Team Black Project

Scenario

2006-04-02T22:35:00.001-04:00

A scenario is a narrative, a story. As such, it should have a at least a little bit of plot.
Give names to the people in your scenarios. In addition to making the people seem more real (and interesting), it makes it easier to refer to them in later conversations.
In addition to names, give the people a background, a story. This helps convey why they act the way that they do.
Feel free to use your own story and name, but put your story in the third-person (say "he" or "she" instead of "I").
In addition to showing how your characters use Chandler, it may be helpful to show them struggling to do the same thing with their current PIM/email client.
Remember that not all human behavior is particularly admirable. Please include scenarios of people trying to do bad things with their tools.
Make it fun!

Found these points...might be useful to keep in mind

Nanobots Not Needed

2006-04-02T22:29:00.000-04:00

Nanobots Not Needed

SUMMARY: The popular idea of so-called nanobots, powerful and at risk of running wild, is not part of modern plans for building things “atom-by-atom” by molecular manufacturing. Studies indicate that most people don't know the difference between molecular manufacturing, nanoscale technology, and nanobots. Confusion about terms, fueled by science fiction, has distorted the truth about advanced nanotechnology. Nanobots are not needed for manufacturing, but continued misunderstanding may hinder research into highly beneficial technologies and discussion of the real dangers.

Nanobots have plagued nanotechnology from the beginning. Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation (1986), which introduced nanotechnology to the public, described certain kinds of tiny robots with limited capability. But in some fiction and fanciful speculation, these “nanorobots” or “nanobots” possess near-magical powers: transforming any object into anything else, acting as a universal medical device, or destroying anything they touch. This idea has caused confusion about the actual goals of advanced nanotechnology1 research.

Originally, nanotechnology was about building stuff from the atoms up. “Assemblers” were specialized molecular construction machines. “Disassemblers” were research tools to figure out how to make things. A programmable atom-based manufacturing system would be able to build as many more systems as desired. But all these ideas merged with the nanobot concept, plus a heavy dose of science fiction, to create the idea of a single machine that could do it all—and might run wild, turning the world into a “gray goo” of self-copies.2

Meanwhile, the meaning of “nanotechnology” was being stretched. As funding opportunities increased, researchers in related and distant fields of nanoscale technology adopted the term to describe work they'd been doing for decades. By 1992, Drexler had to coin “molecular manufacturing” and “molecular nanotechnology” to indicate what he originally meant by nanotechnology.

Studies have shown that most readers don't know the difference between molecular manufacturing, nanoscale technology, and nanobots. Most nanoscale technologies use big machines to make small products. Molecular manufacturing is about tiny manufacturing systems. But those manufacturing systems are not nanobots.3 Modern plans for molecular manufacturing do not involve self-contained nanoscale construction robots at all.

No one worries about an inkjet printer crawling off the desk and stealing ink cartridges. Molecular manufacturing systems will be no more autonomous than inkjets. Early, primitive, microscopic systems will not even have onboard computers. In advanced designs, called nanofactories,4 the molecular fabrication apparatus will all be fastened down in well-ordered ranks inside a much larger structure. All designs will be externally controlled and supplied, capable of producing a duplicate nanofactory in about an hour—but only on command.

As nanoscale technologies begin to move from the lab to the marketplace, and attention turns to molecular manufacturing research, it will be increasingly important for journalists to counter outdated and incorrect ideas of nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing. Both scientists and the public have gotten the idea that molecular manufacturing requires the use of nanobots, and they may criticize or fear it on that basis. The truth is less sensational, but its implications5 are equally compelling.

European view of nanotech in 20 years

2006-04-02T22:26:00.000-04:00

European view of nanotech in 20 years

See the report by Ottilia Saxl, founder and CEO of the Institute of Nanotechnology, UK, for the European Commission Expert Group on Key Technologies for Europe. Titled Nanotechnology – a Key Technology for the Future of Europe (PDF), it includes on pages 26-28 a scenario of the role of nanotech in 2025. The technology will sound familiar, but the political context is quite different from most U.S. nanotech scenarios (emphasis added):

“Rogerio remembers the days when people travelled by car or aeroplane, until droughts, fires, famines, plagues and hurricanes became so frequent that the scientific evidence for an imminent, irreversible ecological global disaster could no longer be ignored. Governments had to then make some very hard-hitting decisions to ensure the survival of the planet, and the continuation of the human race. Travel was forbidden, except in emergency, new forms of energy use were enforced through legislation…

“Surprisingly, also, the bank had done rather well out of the new world order. The use and development of these new technologies had been enforced by law, and this meant a new role for the bank in providing finance. By law also, banks today had to use a high proportion of their surplus to support projects in specified regions of the world at very low interest rates. Not popular to begin with, but the benefits were now apparent. However, it had been sad to see so many businesses such as those involved in import and export of out-of-season fruits, flowers and vegetable, and those needing a high energy input such as glass factories, go to the wall.”

Emerging technologies and their implications for the future

2006-03-18T19:53:00.000-05:00

Cyborgs

Biotech

Artificial Intelligence

Nanotechnology

RFID

More...http://future.iftf.org/rfid/index.html

Future Imperative

2006-03-16T19:40:00.000-05:00

What if technology were being developed that could enhance your mind or body to extraordinary or even superhuman levels -- and some of these tools were already here? Wouldn't you be curious?Actually, some are here. But human enhancement is an incredibly broad and compartmentalized field. We’re often unaware of what’s right next door. This site reviews resources and ideas from across the field and makes it easy for readers to find exactly the information they're most interested in.

http://futureimperative.blogspot.com/

In the future, if everyone doesn't die. Wouldn't the world blow up?

2006-03-15T00:54:00.000-05:00

In the future, if everyone doesn't die. Wouldn't the world blow up? Good question. But do notice that scientists once have done an experiment by caging two mice allowing them to multiply until the cage is full. After the mice community has reached 70, the female mice started to experience automatic abortions. Humans will react the same if the population grows too high.
The main reason why humans give birth to children is:When YOU become old, your son or daughter can take care of you.
But in the future, you don't age. What do you want children for? You no longer need people to take care of you. The Immortality Device and futuristic medicine will keep you extremely healthy for eternity. Imagine if your children also decide to have their own children. Then this planet will really blow up. In the future, people will change their ways of thinking. Children are no longer needed. Today's people love children. Tomorrow, children become hindrances. The more children we produce, the more mouth to feed. Soon everyone would be living on the street. Then your children and your grand children will blame you for producing them. They believe that you are responsible for their misery. Take a look at this cartoon:

Kids in the future will become colder to parents. Think about it. If you become physically immortal, you will never die. And you think your kids are supposed to take care of you and respect you forever? Say if you reached 60, and you want to retire. So you ask your kid to send you 15% of his income every month to support you. Since you will never die, your kid must give you 15% of his income for eternity? Right now, since people age and die, it's okay to ask your own children to support you until you die. But in the future, you will live forever. I don't think that kids in the future are going to be as generous as today's kids. Honestly speaking, YOU WILL NOT BE GENEROUS TO YOUR KIDS EITHER. Your kids learn from you and produce their own children. The next thing you know, you have 400 grand-children. All poor like hell due to population-overgrowth. They all come chasing behind you asking you for help. Since they are your offsprings, you should help them. Right? Well, good luck.

Christian Europe may have to rely on Muslims to keep the faith By Rónán Mullen

2006-03-14T16:19:00.000-05:00

Europe has lost faith in God. And when you lose faith in God, you lose faith in humanity. Like the great Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in his 1983 Templeton Prize Lecture: “The failings of the human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.”

The loss of faith that has led to European depopulation and cynicism may also prevent us from integrating our Muslim brothers and sisters.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1306520/posts

Secular Europe, religious America

2006-03-14T16:01:00.000-05:00

AMERICA and Europe, or at least the nations of "old" western Europe, have been increasingly at odds since the end of the Cold War. Even a casual observer can see this in the rampant anti-Americanism on the continent. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_155/ai_n6143340

The Future of Human Nature

2006-03-14T15:32:00.000-05:00

We are at an inflection point in history. For the first time, our technologies and intellectual energies are not aimed outward—at modifying our environment through agriculture, clothing, and constructing cities. Instead, our energies are increasingly aimed inward—at modifying our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities, and progeny. This is occurring not in some distant future, but now and in the next 10 to 20 years. What does this shift in the definition of "human" mean for us and our kids? There are three scenarios: Heaven—in which our inventions conquer pain, suffering, stupidity, ignorance, and even death. Hell—in which our creations wipe out the human race or all of life on earth within a generation. And Prevail—which argues that these first two scenarios are technodeterminist. In this scenario, what really matters—as always—is not how many transistors we get to talk to each other, but how many ornery, imaginative, unpredictable human beings we can bring together to arrive at surprising ways to co-evolve with our challenges.

Future Communication: Humanism vs. Technology

2006-03-14T15:26:00.000-05:00

Technology—handheld devices, cell phones, texting, cell photos, MSN, CRM, databases, remote networking (Linked-in, PLAXO)—it’s all changed the way we communicate. Technological wizardry allows us more ways to be in touch, from more places, with increased computer power, video messaging, and portability. We are increasingly living in a knowledge-based economy. Part of living in such a world means dealing with a constant bombardment of messages. It’s shocking how much information we process yet how little knowledge we acquire. So, if the medium is the message, what are we saying about ourselves? Will we control how we communicate or will communication management tools cause us to adopt purely technological means of communication, and abdicate natural, human-to-human interaction? Will future communication happen solely by remote control? In the future, humans will still be able to play the decisive role in determining how we respond to communications technology; how we assess its impact on the quality, depth, and breadth of our communications; and in turn how we allow technology to shape the relationships we form on a business and personal level. A pivotal part of the equation is the different way that men and women respond to technology and communication.

World Future Society News

2006-03-14T15:22:00.000-05:00

Latest Futurist Explores the Wealth Gap, Nanotechnology, and The Future of Aging Technology is Changing Human Interaction
Most-Important Trends Shaping the Future
The Future of Dining

Is the aging of the developed world a ticking time bomb?

2006-03-14T15:20:00.000-05:00

The developed-world populations are aging and shrinking, producing huge fiscal, economic, political, and social stresses given the unfunded liabilities of public entitlement programs. Does this phenomenon represent a global crisis? If a crisis looms, when will it unfold, who faces the greatest risk, and what if anything can be done? Twenty important experts offer their views - A Symposium Of Views - Panel Discussion - Cover Storyhttp://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2633/is_1_18/continue

2006-03-14T11:31:00.000-05:00

http://loom.corante.com/archives/2006/01/17/the_return_of_the_puppet_masters.php

The Return of the Puppet Masters

Posted by Carl Zimmer

Are brain parasites altering the personalities of three billion people? The question emerged a few years ago, and it shows no signs of going away.

I first encountered this idea while working on my book Parasite Rex. I was investigating the remarkable ability parasites have to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It's in the fluke's interest to get eaten, because only by getting into the gut of a sheep or some other grazer can it complete its life cycle. Another fluke, Euhaplorchis californiensis, causes infected fish to shimmy and jump, greatly increasing the chance that wading birds will grab them.

Those parasites were weird enough, but then I got to know Toxoplasma gondii. This single-celled parasite lives in the guts of cats, sheddding eggs that can be picked up by rats and other animals that can just so happen be eaten by cats. Toxoplasma forms cysts throughout its intermediate host's body, including the brain. And yet a Toxoplasma-ridden rat is perfectly healthy. That makes good sense for the parasite, since a cat would not be particularly interested in eating a dead rat. But scientists at Oxford discovered that the parasite changes the rats in one subtle but vital way.

The scientists studied the rats in a six-foot by six-foot outdoor enclosure. They used bricks to turn it into a maze of paths and cells. In each corner of the enclosure they put a nest box along with a bowl of food and water. On each the nests they added a few drops of a particular odor. On one they added the scent of fresh straw bedding, on another the bedding from a rat's nests, on another the scent of rabbit urine, on another, the urine of a cat. When they set healthy rats loose in the enclosure, the animals rooted around curiously and investigated the nests. But when they came across the cat odor, they shied away and never returned to that corner. This was no surprise: the odor of a cat triggers a sudden shift in the chemistry of rat brains that brings on intense anxiety. (When researchers test anti-anxiety drugs on rats, they use a whiff of cat urine to make them panic.) The anxiety attack made the healthy rats shy away from the odor and in general makes them leery of investigating new things. Better to lie low and stay alive.

Then the researchers put Toxoplasma-carrying rats in the enclosure. Rats carrying the parasite are for the most part indistinguishable from healthy ones. They can compete for mates just as well and have no trouble feeding themselves. The only difference, the researchers found, is that they are more likely to get themselves killed. The scent of a cat in the enclosure didn't make them anxious, and they went about their business as if nothing was bothering them. They would explore around the odor at least as often as they did anywhere else in the enclosure. In some cases, they even took a special interest in the spot and came back to it over and over again.

The scientists speculated that Toxoplasma was secreted some substance that was altering the patterns of brain activity in the rats. This manipulation likely evolved through natural selection, since parasites that were more likely to end up in cats would leave more offpsring.

The Oxford scientists knew that humans can be hosts to Toxoplasma, too. People can become infected by its eggs by handling soil or kitty litter. For most people, the infection causes no harm. Only if a person's immune system is weak does Toxoplasma grow uncontrollably. That's why pregnant women are advised not to handle kitty litter, and why toxoplasmosis is a serious risk for people with AIDS. Otherwise, the parasite lives quietly in people's bodies (and brains). It's estimated that about half of all people on Earth are infected with Toxoplasma.

Given that human and rat brains have a lot of similarities (they share the same basic anatomy and use the same neurotransmitters), a question naturally arose: if Toxoplasma can alter the behavior of a rat, could it alter a human? Obviously, this manipulation would not do the parasite any good as an adaptation, since it's pretty rare for a human to be devoured by a cat. But it could still have an effect.

Some scientists believe that Toxoplasma changes the personality of its human hosts, bringing different shifts to men and women. Parasitologist Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague administered psychological questionnaires to people infected with Toxoplasma and controls. Those infected, he found, show a small, but statistically significant, tendency to be more self-reproaching and insecure. Paradoxically, infected women, on average, tend to be more outgoing and warmhearted than controls, while infected men tend to be more jealous and suspicious.

It's controversial work, disputed by many. But it attracted the attention of E. Fuller Torrey of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Torrey and his colleagues had noticed some intriguing links between Toxoplasma and schizophrenia. Infection with the parasite has been associated with damage to a certain class of neurons (astrocytes). So has schizophrenia. Pregnant women with high levels of Toxoplasma antibodies in their blood were more likely to give birth to children who would later develop schizophrenia. Torrey lays out more links in this 2003 paper. While none is a smoking gun, they are certainly food for thought. It's conceivable that exposure to Toxoplasma causes subtle changes in most people's personality, but in a small minority, it has more devastating effects.

A year later, Torrey and his colleagues discovered one more fascinating link. They raised human cells in Petri dishes and infected them with Toxoplasma. Then they dosed the cells with a variety of drugs used to treat schizophrenia. Several of the drugs--most notably haloperidol--blocked the growth of the parasite.

So Fuller and the Oxford scientists joined forces to find an answer to the next logical question: can drugs used to treat schizophrenia help a parasite-crazed rat? They now report their results in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (press release). They ran the original tests on 49 more rats. Once again, parasitized rats lost their healthy fear of cats. Then the researchers treated the rats with haloperidol and several other anti-psychotic drugs. They found that the drugs made the rats more scared. They also found that the antipsychotics were as effective as pyrimethamine, a drug that is specifically used to eliminate Toxoplasma.

There's plenty left to do to turn these results into a full-blown explanation of parasites and personalities. For example, what is Toxoplasma releasing into brains to manipulate its hosts? And how does that substance give rise to schizophrenia in some humans? And even if the hypothesis does hold up, it would only account for some cases of schizophrenia, while the cause of others would remain undiscovered. But still...the idea that parasites are tinkering with humanity's personality--perhaps even giving rise to cultural diversity--is taking over my head like a bad case of Toxoplasma.

2006-03-14T11:28:00.000-05:00

http://betterhumans.com/blogs/dry_observer/archive/2006/02/10/4288.aspx

Dry Observer

Gods and Monsters -- Human Augmentation for Athletes, Legal or Otherwise...

Human augmentation has the promise of improving human mental and physical abilities in almost every way by changing our biochemistry, our methods of learning, our neurology, even (perhaps especially) our genes. Ironically, while increasing human intelligence and creative/technical gifts would have a dramatic impact on human civilization, much of the furor surrounding this field's potential results from its demonstrated ability to modify athletes.

This article from Deutch Welle describes suspicions that a German coach has been involved in the "genetic doping" of athletes, defined by the World Anti-Doping Agency as "the non-therapeutic use of cells, genes, genetic elements, or of the modulation of gene expression, having the capacity to improve athletic performance." The article reports:
E-mails sent and received by Springstein, a one-time coach of the German Athletics Association (DLV), which were seized by the police during a raid on Springstein's home, brought up references to Repoxygen -- a banned substance meant to be used in gene therapy to treat patients with anemia.

"Repoxygen helps to induce a controlled release of erythropoietin (EPO), a substance that stimulates the production of red blood cells, thereby increasing the amount of oxygen the blood can deliver to the muscles.

"In one email, Springstein wrote that 'new Repoxygen is hard to get. Please give me new instructions soon so that I can order the product before Christmas.'"

The World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Olympic Committee have already banned synthetic EPO among athletes, but Repoxygen stimulates cells to produce EPO "naturally." Experts are surprised that genetic doping has become a factor prior to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Some experts actually suspected that genetic augmentation might have been a factor in even the 2004 Olympic Games (as noted here).

An article in The Scientist also discusses these issues, also noting some concerns from members of the World Anti-Doping Agency:

"Olivier Rabin, the agency's science director, said athletes are most likely to use gene technologies that offer them the same kind of benefits as banned drugs. 'Boosting of oxygen transfer and muscle mass building are definitely two of the key areas of gene doping, as indicated by the abuse of pharmaceutical drugs by some athletes for those purposes today,' Rabin said.

"Geoffrey Goldspink from University College London is one researcher whose work on gene therapy for muscle mass has already brought him unwanted attention from the sporting world. He and his colleagues are developing a treatment for muscle wasting diseases that involves transferring the gene for mechano growth factor, using a plasmid vector. In mouse studies, the gene triggered a 30% increase in muscle mass within weeks, suggesting the treatment could be more potent than anabolic steroids.

"Goldspink said he is frequently contacted by people from what he calls the 'sports counter-culture,' who want him to supply them with his technology. He forwards such Emails to WADA, but acknowledges it wouldn't be impossible for a lab elsewhere to produce it themselves. 'It's not rocket science to make genes,' he said. 'Many graduates in biochemistry can make them if they're experienced enough.'"

The article notes that WADA scientists are trying to develop ways of detecting gene doping, "including mass spectroscopy approaches that can distinguish between endogenous and introduced growth factors, tomographic detection of mRNA being formed in unusual tissues after gene transfer, and microarray searches for alterations in the expression profile of certain genes."

Opinions differ, however, as to whether or not genetic augmentation is necessarily a bad thing, as noted in this article from Betterhumans.Com:

"Miah, the author of Genetically Modified Athletes, says that the IOC can't treat genetic modification as it does other forms of doping. 'It's not sufficient simply to prohibit this technology in sport,' says Miah, 'and hope that will be the end of the issue.' Given the threat of black market labs and the lack of a valid method of detection, Miah says that prohibition isn't the best option. 'Increasingly, genetic modification will be seen as a valuable aspect of our society,' says Miah, 'promoting health and benefiting humanity.'

"Miah points out that genetic modification is just one more tool at athletes' disposal, no different than an altitude chamber that increases the concentration of their red blood cells to improve their endurance. He says the criteria for distinguishing between fair and unfair technologies haven't been addressed by international sport bodies since the beginning of the anti-doping movement 40 years ago.

"Some argue that genetic manipulation undermines the anti-doping position that doping creates an inequality amongst competitors. There are natural variations in genes among people and allowing athletes access to gene therapy could actually level the inherently uneven playing field. This argument, however, rests on there being equal access to gene therapy."

And equal access, of course, cuts to the heart of most human enhancement issues. If we can make people "better than well," if we can make them effectively superhuman in one or many attributes (such as endurance, memory, strength, overall health or basic intelligence), what happens to the gap between rich and poor if only a small sliver of a society can afford the augmentations?

As Joel Garreau, author of Radical Evolution, notes in this WorldChanging interview:

Garreau: "Well I have a scenario on that. Take any enhancement technology. I'm think of the ones that exist, like Modafinil, trade name Provigil. This is the primitive prescription drug that allows you to stay awake without any of the side effects of speed or caffeine like jitter or paranoia. You always see the same path. The drug is originally aimed at the sick. In this case it was aimed at the narcoleptics who fall asleep uncontrollably. But within the blink of an eye it moves on to group two, which is the needy well; in this case it was instantly tested on Army helicopter pilots who were young and healthy. The Army discovered that these helicopter pilots could function splendidly for 40 hours without sleep and then have 8 hours of sleep and then do it again for another 40 hours.

"And that's just the first iteration of this. The stuff that's in the pipeline is much more impressive in its effects. But the third group to be attracted to enhancements like this is where people start getting creeped out. And that's the merely ambitious, the people who want to stay awake either in the immortal words of Kiss, to "rock and roll all night and party every day," or they're just ambitious because they want to make partner in a law firm and they want to outperform their peers. And so they lunge at any enhancement that you can offer. Viagra was originally created for some other therapeutic reason but of course its big market has been the ambitious, if you will.

"I think we're going to see that path with any enhancement and I think what freaks people out is the idea that it's going to be used by people who simply want to have advantage over their competitors. If you buy that path, then you're looking in the very near term at a potential division of the species between the Enhanced, the Naturals, and the Rest. The Enhanced are the people who have the interest and the money to embrace all of these enhancements. The Naturals are the ones who could do it if they wanted to, but they're like today's vegetarians or today's fundamentalists, and they eschew these enhancements for either aesthetic or political or religious reasons. The third group is the Rest and either for reasons of geography or money, they don't have access to these enhancements and they hate and envy the people who do. That division could get pretty exciting pretty fast in terms of conflict."

James Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg, offers this alternative path in the same interview:

Hughes: "My answer to that complaint is that literacy is in the same boat. When you teach people to read are you making the illiterate less well off? Yes, in fact, in a generally literate society employers will generally want to hire literate people. But we don't then argue that we shouldn't teach people to read because we're making the illiterates worse off. We argue that we should teach everyone to read. So if there is a substantial population of Amish in the future who feel disenfranchised because they've decided not to take the cognitive enhancement drugs, and aren't able to work at what's considered the then normative level of work productivity and cognitive performance, I don't really think that the answer is to have a regulatory approach. I'm not suggesting that that's Joel's answer, but that is a lot of people's answer.

