was not functioning for a short period of time. This idea is one of the centerpieces of his upcoming book and is a major theme for all of us to consider as we envision the future of mankind.

3. Michael shows video clips of the incredible advances that are being made in interfacing the human brain with prosthetic limbs. Michael asks us to consider the implications and capabilities that will be unleashed for mankind as our ability to interface directly with the neurons of the brain improves in the coming years. The ability to read minds and the ability to purposely enhance the human body is considered.

Authors@Google: Michael Chorost

The Short:
An IEEE Spectrum report and University of Michigan report tell of a fascinating advance in the development of a tiny microchip that can be implanted into the eye or other parts of the human body. The Phoenix microchip created my Michigan researchers would only require 1/30,000 as much power as comparable chips and would contain a sensor and a cpu enclosed in a 1 cubic millimeter package.

With such a low power microchip it would be feasible to run the chip for up to a year using current thin-film batteries. Countless applications for implants into the eye and other parts of the body would finally become feasible with a microchip that could operate on a battery for such an extended period.

The Long:
Some cool quotes from the University of Michigan article:

“The chip consumes just 30 picowatts during sleep mode. A picowatt is
one-trillionth of a watt. Theoretically, the energy stored in a watch
battery would be enough to run the Phoenix for 263 years.”

“Low power consumption allows us to reduce battery size and thereby
overall system size. Our system, including the battery, is projected to
be 1,000 times smaller than the smallest known sensing system today,”
Blaauw said. “It could allow for a host of new sensor applications.”

The microchip relies on a number of clever ideas to achieve its amazingly small power consumption. Chief among them is that unlike normal chips, this chip does not leak power when it is in idle mode (the period when it is not running instructions) which happens to be about 99% of the device’s lifetime. Essentially, the chip needs to turn on for a second or two and take a reading, then turn off for perhaps ten minutes before taking another reading. Another energy saving trick was to use a lower voltage, which causes the chip to run slower but in exchange causes it to use significantly less energy. From the IEEE article we see a number of other enhancements quoted here:

“Phoenix makes use of some other power-saving tricks.
It uses a very slow timer to tell the chip when to
switch back on and take a new sensor reading. Phoenix’s
timer operates at a frequency of less than one
oscillation per second, drawing just 2 pW. The
researchers also developed techniques for streamlining
the set of instructions the processor must be able to
execute and for compressing data in the chip’s memory.
With fewer instructions and less data to store, the chip
requires less memory, and because the volatile memory
embedded in microprocessors always requires power to
retain its contents, keeping the total amount of memory
down is important.”

Picture from ieee article

The Short:
For decades now the standard approach to stimulating human nerve cells has been to use the method used by the human body itself - electrical current. Electrical stimulation of nerves is quite effective, but also comes with significant drawbacks including damage caused by the physical contact from the electrodes and the inability to stimulate at a small enough granularity, thereby causing undesired stimulation of nearby cells.

Recently researchers have devised an alternative solution to nerve stimulation: zapping them with a laser beam. Laser based nerve stimulation overcomes many of the problems associated with electrical stimulation: it requires no physical contact with the nerve cells and the laser can be tuned to precisely hit only the nerve cells that are desired. Laser based nerve stimulation could unleash a revolution in our ability to interface with nerve cells. For example, the precision offered by laser interfacing with human nerves may aid efforts to develop prosthetic limbs that are as dexterous as real human limbs.

The Long:

This breakthrough in laser based nerve stimulation has created a flurry of press in recent months. In addition to the ieee article referenced above, another excellent article came from the researchers published by spie here. Interestingly, the exact mechanism by which laser light is able to cause neuron stimulation is unknown, as quoted here by the spie article:

“A conceptual understanding of how laser light stimulates neural tissues
is crucial for the further optimization of the technique, allowing it
to reach its full potential. The current hypothesis—based on a number
of mechanistic experiments—is that the laser activates nerves by a
transient, thermally induced mechanism. At the stimulation threshold,
experiments suggest that the maximum nerve-surface temperature increase
is less than 9°C, well below the 45–50°C tissue temperatures required
for the onset of tissue damage. Future experiments will reveal if
stimulation arises through a direct membrane interaction or an indirect
effect leading to membrane depolarization.”

The article offers a fantastic picture that demonstrates the superior nature of laser based stimulation over electrical stimulation in its ability to target only the desired nerve cells without accidentally stimulated nearby neurons. In the picture below we see that the electrical stimulation caused the target nerve to stimulate but also caused unwanted stimulation of nearby nerves. The laser based stimulation avoided this unwanted stimulation.

HQ Inc. offers the CorTemp temperature pill that can record body temperature and heart rate data continuously and wirelessly transmit this data to an external device for graphing and archiving. The pill is swallowed by the participant and records data as it passes through the intestines before eventually being excreted by the human body hours later. The pill has seen many applications in the real world for athletics, for the military, for monitoring of animal vitals.

This article from ieee documents how football teams are using the pill to monitor players who may be in danger of dying from overheating during intense physical drills, which sadly happened to Korey Stringer in 2003.

Check out this cool diagram of the CorTemp Pill taken from the HQ Inc. website

From the IEEE report on the singularity comes a really cool flash tool that gives you a tour of the implants and technologies for human enhancement that are already commercially available today. A few of my favorites include the bionic eye to partially cure blindness, a cochlear implant to partially cure deafness, and a camera pill that once swallowed allows for pictures to be taken of your intestines. Below is a picture of the flash tool, but you really need to see it in person so click here now!

picture snapshot of bionic body shop flash tool