"I also don't think that there's any useful distinction between therapy and enhancement although many people will persist in making it. My favorite example is that anti-aging medicine will stop an awful lot of diseases. I don't see how you can distinguish in that case between saying well this is also a prophylactic against cancer, and saying that it will extend my life a couple tens of decades. In terms of the psychopharmaceuticals I'm generally in favor of deregulation. As I said I think that there are gonna be some psychopharmaceuticals and neuro-nano technologies which will have very profound dangers attached to them, much more dangerous than heroin and cocaine are today. But we see with the Drug War today the tremendous social costs associated with restricting people's cognitive liberty.

"My final point about this is that the real distinction in the future will be between what we have 'in the Plan,' that is what we have as a matter of universal access, and what we have in the market. Already we have 'enhancements' covered by Medicaid or Medicare or by private health insurance, like breast reconstruction after cancer or Viagra, and so we just stretch our boundaries of what we consider to be therapeutic to include these cosmetic or life enhancements. At the same time, over in the marketplace, we have things like aspirin and Band-Aids which are indisputably therapeutic but we've decided that there's no useful reason why they need to be 'in the Plan.' So I think that's the kind of decision that we're gonna have to make in the future. If there are drugs or treatments or devices which threaten to radically exacerbate inequality in society that is the point at which you say everybody needs access to this through some kind of universal access system - put them in the plan and give them to everybody. But if the enhancements don't threaten those kinds of inequalities, then we can have a debate about whether they belong in the market or not."

I happen to think a well-informed public discussion of these issues would serve everyone's best interests. I also think we should remember this discussion is not happening in a vacuum -- whatever the United States or the European Union may decide to do, India, Japan, China, South Korea, Australia, Russia and many other advanced nations will have to decide how they will deal with this issue. Will they decide to dramatically augment their entire populations? Just the scientists? Just a chosen elite? Or will they forego the technology altogether?

2006-03-14T11:26:00.000-05:00

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99/n634/a03.html

SPORT, DRUGS AND IT'S TIME FOR HEADS TO ROCK AND ROLL

Neil Drysdale Says That Drug Usage Is Making A Mockery Of The Sporting Ideals

While eco-terorists engage in conflict against genetically-modified foodstuffs by burning crops and gaining royal patronage, and the use of recreational drugs, whether ecstasy or cocaine, has increasingly become the crime that dare not speak its name, sport continues to be plagued by the march of the monsters.

Within the past week, Arsenal's Emmanuel Petit has claimed there is widespread substance abuse in football; Michelle de Bruin's four-year ban from international swimming has predictably been ratified by the IOC; Scotland's European champion, Dougie Walker, has spoken of his personal torment as he awaits the verdict of a doping panel; and the former cycling hero, Marco Pantani, whose exploits in last summer's notorious Tour de France earned him the adulation of his compatriots and admission to 'la dolce vita', currently finds himself the latest spokes-personality to find his reputation in tatters over a positive blood test and allegations that his huge success owes more to the laboratory than any God-given talent.

It's a reminider, if any were required, that we are fast approaching the development of the GM athlete, created then fortified by science and immune from detection by the testers. Log onto the internet these days and virtual reality has been transformed to hard fact. Peptide hormones, diuretics, HGH, endogenous steroids, human chorionic gonadotrophin....

Here is a polysyllabic realm in which the progress of the boffins allows these competitors prepared to cheat a pass- key to their wildest dreams of lucrative sponsorships, Olympic gold medals and the inevatability that even if they're eventually trapped, the mess of litigation which ensues will drag on in sufficiently Jarndyce-like fashion to convince a sceptical public that their suspicions are correct. Namely: "They're all at it."

Ultimately, this cynicism will prove the death of sport if it's allowed to rage on unfettered, but according to Frank Dick, the respected coach and mentor to a wide range of sports stars from Boris Becker to Gerhard Berger and Daley Thompson, we've passed the stage where hand-wringing and why-oh-why editorials are the answer.

Either we simply cry havoc and let slip of drugs, permitting everyone to take whatever substances they want, or we decide finally to stamp down on those for whom the pharmacy is a shortcut to success.

Not with a minority of cash-strapped testing agents either, but by governments and the IOC finally combining to ram home the message that the next generation of Johnsons, Flo-Jos and De Bruins will not be allowed to pollute the Olympic ideal.

"It's easier said than done when you acknowledge that some variants of HGH are nearly impossible to detect, and that the development of drugs like creatine has muddied the waters, but I don't believe, and I can't believe, that the problems are insurmountable and that we should complacently hand athletics, cycling, swinning and the rest over to the druggies," said Dick. "The fact is, though, that the present rules were devised for amateurs not professionals, and that the limited funding available to the testers is completely inadequate to deal with the scale of the abuse. In a perfect world, the breakthrough would come when people did the right thing because they wanted to, not because they had to, but the incentives and inducements are so huge nowadays that's probably a pipe dream.

"Yet it has to be recognised that science is on the move and too many sports bodies are standing still. The UK Sports Council has just formed an Ethics Committee and maybe that is one way forward. But, at the moment, we're only scratching the surface. What's the government doing? And what have previous governments done?"

Precious little is the immediate response as you might expect from a body whose PR geniuses produce images of copulating insects designed to discourage teenagers from having sex and similarly obscure and/or simplistic anti-drug messages. But even the prudes and puritans have to accept it's never been enough to tell youngsters: "Just Say No."

Instead, the International Olympic Committee has to grasp the reality that in a world of test-tube babies, cryogenics, the development of GM substances and animal cloning, science and sport are inextricably linked and that, if new performance-enhancing supplements are placed on the market, as long as they're both safe and legal, there should be no obstruction to athletes employing them to improve their standards.

As for the remainder, those materials with horrific side-effects - such as the growth hormone preparations which have been linked to CJD - the only course of action open to the IOC and its political counterparts, is to invest significantly in eradicating the scourge with regular out-of-season sampling, blood testing and contracts signed by athletes confirming that they have not contravened the regulations.

"The IOC established a $25 million anti-doping agency in February but we need the government to offer more than merely spiritual support," said Craig Reedie, one of Britain's two committee members. "Because unless sport gets its act together, national legislation will have to be enacted here, as it is in France, and drug-taking will become a criminal offence."

Cycling has already proved what happens when you allow the gendarmerie to turn an event into a Tour de Force. Other sports should be watching and worrying and waking up to the possibility of suffering the same dreaded fate.

[Sidebar:] THE DRUGS THEY TAKE, THE THINGS THEY DO...

AMPHETAMINES

Amphetamines can increase aggression as well as reducing tiredness and fatigue, allowing competitors to perform at their maximum for a longer period. They have a long history of use, especially in cycling. British cyclist, Tommy Simpson who died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France was found to have amphetamines in his bloodstream.

Side effects are a rise in blood pressure and body temperature as well as an increase in anxiety.

ANABOLIC STEROIDS

Perhaps the most famous sort a illegal drug, anabolic steroids help build muscle, and strength. They are therefore widely used by power athletes who rely on explosiveness like weightlifters and sprinters. Endurance athletes, like cyclists, long distance swimmers and triathietes also use them however to help them recover from the effects of their heavy training loads. Testing is done by measuring the bodies' level of testosterone to epitosterone.

Side effects are well documented and include mood changes and other psychiatric and psychological conditions, hypertension, skin disease and an increased chance of suffering a stroke.

BETABLOCKERS

Are used to control the effects of anxiety and also to slow down the heart rate. As such they tend to be used in sports requiring a steady hand and great precision such as archery or shooting.

DIURETICS

Used to bring about dramatic weight loss and as such are favoured by the likes of boxers and jockeys. Also the type of drug that Diego Maradona used before the 1994 World Cup in which he failed a drug test. Diuretics can also be used to increase urine volume in an effort to make the detection of small quantities of banned substances more difficult.

PEPTIDE HORMONES

Often referred to as "designer drugs" these amino acids are designed to simulate the actions of the body's natural steroid hormones, increasing the body's anabolic capabilities. Worryingly, there is a possible link between the use of human growth hormone and Creutzfeld-Jacob disease.

BLOOD DOPING

Blood doping simulates the benefits of training at altitude, boosting the body's red blood cell count thereby increasing endurance. In days gone by blood doping was achieved by taking blood out of the body, storing it and then reinfusing it into the athlete's body. In recent years this inconvenient and time consuming method has been superseded by the use of the drug Erthyropoietin ( EPO ). EPO was originally developed to counter anaemia resulting from kidney failure but is now the drug of choice for endurance athletes and was at the centre of last years Tour de France scandals. EPO is impossible to detect and so the cycling authorities have decreed that a haematocrit level above 50% is both unsafe and an indication of drug taking.

2006-03-14T11:25:00.000-05:00

URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99/n634/a03.html
Newshawk: Shug http://www.ukcia.org/
Votes: 1
Pubdate: Sun, 13 June 1999
Source: Scotland on Sunday
Section: Sport
Contact: Letters_sos@scotsman.com
Author: Neil Drysdale
things they do...', is at the end of the item.

SPORT, DRUGS AND IT'S TIME FOR HEADS TO ROCK AND ROLL

Neil Drysdale Says That Drug Usage Is Making A Mockery Of The Sporting Ideals

While eco-terorists engage in conflict against genetically-modified foodstuffs by burning crops and gaining royal patronage, and the use of recreational drugs, whether ecstasy or cocaine, has increasingly become the crime that dare not speak its name, sport continues to be plagued by the march of the monsters.

Within the past week, Arsenal's Emmanuel Petit has claimed there is widespread substance abuse in football; Michelle de Bruin's four-year ban from international swimming has predictably been ratified by the IOC; Scotland's European champion, Dougie Walker, has spoken of his personal torment as he awaits the verdict of a doping panel; and the former cycling hero, Marco Pantani, whose exploits in last summer's notorious Tour de France earned him the adulation of his compatriots and admission to 'la dolce vita', currently finds himself the latest spokes-personality to find his reputation in tatters over a positive blood test and allegations that his huge success owes more to the laboratory than any God-given talent.

It's a reminider, if any were required, that we are fast approaching the development of the GM athlete, created then fortified by science and immune from detection by the testers. Log onto the internet these days and virtual reality has been transformed to hard fact. Peptide hormones, diuretics, HGH, endogenous steroids, human chorionic gonadotrophin....

Here is a polysyllabic realm in which the progress of the boffins allows these competitors prepared to cheat a pass- key to their wildest dreams of lucrative sponsorships, Olympic gold medals and the inevatability that even if they're eventually trapped, the mess of litigation which ensues will drag on in sufficiently Jarndyce-like fashion to convince a sceptical public that their suspicions are correct. Namely: "They're all at it."

Ultimately, this cynicism will prove the death of sport if it's allowed to rage on unfettered, but according to Frank Dick, the respected coach and mentor to a wide range of sports stars from Boris Becker to Gerhard Berger and Daley Thompson, we've passed the stage where hand-wringing and why-oh-why editorials are the answer.

Either we simply cry havoc and let slip of drugs, permitting everyone to take whatever substances they want, or we decide finally to stamp down on those for whom the pharmacy is a shortcut to success.

Not with a minority of cash-strapped testing agents either, but by governments and the IOC finally combining to ram home the message that the next generation of Johnsons, Flo-Jos and De Bruins will not be allowed to pollute the Olympic ideal.

"It's easier said than done when you acknowledge that some variants of HGH are nearly impossible to detect, and that the development of drugs like creatine has muddied the waters, but I don't believe, and I can't believe, that the problems are insurmountable and that we should complacently hand athletics, cycling, swinning and the rest over to the druggies," said Dick. "The fact is, though, that the present rules were devised for amateurs not professionals, and that the limited funding available to the testers is completely inadequate to deal with the scale of the abuse. In a perfect world, the breakthrough would come when people did the right thing because they wanted to, not because they had to, but the incentives and inducements are so huge nowadays that's probably a pipe dream.

"Yet it has to be recognised that science is on the move and too many sports bodies are standing still. The UK Sports Council has just formed an Ethics Committee and maybe that is one way forward. But, at the moment, we're only scratching the surface. What's the government doing? And what have previous governments done?"

Precious little is the immediate response as you might expect from a body whose PR geniuses produce images of copulating insects designed to discourage teenagers from having sex and similarly obscure and/or simplistic anti-drug messages. But even the prudes and puritans have to accept it's never been enough to tell youngsters: "Just Say No."

Instead, the International Olympic Committee has to grasp the reality that in a world of test-tube babies, cryogenics, the development of GM substances and animal cloning, science and sport are inextricably linked and that, if new performance-enhancing supplements are placed on the market, as long as they're both safe and legal, there should be no obstruction to athletes employing them to improve their standards.

As for the remainder, those materials with horrific side-effects - such as the growth hormone preparations which have been linked to CJD - the only course of action open to the IOC and its political counterparts, is to invest significantly in eradicating the scourge with regular out-of-season sampling, blood testing and contracts signed by athletes confirming that they have not contravened the regulations.

"The IOC established a $25 million anti-doping agency in February but we need the government to offer more than merely spiritual support," said Craig Reedie, one of Britain's two committee members. "Because unless sport gets its act together, national legislation will have to be enacted here, as it is in France, and drug-taking will become a criminal offence."

Cycling has already proved what happens when you allow the gendarmerie to turn an event into a Tour de Force. Other sports should be watching and worrying and waking up to the possibility of suffering the same dreaded fate.

[Sidebar:] THE DRUGS THEY TAKE, THE THINGS THEY DO...

AMPHETAMINES

Amphetamines can increase aggression as well as reducing tiredness and fatigue, allowing competitors to perform at their maximum for a longer period. They have a long history of use, especially in cycling. British cyclist, Tommy Simpson who died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France was found to have amphetamines in his bloodstream.

Side effects are a rise in blood pressure and body temperature as well as an increase in anxiety.

ANABOLIC STEROIDS

Perhaps the most famous sort a illegal drug, anabolic steroids help build muscle, and strength. They are therefore widely used by power athletes who rely on explosiveness like weightlifters and sprinters. Endurance athletes, like cyclists, long distance swimmers and triathietes also use them however to help them recover from the effects of their heavy training loads. Testing is done by measuring the bodies' level of testosterone to epitosterone.

Side effects are well documented and include mood changes and other psychiatric and psychological conditions, hypertension, skin disease and an increased chance of suffering a stroke.

BETABLOCKERS

Are used to control the effects of anxiety and also to slow down the heart rate. As such they tend to be used in sports requiring a steady hand and great precision such as archery or shooting.

DIURETICS

Used to bring about dramatic weight loss and as such are favoured by the likes of boxers and jockeys. Also the type of drug that Diego Maradona used before the 1994 World Cup in which he failed a drug test. Diuretics can also be used to increase urine volume in an effort to make the detection of small quantities of banned substances more difficult.

PEPTIDE HORMONES

Often referred to as "designer drugs" these amino acids are designed to simulate the actions of the body's natural steroid hormones, increasing the body's anabolic capabilities. Worryingly, there is a possible link between the use of human growth hormone and Creutzfeld-Jacob disease.

BLOOD DOPING

Blood doping simulates the benefits of training at altitude, boosting the body's red blood cell count thereby increasing endurance. In days gone by blood doping was achieved by taking blood out of the body, storing it and then reinfusing it into the athlete's body. In recent years this inconvenient and time consuming method has been superseded by the use of the drug Erthyropoietin ( EPO ). EPO was originally developed to counter anaemia resulting from kidney failure but is now the drug of choice for endurance athletes and was at the centre of last years Tour de France scandals. EPO is impossible to detect and so the cycling authorities have decreed that a haematocrit level above 50% is both unsafe and an indication of drug taking.

MAP posted-by: Richard Lake

Human Body Version 2.0

2006-03-14T04:34:00.000-05:00

Human Body Version 2.0

by	Ray Kurzweil

In the coming decades, a radical upgrading of our body's physical and mental systems, already underway, will use nanobots to augment and ultimately replace our organs. We already know how to prevent most degenerative disease through nutrition and supplementation; this will be a bridge to the emerging biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution. By 2030, reverse-engineering of the human brain will have been completed and nonbiological intelligence will merge with our biological brains.

Published on KurzweilAI.net Feb. 17, 2003. The author will present a talk based on this article on Feb. 21 at Time magazine's "The Future of Life" conference.

Sex has already been largely separated from its biological function. For the most part, we engage in sexual activity for intimate communication and sensual pleasure, not reproduction. Conversely, we have multiple methodologies for creating babies without physical sex, albeit most reproduction still does derive from the sex act. Although not condoned by all sectors of society, this disentanglement of sex from its biological function has been readily, even eagerly, adopted by the mainstream.

So why don't we provide the same extrication of purpose from biology for another activity that also provides both social intimacy and sensual pleasure, namely eating? We have crude ways of doing this today. Starch blockers, such as Bayer's Precose, partially prevent absorption of complex carbohydrates; fat blockers, such as Chitosan, bind to fat molecules, causing them to pass through the digestive tract; and sugar substitutes, such as Sucralose and Stevia, provide sweetness without calories. There are limitations and problems with each of these contemporary technologies, but a more effective generation of drugs is being developed that will block excess caloric absorption on the cellular level.

Let us consider, however, a more fundamental reengineering of the digestive process to disconnect the sensual aspects of eating from its original biological purpose: to provide nutrients into the bloodstream that are then delivered to each of our trillions of cells. These nutrients include caloric (energy-bearing) substances such as glucose (from carbohydrates), proteins, fats, and a myriad of trace molecules, such as vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals, that provide building blocks and facilitating enzymes for diverse metabolic processes.

An Era of Abundance

Our knowledge of the complex pathways underlying digestive processes is rapidly expanding, although there is still a great deal we do not fully understand. On the one hand, digestion, like any other major human biological system, is astonishing in its intricacy and cleverness. Our bodies manage to extract the complex resources needed to survive, despite sharply varying conditions, while at the same time, filtering out a multiplicity of toxins.

On the other hand, our bodies evolved in a very different era. Our digestive processes in particular are optimized for a situation that is dramatically dissimilar to the one we find ourselves in. For most of our biological heritage, there was a high likelihood that the next foraging or hunting season (and for a brief, relatively recent period, the next planting season) might be catastrophically lean. So it made sense for our bodies to hold on to every possible calorie. Today, this biological strategy is extremely counterproductive. Our outdated metabolic programming underlies our contemporary epidemic of obesity and fuels pathological processes of degenerative disease such as coronary artery disease, and type II diabetes.

Up until recently (on an evolutionary time scale), it was not in the interest of the species for old people like myself (I was born in 1948) to use up the limited resources of the clan. Evolution favored a short life span—life expectancy was 37 years only two centuries ago—so these restricted reserves could be devoted to the young, those caring for them, and those strong enough to perform intense physical work.

We now live in an era of great material abundance. Most work requires mental effort rather than physical exertion. A century ago, 30 percent of the U.S. work force worked on farms, with another 30 percent deployed in factories. Both of these figures are now under 3 percent. The significant majority of today's job categories, ranging from airline flight attendant to web designer, simply didn't exist a century ago. Circa 2003, we have the opportunity to continue to contribute to our civilization's exponentially growing knowledge base—incidentally, a unique attribute of our species—well past our child-rearing days.

Our species has already augmented the "natural" order of our life cycle through our technology: drugs, supplements, replacement parts for virtually all bodily systems, and many other interventions. We already have devices to replace our hips, knees, shoulders, elbows, wrists, jaws, teeth, skin, arteries, veins, heart valves, arms, legs, feet, fingers, and toes. Systems to replace more complex organs (for example, our hearts) are beginning to work. As we're learning the principles of operation of the human body and the brain, we will soon be in a position to design vastly superior systems that will be more enjoyable, last longer, and perform better, without susceptibility to breakdown, disease, and aging.

Artist and cultural catalyst Natasha Vita-More pioneered a conceptual design for one such system, called Primo Posthuman, designed for mobility, flexibility and superlongevity. It features innovations such as a metabrain for global-net connection with prosthetic neo-neocortex of AI interwoven with nanobots; smart skin that is solar protected with biosensors for tone and texture changeability, and high-acuity senses.

Introducing Human Body Version 2.0

We won't engineer human body version 2.0 all at once. It will be an incremental process, one already well under way. Although version 2.0 is a grand project, ultimately resulting in the radical upgrading of all our physical and mental systems, we will implement it one benign step at a time. Based on our current knowledge, we can already touch and feel the means for accomplishing each aspect of this vision.

From this perspective, let's return to a consideration of the digestive system. We already have a reasonably comprehensive picture of the constituent ingredients of the food we eat. We already have the means to survive without eating, using intravenous nutrition (for people who are unable to eat), although this is clearly not a pleasant process, given the current limitations in our technologies for getting substances in and out of the blood stream.

The next phase of improvement will be largely biochemical, in the form of drugs and supplements that will block excess caloric absorption and otherwise reprogram metabolic pathways for optimal health. We already have the knowledge to prevent most instances of degenerative disease, such as heart disease, stroke, type II diabetes, and cancer, through comprehensive programs of nutrition and supplementation, something which I personally do, and will describe in an upcoming book (A Short Guide to a Long Life, coauthored with Terry Grossman, M.D.). I view our current knowledge as a bridge to the full flowering of the biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution.

It's All About Nanobots

In a famous scene from the movie, The Graduate, Benjamin's mentor gives him career advice in a single word: "plastics." Today, that word might be "software," or "biotechnology," but in another couple of decades, the word is likely to be "nanobots." Nanobots—blood-cell-sized robots—will provide the means to radically redesign our digestive systems, and, incidentally, just about everything else.

In an intermediate phase, nanobots in the digestive tract and bloodstream will intelligently extract the precise nutrients we need, call for needed additional nutrients and supplements through our personal wireless local area network, and send the rest of the food we eat on its way to be passed through for elimination.

If this seems futuristic, keep in mind that intelligent machines are already making their way into our blood stream. There are dozens of projects underway to create blood-stream-based "biological microelectromechanical systems" (bioMEMS) with a wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic applications. BioMEMS devices are being designed to intelligently scout out pathogens and deliver medications in very precise ways.

For example, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago has created a tiny capsule with pores measuring only seven nanometers. The pores let insulin out in a controlled manner but prevent antibodies from invading the pancreatic Islet cells inside the capsule. These nanoengineered devices have cured rats with type I diabetes, and there is no reason that the same methodology would fail to work in humans. Similar systems could precisely deliver dopamine to the brain for Parkinson's patients, provide blood-clotting factors for patients with hemophilia, and deliver cancer drugs directly to tumor sites. A new design provides up to 20 substance-containing reservoirs that can release their cargo at programmed times and locations in the body.

Kensall Wise, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, has developed a tiny neural probe that can provide precise monitoring of the electrical activity of patients with neural diseases. Future designs are expected to also deliver drugs to precise locations in the brain. Kazushi Ishiyama at Tohoku University in Japan has developed micromachines that use microscopic-sized spinning screws to deliver drugs to small cancer tumors.

A particularly innovative micromachine developed by Sandia National Labs has actual microteeth with a jaw that opens and closes to trap individual cells and then implant them with substances such as DNA, proteins or drugs. There are already at least four major scientific conferences on bioMEMS and other approaches to developing micro- and nano-scale machines to go into the body and bloodstream.

Ultimately, the individualized nutrients needed for each person will be fully understood (including all the hundreds of phytochemicals) and easily and inexpensively available, so we won't need to bother with extracting nutrients from food at all. Just as we routinely engage in sex today for its relational and sensual gratification, we will gain the opportunity to disconnect the eating of food from the function of delivering nutrients into the bloodstream.

This technology should be reasonably mature by the 2020s. Nutrients will be introduced directly into the bloodstream by special metabolic nanobots. Sensors in our bloodstream and body, using wireless communication, will provide dynamic information on the nutrients needed at each point in time.

A key question in designing this technology will be the means by which these nanobots make their way in and out of the body. As I mentioned above, the technologies we have today, such as intravenous catheters, leave much to be desired. A significant benefit of nanobot technology is that unlike mere drugs and nutritional supplements, nanobots have a measure of intelligence. They can keep track of their own inventories, and intelligently slip in and out of our bodies in clever ways. One scenario is that we would wear a special "nutrient garment" such as a belt or undershirt. This garment would be loaded with nutrient bearing nanobots, which would make their way in and out of our bodies through the skin or other body cavities.

At this stage of technological development, we will be able to eat whatever we want, whatever gives us pleasure and gastronomic fulfillment, and thereby unreservedly explore the culinary arts for their tastes, textures, and aromas. At the same time, we will provide an optimal flow of nutrients to our bloodstream, using a completely separate process. One possibility would be that all the food we eat would pass through a digestive tract that is now disconnected from any possible absorption into the bloodstream.

This would place a burden on our colon and bowel functions, so a more refined approach will dispense with the function of elimination. We will be able to accomplish this using special elimination nanobots that act like tiny garbage compactors. As the nutrient nanobots make their way from the nutrient garment into our bodies, the elimination nanobots will go the other way. Periodically, we would replace the nutrition garment for a fresh one. One might comment that we do obtain some pleasure from the elimination function, but I suspect that most people would be happy to do without it.

Ultimately we won't need to bother with special garments or explicit nutritional resources. Just as computation will eventually be ubiquitous and available everywhere, so too will basic metabolic nanobot resources be embedded everywhere in our environment. In addition, an important aspect of this system will be maintaining ample reserves of all needed resources inside the body. Our version 1.0 bodies do this to only a very limited extent, for example, storing a few minutes of oxygen in our blood, and a few days of caloric energy in glycogen and other reserves. Version 2.0 will provide substantially greater reserves, enabling us to be separated from metabolic resources for greatly extended periods of time.

Once perfected, we will no longer need version 1.0 of our digestive system at all. I pointed out above that our adoption of these technologies will be cautious and incremental, so we will not dispense with the old-fashioned digestive process when these technologies are first introduced. Most of us will wait for digestive system version 2.1 or even 2.2 before being willing to do dispense with version 1.0. After all, people didn't throw away their typewriters when the first generation of word processors was introduced. People held onto their vinyl record collections for many years after CDs came out (I still have mine). People are still holding onto their film cameras, although the tide is rapidly turning in favor of digital cameras.

However, these new technologies do ultimately dominate, and few people today still own a typewriter. The same phenomenon will happen with our reengineered bodies. Once we've worked out the inevitable complications that will arise with a radically reengineered gastrointestinal system, we will begin to rely on it more and more.

Programmable Blood

As we reverse-engineer (learn the principles of operation of) our various bodily systems, we will be in a position to engineer new systems that provide dramatic improvements. One pervasive system that has already been the subject of a comprehensive conceptual redesign is our blood.

One of the leading proponents of "nanomedicine," (redesigning our biological systems through engineering on a molecular scale) and author of a book with the same name is Robert Freitas, Research Scientist at nanotechnology firm Zyvex Corp. Freitas' ambitious manuscript is a comprehensive road map to rearchitecting our biological heritage. One of Freitas' designs is to replace (or augment) our red blood cells with artificial "respirocytes" that would enable us to hold our breath for four hours or do a top-speed sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath. Like most of our biological systems, our red blood cells perform their oxygenating function very inefficiently, and Freitas has redesigned them for optimal performance. He has worked out many of the physical and chemical requirements in impressive detail.

It will be interesting to see how this development is dealt with in athletic contests. Presumably, the use of respirocytes and similar systems will be prohibited from Olympic contests, but then we will have the specter of teenagers in junior high school gymnasiums routinely outperforming Olympic athletes.

Freitas envisions micron-size artificial platelets that could achieve hemostasis (bleeding control) up to 1,000 times faster than biological platelets. Freitas describes nanorobotic microbivores (white blood cell replacements) that will download software to destroy specific infections hundreds of times faster than antibiotics, and that will be effective against all bacterial, viral and fungal infections, with no limitations of drug resistance.

I've personally watched (through a microscope) my own white blood cells surround and devour a pathogen, and I was struck with the remarkable sluggishness of this natural process. Although replacing our blood with billions of nanorobotic devices will require a lengthy process of development, refinement, and regulatory approval, we already have the conceptual knowledge to engineer substantial improvements over the remarkable but very inefficient methods used in our biological bodies.

Have a Heart, or Not

The next organ on my hit list is the heart. It's a remarkable machine, but it has a number of severe problems. It is subject to a myriad of failure modes, and represents a fundamental weakness in our potential longevity. The heart usually breaks down long before the rest of the body, and often very prematurely.

Although artificial hearts are beginning to work, a more effective approach will be to get rid of the heart altogether. Among Freitas' designs are nanorobotic blood cell replacements that provide their own mobility. If the blood system moves with its own movement, the engineering issues of the extreme pressures required for centralized pumping can be eliminated. As we perfect the means of transferring nanobots to and from the blood supply, we can also continuously replace the nanobots comprising our blood supply.

Energy will be provided by microscopic-sized hydrogen fuel cells. Integrated Fuel Cell Technologies, one of many companies pioneering fuel cell technology, has already created microscopic-sized fuel cells. Their first-generation design provides tens of thousands of fuel cells on an integrated circuit and is intended to power portable electronics.

With the respirocytes providing greatly extended access to oxygenation, we will be in a position to eliminate the lungs by using nanobots to provide oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. One might point out that we take pleasure in breathing (even more so than elimination!). As with all of these redesigns, we will certainly go through intermediate stages where these technologies augment our natural systems, so we can have the best of both worlds. Eventually, however, there will be no reason to continue with the complications of actual breathing and the requirement of having breathable air everywhere we go. If we really find breathing that pleasurable, we will develop virtual ways of having this sensual experience.

We also won't need the various organs that produce chemicals, hormones, and enzymes that flow into the blood and other metabolic pathways. We already create bio-identical versions of many of these substances, and we will have the means to routinely create all biochemically relevant substances within a couple of decades. These substances (to the extent that we still need them) will be delivered via nanobots, controlled by intelligent biofeedback systems to maintain and balance required levels, just as our "natural" systems do today (for example, the control of insulin levels by the pancreatic Islet cells). Since we are eliminating most of our biological organs, many of these substances may no longer be needed, and will be replaced by other resources that are required by the nanorobotic systems.

Similarly the organs that filter the blood for impurities, such as the kidneys, can also be replaced by nanorobot-based elimination services.

It is important to emphasize that this redesign process will not be accomplished in a single design cycle. Each organ and each idea will have its own progression, intermediate designs, and stages of implementation. Nonetheless, we are clearly headed towards a fundamental and radical redesign of the extremely inefficient and limited functionality of human body version 1.0.

So What's Left?

Let's consider where we are. We've eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.

The skeleton is a stable structure, and we already have a reasonable understanding of how it works. We replace parts of it today, although our current technology for doing this has severe limitations. Interlinking nanobots will provide the ability to augment and ultimately replace the skeleton. Replacing portions of the skeleton today requires painful surgery, but replacing it through nanobots from within can be a gradual and noninvasive process. The human skeleton version 2.0 will very strong, stable, and self repairing.

We will not notice the absence of many of our organs, such as the liver and pancreas, as we do not directly experience their functionality. The skin, however, is an organ we will actually want to keep, or at least we will want to maintain its functionality. The skin, which includes our primary and secondary sex organs, provides a vital function of communication and pleasure. Nonetheless, we will ultimately be able to improve on the skin with new nanoengineered supple materials that will provide greater protection from physical and thermal environmental effects while enhancing our capacity for intimate communication and pleasure. The same observation holds for the mouth and upper esophagus, which comprise the remaining aspects of the digestive system that we use to experience the act of eating.

Redesigning the Human Brain

The process of reverse engineering and redesign will also encompass the most important system in our bodies: the brain. The brain is at least as complex as all the other organs put together, with approximately half of our genetic code devoted to its design. It is a misconception to regard the brain as a single organ. It is actually an intricate collection of information-processing organs, interconnected in an elaborate hierarchy, as is the accident of our evolutionary history.

The process of understanding the principles of operation of the human brain is already well under way. The underlying technologies of brain scanning and neuron modeling are scaling up exponentially, as is our overall knowledge of human brain function. We already have detailed mathematical models of a couple dozen of the several hundred regions that comprise the human brain.

The age of neural implants is also well under way. We have brain implants based on "neuromorphic" modeling (i.e., reverse-engineering of the human brain and nervous system) for a rapidly growing list of brain regions. A friend of mine who became deaf while an adult can now engage in telephone conversations again because of his cochlear implant, a device that interfaces directly with the auditory nervous system. He plans to replace it with a new model with a thousand levels of frequency discrimination, which will enable him to hear music once again. He laments that he has had the same melodies playing in his head for the past 15 years and is looking forward to hearing some new tunes. A future generation of cochlear implants now on the drawing board will provide levels of frequency discrimination that go significantly beyond that of "normal" hearing.

Researchers at MIT and Harvard are developing neural implants to replace damaged retinas. There are brain implants for Parkinson's patients that communicate directly with the ventral posterior nucleus and subthalmic nucleus regions of the brain to reverse the most devastating symptoms of this disease. An implant for people with cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis communicates with the ventral lateral thalamus and has been effective in controlling tremors. "Rather than treat the brain like soup, adding chemicals that enhance or suppress certain neurotransmitters," says Rick Trosch, an American physician helping to pioneer these therapies, "we're now treating it like circuitry."

A variety of techniques are being developed to provide the communications bridge between the wet analog world of biological information processing and digital electronics. Researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute have developed noninvasive devices that can communicate with neurons in both directions. They demonstrated their "neuron transistor" by controlling the movements of a living leech from a personal computer. Similar technology has been used to reconnect leech neurons and to coax them to perform simple logical and arithmetic problems. Scientists are now experimenting with a new design called "quantum dots," which uses tiny crystals of semiconductor material to connect electronic devices with neurons.

These developments provide the promise of reconnecting broken neural pathways for people with nerve damage and spinal cord injuries. It has long been thought that recreating these pathways would only be feasible for recently injured patients because nerves gradually deteriorate when unused. A recent discovery, however, shows the feasibility of a neuroprosthetic system for patients with long-standing spinal cord injuries. Researchers at the University of Utah asked a group of long-term quadriplegic patients to move their limbs in a variety of ways and then observed the response of their brains, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Although the neural pathways to their limbs had been inactive for many years, the pattern of their brain activity when attempting to move their limbs was very close to that observed in non-disabled persons.

We will, therefore, be able to place sensors in the brain of a paralyzed person (e.g., Christopher Reeve) that will be programmed to recognize the brain patterns associated with intended movements and then stimulate the appropriate sequence of muscle movements. For those patients whose muscles no longer function, there are already designs for "nanoelectromechanical" systems (NEMS) that can expand and contract to replace damaged muscles and that can be activated by either real or artificial nerves.

We Are Becoming Cyborgs

We are rapidly growing more intimate with our technology. Computers started out as large remote machines in air-conditioned rooms tended by white-coated technicians. Subsequently they moved onto our desks, then under our arms, and now in our pockets. Soon, we'll routinely put them inside our bodies and brains. Ultimately we will become more nonbiological than biological.

The compelling benefits in overcoming profound diseases and disabilities will keep these technologies on a rapid course, but medical applications represent only the early adoption phase. As the technologies become established, there will be no barriers to using them for the expansion of human potential. In my view, expanding our potential is precisely the primary distinction of our species.

Moreover, all of the underlying technologies are accelerating. The power of computation has grown at a double exponential rate for all of the past century, and will continue to do so well into this century through the power of three-dimensional computing. Communication bandwidths and the pace of brain reverse-engineering are also quickening. Meanwhile, according to my models, the size of technology is shrinking at a rate of 5.6 per linear dimension per decade, which will make nanotechnology ubiquitous during the 2020s.

By the end of this decade, computing will disappear as a separate technology that we need to carry with us. We'll routinely have high-resolution images encompassing the entire visual field written directly to our retinas from our eyeglasses and contact lenses (the Department of Defense is already using technology along these lines from Microvision, a company based in Bothell, Washington). We'll have very-high-speed wireless connection to the Internet at all times. The electronics for all of this will be embedded in our clothing. Circa 2010, these very personal computers will enable us to meet with each other in full-immersion, visual-auditory, virtual-reality environments as well as augment our vision with location- and time-specific information at all times.

By 2030, electronics will utilize molecule-sized circuits, the reverse-engineering of the human brain will have been completed, and bioMEMS will have evolved into bioNEMS (biological nanoelectromechanical systems). It will be routine to have billions of nanobots (nano-scale robots) coursing through the capillaries of our brains, communicating with each other (over a wireless local area network), as well as with our biological neurons and with the Internet. One application will be to provide full-immersion virtual reality that encompasses all of our senses. When we want to enter a virtual-reality environment, the nanobots will replace the signals from our real senses with the signals that our brain would receive if we were actually in the virtual environment.

We will have a panoply of virtual environments to choose from, including earthly worlds that we are familiar with, as well as those with no earthly counterpart. We will be able to go to these virtual places and have any kind of interaction with other real (as well as simulated) people, ranging from business negotiations to sensual encounters. In virtual reality, we won't be restricted to a single personality, since we will be able to change our appearance and become other people.

Experience Beamers

"Experience beamers" will beam their entire flow of sensory experiences as well as the neurological correlates of their emotional reactions out on the Web just as people today beam their bedroom images from their web cams. A popular pastime will be to plug in to someone else's sensory-emotional beam and experience what it's like to be someone else, à la the plot concept of the movie "Being John Malkovich." There will also be a vast selection of archived experiences to choose from. The design of virtual environments and the creation of archived full-immersion experiences will become new art forms.

The most important application of circa-2030 nanobots will be to literally expand our minds. We're limited today to a mere hundred trillion interneuronal connections; we will be able to augment these by adding virtual connections via nanobot communication. This will provide us with the opportunity to vastly expand our pattern recognition abilities, memories, and overall thinking capacity as well as directly interface with powerful forms of nonbiological intelligence.

It's important to note that once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in our brains (a threshold we've already passed), it will grow exponentially, as is the accelerating nature of information-based technologies. A one-inch cube of nanotube circuitry (which is already working at smaller scales in laboratories) will be at least a million times more powerful than the human brain. By 2040, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be far more powerful than the biological portion. It will, however, still be part of the human-machine civilization, having been derived from human intelligence, i.e., created by humans (or machines created by humans) and based at least in part on the reverse-engineering of the human nervous system.

Stephen Hawking recently commented in the German magazine Focus that computer intelligence will surpass that of humans within a few decades. He advocated that we "develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it." Hawking can take comfort that the development program he is recommending is well under way.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0551.html?printable=1

The Robots are Coming!

2006-03-13T00:50:00.000-05:00

Helper, security and companion robots will be commonplace a decade from now. There are already more than 100 robotic commercialisation projects in the global public arena, and a dozen commercially available robots in the Japanese domestic market.

In the next two to three years, that number will grow considerably, with research companies forecasting the home robotics market may one day be equal in size to the automotive market.

The robots on this page are some of the 100 robots demonstrated at the 2003 Robodex conference in Japan.They represent the current state-of-the-art for domestic helper and security robots and from left to right they are: the SOK C4 GuardRobo (on each end of row), Mitsubishi’s Wakamaru, Honda’s Asimo, tsmuk’s Banyru Guard Dragon (in front of Asimo), Matsushita’s HOSPI Hospital delivery robot, Kawada’s HRP2 and five Fujitsu MARONs.

The event which is the mecca for the rapidly evolving consumer robotics industry, saw robots demonstrate their value in performing simple manual labour, delivery and security duties, helper and companionship roles, with some even capable of conversation, recognising their owner, receptionist duties and language translation.

The most compelling commercially-viable area for consumer robotics in the short term appears to be that of security, where a robot can patrol the home in the owners absence, with smoke and motion detectors, and send video directly to the owner’s 3G mobile phone in the event of detecting intruders or fire. The word “robot” is relatively new – it was first used in 1920 by Czech playwright Karel Capek and comes from the Czech “robota”, which means “tedious labor”, though the concept of artificial lifeform was popularised in 1822 when Mary Shelley published the landmark novel “Frankenstein.”

Not just another writer, Isaac Asimov, layed down the ideas and principles in 1941, giving us the term robotics and the three (subsequently four) basic laws of robotics in 1942 (story 2407), at the same time forecasting the massive ubiquitous robotics industry about to unfold in the next decade, some 60 years ago.

One hundred years hence, by 2040, analysts predict that most households will own a robot, or at least be considering one. Robotics is already a US$8 billion industry globally, comprised mainly of industrial robots for welding, painting and assembly line tasks.

The consumer robotics marketplace is just emerging, with a gross of US$600 million in 2002, comprised mainly of programmable robots which mow lawns, clean floors and amuse children. The next level of robotics will be even more compelling and much more affordable.

Korean robotics start-up Mostitech (http://www.gizmo.com.au/public/News/news.asp?articleid=2689) recently rocked the fledgling personal robotics industry by announcing the mid-2004 availability of a home security robot that will sell for around AUD$1,100.

The as-yet unnamed robot is battery-operated and patrols the owners home, monitoring for intruders, fire and smoke and alerting the owner by sending digital images to their cell phone should it encounter anything amiss - the same functionality offered elsewhere.

Japan intends to own the consumer robotics industry and prices for robots with similar functionality are available in its domestic market for AUD$15,000+

Motitech’s robot appears to have identical functionality, at 10% of the price, indicating that competition will be very fierce in this industry.

The 50cm tall robot security guard can be controlled from a mobile phone and the home can be monitored in real time. Face-recognition will be added to the 12 kilogram robots impressive repertoire before it lands.

Gizmo has covered a number of robotic security guards including Banyru (1638), Artemis (2635),GuardRobo (2260) and Sanyo’s Robot Guard Dog (1249).

Momentum is expected to build rapidly from this year forward, with the reasonable expectations that computer processing power will continue to become exponentially cheaper (Moore’s Law article 1417), and the economies of mass production and global competition will see a price-performance curve which might be even steeper than that of the PC, the digital camera and the mobile phone.

Useful semi-autonomous home robots will soon become available for early adopters with deep pockets and the mass market is expected to follow soon after.

Within a decade, affordable home robots will be playing a role encompassing some, maybe all, of the duties of a housekeeper, personal assistant, security guard, gardener and attentive, ever-serving companion.

If one ambitious project meets fruition, that goal might be achieved before the year is out.

Valerie (http://www.gizmo.com.au/public/News/news.asp?articleid=2545) is a domestic android. Valerie will clean your house, change light bulbs, wash the dishes, do the laundry, check the sports scores for you, book plane tickets and call the police in an emergency, even if she does look like hell without her make-up. She speaks English but more importantly, understands English and can hence be programmed by non-programmers.

Valerie will go on sale this year at US$59,000. (2545)

Most of the world’s robotics activity and hence expertise, is concentrated in one spot (Japan) but work is being done in all countries and the era of the useful, affordable household robot is almost upon us.

According to projections from UNEC the personal robotics industry will have grown to US$5.4 billion by 2005 and to US$17.1 billion by 2010 – spectacular growth indeed, but humble by comparison to the following decade. A quarter century from now, the robotics industry is expected to rival the automobile and computer industries in both dollars and jobs.

The next generation of robots will interact with humans on an extremely sophisticated level, making decisions, helping, caring and giving companionship.

Just how sophisticated?

NEC recently announced the availability of a PDA-based, speech-to-speech Travel Interpreter which enables a traveller speaking only English to converse with someone who speaks only Japanese. Incorporating speech recognition, conversation-based speech translation and speech synthesis technology, this unit has gone a long way towards eliminating the language barrier which exists between massive groups of the world population. It is available from Narita Airport now! It will also be available in Papero, NEC’s companion robot.

It’s all just beginning, and it will be a fascinating study.

The Three Basic Laws of Robotics

Isaac Asimov defined the “Three Laws of Robotics” in “Runaround”

He added a fourth law at a later date.

LAW 0: A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm (added later).

LAW 1: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

LAW 2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

LAW 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Fujitsu Develops Human Task Support Robot

2006-03-13T00:46:00.000-05:00

Fujitsu Laboratories. and Fujitsu Frontech have announced their joint development of a service robot that can provide support for various services in offices and commercial facilities. The newly developed robot features functions that enable it to provide such services as greeting and escorting guests onto elevators, operating the elevators, moving parcels using a cart, and security patrolling of buildings at night.

Fujitsu Frontech Limited will commercialise the robot, with sales scheduled to begin in June 2005. Details of the robot are to be presented at the 22nd Annual Conference of the Robotics Society of Japan scheduled to be held from September 15 at Gifu University in Japan. There will also be a demonstration of the robot at the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies Providing Image, Information and Communications (CEATEC) Japan 2004, opening on October 5 at Makuhari Messe in Japan.

There is great anticipation for the application of robots for a wide range of fields such as in medical services, social services, housework, and so on. According to Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), societal expectations are high for robots to contribute to the realisation of an enriched society. Fujitsu Laboratories has been conducting ongoing R&D on robots for practical use, in the quest for robots to support people in their daily lives and make their lives more convenient.

Fujitsu's past robot offerings include the bipedal robots HOAP-1, that was developed in September 2001, and HOAP-2 developed in March 2003, both of which were designed for a broad range of applications for R&D of robot technologies and which are commercially available from Fujitsu Automation Limited.

Fujitsu also developed MARON-1 in October 2002, a home robot that can be controlled from a mobile phone and which is being sold by PFU Limited on a limited basis. Building on its past expertise in developing robots for R&D and home-use applications, Fujitsu went further to the next level by developing a robot that can co-exist with people and provide services in a variety of places such as offices and public facilities.

The new service robot is comprised of a head capable of moving up, down, left, and right, arms with four degrees of freedom (1), left and right motor-driven wheels that can rotate independently, a CPU that controls the entire robot, and a 3D visual processing system comprised of a digital signal processor (DSP) (2)and custom hardware.

Key features of the robot are as follows:

1. Ability to autonomously move to a designated location according to a pre-programmed map while carefully avoiding obstacles

The robot is capable of quickly perceiving people or things in its surrounding areas while simultaneously measuring their location, through the use of two cameras which can be quickly self-selected from its eight available cameras as necessary, using the newly developed 3-D visual processing system. Visual processing enables the robot to detect and avoid obstacles so that it can move safely to a designated location, thereby making it capable of completing tasks alongside people.

2. Ability to perceive, take hold of, and hand objects to people

By utilizing visual processing the robot can hold things and press buttons, such as elevator buttons. The arms can move naturally and smoothly through the use of the central pattern generator (CPG)/ numerical perturbation (NP) method (3)developed by Fujitsu, which simulates the nervous system of vertebrates.

3. Ability to turn toward voices when called, and accomplish tasks by following voice instructions

The robot is equipped with multiple microphones that enable detection of the direction of a sound source. The robot can also visually detect people, and can understand and complete simple tasks that are instructed verbally.

4. Functions to search for information according to users' needs and present the information using the most appropriate method

The robot can connect to the Internet, search for information according to user request, and present the information in the method that best fits the situation, such as by announcing the information, displaying the information on its own display, pointing to information on a separate source, and so on. Various kinds of Internet services can be provided through the robot by using its network-related functions. Self-equipped with a web server, the robot can be instructed, programmed and remote-controlled from an external devices such as computers, that do not feature specific applications for the robot.

5. Self-charging

When low on power, the robot autonomously moves to a charger to self-charge by using high-density non-contact charging based on an induction charging method to enable safe charging.

6. Ability to flexibly maneuver itself within compact spaces, on slopes, over minor surface gradations, and complete tasks

The robot can pivot on the spot by using two driving wheels that move independently. It also can move flexibly and smoothly over slopes and uneven surfaces, by utilizing a hing that connects its front and back driving wheels.

7. Natural, easy-to-understand human-like voice

Utilizing the natural prosody speech synthesis method (4)developed by Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., the robot is capable of natural, human-like speech.

Key Specifications

Dimensions: 644 mm (width) x 566mm (depth) x 1300 mm (height) Weight: 63 kg Mobility of operable parts: Head: 2 degrees of freedom, Arms: 4 degrees of freedom, Hands: 1 degree of freedom, Wheels: 2 degrees of freedom Speed: 3 km/hr Sensors: 8 CMOS cameras, 2 ultrasonic sensors, 2 proximity sensors User interface: 10.5" TFT touch panel monitor, 3 microphones, 1 speaker Expansion interfaces: Wireless LAN (802.11b equipped) OS: Main CPU- WindowsXP embedded, DSP: DSP/BIOS Battery type: Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH, in main unit) Charging method: Non-contact self-charging (enables 24-hour continuous operation)

New robotic devices promise mobility for the handicapped

2006-03-13T00:37:00.000-05:00

The recent news that Swiss and Spanish scientists have developed a successful prototype of a mind-controlled wheelchair is yet another indication of broad range of work being done around the planet to develop mobility solutions for the disabled and aged market. Most importantly, the new system adds a critical dimension to the work being done - machine control via the mind. In a system which might best be described as augmented or assisted telepathy, the new system is reported to use electrodes embedded in a skullcap to monitor the brain patterns of the user, interpret them via sophisticated software algorithms, and control the wheelchair via a wireless link.

Like most modern household robotic devices (such as the Dyson Robot Vacuum Cleaner and Husqvarna's Robot Lawn Mower ), the wheelchair monitors the immediate environment and ensure there are no collisions.

Coupled with work recently reported at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology and Independence Technology (a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary), the news suggests that within a few years there will be a wide range of devices enabling the most severely handicapped people to achieve independent mobility.

The aging world population is seen as an affluent target market for carer and helper robotic applications.Gizmo 4 featured an article on exoskeletons - wearable robots capable of adding speed. Strength and intelligent movement to the wearer.

The Power Assist Suit was developed at Kanagawa to aid nurses in lifting immobile patients. Electronic sensors monitor the user's muscles and trigger the hydraulically operated suit to boost strength by more than 50%.

The aging world population is seen as an affluent target market for carer and helper robotic applications.Independence Technology's initial offering, the iBOT, is already in the marketplace.Independence Technology uses the latest technologies to develop cutting-edge products and services to help people with disabilities live their lives with greater freedom, and enrolled the help of Segway inventor Dean Kamen in developing the iBOT Mobility system.

Designed to give disabled people maximum autonomy, the iBOT is a four-wheeled wheel-chair which can rise vertically to eye-level and balance on two wheels, use four wheels to cross rough terrain and can go up and down stairs. The iBOT functions are made possible by gyroscopes that are programmed to create balancing capabilities based on an individual's centre of gravity.

The gyroscopes, in effect, emulate the principle by which humans are able to stand, balance themselves and navigate around and through various environments and terrain.

AIST develops autonomous humanoid robot

2006-03-13T00:19:00.000-05:00

On January 23, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba, Ibaraki unveiled its HRP-2 humanoid robot equipped with a new system that enables autonomous self-directed operation. The robot demonstrated the ability to respond to spoken human commands by retrieving a can of juice from a refrigerator and bringing it to the person who requested it.

The robot’s head is equipped with improved cameras, which serve as eyes, and it incorporates a system that enables it to perceive its environment, remove any obstacles it encounters along the way, and self-correct its direction if it strays off course.

At the demonstration, a person seated at a table instructed a robot to bring him some juice. The robot communicated the command to a second robot, which then walked to the refrigerator, moving chairs out of the way as it proceeded. It opened the door of the refrigerator, retrieved a can of juice, and brought it back to the table.

AIST has also developed a robot that relies on laser beams to get a three-dimensional understanding of its surroundings. According to the institute, “The HRP-2 is a robot that can provide assistance in real-life situations. Further integration of technology will lead to more functional enhancements in the future.”

Edo-period “robot” returns to life in Japan

2006-03-13T00:17:00.000-05:00

built upon the strength of this affection.

The affection toward robots can be traced back to the karakuri mechanical dolls of the Edo period. One such doll is the mechanical “calligraphy writing doll,” considered a masterpiece of karakuri craftsmanship. Recently returned to Japan after a long absence, the doll was constructed more than 150 years ago by Tanaka Hisashige, who is often referred to as the “Edison of Japan” and who served as a technical advisor for the Nabeshima feudal domain.

The “calligraphy writing doll” resembles a young man holding a brush in his right hand. With a series of movements fully controlled by precise automatic mechanisms, the young man dips his brush into ink and draws the kanji character for kotobuki (”blessing” or “longevity”) on a sheet of paper in front of him. When finished, he displays a look of satisfaction to his onlookers.

Science historian Higashino Susumu (55), who recently succeeded in his 13-year effort to persuade a wealthy American collector to sell the prized karakuri back to Japan, is amazed by the sophistication of the restored doll. Mechanical dolls capable of writing were also made in China and Europe, but unlike this Japanese masterpiece, their pens had to be dipped in ink beforehand or they only moved from the elbow down — thus, they remained confined to the realm of crude puppetry. Hisashige imbued his creation with a sense of reality, such as in the human-like way he follows the brush stroke with his eyes as he writes. “Hisashige’s aim was not to create a doll, but to create a human,” says Higashino.

This uncompromising precision in Hisashige’s work embodies the manufacturing spirit that has underpinned the development of postwar Japan. Later in life at the age of 75, after the Meiji Restoration, Hisashige founded the engineering company that would later become Toshiba. And so it was, the Japanese manufacturing industry had its beginnings in Edo craftsmanship that was uniquely Japanese.

RI-MAN, the soft-skinned robot

2006-03-13T00:16:00.000-05:00

RI-MAN, an autonomous lifestyle-support robot developed at RIKEN’s Bio-Mimetic Control Research Center (Nagoya, Japan), now has soft skin. If put to work in care facilities, RI-MAN’s soft arms and chest will enable it to perform delicate work that present-day robots are not allowed to do, such as lifting patients up into its arms.

The robot, which is 158 cm (5 ft 2 in) tall and weighs about 100 kg (220 lbs), consists of a humanoid upper body that sits atop a wheeled base. A 5-mm layer of silicone covers most of the upper body, including the face and chest. The skin sinks in slightly when pressed, giving it a resilient, supple feeling. Under the layer of silicone are 320 pressure sensors that enable RI-MAN to self-adjust the softness as needed.

Research team leader Zhiwei Luo says, “We may see commercial applications of this technology in as early as five years.”

Manga-inspired robot works in Japanese airport

2006-03-13T00:10:00.000-05:00

We can't claim to be big fans of the Japanese manga Galaxy Express 999, but clearly the comic is still pretty popular in Japan, because its heroine, the blonde-tressed Maetel, has been given life as a robot, and is working in Kita-Kyushu, the hometown of the comic's creator, Leiji Matsumoto. Of course, the robotic Maetel might feel she's gotten something of a raw deal: instead of traveling through space on an intergalactic train like her fictional alter ego, she's earthbound, working as the receptionist in Kita-Kyushu's airport. Come the revolution, we plan to stay well out of her way.

Fido luggage is traveler's best friend

2006-03-13T00:01:00.000-05:00

Sure, wheeled suitcases and ergonomically correct bags make traveling easier, but face it, what you really want is a robotic suitcase that follows you around on its own without you having to pick it up even once. That's the idea behind Fido Luggage, a product concept from architect Peter Yeadon. Once the bag's owner slips on a watch-like controller, the suitcase is under his control, able to follow both passively over a wireless link, and to obey voice commands. The bag's wheels are each independently controlled for smooth travel in any direction, and laser sensors help it navigate rough terrain and avoid running over small children. Needless to say, we don't expect to ever see this for sale in our corner luggage shop (and we suspect that even if it was somehow produced, the TSA would instantly ban it from US airports), but we can't help but want it anyhow. After all, it's everything we ever wanted in a pet: quiet, obedient and willing to bring us our slippers, newspaper and just about everything else.

Hitachi Hides 'New' Security Robot But Wheels May Reveal the Secret, Says MobileRobots Inc

2006-03-12T23:55:00.000-05:00

Is There a 4-Year-Old MobileRobots DX under That Bubble?

AMHERST, N.H., March 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Hitachi, according to a March 8,
2006 AP wire release, is developing a security robot that can map its
surroundings and look for suspicious changes in the landscape. However, the
Hitachi robot is suspiciously similar to a MobileRobots Inc's Pioneer-DX with
laser-mapping and navigation -- available commercially for nearly four years!
The AP release contains no photos, but photos of the Hitachi robot were
printed in Kyodo News on the Web in Japan. These photos show a large bubble
covering the robotic base. The front of the Hitachi bubble has a horizontal
slit for range-finding readings, just as MobileRobots' navigation system
requires. (http://home.kyodo.co.jp/modules/fstPhotos/index.php?photoid=11597).
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20060309/FLTH016 )
Says Dr. William Kennedy, co-founder of MobileRobots, "The wheel rims are
the giveaway. The Pioneer DX systems sold a few years ago had unique gold
wheel rims custom-manufactured for our company, which can be seen quite
clearly in the photo. We have no problem with customers using our robots to
prototype; that's what they're for. But it would be misleading to portray
robot technologies we've sold commercially for four years as something new and
revolutionary."
MobileRobots Pioneer robots are sold in Japan by Revast Technologies of
Tokyo. Revast has sold Pioneer DX robots to Hitachi. MobileRobots has
attempted to contact Hitachi concerning the release, but has not yet received
an answer.
MobileRobots Inc sells a larger self-charging robot, called PatrolBot(TM),
that performs security tasks, monitors building conditions and makes
deliveries in offices, laboratories and clean-rooms. MobileRobots
MapperBot(TM) is used to create electronic floor plans of buildings in
minutes. MobileRobots also provide the autonomous "robot brain" system called
ARCSinside(TM) that is used inside larger third-party Automated Guided
Vehicles to move goods in factories. Unlike other systems, ARCSinside robots
do not need colored stripes, wires in the floor or triangulation beacons
installed around the workspace.

About MobileRobots Inc
MobileRobots Inc, formerly ActivMedia Robotics, LLC, is a global leader in
design and manufacture of intelligent mobile robots, sensing and controls.
Established in 1995, the company has sold thousands of robots to organizations
including Intel, Amgen, Carnegie Mellon, John Deere, Microsoft, NASA, US Army
and the US Navy. To learn more, visit http://www.MobileRobots.com .
MobileRobots R&D, production and business offices are in Amherst, NH.

Robotic bartender understands verbal orders and tells jokes

2006-03-12T23:46:00.000-05:00

March 12, 2006 If there was a list of professions least likely to see humans replaced by machines, the barkeeper would logically be on that list. But students in the final year of a computational linguistics and phonetics course at the University of Saarland in Germany have created a robotic bartender to demonstrate how digital language technologies can be combined with robotics.

The robotic Barkeeper understands natural language and hence takes orders in exactly the same way as a normal bartender. It has a database of cocktail recipes, and will propose drinks to the customer at the beginning of the conversation. The user can then choose any cocktail by spoken commands, or create their own cocktail by choosing the ingredients. Then while it is making the drinks, it keeps the customers entertained by telling jokes. The Barkeeper has an extensive jokes database, with additional specific jokes about each cocktail and each ingredient.When it serves the drink, it also explains to the customer exactly what the alcoholic content is.

The computer linguistics course was run by University of Saarland professors Manfred Pinkal and Hans Uszkoreit and involved the students creating a speaking robot in just six weeks.

Three students, Thomas Horf, Roland Roller, Sabrina Wilske, decided on building the barkeeper robot while two other teams decided on a blackjack dealing robot and a logistics robot.

Living Forever

2006-03-08T23:16:00.000-05:00

Is immortality coming in your lifetime? Medical advances, cryonics, cloning, genetic engineering, and other advances offer tantalizing promises. We'll look at the possibilities.
Ray Kurzweil's Plan for Cheating Death By Terry Grossman

A cure for aging may be found in the next fifty years. The trick now is to live long enough to be there when it happens. In his two new books, Ray Kurzweil has painted a clear picture of the future and provided a blueprint for how to get there. (Added February 3rd 2006)

Interview with Robert A. Freitas Jr. Part 2 By Robert A. Freitas Jr. and Sander Olson

There are very few diseases or conditions--including infectious diseases--aside from physical brain damage, that cannot be cured using nanomedicine, says nanomedicine pioneer Robert A. Freitas Jr. He believes nanomedicine's greatest power will emerge in a decade or two as we learn to design and construct complete artificial nanorobots using diamondoid nanometer-scale parts and subsystems. (Added February 2nd 2006)

Ray Kurzweil's Dangerous Idea By Ray Kurzweil
"What is your dangerous idea?" Over one hundred big thinkers answered this question, as part of The Edge's Annual Question for 2006. Ray Kurzweil's dangerous idea? We can achieve immortality in our lifetime. (Added January 17th 2006)

Open-Source Biology And Its Impact on Industry By Rob Carlson
Technology based on intentional, open-source biology is on its way, whether we like it or not. Distributed biological manufacturing is the future of the global economy and will occur as inexpensive, quality DNA sequencing and synthesis equipment becomes available to anyone. In 2050, garage biology hacking will be well under way. Fear of potential hazards should be met with increased research and education, rather than closing the door on the profound positive impacts that distributed biological technology will have on human health, human impacts on the environment, and increasing standards of living around the world. (Added March 3rd 2004)

Foreword to Electronic Reporting in the Digital Medical Enterprise By Ray Kurzweil
Doctors in the year 2012 will have access to full-immersion virtual-reality training and surgical systems, microchip-based protein and gene analysis systems, knowledge-based systems providing automated guidance and access to the most recent medical research, and always-present visual displays of patient data for instant interaction via voice. (Added June 6th 2003)

The Future of Life By Ray Kurzweil
A coming era of personalized genetic medicine, breakthroughs that radically extend the human lifespan, nanomedicine, and the merger of our biological species with our own technology were among the future visions presented at TIME's "The Future of Life" conference. (Added March 31st 2003)

Human Body Version 2.0 By Ray Kurzweil
In the coming decades, a radical upgrading of our body's physical and mental systems, already underway, will use nanobots to augment and ultimately replace our organs. We already know how to prevent most degenerative disease through nutrition and supplementation; this will be a bridge to the emerging biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution. By 2030, reverse-engineering of the human brain will have been completed and nonbiological intelligence will merge with our biological brains. (Added February 17th 2003)

Death is an Outrage By Robert A. Freitas Jr.
Each year, we allow a destruction of knowledge equivalent to three Libraries of Congress with an average value of about $2 million dollars for each human life lost. The solution: "dechronification"--nanomedicine tools that can arrest biological aging and reduce your biological age. (Added January 10th 2003)

Human Cloning is the Least Interesting Application of Cloning Technology By Ray Kurzweil
Cloning is an extremely important technology--not for cloning humans but for life extension: therapeutic cloning of one's own organs, creating new tissues to replace defective tissues or organs, or replacing one's organs and tissues with their "young" telomere-extended replacements without surgery. Cloning even offers a possible solution for world hunger: creating meat without animals. (Added January 4th 2003)

Dialogue between Ray Kurzweil, Eric Drexler, and Robert Bradbury By K. Eric Drexler, Ray Kurzweil, and Robert Bradbury
What would it take to achieve successful cryonics reanimation of a fully functioning human brain, with memories intact? A conversation at the recent Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension between Ray Kurzweil and Eric Drexler sparked an email discussion of this question. They agreed that despite the challenges, the brain's functions and memories can be represented surprisingly compactly, suggesting that successful reanimation of the brain may be achievable. (Added December 4th 2002)

The Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension By Ray Kurzweil
On November 15-17, 2002, leaders in life extension and cryonics came together to explore how the emerging technologies of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and cryonics will enable humans to halt and ultimately reverse aging and disease and live indefinitely. (Added November 21st 2002)

The Vasculoid Personal Appliance By Robert A. Freitas Jr.
Robert A. Freitas Jr. (author, "Nanomedicine") visualizes a future "vasculoid" (vascular-like machine) that would replace human blood with some 500 trillion nanorobots distributed throughout the body’s vasculature as a coating. It could eradicate heart disease, stroke, and other vascular problems; remove parasites, bacteria, viruses, and metastasizing cancer cells to limit the spread of bloodborne disease; move lymphocytes faster to improve immune response; reduce susceptibility to chemical, biochemical, and parasitic poisons; improve physical endurance and stamina; and partially protect from various accidents and other physical harm. (Added October 22nd 2002)

External Counterpulsation -- A New Paradigm for Treating Heart Disease By Terry Grossman
External Counterpulsation (ECP) is an ingenious method for treating angina that doesn't use drugs, is non-invasive, inexpensive and safe -- unlike conventional surgical procedures such as angioplasty and bypass surgery. Physicians should inform patients of all the treatment options available for ischemic heart disease, including FDA-approved ECP, says physician Dr. Grossman. (Added June 17th 2002)

Predictive Human Genomics Is Here By Terry Grossman
Thanks to breakthroughs in genomics testing, physicians now have tools for true preventive medicine. Gene chips and genomics test panels can predict one’s predisposition towards many serious -- and often preventable -- genetic diseases and allow doctors to modify gene expression through precise, targeted, individualized interventions. (Added May 29th 2002)

Respirocytes By Robert A. Freitas Jr.
An artificial nanomedical erythrocyte, or "respirocyte" -- intended to duplicate all of the important functions of the red blood cell -- could serve as a universal blood substitute, preserve living tissue, eliminate "the bends," allow for new sports records, and provide treatment for anemia, choking, lung diseases, asphyxia, and other respiratory problems. (Added May 20th 2002)

We Are Becoming Cyborgs By Ray Kurzweil
The union of human and machine is well on its way. Almost every part of the body can already be enhanced or replaced, even some of our brain functions. Subminiature drug delivery systems can now precisely target tumors or individual cells. Within two to three decades, our brains will have been "reverse-engineered": nanobots will give us full-immersion virtual reality and direct brain connection with the Internet. Soon after, we will vastly expand our intellect as we merge our biological brains with non-biological intelligence. (Added March 15th 2002)

Radical body design"Primo Posthuman" By Natasha Vita-More
Primo 3M+ is a prototype future body, a conceptual design with superlongevity in mind. Primo by design is multi-functional. It is reliable, changeable, upgradeable, and complete with enhanced senses. Primo is the new designer body. (Added February 25th 2002)

Why Sleep? By Terrence Sejnowski
The 5th Annual Edge Question reflects the spirit of the Edge motto: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." Terrence Sejnowski asks: why sleep? (Added January 21st 2002)

Why is religion so important to most Americans and so trivial to most intellectuals? By David Gelernter
The 5th Annual Edge Question reflects the spirit of the Edge motto: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." David Gelernter asks: why is religion important to some? (Added January 21st 2002)

Food For Thought By David Dalrymple
Ten-year-old college student David Dalrymple recently spoke at the International Food Policy Research Institute's "Sustainable Food Security for All by 2020" Conference, sharing some suggestions about solutions to world hunger and regulation of food and drugs. This paper, written months before his presentation, has some of the ideas he shared at the conference. (Added September 27th 2001)

The End Of Time: A Talk With Julian Barbour By Julian Barbour
In this talk with the Edge's John Brockman, Julian Barbour takes on the absolute framework of time. And if time truly doesn't exist, could we, hypothetically, live forever? (Added August 3rd 2001)

Foreword to 'Dark Ages II' (book by Bryan Bergeron) By Ray Kurzweil
Our civilization's knowledge legacy is at great risk, growing exponentially with the exploding size of our knowledge bases. And that doesn't count the trillions of bytes of information stored in our brains, which eventually will be captured in the future. How long do we want our lives and thoughts to last? (Added July 26th 2001)

Say Ah By Robert A. Freitas Jr.
Nanorobots the size of bacteria might one day roam people's bodies, rooting out disease organisms and repairing damaged tissue. (Added May 23rd 2001)

Diary of an Immortal Man By Richard Dooling
What would it be like to live forever? Writer Richard Dooling explores this question in this fictional piece from Esquire. (Added May 22nd 2001)

The Transhumanist FAQ By Nick Bostrom
This FAQ, written by Nick Bostrom (with the help of others—see endnote), outlines the principles of transhumanism and provides definitions of transhumanist terms and resources. This is one of many versions of the "Transhumanist FAQ" that can be found on many websites, per organization or individual. (Added April 30th 2001)

Immortality By Swami Vivekananda
Vivekananda attempts to answer the question: are we mortal or immortal? If we are mortal, no further questions need be asked. But if we are immortal, what are the logical arguments that support this idea and what is it that endures after death? From his talk delivered over a hundred years ago. (Added April 26th 2001)

Life Extension and Overpopulation By Max More
The prospect of life extension raises fears of overpopulation. Extropian Max More argues we should focus on reducing births, not on raising or maintaining death, since population growth and pollution are slowing down (from growing wealth) and in the future we can create new habitats in space. (Added April 9th 2001)

Why Cryosuspension Makes Sense By Terry Grossman
We're all genetically programmed to die, but advances in nanomedicine are expected to allow for "radical life extension" by 2050. Meanwhile, there's cryostasis--freezing the body immediately after death with a view toward resuscitation in the future. (Added April 3rd 2001)

The Transhuman Singularity By Terry Grossman
Therapeutic human cloning, stem cell therapies, synthetic organs, molecular nanotechnology, and the digital-cerebral interface may allow us to achieve immortality in this century. But keeping bionic transhumans alive until immortalilty is achieved may prove very expensive. And not everyone will want it. (Added March 27th 2001)

Human Cloning is the Least of It By Ray Kurzweil
In this message posted to the WIRED Future List, Raymond Kurzweil asserts that cloning--replicating animals, organs, and cells--has profound implications for health and well-being of both humans and animals, including a possible solution for world hunger. He also sees no problem with human cloning. (Added February 22nd 2001)

Nanotechnology, Nanomedicine and Nanosurgery By Robert A. Freitas Jr.

2006-03-08T23:15:00.000-05:00

The ability to build complex diamondoid medical nanorobots to molecular precision, and then to build them cheaply enough in sufficiently large numbers to be useful therapeutically, will revolutionize the practice of medicine and surgery. http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0644.html?m%3D5

The Death of the West [Patrick J. Buchanan]

2006-03-08T22:18:00.000-05:00

BUCHANAN DECLARES: DEATH OF THE WESTIn his ultracontroversial book, which will be banned and burned in many quarters, Brave Buchanan contends that the U.S. will be a Third World nation by the year 2050.

The BestSellingAuthorTVHostPresidentialCandidateColumnist predicts Europe will be inundated by an Islamic-Arab-African invasion and most First World nations, including Japan, will have begun slowly to vanish from the earth.

Buchanan is primed and ready for a media blitz behind DEATH OF THE WEST [ranked #492 on AMAZON's hourly sales chart Wednesday morning], set for release from DUNNE. Buchanan will light the bonfire on NBC's TODAY show this Friday, according to a network source.
But the DRUDGE REPORT can once again bring you the first sneak. Relying upon the most recent UN population studies, Buchanan declares:

By 2050, only 10% of the world's people will be of European descent. One third of Europe's people will be over 60, and one-in-ten over 80. Involuntary euthanasia has already come to Europe.
Between now and 2050, Asia, Africa, and Latin America will grow by three to four billion people -- 30 to 40 new Mexicos! -- as Europe will lose the equivalent of the entire population of Germany, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
By 2050, 23 million Germans will have disappeared along with 16 million Italians and 30 million Russians.
Russia will lose Siberia and the far east to China and be pushed out of the Caucuses and Central Asia, where Islamic populations are exploding while Russia's is dying.
Either Europe must effect a radical cutback in pensions and health care for seniors, or Europe must import scores of millions of Arabs and Africans to care for the elderly and pay the taxes to sustain their welfare states.
The 4.2 million Palestinians in Israel and on the West Bank and Gaza will explode to 9 million by 2025, and 15 million by 2050, when Palestinians will outnumber Israel's Jewish population two-to-one.
America's "Dual Containment" policy in the Persian Gulf seems unsustainable. In less than 25 years, Iraq will have 42 million people and Iran 94 million people, more than any European nation except Russia.
The Islamic invasions of Spain and France in the eighth century, and of the Balkans and Central Europe from the 14th to the 17th centuries, will be reenacted in the lifetime of most of those now living. Islam has already surpassed Catholicism as the largest religion on earth.
It is the Christian nations -- Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox -- that have begun to die. In a chapter titled, "Where Have All the Children Gone?" Buchanan explains why, and why it is unlikely the West can solve the demographic crisis before it leads to The Death of the West.
In his chapter La Reconquista, Buchanan contends that an invasion of the United States is taking place and that America now harbors a "nation within a nation."
There are 30 million foreign born in the U.S. today, and between 9 and 11 million illegal aliens, or as many undocumented aliens in the U.S. as there are people in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Mexico is exporting its poor and unemployed for U.S. taxpayers to employ and educate. Radical and militant Hispanics and Mexican leaders alike believe this will lead to the cultural and demographic recapture of the Southwest from America, reversing the results of The Mexican War.
By supporting open borders, the GOP is committing suicide. First- time Hispanic voters chose Clinton 15-1 over Dole. Of the seven major immigration states -- Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California, Texas and Florida -- Mr. Bush lost five, and perhaps six. Of the 10 states with the smallest share of immigrants, Bush won all 10.
European-Americans are a minority in America's most populous state, California, and by 2004, will be a minority in Texas.
The political agenda of California Hispanics includes race welfare for illegal aliens, racial preferences, bilingual education, open borders, dual citizenship, Cinqo de Mayo as a California holiday, and, in one case, replacing a statue of an American hero of the Mexican War with the Aztec god Quetzacoatl.
White Americans are fleeing California at the rate of 100,000 a year.
MeCHA, the student organization that claims chapters on hundreds of campuses has a program that reads like a Mexican version of the agenda of the white-supremacist Aryan Nation.
In 2001, an Office for Mexicans Abroad in Mexico was providing survival kits with everything from dried meat to anti-diarrhea pills to condoms to Mexicans setting off to break in to the United States .
As of 2000, there were 8.4 million foreign born in California, as many foreign born as there are people in New Jersey, a primary cause of the state energy and schools crisis.
Among Third World immigrants, poverty rates and incarceration rates are double and triple what they are among native-born Americans. Shooting up the flares and waving the flag, Buchanan argues that the 1960s "counter-culture" has become America's dominant culture, and the iconoclasts of that counter-culture are systematically demolishing America's history and heritage.
Under Political Correctness, America's greatest heroes -- soldiers, explorers and statesmen from Columbus to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson -- are under savage attack as genocidal racists and exploiters of indigenous peoples.
The history books of American public schools are being rewritten with the old heroes ignored or trashed and Western civilization disparaged and demeaned.
When Mel Gibson's film, "The Patriot," came out in 2000, it was savagely attacked for presenting black Americans as fighting patriots in the Revolutionary War.
With the assault on Confederate books, symbols, flags, heroes, and holidays almost complete, the attack is now proceeding against the Puritan fathers, soldiers who fought in The Mexican War, and, in New Jersey, even against the Declaration of Independence itself.
In some school districts, Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, and any realistic portrayal of the America South, including Harper' Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, are now forbidden.
Even the great museums on America's Mall, to introduce school children to the greatness and glory of America's past, are being used to indoctrinate children in how wicked and evil our forefathers were. In his chapter, "The De-Christianization of America," Buchanan argues that the death of the Christian faith in Western countries is a primary cause of their dying populations. Whenever faith dies, the people die. A new atheistic civilization is arising, he argues, and is using its dominance of the culture and the courts to drive
Christianity out of the temples of our civilization.
Secular Humanism, widely mocked and disparaged, a few decades ago, is now the dominant faith of the nation's cultural elites. The moral tenets of humanism are replacing those of Christianity in our public life.
Even Christian churches are rewriting their hymnals to make them acceptable to the dominant culture.
Anti-Catholic films and filthy and blasphemous anti-Christian art are the deliberate insults of a triumphant pagan and secularist faith.
Subject: America's last stand?

Islamic Militants may not win the present war, but they have time on their side. Not too far in the future, these militants and others in the third world will decisively outnumber the elderly populations of Europe and the United States. They will outnumber so decisively that by then they'll easily gain the upper hand in any struggle for world hegemony. Some of the great events of this new order will be, the disappearance of entire nations, the dissolution of the United States, the return of Christianity to the catacombs, and a new dark age for the world. Yes the stakes are high and it's almost too late! The overpopulation doomsayers, abortion profiteers, and moral revisionists are root causes of the demise of Western Civilization they can and should be exposed and fought.

Some sobering things to think about:

The vaunted population explosion has become a population implosion in the Western world.
Unrestricted immigration, the quick fix for Europe's population decline: why it may turn out to be more damaging than the decline itself.
The death knell for Israel? How population trends will change the Middle East picture in the next twenty-five years.
Empty churches full mosques.What lies ahead for the post Christian world.
California, A Mexican State?
How a population decline like we see today among the Western Nations spelled doom for the Roman Empire.
Tender thoughts lead to the gas chamber: How the ones for equallity have exploited and distorted the ideas of mercy and compassion in order to popularize their anti-Christian anti- life ethic.
Why the rewriting of the historical picture of America? The results of decades of think speak that defamed American heroes like George Washington and Andrew Jackson. Such men today are pictured as racist, greedy villians.

Christopher Columbus is now worse than Hitler! It may be hard to believe but the U.S. Supreme court once declaired the U.S. a Christian nation! John Stuart Mills stated that free institutions can't exist in countries made up of different nationalities like the United States is today. Another term is Balkanization. The Bush Administration is called divisive, insensitive, and exclusionary because they mentioned an un-Pc individual named Jesus. The Humanist Manifesto, sadly to say, now influences both parties in America today! Eisenhower and Nixon, two who restricted illegal immigration. A move that would not be allowed today.

Diversity, those who preach it live another way while Christianity is identified by the ones crying diversity as the real enemy.

The death of the West, Pat Buchanan.

'The Death of the West': Pat Buchanan Raises a Demographic Alarum [CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL]

2006-03-08T22:03:00.000-05:00

Through a syndicated column, a long career as a CNN pundit and three quixotic presidential campaigns, the former Republican presidential aide Patrick J. Buchanan has established himself as the country's most prominent foe of immigration. In his tirade ''The Death of the West,'' he makes clear that he sees newcomers as only part of the problem. Braiding two separate complaints, he argues, first, that plummeting birthrates will make white people a minority in much of the West; and, second, that an intolerant liberal elite has transformed America's culture, wrecking its most precious traditions -- which happen to be its bulwark against getting swamped by foreigners.
Buchanan's demographic alarum marks the re-emergence of a genre of racial-doom books not seen (for reasons that are obvious enough) since before World War II. In 1960 a quarter of humanity was of European descent, Buchanan notes; today whites make up just a sixth of the human race, and they're aging. The American birthrate is below replacement level for the first time since the Depression. Of the 22 countries with the world's lowest birthrates, 20 are in Europe, and Spain's median age will be 55 in a few decades. Barbarians will soon be at the gates. Only 8 million Russians will be living in the mineral- and oil-rich lands east of the Urals, irresistible lebensraum for a Chinese population rising toward 1.5 billion. Europe's generous welfare states, viable in a society that has 5 workers per retiree, will buckle once that ratio falls to 2. Short on labor, Europe must choose either penury for its elderly or a huge immigration from Africa and a ''second great Islamic wave.''
Buchanan's explanation of what sent our own country to hell in a handbasket is the standard-issue cultural-conservative one. Abortion, pornography, euthanasia, gun control and political correctness are the crimes; feminists, liberal judges and Marxisant scholars are the perpetrators. Americans of different stripes will agree with at least some of Buchanan's assertions: that racial activism has taken on aspects of a religion in the hands of the hard left, that international prosecutors pursue rightists like Augusto Pinochet with far more zeal than leftists like Fidel Castro, that the ideology of ''human rights'' was put to the service of imperialism in Kosovo, that ''hate crimes'' legislation has less to do with justice than with ideological special pleading, that political correctness -- the punctiliousness that Americans bring to matters of race, gender and sexual orientation -- maintains a tenacious hold on public life, chilling free discussion. Future historians will snicker at it, as we do at Victorian prudery; but they will also shudder, as we do at McCarthyite persecution.
Still, just as there were real perverts in Victoria's day and real Stalinists in McCarthy's, there are real segregationists in our own. Buchanan focuses to the point of obsession on the crusade against symbols of the Confederacy, from Virginia's abolition of Confederate History Month to the vandalism of a statue in Selma of the Confederate general and Klansman Nathan Bedford Forrest. While claiming to reject ''the blood-and-soil idea of a nation,'' he does not recognize a difference between ''civilization'' on the one hand and race on the other. You can tell this by the way he flings around the term ''third world'' as a synonym for ''nonwhite.'' California, he says, ''is on its way to becoming a predominantly third world state'' (which will surely be news to the English biochemists and French stockbrokers queued up to enter it).
Much of this provocation is surely ladled out just to rile the bien-pensants. Buchanan loves ideological dust-ups (''The pill and condom have become the hammer and sickle of the cultural revolution'') and purple oratory (''Western women are terminating their pregnancies at a rate that represents autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry''). His signal debating trick is a cheap one, ever beloved of rabble-rousers -- to take a broad historical trend and find someone to scapegoat for it. Thus, Republicans are fleeing social issues not because they cost votes but because ''the media have whispered in Republican ears.'' The 20 years after World War II were a ''golden age of marriage,'' but this superb modus vivendi ''fell apart in the 1960's, when feminists managed to add 'sex' to the discriminations forbidden by the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964.'' And Americans, in his reading, were duped out of their ancestral faiths by a few wily atheistic savants from the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse chief among them.
Buchanan is now reflexively hostile to any evidence that the United States retains any strong points at all. He deplores the fact that no top college has an American history requirement. But clearly universities are doing something right, for in what other country does the biography of a hitherto little-studied 18th-century politician spend months on the best-seller list, as David McCullough's ''John Adams'' has done? Buchanan also detects, quoting James Burnham, a ''deepening loss, among the leaders of the West, of confidence in themselves and in the unique quality of their own civilization.'' This is a bizarre complaint from one who rails at the International Monetary Fund and at the ''braggadocio'' of those who declare the United States the world's only superpower. Western leaders, in fact, are self-confident as never before -- and the central pillar of that self-confidence is their belief that, to some extent, all cultures are becoming Western ones.
In 1992, Buchanan electrified the Republican National Convention with a declaration that Americans were locked in a ''religious war'' and a ''cultural war'' for the nation's soul. What distinguishes ''The Death of the West'' from his lament then is that today he considers that war decisively lost. ''A new generation has now grown up,'' he writes, ''for whom the cultural revolution is not a revolution at all, but the culture they were born into and have known all their lives.'' Far from coming to an accommodation with this new order, he is past even wishing the country well: cultural revolutionaries ''have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for -- their country, not ours.'' Having spent years fighting what he took to be a dangerous faction in American life, Pat Buchanan has come to realize that what he has been fighting is America itself. He has decided he prefers the fight to the country.

Imagining the Future [Yuval Levin]

2006-03-08T18:42:00.000-05:00

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/4/levin.htm.

To think about technology is to think about the future. It is, unavoidably, to speculate and to predict, to imagine how our lives might be affected by new tools, new methods, and new powers. Most arguments about technology are therefore really arguments about the future. They give voice to different sorts of expectations about progress and change, and to different sorts of intuitions about the character of human life. The particular technology being debated is often secondary to these larger much-disputed themes, and the public debate is shaped by different ways of imagining the future at least as much as by the specific technical potential of a new device or technique.
This has certainly been the case in the most prominent set of arguments about technology in America today—arguments about human biotechnology. For at least three decades, but especially since the late 1990s, the future of these biotechnologies has been a hot political issue in this country. Novel prospects for manipulating nascent human life, enhancing physical or mental powers, reshaping the life cycle, or otherwise exercising unprecedented control over our biological selves have increasingly been fodder for public argument. Advocates and critics of these emerging powers tend to agree about one thing: biotechnology will play a critical role in shaping the future of humanity. continue...

ethical and social implications

2006-02-25T20:42:00.000-05:00

As computers are programmed to act more like people, several social and ethical concerns come into focus. For example: Are there ethical bounds on what computers should be programmed to do? Sources listed here focus on AI, but also included are works that range more broadly into the general impact of computerization.

http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/ethics.html

http://futureimperative.blogspot.com/2006/02/gods-and-monsters-human-augmentation.html
-the above is a blog dedicated to human augmentation and its effect socially.. very good
http://betterhumans.com/
another blog about human aug... sharing both good and bad

more links:
http://www.natasha.cc/paper.htm
http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~aviseu/pdf%20files/cepe.pdf

link

2006-02-20T13:28:00.000-05:00

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast15nov_1.htm

Human Population: Fundamentals of Growth

2006-02-09T00:18:00.000-05:00

Human Population: Fundamentals of Growth
Population Growth and Distribution

In 2000, the world had 6.1 billion human inhabitants. This number could rise to more than 9 billion in the next 50 years. For the last 50 years, world population multiplied more rapidly than ever before, and more rapidly than it will ever grow in the future.

Anthropologists believe the human species dates back at least 3 million years. For most of our history, these distant ancestors lived a precarious existence as hunters and gatherers. This way of life kept their total numbers small, probably less than 10 million. However, as agriculture was introduced, communities evolved that could support more people.

World population expanded to about 300 million by A.D. 1 and continued to grow at a moderate rate. But after the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, living standards rose and widespread famines and epidemics diminished in some regions. Population growth accelerated. The population climbed to about 760 million in 1750 and reached 1 billion around 1800 (see chart, "World population growth, 1750–2150,").

World Population Distribution by Region, 1800–2050

Source: United Nations Population Division, Briefing Packet, 1998 Revision of World Population Prospects.

In 1800, the vast majority of the world's population (86 percent) resided in Asia and Europe, with 65 percent in Asia alone (see chart, "World population distribution by region, 1800–2050"). By 1900, Europe's share of world population had risen to 25 percent, fueled by the population increase that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Some of this growth spilled over to the Americas, increasing their share of the world total.

World population growth accelerated after World War II, when the population of less developed countries began to increase dramatically. After millions of years of extremely slow growth, the human population indeed grew explosively, doubling again and again; a billion people were added between 1960 and 1975; another billion were added between 1975 and 1987. Throughout the 20th century each additional billion has been achieved in a shorter period of time. Human population entered the 20th century with 1.6 billion people and left the century with 6.1 billion.

The growth of the last 200 years appears explosive on the historical timeline. The overall effects of this growth on living standards, resource use, and the environment will continue to change the world landscape long after.
Exponential Growth

As long ago as 1789, Thomas Malthus studied the nature of population growth in Europe. He claimed that population was increasing faster than food production, and he feared eventual global starvation. Of course he could not foresee how modern technology would expand food production, but his observations about how populations increase were important. Population grows geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8 …), rather than arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4 …), which is why the numbers can increase so quickly.

A story said to have originated in Persia offers a classic example of exponential growth. It tells of a clever courtier who presented a beautiful chess set to his king and in return asked only that the king give him one grain of rice for the first square, two grains, or double the amount, for the second square, four grains (or double again) for the third, and so forth. The king, not being mathematically inclined, agreed and ordered the rice to be brought from storage. The eighth square required 128 grains, the 12th took more than one pound. Long before reaching the 64th square, every grain of rice in the kingdom had been used. Even today, the total world rice production would not be enough to meet the amount required for the final square of the chessboard. The secret to understanding the arithmetic is that the rate of growth (doubling for each square) applies to an ever-expanding amount of rice, so the number of grains added with each doubling goes up, even though the rate of growth is constant.

Similarly, if a country's population begins with 1 million and grows at a steady 3 percent annually, it will add 30,000 persons the first year, almost 31,000 the second year, and 40,000 by the 10th year. At a 3 percent growth rate, its doubling time — or the number of years to double in size — is 23 years. (The doubling time for a population can be roughly determined by dividing the current growth rate into the number "69." Therefore, 69/3=23 years. Of course, if a population's growth rate does not remain at this rate, the projected doubling time would need to be recalculated.)

The 2000 growth rate of 1.4 percent, when applied to the world's 6.1 billion population, yields an annual increase of about 85 million people. Because of the large and increasing population size, the number of people added to the global population will remain high for several decades, even as growth rates continue to decline.

Between 2000 and 2030, nearly 100 percent of this annual growth will occur in the less developed countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, whose population growth rates are much higher than those in more developed countries. Growth rates of 1.9 percent and higher mean that populations would double in about 36 years, if these rates continue. Demographers do not believe they will. Projections of growth rates are lower than 1.9 percent because birth rates are declining and are expected to continue to do so. The populations in the less developed regions will most likely continue to command a larger proportion of the world total. While Asia's share of world population may continue to hover around 55 percent through the next century, Europe's portion has declined sharply and could drop even more during the 21st century. Africa and Latin America each would gain part of Europe's portion. By 2100, Africa is expected to capture the greatest share (see chart, "World population distribution by region, 1800–2050", above).

The more developed countries in Europe and North America, as well as Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, are growing by less than 1 percent annually. Population growth rates are negative in many European countries, including Russia (-0.6%), Estonia (-0.5%), Hungary (-0.4%), and Ukraine (-0.4%). If the growth rates in these countries continue to fall below zero, population size would slowly decline. As the chart "World population growth, 1750–2150" shows, population increase in more developed countries is already low and is expected to stabilize.
Terms

Birth rate (or crude birth rate): The number of live births per 1,000 population in a given year. Not to be confused with the growth rate.

Doubling time: The number of years required for the population of an area to double its present size, given the current rate of population growth. Population doubling time is useful to demonstrate the long-term effect of a growth rate, but should not be used to project population size. Many more developed countries have very low growth rates and, as a result, the equation shows doubling times of hundreds or thousands of years. But these countries are not expected to ever double again. Most, in fact, likely have population declines in their future. Many less developed countries have high growth rates that are associated with short doubling times, but are expected to grow more slowly as birth rates are expected to continue to decline.

Growth rate: The number of persons added to (or subtracted from) a population in a year due to natural increase and net migration; expressed as a percentage of the population at the beginning of the time period.

Less developed countries: Less developed countries include all countries in Africa, Asia (excluding Japan), and Latin America and the Caribbean, and the regions of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.

More developed countries: More developed countries include all countries in Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.

Population Explosion Among Older Americans

2006-02-09T00:14:00.000-05:00

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0780132.html

Population Explosion Among Older Americans

The United States saw a rapid growth in its elderly population during the 20th century. The number of Americans aged 65 and older climbed above 34.9 million in 2000, compared with 3.1 million in 1900. For the same years, the ratio of elderly Americans to the total population jumped from 1 in 25 to 1 in 8. The trend is guaranteed to continue in the coming century as the baby-boom generation grows older. Between 1990 and 2020, the population aged 65 to 74 is projected to grow 74%.

The elderly population explosion is a result of impressive increases in life expectancy. When the nation was founded, the average American could expect to live to the age of 35. Life expectancy at birth had increased to 47.3 by 1900 and in 2000 stood at 76.9.

Along with the growth of the general elderly population has come a remarkable increase in the number of Americans reaching age 100. In 2000 there were 50,454 centenarians (people aged 100 or over), representing 1 out of every 5,578 people. In 1990 centenarians numbered 37,306 people, or 1 out of every 6,667 people.

Source: Based on U.S. Census Bureau data.

World Population Ageing: 1950-2050

2006-02-09T00:11:00.000-05:00

http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/worldageing19502050/

World Population Ageing: 1950-2050

This report was prepared by the Population Division as a contribution to the 2002 World Assembly on Ageing and its follow-up. The report provides a description of global trends in population ageing and includes a series of indicators of the ageing process by development regions, major areas, regions and countries. The report shows that:

Population ageing is unprecedented, without parallel in human history—and the twenty-first century will witness even more rapid ageing than did the century just past.

Population ageing is pervasive, a global phenomenon affecting every man, woman and child—but countries are at very different stages of the process, and the pace of change differs greatly. Countries that started the process later will have less time to adjust.

Population ageing is enduring: we will not return to the young populations that our ancestors knew.

Population ageing has profound implications for many facets of human life.

MOLECULAR NANOTECHNOLOGY FULLY LOADED WITH BENEFITS AND RISKS

2006-02-09T00:07:00.000-05:00

http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=7161

MOLECULAR NANOTECHNOLOGY FULLY LOADED WITH BENEFITS AND RISKS
By Mike Treder
The Futurist

Mike Treder, CRN executive director, serves on the boards of directors of the Human Futures Institute and the World Transhumanist Association.

Jan. 5, 2004 -- The future shock of rapid change and technology run amok described by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 best seller has perhaps been less debilitating for most people than predicted, but even Toffler could not have envisioned the tidal wave of change that will hit us when nanofactories make the scene.

Imagine a world with billions of desktop-size, portable, nonpolluting, cheap machines that can manufacture almost anything-from clothing to furniture to electronics, and much more – in just a few hours. Today, such devices do not exist. But in the years ahead, this advanced form of nanotechnology could create the next Industrial Revolution – or the world's worst nightmare.

The technology described in this article is molecular nanotechnology (MNT). This is a big step beyond most of today's nanotech research, which deals with exploring and exploiting the properties of materials at the nanoscale. Industry has begun using the term nanotechnology to cover almost any technology significantly smaller than microtechnology, such as those involving nanoparticles or nanomaterials. This broad field will produce important and useful results, but their societal effects – both positive and negative – will be modest compared with later stages of the technology.

MNT, by contrast, is about constructing shapes, machines, and products at the atomic level – putting them together molecule by molecule. With parts only a few nanometers wide, it may become possible to build a supercomputer smaller than a grain of sand, a weapon smaller than a mosquito, or a self-contained nanofactory that sits on your kitchen counter.

"Picture an automated factory, full of conveyor belts, computers, and swinging robot arms," writes scientist and engineer K. Eric Drexler, who first brought nanotechnology to public attention with his 1986 book "Engines of Creation." "Now imagine something like that factory, but a million times smaller and working a million times faster, with parts and workpieces of molecular size."

Unlike any machine ever built, the nanofactory will be assembled from the bottom up, constructed of specifically designed and placed molecules. Drexler says, "Nanotechnology isn't primarily about miniaturizing machines, but about extending precise control of molecular structures to larger and larger scales. Nanotechnology is about making precise things big."

Virtually every previous technological improvement has been accomplished by making things smaller and more precise. But as the scales at which we work get smaller and smaller, we approach limits imposed by physics. The smallest unit of matter we can build with is the atom, or combinations of atoms known as molecules. The earthshaking insight of molecular nanotechnology is that, when we reach this scale, we can reverse direction and begin building up, making products by placing individual atoms and molecules exactly where we want them.

Ever since Richard Feynman enunciated MNT's basic concepts in 1959, and especially since Drexler began detailing its amazing possibilities in the 1980s, proposals for building products in various ways have been put forth. Some of these have been fanciful and many have been impractical. At this point, it appears that the idea of a nanofactory is the safest and most useful method of building general-purpose products by molecular manufacturing.

Inside a Nanofactory

The inner architecture of a nanofactory will be a stunning achievement, outside the realm of anything previously accomplished. Nanofactories will make use of a vast number of moving parts, each designed and precisely constructed to do a specific job. Some of these parts will be visible to the human eye. Most will be microscopic or even nanoscale, smaller than a human cell. An important feature of a nanofactory is that all of its parts will be fixed in place. This is significant because it greatly simplifies development of the device. Engineers won't have to figure out how to tell each little nanobot in a swarm where to go and how to get there, and none of the parts can get lost or go wild.

Perhaps the easiest way to envision the inner workings of a nanofactory is to picture a large city, with all the streets laid out on a grid. Imagine that in this city everyone works together to build gigantic products-ocean liners, for instance. To build something that big, you have to start with small parts and put them together.

In this imaginary city, all the workers stand along the streets and pass the parts along to each other. The smallest parts are assembled on the narrowest side streets, and then handed up to the end of the block. Other small parts from other side streets are joined together to make medium-sized parts, which are joined together to make large parts. At the end, the largest parts converge in one place, where they are joined together to make the finished product.

A nanofactory performs in this way, with multiple assembly lines operating simultaneously and steadily feeding into each other.

The first and hardest step in building a nanofactory is building an assembler, a tiny device that can combine individual molecules into useful shapes. An early plan for molecular manufacturing imagined lots of free-floating assemblers working together to build a single massive product, molecule by molecule. A more efficient approach is to fasten down the assemblers in orderly arrays of chemical fabricators, instruct each fabricator to create a tiny piece of the product, and then fasten the pieces together, passing them along to the next level within the nanofactory.

A human-scale nanofactory will consist of trillions of fabricators, and it could only be built by another nanofactory. But at the beginning, an assembler could build a very small nanofactory, with just a few fabricators. A smaller nanofactory could build a bigger one, and so on. According to the best estimates we have today, a fabricator could make its own mass in just a few hours. So a small nanofactory could make another one twice as big in just a few days-maybe less than a day. Do that about 60 times, and you have a tabletop model.

By the time the first working assembler is ready, the blueprint for a basic nanofactory may already be prepared. But until we have an assembler, we can't make a nanofactory.

Building an assembler is one of the ambitious research projects of Zyvex, a Texas firm that bills itself as "the first molecular nanotechnology company." Zyvex has gathered many leading minds in physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, and computer programming to focus on the long-range goal of molecular assembler manufacturing technology. Along the way, the company has developed some of the world's most precise tools for manipulating and testing materials and structures at the nanoscale. Numerous other projects at research universities and in corporations around the world are contributing valuable knowledge to the field.

How far are we from having a working assembler? A 1999 media report on nanotech said, "Estimates vary. From five to 10 years, according to Zyvex, or from eight to 15 years, according to the research community."

And how long will it take from building a single assembler to having a fully functional nanofactory? The report continues, "After that, it could be decades before we'll be able to manufacture finished consumer goods." This reflects the common wisdom, but it's wrong. Very wrong.

The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN), a nonprofit think tank co-founded by this author, published a detailed study in summer 2003 of the work required to progress from a single assembler to a full-fledged nanofactory that can create a wide variety of low-cost products. The startling conclusion of this report is that the span of time could be measured in weeks-probably less than two months. And what will the first nanofactory build? Another one, and another one.

Each nanofactory will be able to duplicate itself in as little as a few hours, or perhaps a half a week at most. Even using the most conservative estimate, in a couple of months you could have a million nanofactories, and a few months after that, a billion. Less than a year after the first basic assembler is completed, every household in the world conceivably could have its own nanofactory.

Creativity Unleashed

Before a tidal wave strikes, another dramatic event – usually an earthquake or major landslide – must occur to trigger it. The first generation of products to come out of nanofactories-inexpensive but high quality clothing, furniture, electronics, household appliances, bicycles, tools, building supplies, and more-may be like that: a powerful landslide of change, but only a portent of the gigantic wave that is to follow.

Most of these early products will probably be similar to what are current at the time nanofactories begin production. Because they are built by MNT, with every atom precisely placed, they will be better in every way-stronger, lighter, cheaper – but they still will be built on existing models.

The world-changing shock wave will hit when we realize that we no longer need be restricted to existing models – not when a supercomputer smaller than a grain of sand can be integrated into any product, and not when people everywhere-young, old, male, female, technical, nontechnical, practical, artistic, and whimsical – will have the opportunity to be designers.

MNT product design will be eased by CAD (computer-aided design) programs so simple that a child can do it – and that's no exaggeration. New product prototypes can be created, tested, and refined in a matter of hours instead of months and without the expense of traditional production facilities. No special expertise is needed beyond the skill for using CAD programs – only imagination, curiosity, and the desire to create.

Within months, conceivably, even the most up-to-date appliances, machines, communication media, and other electronics will be outmoded. Imagine embedding "smart" gadgetry into everything you own or might want to have. Demand for these new products will be intense. The cost of manufacturing them may be almost negligible.

To maximize the latent innovation potential in nanofactory proliferation, and to help prevent illicit, unwise, or malicious product design and manufacture, CRN recommends that designers work (and play) with modular nanoblocks of various compositions and purposes to create a wide variety of products, from consumer goods and educational tools to building supplies and even new modes of transportation. When combined with automated verification of design safety and protection of intellectual property, this should open up huge new areas for originality and improvement while maintaining safety and commercial viability.

Working with nanoblocks, designers can create to their hearts' content. The combination of user-friendly CAD and rapid prototyping will result in a spectacular synergy, enabling unprecedented levels of innovation and development. Among the many remarkable benefits accruing to humanity from nanofactory proliferation will be this unleashing of millions of eager new minds, allowed for the first time to freely explore and express their brilliant creative energy.

It becomes impossible to predict what might be devised then. The smart components and easy design systems of the nanotech revolution will rewrite the rules.

Benefits and Dangers

This all adds up to change that is sudden and shocking and could be extremely disruptive.

On the plus side, MNT could solve many of the world's problems. Simple products like plumbing, water filters, and mosquito nets-made cheaply on the spot-would greatly reduce the spread of infectious diseases. The efficient, cheap construction of strong and lightweight structures, electrical equipment, and power storage devices will allow the use of solar thermal power as a primary and abundant energy source.

Many areas of the world could not support a twentieth-century manufacturing infrastructure, with its attendant costs, difficulties, and environmental impacts, but MNT should be self-contained and clean. A single packing crate or suitcase could contain all the equipment required for a village-scale industrial revolution.

Computers and display devices will become stunningly inexpensive and could be made widely available. Much social unrest can be traced directly to material poverty, ill health, and ignorance. Nanofactories could greatly reduce these problems.

On the other hand, all this sudden change-the equivalent of a century's development packed into a few years-has the potential to disrupt many aspects of society and politics.

When a consumer purchases a manufactured product today, he is paying for its design, raw materials, the labor and capital of manufacturing, transportation, storage, marketing, and sales. Additional money-usually a fairly low percentage-goes to the owners of each of these businesses, and eventually to the employed workers. If nanofactories can produce a wide variety of products when and where they are wanted, most of this additional effort will become superfluous. This raises many questions about the nature of a post-MNT economy: Who will own the technology for molecular manufacturing? Will it be heavily restricted, or widely available? Will products become cheaper? Will major corporations disappear? Will new monopolies arise? Will most people retire-or be unemployed? What will it do to the gap between rich and poor?

It seems clear that molecular manufacturing could severely disrupt the present economic structure, greatly reducing the value of many material and human resources, including much of our current infrastructure. Despite utopian postcapitalist hopes, it is unclear whether a workable replacement system could appear in time to prevent the human consequences of massive job displacement.

MNT manufacturing will allow the cheap creation of incredibly powerful devices and products. Stronger materials will allow the creation of much larger machines, capable of excavating or otherwise destroying large areas of the planet at a greatly accelerated pace. It is too early to tell whether there will be economic incentive to do this. However, given the large number of activities and purposes that would damage the environment if taken to extremes, and the ease of taking them to extremes with molecular manufacturing, it seems likely that this problem is worth worrying about.

Some forms of damage can result from an aggregate of individual actions, each almost harmless by itself. For example, the extreme compactness of nanomanufactured machinery may lead to the use of very small products, which can easily turn into nanolitter that will be hard to clean up and may cause health problems. Collection of solar energy on a sufficiently large scale-by corporations, municipalities, and individuals-could modify the planet's albedo and directly affect the environment. In addition, if we are not careful, the flexibility and compactness of molecular manufacturing may allow the creation of free-floating, foraging self-replicators-a "gray goo" that could do serious damage to the biosphere by replicating out of control.

Molecular manufacturing raises the possibility of horrifically effective weapons. As an example, the smallest insect is about 200 microns; this creates a plausible size estimate for a nanotech-built antipersonnel weapon capable of seeking and injecting toxin into unprotected humans. The human lethal dose of botulism toxin is about 100 nanograms, or about 1/100 the volume of the weapon. As many as 50 billion toxin-carrying devices-theoretically enough to kill every human on earth-could be packed into a single suitcase. Guns of all sizes would be far more powerful, and their bullets could be self-guided. Aerospace hardware would be far lighter and offer higher performance; built with minimal or no metal, such craft would be much harder to spot on radar.

The awesome power of MNT may cause two or more competing nations to enter into an unstable arms race. Increased uncertainty of the capabilities of an adversary, less time to respond to an attack, and better targeted destruction of the enemy's resources during an attack all make nanotech arms races less stable than a nuclear arms race. Also, unless nanotech is tightly controlled on an international level, the number of nanotech nations in the world could be much higher than the number of nuclear nations, increasing the chance of a regional conflict expanding globally.

Criminals and terrorists with stronger, more powerful, and more compact devices could do serious damage to society. Chemical and biological weapons could become much deadlier and easier to conceal. Many other types of terrifying devices are possible, including several varieties of remote assassination weapons that would be difficult to detect or avoid. If such devices were available from a black market or a home factory, it would be nearly impossible to detect them before they were used; a random search capable of spotting them would be a clear violation of current human rights standards in most civilized countries.

Surveillance devices could be made microscopically small, low-priced, and very numerous-leading to questions of pervasive invasions of privacy, from illicit selling of sexual or other images to ubiquitous covert government or industrial spying. Attempts to control all these risks may lead to abusive restrictions, or create a black market that would be very risky and almost impossible to stop, because small nanofactories will be very easy to smuggle and fully dangerous.

Searching for Solutions

If you knew that in one year's time you would be forced to walk a tightrope without a net hundreds of feet above a rocky canyon, how soon would you begin practicing? The analogy applies to nanofactory technology. Because we know it is possible-maybe even probable-that everything we've reviewed here could happen within a decade, how soon should we start to prepare?

A report issued by the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics in February 2003 calls for serious consideration of the ethical, environmental, economic, legal, and social implications of nanotechnology. Report co-author Peter Singer says, "Open public discussion of the benefits and risks of this new technology is urgently needed."

There's no doubt that such discussion is warranted and urgent. But beyond talking about ethics, immediate research into the need, design, and building of an effective global administration structure is crucial. Unwise regulation is a serious hazard. Simple solutions won't work.

"A patchwork of extremist solutions to the wide-ranging risks of advanced nanotechnology is a grave danger," says Chris Phoenix, research director for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. "All areas of society stand to be affected by molecular manufacturing, and unless comprehensive international plans are developed, the multiplicity of cures could be worse than the disease. The threat of harm would almost certainly be increased, while many extraordinary benefits could go unrealized."

We have much to gain, and much to lose. The advantages promised by MNT are real, and they could be ours soon. Living conditions worldwide could be dramatically improved, and human suffering greatly diminished. But everything comes at a cost. The price for safe introduction of the miracles of nanofactory technology is thorough, conscientious preparation.

Several organizations are stepping up to this challenge. For example:

* The Foresight Institute has drafted a set of molecular nanotechnology guidelines for researchers and developers. These are mostly aimed at restricting the development of MNT to responsible parties and preventing the production of free-ranging self-replicating nanobots.

* The Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University is exploring various scenarios for safe and socially conscious implementation of molecular manufacturing and other emerging technologies. These scenarios depict the world in 2050, based on various policy choices we might make between now and then.

* The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology is studying all the issues involved-political, economic, military, humanitarian, technological, and environmental-and developing well-grounded, complete, and workable proposals for effective administration and safe use of advanced nanotechnology. Current results of CRN's research lead to the conclusion that establishing a single international program to develop molecular manufacturing technology may be the safest course. The leading nations of the world would have to agree to join-or at least not to oppose-this effort, and a mechanism to detect and deter competing programs would have to be devised.

It will take all this and more. The brightest minds and clearest thinkers, the most energetic activists and committed organizers, the smartest scientists, most dedicated ethicists, and most creative social planners desperately will be needed.

Will it be easy to realize the benefits of nanofactory technology while averting the dangers? Of course it will not. Is it even possible? It had better be. Our future is very uncertain, and it's very near. Much nearer than we might have thought. Let's get started.

Current Trends in Man-Machine interface

2006-02-08T19:56:00.000-05:00

Introduction

A man-machine interface can be defined as the mediator between users and machines. It is a system that takes care of the entire communication process, is responsible for the provision of the machine "knowledge", functionality and available information, in a way that is compatible with the end-user's communication channels, and translates the user's actions (user input) into a form (instructions/commands) understandable by a machine. As increasingly complex systems, products and services appear in the market, the necessity for more user friendly man-machine interfaces is becoming progressively more crucial for their utilization, and consequently for their market success. Graphical user interfaces, audio based interaction, speech synthesis and understanding, natural languages, direct manipulation, and multimodal interaction dialogues, as well as ergonomics and human factors evaluation have all contributed to the evolution of more powerful, complex and demanding user interfaces. Recently introduced concepts are expected to have a profound impact on future developments in man-machine interface technology. These include user-tailored environments (interfaces compatible with the user's available communication channels); user-support environments (capable of assisting the user during the interaction process); 3D direct manipulation; multimodal-multimedia interfaces (providing concurrent interaction by means of different media);
alternative interaction techniques and input/output devices; virtual environments (by means of the realization of interaction environments far beyond the physical capabilities of the user and the terminal platform); and co-operative and collaborative environments (that provide concurrent access to the same environment by several, locally-based or remotely located users, allowing co-operation and collaboration between them).Potential users of computer systems and telecommunications products will be required to use the emerging technology, functioning and communicating in a multimodal, multiprocess, and co-operative environ-ment. Disabled and elderly users may have problems in accessing interface entities that use modalities inaccessible to the particular user, or in accessing interfaces that demand high cognitive and interaction abilities. On the other hand, the availability of interface entities in redundant forms (messages, selection menus, workspaces, etc.), the availability of a variety of interaction techniques that utilize alternative modalities (e.g. selection, position, quantity), the selection of adequate interaction metaphors (e.g. the desktop metaphor that is utilized in most of the currently available graphical user interfaces), and the introduction of intelligence in the man- machine systems, can contribute to the provision of interfaces tailored to the user's abilities and preferences, if the requirements of disabled and elderly users are considered at an early stage of the design. This section addresses some of the recent technological advances that influence the design and development of the man-machine interface, while at the same time identifying the possible impact on disabled and elderly people.

Nurses get bionic "power suit"

2006-02-08T19:38:00.000-05:00

A robotic exoskeleton has been created by Japanese researchers to allow nurses to lift patients effortlessly - and without damaging their backs.

"Back injuries are a huge problem for us," says a spokeswoman for the Royal College of Nursing in London. Every year, 3600 nurses from Britain's National Health Service have to take time off work because of back problems.

To address this global problem, Keijiro Yamamoto and his team at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology in Japan have designed and built a prototype "power suit" with a jointed metal framework that straps on to the wearer's limbs.

While the prototype is distinctly unlovely - it trails an unwieldy thicket of cables and compressed-air lines - Yamamoto says he's begun refining his design.

Concerted effort

So how does it work? Sensor pads taped to the major muscle groups calculate how much force you need to pick up a patient. As you lift, the sensors send data to a microcomputer that triggers the business end of the system: a bunch of concertina-like limb and body actuators powered by compressed air.

These move slowly and create low mechanical stress - giving someone as much or as little help as they need, says Yamamoto.

The suit has five actuators: one for each elbow, one for the waist (not shown in graphic for clarity) and one for each knee. The elbow actuators push on the frame that lets your forearms lift the patient, while the waist actuator helps straighten your back and the knee actuators help you straighten your legs.

The computer simply works out when the nurse's limbs and joints have enough artificial support, allowing them to continue working, but effortlessly.

Power lift

The main role of the Power Assist Suit will be helping nurses and physiotherapists lift patients on and off beds. In tests, a nurse weighing 64 kilograms was able to pick up and carry a patient weighing 70 kilograms.

"And since the mechanics of the suit are hidden behind the wearer, the nurse can be in direct contact with the patient," says Yamamoto. "That's very reassuring for the patient."

The prototype suit weighs 18 kilograms, but Yamamoto believes he will be able to cut the weight in half for a commercial version.

Although developing the prototype cost around £15,000, Yamamoto says health authorities will be able to buy a commercial version of the suit for around £1200 within two years.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1072

IST-FET launches Integrated Project:’Neurobotics’

2006-02-08T13:27:00.000-05:00

’The Fusion of Neuroscience and Robotics for Augmenting Human Capabilities’

FET, the Unit dealing with Future and Emerging Technologies and acting as the pathfinder of IST by exploring new science and technology frontiers, has launched a new research initiative- Beyond Robotics. Neurobotics is one out of three so-called Integrated Projects.

The ultimate objective of the NEUROBOTICS project is to introduce a discontinuity in the robot design, thus going literally "Beyond Robotics". This discontinuity will be pursued by a strategic alliance between Neuroscience and Robotics, which will go well beyond present, mostly fragmented, collaborations, and lead to overcome state-of-the-art of robotics worldwide.

More particularly Neurobotics aims at:
1) systematically exploring the area of Hybrid Bionic Systems (HBSs)
2) deeply investigating the theme of human augmentation
3) developing new integrated robotic artefacts, as much biomorphic as required to be effectively interfaced with the human body and brain

Three robotic platforms featuring different levels of hybridness (i.e. mechanical coupling with the human body) and of connectivity (to the human nervous system) will be developed to be used in experiments on human augmentation: biomimetic scalable artefacts to be remotely controlled by human operator; intelligent wearable artefacts loosely physically coupled with the human body; arm-hand sub-systems tightly physically coupled with the human body.

The expected outcome of Neurobotics is to provide general answers on how the field of human augmentation can be approached with methods, tools, and aims that have a solid scientific foundation, keeping into account the ethical and societal perspective. The heritage of Neurobotics will be the kernel of a new community of European researchers, with strong links to non-European top scientists (e.g. in US and Japan), able to dominate the scientific, technical, industrial, societal and ethical aspects of this novel discipline and to exploit it to the benefit of the EU citizens.

Neurobotics is co-ordinated by the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy. Participants that are coming from a wide variety of interests include: CNRS, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Karolinska Institutet, Umea Universitet, Kungliska Tekniska Hoegskolan, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, University Pierre et Marie Curie, Universita di Genova, DLR, Universita di Parma, National Technical University of Athens, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Universita Campus Biomedico di Roma, Università di Ferrara, Pont-Tech s.c.r.l.

Dissemination plans: the activities and the results of Neurobotics will be widely disseminated to different scientific communities and to the general public worldwide. Workshops and seminars on the different scientific and technological aspects of Neurobotics will be organised soon, as well as Doctoral Summer and Winter Schools. Multidisciplinary workshops on the ethical and societal implications of Neurobotics are also planned.

biomotion lab

2006-02-08T01:44:00.000-05:00

http://www.biomotionlab.ca/

A lab are working on several aspects of visual perception and cognition. Our major interest is focussed on questions concerning the biology and psychology of social recognition. That is:

. life detection
. conspecific recognition
. gender recognition
. individual recognition
. recognition of an agent's actions
. recognition of emotions, personality traits and intentionality

Division of Information & Intelligent Systems

2006-02-08T01:12:00.000-05:00

Supports fundamental research in robotics, i.e., machines with sensing, intelligence and mobility. The emphasis is on (1) systems operating in unstructured environments with a high level of uncertainty, (2) interaction and cooperation of humans and robots, and (3) advanced sensory systems, particularly computer vision. Research topics include: theoretical, algorithmic, experimental, and hardware issues in robotics, including those on macro-, micro-, and nano-scale; robotics for unstructured environments including issues of robustness, fault tolerance and reconigurability; personal robots, with an emphasis on human-centered end use; novel and advanced approaches to sensing, perception, and actuation including embedded and highly distributed systems; understanding and processing of visual data; representation, reasoning, and planning for complex physical tasks involving temporal and spatial relationships; robots to extend human capabilities into unknown and hazardous environments; communication and task sharing between humans and machines, and among machines; intelligent cooperation among multiple robots; other research topics in robotic and computer vision applications, such as systems for surgery, undersea, space, search-and-rescue, and agriculture.

Think nano has ethical problems? Just wrap your brain around neuro

2006-02-07T23:54:00.000-05:00

What new tools to improve human performance will emerge from the convergence of nanotech, biotech, infotech and cognitive science?
This was topic of discussion at the recent NBIC conference in New York, where several hundred scientists, ethicists, government officials and business executives gathered.
Like nanotechnology 10 years ago, speculating about potential NBIC applications is easy. Developing novel tools that solve real world problems remains hard. Always keeping this in mind, Mike Roco, conference co-chair and architect of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, performs the difficult task of distinguishing practical applications from mere conjecture, while cultivating an environment that encourages exploratory discussions. My goal was to explore the political and economic issues that might arise as these converging technologies make possible neurotechnology -- tools that can influence the brain.
In short, when data from nanobiochips that can analyze DNA, RNA and proteins is combined with data from next-generation brain imaging systems (IC), new tools for mental health will emerge. Nanobiochips that can perform the basic bioanalysis functions (genomic, proteomic, biosimulation and microfluidics) at a low cost will transform biological analysis and production in a very similar fashion as the microprocessor did for data.
Nano-imaging techniques will also play a vital role in making the analysis of neuro-molecular level events possible. Neurotechnology will be used for therapeutic ends and to improve human emotional, cognitive and sensory system performance.
Like any new technology, neurotechnology represents both promises and problems. On the upside, neurotechnology represents new cures for mental illness, new opportunities for economic growth and a potential flowering of artist expression. These benefits are countered by the potential use of neurotechnology for law enforcement purposes or its use as neuroweapons that can selectively erase memories. Here are some of the ways that neurotechnology will impact society:
New Industries: As brain imaging advances, neuromarketing will become a significant growth sector in years to come as the trillion-per-year advertising and marketing industries leverage brain scanning technology to better understand how and why people react to different market campaigns.
New Products: For example, neuroceuticals that can temporarily improve different aspects of mental health will become possible. Unlike today psychopharmaceuticals, neuroceuticals are neuromodulators that have high efficacy and negligible side effects. By being able to target multiple subreceptors in specific neural circuits, neuroceuticals will create the possibility for dynamic intracellular regulation of an individual neurochemistry. Neuroceuticals will be used for therapy and improvement.
Competitive advantage: Mental health is the ultimate competitive weapon. Mental health underpins the communication, creativity and employee productivity. Individuals who utilize neuroceuticals (say to forecast emotions) will become more productive and will attain neurocompetitive advantage. While some countries may choose to ban them, performance-enabling neuroceuticals will emerge as significant productivity tools.
Patterns in the location of production: India and China will likely develop regional clusters of neurotechnology firms as political and cultural views on human testing create the necessary conditions for technological experimentation and development.
Public policy: Neuroethicists, like Wrye Sententia from the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, are already confronting issues of brain privacy and cognitive liberty. As the competitive edge provided by neurotechnology becomes apparent, the ethical debate will evolve into a discussion of the right to enable individuals to use these new tools to improve themselves vs. uneven access to what others will describe as unfair performance improvement. In the legislative arena the competitive necessity of using these new tools will cause great concern over whether or not they will be required in order to just compete in tomorrow global economy.
While neurotechnology's impact on society may seem far-fetched to some, so was the idea of flying 400 people from Tokyo to London in 1900. Indeed, it was Lord Kelvin, the head of the British Royal Society, who in 1898, proclaimed that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible, yet 50 years later people were doing it.
Whether or not neurotechnology emerges as I suggest it is clear that sustained investment in NBIC is critically important if we are to deal with the substantial economic, political and social change that lies ahead.

Sharper Minds

2006-02-07T23:46:00.001-05:00

It would be hard to imagine improving on the intelligence of computer engineer Bjoern Stenger, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University. Yet for several hours, a pill seemed to make him even brainier.
Participating in a research project, Stenger downed a green gelatin cap containing a drug called modafinil. Within an hour, his attention sharpened. So did his memory. He aced a series of mental-agility tests. If his brainpower would normally rate a 10, the drug raised it to 15, he said.
“I was quite focused,” said Stenger. “It was also kind of fun.”
The age of smart drugs is dawning. Modafinil is just one in an array of brain-boosting medications — some already on pharmacy shelves and others in development — that promise an era of sharper thinking through chemistry.
These drugs may change the way we think. And by doing so, they may change who we are.
Long-haul truckers and Air Force pilots have long popped amphetamines to ward off drowsiness. Generations of college students have swallowed over-the-counter caffeine tablets to get through all-nighters. But such stimulants provide only a temporary edge, and their effect is broad and blunt — they boost the brain by juicing the entire nervous system.
The new mind-enhancing drugs, in contrast, hold the potential for more powerful, more targeted and more lasting improvements in mental acuity. Some of the most promising have reached the stage of testing in human subjects and could become available in the next decade, brain scientists say.
“It’s not a question of ‘if’ anymore. It’s just a matter of time,” said geneticist Tim Tully, a researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., and developer of a compound called HT-0712, which has shown promise as a memory enhancer. The drug soon will be tested in human subjects.
The new brain boosters stem in part from research to develop treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, spinal cord injuries, schizophrenia and other conditions. But they also reflect rapid advances in understanding the processes of learning and memory in healthy people.
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Developing research
In the last two decades, scientists have made important discoveries about which regions of the brain perform specific functions and how those regions work together to absorb, store and retrieve information. Researchers also have begun to grasp how and where neurotransmitters are manufactured and which ones help perform which mental tasks.
“There are things cooking here that couldn’t have been done one to two decades ago,” said James L. McGaugh, director of UC Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.
Research has gotten further stimulus from a deep-pocketed investor — the U.S. military, which is looking for ways to help pilots and soldiers stay sharp under the stress and exhaustion of combat.
The potential market for cognitive enhancers has never been bigger, or more receptive.
An estimated 77 million members of the baby boom generation will turn 50 in the next 10 years, joining 11 million who have already passed the half-century mark — a stage at which memory and speed of response show noticeable decline.
Modafinil, the drug that whetted Stenger’s powers of concentration, is used to treat narcolepsy and other sleep disorders. It is one of three prescription medications on the market that have been shown to enhance certain mental powers.
The other two are methylphenidate, marketed under the name Ritalin as a remedy for attention deficit disorder, and donepezil, prescribed for patients with Alzheimer’s.
Studies have shown that these drugs can produce significant mental gains in normal, healthy subjects. None of the three has been approved for that purpose. Nevertheless, a growing number of healthy Americans are taking them to get a mental edge.
Some obtain the medications from doctors who write prescriptions for “off-label” uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration — a practice both legal and common. Others buy the drugs through unregulated Internet pharmacies.
Cambridge University psychologist Barbara Sahakian considers modafinil (marketed commercially under the name Provigil) especially intriguing. Its developers aren’t sure exactly how it keeps drowsiness at bay. But even in healthy people, the medication appears to deliver measurable improvements with few side effects.
In a series of experiments in 2001, Sahakian and colleagues found that in games that test mental skill, subjects who took a 200-milligram dose of modafinil paid closer attention and used information more effectively than subjects given a sugar pill.
Confronted with conflicting demands, the people on modafinil moved more smoothly from one task to the next and adjusted their strategies of play with greater agility. In short, they worked smarter and were better at multi-tasking.
“In my mind, it may be the first real smart drug,” Sahakian said. “A lot of people will probably take modafinil. I suspect they do already.”
Donepezil, sold under the name Aricept, also has been found to boost the brain function of healthy people. The drug increases the concentration of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, boosting the power of certain electrical transmissions between brain cells.
In a 2002 study, 18 pilots with an average age of 52 were put through seven training flights in a simulator and taught a complex set of piloting skills over 30 days. Half took a low dose of donepezil; the other half took a placebo. At month’s end, all were tested on the skills they had learned.
The pilots on donepezil retained more of the skills than those who took the placebo. On the most challenging parts of the test, an emergency drill and a landing sequence, their performance was notably superior, according to results of the study published in the journal Neurology.
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Botox for the mind?
Some scientists predict that the development of even more-effective brain-enhancing drugs will usher in an age of “cosmetic neurology.”
“If people can gain a millimeter, they’re going to want to take it,” said Jerome Yesavage, director of Stanford University’s Aging Clinical Research Center and an author of the donepezil study.
Judy Illes, a psychologist at Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, said mind-enhancing medicine could become “as ordinary as a cup of coffee.” This could be good for society, helping people learn faster and retain more, she said.
But it also raises questions: Will the rich get smarter while the poor fall further behind? (Drugs such as modafinil can cost as much as $6 per dose.)
Will people feel compelled to use the medications to keep up in school or in the workplace? In a world where mental function can be tweaked with a pill, will our notion of “normal intelligence” be changed forever?
Mirk Mirkin of Sherman Oaks, 77, a retired marketing manager, would like to regain a bit of his old intellectual nimbleness. A member of Mensa, a society for people with IQs in the top two percentile of the nation, Mirkin is bothered by what he laughingly calls “senior moments,” such as when a name stubbornly eludes him.
If a pill could halt the march of forgetfulness without uncomfortable side effects, he would probably take it, Mirkin said.
Mirkin, who proctors tests for admission into Mensa, said he would not object if younger people took such pills to pump up their mental muscle for the test. “If they physically can handle it and want it bad enough, why not?”
Many college and graduate students want an edge bad enough to take Ritalin, even if they do not suffer from attention deficit disorder.
At campuses, test sites and, increasingly, workplaces across the country, people are popping “vitamin R.” Some users persuade a doctor to prescribe it; others get it from friends who have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.
The growing demand for Ritalin, which can be addictive, has prompted the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to classify it as a “drug of concern.”
On the Internet chat board of the Student Doctor Network, college students preparing for medical school admission tests frequently discuss the benefits of taking Ritalin or similar drugs on exam day.
Some students think they have no choice. “You figure you’re being compared to people who are on Ritalin,” said one Los Angeles student who frequents the site and recently asked a relative to supply the drug. “I just figured it would be more fair if you’re on the same level.”
Eventually, ambitious parents will start giving mind-enhancing pills to their children, said McGaugh, the UC Irvine neurobiologist.
“If there is a drug which is safe and effective and not too expensive for enhancing memory in normal adults, why not normal children?” he said. “After all, they’re going to school, and what’s more important than education of the young? And what would be more important than giving them a little chemical edge?”
Defense Department scientists are pursuing just such an advantage for U.S. combat forces. The Pentagon spends $20 million per year exploring ways to “expand available memory” and build “sleep-resistant circuitry” in the brain.
Among its aims: to develop stimulants capable of keeping soldiers awake, alert and effective for as long as seven days straight. The armed forces have taken leading roles in testing modafinil and donepezil as performance enhancers for pilots and soldiers.
On the horizon are other potential smart drugs, each operating on different systems in the brain. If they progress through tests of safety and effectiveness, the first of them could be available as early as 2008. (See “What’s on the horizon?” below).
Three companies are among the leading contenders in the race to develop drugs for memory and cognitive performance: Memory Pharmaceuticals Corp. of Montvale, N.J.; Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Irvine; and Helicon Therapeutics Inc., founded by Tully, the geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
All the new smart drugs are being developed as treatments for recognized illnesses such as Alzheimer’s — a requirement for FDA approval. But the drug that will make a company and its stockholders rich will be the one that treats a disorder that until recently was not seen as an illness at all — “age-associated memory impairment,” the mild but progressive forgetfulness that afflicts us all as we get older.
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The risks involved
Neuroscientists say two factors could prevent Americans from succumbing completely to the seductions of smart pills. First, their performance may not live up to expectations. Second, they could have side effects, some of them difficult to predict.
“There’s no free lunch,” said Tully. Consumers will have to consider what level of discomfort or risk they’re willing to accept in exchange for sharper recall or enhanced powers of concentration.
The side effect that most neuroscientists fear is not physical discomfort, but subtle mental change. Over time, a memory-enhancing drug might cause people to remember too much detail, cluttering the brain.
Similarly, a drug that sharpens attention might cause users to focus too intently on a particular task, failing to shift their attention in response to new developments.
In short, someone who notices or remembers everything may end up understanding nothing.
“The brain was designed by evolution over the millennia to be well-adapted because of the lives we lead,” said Martha Farah, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Our lives are better served by being able to focus on the essential information than being able to remember every little detail…. We meddle with these designs at our peril.”
Despite such qualms, Farah is drawn to the idea that a mind enriched by a life of experience might not have to lose the speed of recall it enjoyed in its youth.
“To have the wisdom of age and the memory of a young person? That’d be a very good combination.”
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What’s on the horizon?
Smart drugs will probably emerge from among medications developed for impairments of the brain and nervous system, including depression and schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis, stroke and spinal cord injury. Here are a few under development:
Ampakines
Are designed to amplify the strength of electrical signals between brain cells.
Could be the first of the new generation of cognitive enhancers to come to market; developed by Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc., which has launched human trials.
One is being tested by the Pentagon as an antidote for sleep deprivation.
Boosted cognitive function of healthy Swedish medical students in a 1997 study.
Mem compounds
Are designed to strengthen consolidation of long-term memory — key to learning new skills.
Are under development by Memory Pharmaceuticals Corp., which has begun human testing on three separate Mem compounds as treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment and depression.
In early animal studies, one Mem compound appeared to restore the maze recall of middle-aged rats to youthful levels.
Could come to market by 2008.
HT-0712
Is designed to speed and strengthen the process by which short-term memories are committed to long-term storage.
Is under development by Helicon Therapeutics Inc., which plans to move from animal testing to trials on humans soon.
Shows particular promise as a drug to aid in the rehabilitation of stroke victims and to counter the effects of age-associated memory impairment.
Gene therapy
Genetically engineered cells are implanted deep inside the cortex, acting as a miniature biological pump that secretes nerve growth factor (NGF), a naturally occurring protein in all vertebrates.
Nerve growth factor revitalizes brain cells that atrophy and shrink as their host’s age advances.
Biotechnology company Ceregene Inc. has launched early tests of the gene therapy on human subjects suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, in hopes of slowing its progress.
UC San Diego neuroscientist Mark Tuszynski, who designed the NGF-secreting pump, reported in 2000 that aged monkeys who got the implanted cells showed an almost complete restoration of normal cell function and size.

Engineered enhancers closer than you think

2006-02-07T23:46:00.000-05:00

Thirty years from now, the uproar surrounding Barry Bonds' alleged steroid use might seem quaint by comparison to the human enhancement technologies that could be available then. In the next few decades, futurists say, athletes and soldiers will call on artificial muscles to lift heavier loads and run faster. Bionic eyes will let them see distant targets, while "nanobots" enhance their cognitive abilities and genetic-engineering techniques boost their performance under pressure. "The use of anabolic steroids, in retrospect, will seem almost prehistoric — as well as stupid," said Jerome C. Glenn, executive director of the American Council for the United Nations University (Washington) and co-author of the book 2004: State of the Future. "In the future, we'll be able to enhance ourselves in other ways that won't be so dangerous." Many of those enhancement techniques, some based in electronics, are already in the works, experts said last week. For example, university researchers will meet in San Diego in March for an unusual arm-wrestling match between a human being and an artificial arm made from electroactive polymers (see Oct. 4, page 1). The researchers, many working on artificial muscles of their own, say the technology could one day find its way into the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's so-called "exoskeleton," which is supposed to help soldiers run faster, jump higher and lift more weight. Ultimately, some hope it will also one day take its place inside human bodies, where it could enable extraordinary athleticism. Elsewhere, researchers in the public and private sectors are said to be placing chips inside human brains and isolating DNA strings that could be manipulated to alter human talents and behaviors. Such scenarios, unlikely as they may seem at first glance, are being taken seriously. Glenn of the American Council for the United Nations University, for example, has embarked on a study of how human augmentation would affect the International Olympic Games. The study considers the possibility of separate Olympics for augmented and nonaugmented athletes. "The ability to alter our bodies will be done by a variety of methods, from genetic engineering to nanobots to bionics," Glenn said. "Anyone who thinks that all athletes in the future will remain naturally endowed is living in a fantasy world." Grand challengeTo be sure, everyday use of such technologies is on a very far horizon, if it happens at all. Many engineering experts view such possibilities as too distant for serious consideration today. "It's like asking if there's going to be an anti-gravity machine in the future," said Philip Troyk, director of neural engineering for the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago). "You could probably get 20 physicists to talk it over, but at this point, it's science fiction." Still, some of the technologies now under development have immediate uses. Electroactive polymers (EAPs), for example, have wiped the lenses of cameras on explorer robots and have been proposed for use in robotic telesurgery. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, Calif.) are so convinced of their ultimate value that one, Yoseph Bar-Cohen, has proposed a "grand challenge" that pits an EAP arm against a human opponent — in this case, a 16-year-old San Diego high school girl. Whatever the outcome, engineers say the match, scheduled for March 7 at the Smart Materials and Structures Conference, will highlight a technology with potential for both robots and humans. Its key element is the musclelike EAP, which deforms with the application of an electric field across its surface. The technology has already spawned startup companies. Artificial Muscle Inc. (Menlo Park, Calif.) has been spun out from SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) to make the muscles, and NanoSonic Inc. — created in cooperation with Virginia Tech and the state of Virginia — is developing a "metal rubber" that works in conjunction with the muscles. This bendable material will be used as an electrical lead, attaching to the muscle to provide electrical stimulation. Its advantage is that it doesn't restrict the muscle's movement and won't fatigue easily after repeated use, the company said. Researchers admit the artificial muscles don't yet produce much force, but they are optimistic about their potential. "They won't beat Barry Bonds this year, but give them 10 years, and that could change," said Richard Claus, the Lewis A. Hester Chair of Engineering at Virginia Tech University (Blacksburg). "There are barriers to overcome," conceded Bar-Cohen, a senior research scientist at the JPL and author of Electroactive Polymer Actuators as Artificial Muscles: Reality, Potential and Challenges. "But in principle, these materials could be implantable in humans." Moral questionsFuturists say that artificial muscles merely scratch the surface of the augmentation options that soon will be possible. Glenn of the American Council for the U.N. University says that he expects visual augmentation to be commonplace within 30 years. Indeed, charge-coupled electronic devices have already been used to stimulate muscles behind the eye, said Glenn, thus changing the shape of the lens and enabling "zoom vision" that could benefit Olympic athletes in archery and baseball, among other sports. Such devices, he said, could be combined with artificial lenses inserted in the eye to produce a level of visual acuity that isn't possible today. Government agencies are said to be looking at a host of other, more distant human enhancement technologies — ranging from genetic engineering to molecular robots. "You could take the molecular-sized 'bots,' put them in your bloodstream and send them to the extremities of your brain," said John L. Petersen, founder of the Arlington Institute (Washington) and a futurist who formerly worked with the National Security Council staff. "And with them, you could influence the brain or even replicate parts of it." Soldiers could use the "bots," which are molecularly assembled structures that behave much like red blood cells, to combat biological warfare by accelerating the actions of the human immune system, said Glenn. Bots could also be programmed to move to the frontal part of the brain to dispense certain chemicals and hence speed an individual's anticipation and response time. "Combining zoom vision with cognitive enhancements in the brain, you could speed up a baseball player's processing so that he could, in a sense, see 'faster,' " Glenn said. "And that would mean the ball would appear to be moving slower, so it would be seen more precisely." Such technologies might enable a player to pick up the spin on a pitcher's curve ball more quickly and accurately. At the same time, scientists are said to be examining DNA strings in search of certain behavioral characteristics desirable for elite soldiers. "We've heard that researchers have identified a genetic DNA string that makes Navy Seals and other elite soldiers more effective," said Petersen of the Arlington Institute. "They're trying to find a way to take that to the military and make it generally available." How the general public will react to such technologies is a separate matter. While most researchers believe society will tolerate their use in soldiers, they're doubtful the same tolerance will be extended to athletes. Because he considers some level of augmentation inevitable, Glenn believes that sporting events will be split up to accommodate enhanced and unenhanced athletes. "It's not fair for someone with enhanced vision to compete with someone who doesn't have that capability," Glenn said. "You'll probably need three Olympics — one for those who are enhanced, another for those who are natural and a third for those who are handicapped." Petersen believes that society will be grappling with issues of human augmentation for decades before finally becoming reconciled with its inevitability. "All of this flies in the face of our assumptions about how the world works," Petersen said. "The ethical, legal and moral issues surrounding this are based upon a past where none of this technology existed, and that's going to be a universal problem."

Human Changing | Jamais Cascio

2006-02-07T22:28:00.000-05:00

The question of how society changes when we can enhance aspects of human capabilities is something we touch on regularly at WorldChanging. It's at least as important a question as how society adapts to climate change or embraces new tools for networking and communication; some of us would argue it may be even more important. As a topic of discussion, it has often been relegated to fringe culture and science fictional musing, but a series of books over the last year have brought the idea ever closer to the mainstream -- and the most recent may be set to make the question of how humankind evolves a front page issue.
Dr. James Hughes, bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College and director of the World Transhumanist Association, published Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Futurein late 2004, examining the ways in which the technological enhancement of human capabilities and lives can strengthen liberal democratic cultures, not threaten them. (I interviewed Dr. Hughes last November, shortly after Citizen Cyborg was released: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.) In March of this year, Ramez Naam, software engineer and technology consultant, brought out More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biologiccal Enhancement, focusing on the ways in which biomedical treatments can and will improve human abilities and happiness. Both of these books -- which I highly recommend reading, even if you're a skeptic about the implications of human augmentation technologies -- received highly positive reviews and greatly advanced the conversation over whether and how to enhance human capabilities through technological intervention.
But I suspect it's the most recent book in this line which will have the greatest mainstream impact. Joel Garreau's Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- And What It Means To Be Human just came out a few days ago, and I expect it to end up on the summer reading lists of policy-makers and pundits everywhere. If Joel's name is familiar, it could be because he's a senior writer for the Washington Post, covering technology and society; it also could be because of his highly-regarded earlier books, The Nine Nations of North America and Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Joel approaches his subjects with a journalist's detachment but a partisan's passion; I've known him for about a decade (he's a part of the GBN "Remarkable People" network), and he's never failed to have his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. If Joel's covering it, there's little doubt it will soon be a regular part of our cultural conversation.
Earlier this month, I had the extreme pleasure of hosting a conversation between James Hughes, Ramez Naam and Joel Garreau, exploring the implications of human enhancement technologies. While none of the three could be termed a "bio-conservative," there are clear differences between their perspectives on how society can and should respond to new technologies (the lack of a bio-conservative in the discussion was intentional; I wanted the group to be able to explore the edges of implications, not get tied up in arguments over terminology or moral standing). The conversation ran over two-and-a-half hours; the resulting transcript is correspondingly lengthy. But I expect that you'll find the discussion compelling and fascinating, and well worth your time.
And, as always, we appreciate your comments to continue the discussion.
(Please note that the interview was sufficiently lengthy that Movable Type was unable to hold it in a single post; the continuation of the interview follows at a link at the bottom of this post.)
Jamais Cascio: I think the one thing we're all in agreement on here is that we are as a society on the edge of a really profound transformation of how we identify ourselves, how we interact with each other, and most broadly how we live. At the same time I think all three of you have different perspectives on precisely what that means. Since I've known Joel the longest, we'll go age before beauty here. Why don't you go ahead and give us a start, Joel?
Joel Garreau: Well my perspective may differ a little bit from the rest of us in that I view myself as a reporter, not an advocate. I don't think I have a dog in this fight. I lay out three scenarios in "Radical Evolution" for how this might play out. You're looking at a curve of exponential change in technology. There are four technologies that are the driving forces. I call them the GRIN technologies: genetics, robotics, information, and nanotechnology. With the recurring doublings of this curve of exponential change, you have a situation in which the past 20 years is not a guide to the next 20 years. It's a guide at best to the next 8. And the last 50 years is not a guide to the next 50 years. It's at best a guide to the next 14. That alone is disconcerting. But then I start asking, what does this mean for society? Because I don't really care that much about transistors. I care about who we are, how we got that way, where we're headed, and what makes us tick. I think that's probably true for all of us.
I sketch out three scenarios. The first is the Heaven scenario. That's basically the Ray Kurzweil memorial scenario. In that, human society moves on a nice smooth curve equivalent to the curve of technological change and in no time at all we've conquered pain, suffering, death, and stupidity. It's a dramatic change in the society within 10 or 20 years and it's all largely good. I take that very seriously as a scenario, although I'm not a particular advocate of any of these.
Then scenario two is the Hell scenario, which is the Bill Joy memorial scenario. That's eerily a mirror image of the Heaven scenario. It agrees that we're looking at a curve of exponential change. It agrees that we're looking at the time compression. But the premise of that one is that these GRIN technologies are offering unprecedented power to individuals. If you do that, it's equivalent to handing a million individuals an atomic bomb and asking yourself do you suppose one of them might go off. In that scenario we're talking about extincting the species in 20 or 30 years. That's the optimistic view. The pessimistic view would be extincting the biosphere. I take that very seriously too.
(When I identify Kurzweil and Joy with these scenarios, they're just the most obvious people to talk about. But there are lots of others who agree.)
Then there's the third scenario, Prevail. It's not a middle scenario between Heaven and Hell. It's way off in an entirely different territory. The poster boy for that one is Jaron Lanier, who was important in the formulation of virtual reality. The critique that Prevail offers is that both Heaven and Hell assume that society is going to be pretty much driven by technology. If you were doing summer movies of Heaven and Hell there wouldn't be much of a plot. It would be: there are amazing changes occurring; there's not a hell of a lot we can do about it; hold on tight; the end. With fabulous special effects.
With Prevail the assumption is that human history is not necessarily linked to any driving forces, no matter how apparently powerful. It's assuming that even if the technology is on a smooth curve, that doesn't mean that the changes in human nature are on a smooth curve. They'll have farts and belches and reverses and loops like everything else throughout all of human history. It also assumes that the measure of change should be different from Heaven and Hell. Heaven and Hell are both basically measuring the number of contacts between transistors as the measure of change. Prevail assumes that the appropriate measure is the number of connections between human beings, not between transistors. Does that all make sense?
Cascio: Yeah, it does. And it's a good introduction. James? Talk to us about what you think the next 10 to 20 years holds for us.
James Hughes: Well Joel does lay out some of the things that are also on my time horizon. But I do have a dog in the fight: I've always been a political activist and on the side of democracy, equality, freedom, things like that, and one of my concerns here is that these technologies will change the terrain for a lot of the concerns that we've had over the last couple hundred years about creating a more democratic and equitable world. I want to make sure that we chart how to best create that world given those technologies. What I see as an initial response from a lot of the people that I would otherwise consider to be my allies politically is to try to shut down those processes of change.
So my intervention in these arguments has been to get people who are politically of good will to start thinking in a more serious way about the positive benefits that these technologies can bring to people's lives in the Heaven possibilities, as Joel puts it. And also to think about the Hell possibilities in a serious way because I don't think that simply banning technologies or even proposing that we ban these technologies is either a realistic option or sets us up for the appropriate policy discussions that we need to be having. Finally, in terms of the Prevail scenario, I do think that a lot of the techno-wonks on the other side have not given sufficient attention to the ways that technologies are the product of social relations and that different kinds of technologies can be produced by different kinds of societies depending on how those societies are structured.
In other words I think we need to be having a lot more discussion of intellectual property and we need to be having a lot more discussion of equitable distribution of these technologies. There's been a prevailing assumption that once they're available then everyone will eventually have them or will very quickly have them and I don't think that's necessarily the case.
So those have been the two ways that I've been trying to intervene. With the enthusiasts I talk about the equity and freedom issues, and with the equity and freedom folks I talk about the technology issues. So in terms of the way I see the next 30 years developing, I think we're gonna have a restructuring of our political landscape in really traumatic ways. There's going to be a political Moore's Law, political singularities to accompany the technological singularities and I've been trying to figure out where the dogs to bet on are in those fights.
Garreau: I'd like to hear more about the political Moore's Law.
Hughes: I've always been as a social theorist, a social scientist; I've always been pretty much a technological determinist, at least in the sense that technologies create the context for the kind of social relations and political relations that one can have. They change the terrain. They don't necessarily determine who the winners are going to be but they create these new possibilities. And so insofar as we're going to have a human-level brain on everybody's desk in 20 years connected to a global network of high-bandwidth connections that then start burrowing inside our own brains and connecting us one to each other I just don't see how we could possibly go on with the same kind of political structures and ideologies and so forth that we've had in the past.
I think that we'll need global governance to prevent the spread of very dangerous technologies, to have prophylactic answers to global climate change and species extinction and near earth asteroids and cataclysmic tsunamis and all these kinds of things. We also need global governance and global distribution in order to ensure that everyone gets access to the Heaven parts of these technologies, so that everyone in the developing world will have the life-extending shot when it becomes available. So a lot of the political fantasies that people like me, left-wing folks like me, have had for many hundreds of years will have an opportunity to be brought into fruition in the next 30 years.
Cascio: Ramez?
Ramez Naam: Well I take a slightly different tack, I think, than either of the two last ones and part of it I think stems from the fact that I work in R&D myself. I work in software and I see big, complex things get built all the time and I see how much longer they take to come to fruition than people usually anticipate or plan for. So despite the Moore's Law and so on, I think change will be a bit slower than is projected by Kurzweil or Joy. I'm pretty skeptical on nano in it's most kind of world changing potential manifestations.
But I agree with something that I heard both James and Joel say, that a lot of what we'll see in terms of change is not driven by the technology itself, it's driven by human nature and innate human desire and kind of innate emergent features of systems in which many people interact. Things like the fact that once you create information it can be leveraged by many people, and that we as a society are just creating more and more of it. Some of that information is knowledge about how to do things like alter our genes and so on.
But let me elaborate somewhat on that being driven by human nature and human desires. What I would say -- let's say an exaggeration of my stance -- is that there's nothing new under the sun here. That these technologies, human enhancement technologies, are a logical extension, and an extension in degree rather than in kind, of things that we've been doing for millennia. That we've always sought more knowledge about the world around us, always sought more knowledge about our own minds and bodies, and new ways and more powerful ways to alter them. And more specifically that people have always been looking for ways to extend their health, extend their life spans, to advantage their children, to have more control over the material world.
The area that I focus on is really human enhancement rather than the whole spectrum of GRIN technologies, as Joel put it. Those technologies, the human enhancement ones, are very different from things like nuclear bombs, in that they for the most part have impact on the world one person at a time. They do not have the capacity for explosive, exponential spread throughout the planet destroying everything that they touch. The technologies that are forecast to do that -- I think we should be slightly skeptical of the claims of their coming into being. The most dangerous technology on the planet for the next 50 years, I suspect, will continue to be nuclear weapons.
As far as kind of social policy, I do have a stance on that, which is that throughout history it seems the societies that have flourished have been those that have maximized individual choice. We've seen this in terms of communist societies versus more open societies in the last century, and before that as well. The reason for that is that many people making individual decisions collectively form a more intelligent network, if you will, or a better global brain, than a few central policy makers. That's not to say that I'm against government regulation, I'm not; I think there are very valuable places for government to intervene, specifically around regulating safety, around regulating access to accurate information, and helping to guarantee that consumers have accurate information, and in assisting those who don't have the means to acquire these technologies when that's necessary. An analogy I'd draw there is to public education or vaccination programs. There's a lot of history of doing those things in a way that does not reduce human liberty and is still helps to boost equality and benefit society.
Cascio: So Mez, you feel that enhancement technologies are, in many respects, simply a continuation of historical trends?
Garreau: I'm not sure I agree with that, by the way.
Cascio: Well tell us why you don't agree with that, Joel.
Garreau: I think that this is an inflection point in history. This is a change in direction. For the last several hundred millennia, our technologies have been aimed outward, at modifying our environment, in the fashion of fire and clothes, agriculture, cities, airplanes, space travel, and so forth. What these technologies are doing are for the first time aimed inward, at modifying our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities, progeny, and, therefore, possibly what it means to be human. When you start increasingly blurring the line between the made and the born, when you are increasingly controlling your own evolution, I think that's a real inflection point in history.
Cascio: Joel, how would you draw a difference between the biomedical technologies for internal transformation, internal enhancement, and something like yoga or lengthy therapy which can have very profound effects in terms of changing one's personality, changing one's behavior and beliefs?
Garreau: I don't know enough to answer that question. I mean I just don't know that much about yoga.
Cascio: I just use that as an example of something that has been going on for a long time that has an effect that sounds very similar to what you describe.
Garreau: It seems to me what we're talking about in the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years is a shift as profound in what it means to be human as was the case when we moved out from being Cro-Magnon or Neanderthals into modern humans. That's a pretty breathtaking thought. The question is where does the wisdom come from to handle that kind of transcendence. It's not that we humans haven't tried to transcend in the past. We've tried Cartesian logic, and we've tried Christian sanctification, and we've tried Buddhist enlightenment, and we've tried the new Soviet man, and there's countless others. These have had limited to mixed impact over history in terms of what it means to be human.
Cultural evolution has made a difference over the last 8,000 years. What it means to be human today is not what it meant to be human in the world of the nasty, brutish, and short lives of the people who first came across the Bering Straights into North America. I do think cultural evolution has mattered. Thus, if you're counting, I think what we're looking at is the third evolution. The first evolution being biological evolution that Darwin describes. The second being cultural evolution that basically covers the history of we humans being able to store and retrieve and collect the wisdom of billions of us collectively because of reading and writing and storytelling. But now with this engineered evolution, or this radical evolution, you're talking about making big changes in the internal aspects of our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities, and progeny in a way that I don't think we've seen before. I don't know enough about yoga, but I don't think yoga has had a collective, massive effect on what it's meant to be human and I'm afraid this time that may be what we're talking about.
Hughes: If I can pick up on that, I emphasize more of the continuity, in that I argue in my book that the aspirations for transcendence which Joel references have intellectual and cultural precursors in our spiritual traditions, with every shaman who was trying to escape from sickness, aging, and death through their spiritual practices, and every religious tradition that promised a brighter, better world. These were the precursors that show that we have this aspiration for a dramatic transcendence of some kind. The melding of those aspirations with rationalism and humanism in the 16th, 17th centuries began to give birth to what we now understand to be a transhumanist movement, a movement toward a radical transformation of the human condition through science and technology. And I'm very taken with the argument also of Andy Clark when he argues in Natural Born Cyborg that the very first human intelligence augmentation was written language because when we wrote numbers down on a piece of paper in order to calculate, we're using those external objects in order to supplement our own cognition. We're offloading our memory into a piece of paper. We don't have to memorize those things anymore. And those technologies have had dramatic effects on human culture such as the decline of the oral tradition.
But I think we have a continuity of processes and aspirations at the same time as we have something qualitatively different emerge. For me another example of the political singularity that I see coming down the road is that although we've always had people who wanted to transcend the self - from a Buddhist point of view, recognizing that the self didn't really exist in the first place - one of the things I see coming about, probably in this century, is that nano-neural networks melded with cybernetics will make it extremely clear to people that the self is an illusion. We will begin to backup and copy and rewrite and be creative with our own selfhood in ways that will eventually lead to its dissolution and the reconfiguration of liberal democracy which is based on the notion of individual autonomous selves. The last chapter of Mez's book is pretty good on depicting what it might look like when people are walking around with these nano neural nets in their heads. But who gets a vote when we have the Borg? Does the whole Borg get one vote or do they get a million votes? Those questions are the ones that blow my mind.
Cascio: Is there a fundamental difference between augmentation and enhancement that's based on external artifacts and augmentation and enhancement that's based on genetic or very deeply internal changes?
Garreau: What are you thinking about when you say augmentation?
Cascio: Well I'm trying to use a fairly broad term because I think that to an extent I agree with the notion that things like paper and calendars and the like are in fact technologies of enhancement, technologies that add to individual capabilities. So augmentation can include memory enhancement, can include enhancements to one's physical abilities. I don't know if you saw the report that came out recently about a new kind of contact lens that makes it much easier for athletes, baseball players is the example they use, to see during the day. It's like wearing sunglasses right against your eyeballs.
Garreau: It gives you a really spooky pink ring around your eyeball, too.
Cascio: Exactly. So that's an example of an artifact-based augmentation as opposed to gene doping.
Hughes: Well if they were to get lasik, that does the same thing, that would be changing their own bodies. Are you asking whether there's a difference between wearing a contact lens and getting lasik?
Naam: Or if there's an important difference. I don't think there is, to be honest. Or if there is, it's really a function of how much can you do with kind of external augmentations. I think when you talk about internal augmentations the reason they seem more profound to people is that people imagine them being able to have more dramatic impacts. If I could have an internal alteration to my neural chemistry that changed me from an introvert to an extrovert or changed my sexual orientation that seems very profound to people. But it would seem just as profound, I think, if it were an external augmentation that did the same thing.
I think maybe a more interesting axis than external versus internal is permanent versus temporary. One of the things that people think about a lot, when they think about genetic alteration of humans, and human behavior in particular, people jump to the model of a parent genetically altering their children. I actually suspect that we'll see more use of genetic techniques, whether through pharmacogenetics and the creation of small molecule drugs or gene therapy or things like them for people to alter themselves rather than to alter their children. Parents, while highly motivated around their children's welfare, are even more motivated, it seems to me, around their children's safety. Whereas a lot of individuals, especially young adults in their early to mid 20's, are much more willing to take risks.
So one of the points that I try to make is that to the extent that it's a change in human nature, I don't think that we're seeing any permanent changes in human nature. I think what we're gonna see is more empowerment of individuals to alter their personality, behavior, emotional landscape, cognition or whatnot, on either a temporary or permanent basis as they choose. That's an additional capability to humans. It's not one they didn't have before, but it's one that's more dramatic I'd say.
Hughes: And it's one technology that's very troubling because when people are able to permanently change their own motivations, and what they consider to be important, how do we preserve individual choice and freedom? When you change your display in Windows it gives you a 10 second window in order to switch it back.
(LAUGHTER)
Hughes: When we have the ability to permanently rewire our brains to want new things we should build in that kind of fail-safe so that we switch back to our default mode and then say "now do I really want, for the rest of my life, to be a grub" or whatever it is that you're switching yourself over into.
Cascio: I'm really kinda concerned about the idea of using Windows as a metaphor for any of this.
(LAUGHTER)
Garreau: Yeah, that's the Hell scenario. A Windows crash, what an awful way to end the species.
Cascio: Actually that's part of Jaron Lanier's argument about why he doesn't worry about the Hell scenario, is that computers are fallible. And the Singularity -- the robot revolution -- will end with an operating system crash.
So there are several of these axes or tensions that seem to be coming up both in this conversation and in the broader literature: internal versus external augmentation, the permanent versus temporary, there's also the enhancement versus therapy concept, that some of these proposed and extant augmentations are valid and acceptable to society as long as they are bringing people who have some kind of disability up to the broadly accepted norm, whereas if they're used for enhancing the abilities of people who are otherwise able it's forbidden or prohibited or at the very least discouraged.
One example from Mez's book concerns the use of Ritalin. For people who have not been diagnosed with ADD, Ritalin actually can be extremely valuable as a way of focusing your attention. But you can't go out and get a Ritalin prescription or you can't buy it over the counter without having this particular medical diagnosis. Do you three feel that the enhancement therapy axis will continue to be an issue or how will that play out?
Garreau: Well I have a scenario on that. Take any enhancement technology. I'm think of the ones that exist, like Modafinil, trade name Provigil. This is the primitive prescription drug that allows you to stay awake without any of the side effects of speed or caffeine like jitter or paranoia. You always see the same path. The drug is originally aimed at the sick. In this case it was aimed at the narcoleptics who fall asleep uncontrollably. But within the blink of an eye it moves on to group two, which is the needy well; in this case it was instantly tested on Army helicopter pilots who were young and healthy. The Army discovered that these helicopter pilots could function splendidly for 40 hours without sleep and then have 8 hours of sleep and then do it again for another 40 hours.
And that's just the first iteration of this. The stuff that's in the pipeline is much more impressive in its effects. But the third group to be attracted to enhancements like this is where people start getting creeped out. And that's the merely ambitious, the people who want to stay awake either in the immortal words of Kiss, to "rock and roll all night and party every day," or they're just ambitious because they want to make partner in a law firm and they want to outperform their peers. And so they lunge at any enhancement that you can offer. Viagra was originally created for some other therapeutic reason but of course its big market has been the ambitious, if you will.
I think we're going to see that path with any enhancement and I think what freaks people out is the idea that it's going to be used by people who simply want to have advantage over their competitors. If you buy that path, then you're looking in the very near term at a potential division of the species between the Enhanced, the Naturals, and the Rest. The Enhanced are the people who have the interest and the money to embrace all of these enhancements. The Naturals are the ones who could do it if they wanted to, but they're like today's vegetarians or today's fundamentalists, and they eschew these enhancements for either aesthetic or political or religious reasons. The third group is the Rest and either for reasons of geography or money, they don't have access to these enhancements and they hate and envy the people who do. That division could get pretty exciting pretty fast in terms of conflict.
Cascio: I couldn't help but think as you were talking about the ambitious people taking the Provigil, the parallels there to mobile phones, fax machines, and being online. At a certain point over the last decade it became an expectation that if you were in certain businesses you had to have a mobile phone, you had to be online all the time and reachable all the time, such that that was not a choice.
Hughes: My answer to that complaint is that literacy is in the same boat. When you teach people to read are you making the illiterate less well off? Yes, in fact, in a generally literate society employers will generally want to hire literate people. But we don't then argue that we shouldn't teach people to read because we're making the illiterates worse off. We argue that we should teach everyone to read. So if there is a substantial population of Amish in the future who feel disenfranchised because they've decided not to take the cognitive enhancement drugs, and aren't able to work at what's considered the then normative level of work productivity and cognitive performance, I don't really think that the answer is to have a regulatory approach. I'm not suggesting that that's Joel's answer, but that is a lot of people's answer.
I also don't think that there's any useful distinction between therapy and enhancement although many people will persist in making it. My favorite example is that anti-aging medicine will stop an awful lot of diseases. I don't see how you can distinguish in that case between saying well this is also a prophylactic against cancer, and saying that it will extend my life a couple tens of decades. In terms of the psychopharmaceuticals I'm generally in favor of deregulation. As I said I think that there are gonna be some psychopharmaceuticals and neuro-nano technologies which will have very profound dangers attached to them, much more dangerous than heroin and cocaine are today. But we see with the Drug War today the tremendous social costs associated with restricting people's cognitive liberty.
My final point about this is that the real distinction in the future will be between what we have "in the Plan," that is what we have as a matter of universal access, and what we have in the market. Already we have "enhancements" covered by Medicaid or Medicare or by private health insurance, like breast reconstruction after cancer or Viagra, and so we just stretch our boundaries of what we consider to be therapeutic to include these cosmetic or life enhancements. At the same time, over in the marketplace, we have things like aspirin and Band-Aids which are indisputably therapeutic but we've decided that there's no useful reason why they need to be "in the Plan." So I think that's the kind of decision that we're gonna have to make in the future. If there are drugs or treatments or devices which threaten to radically exacerbate inequality in society that is the point at which you say everybody needs access to this through some kind of universal access system - put them in the plan and give them to everybody. But if the enhancements don't threaten those kinds of inequalities, then we can have a debate about whether they belong in the market or not.
Cascio: So is post-singularity Medicare the answer?
Garreau: It's a very attractive picture that we're painting here of things like global government and super-Medicare and all that. I wonder whether that's realistic politically.
Hughes: Well every other industrialized country in the world has single-payer healthcare. We're the only one that doesn't. So in every other country in the world there'll be this debate. In the U.S. we have to create that single-payer before we have that debate.
Garreau: It's not an accident that we're not agreeing on these things in this country. It's not just an oversight. I mean, I'm not defending this arrangement, I'm just observing this situation that we have. It's not like we're going to wake up some night and say "Oh, God, how silly of us, we're going in the opposite direction from the rest of the universe, let's change this overnight." These politics exist for a reason. I guess I'm saying this because I'm based in Washington, but I'm having difficulty picturing how we're going to get the Congress to buy our more utopian hopes and dreams.
Hughes: Joel don't you think that once we have an anti-aging pill that Medicare will provide it?
Garreau: That's a good question. I'm interested in guys like Francis Fukuyama and Leon Kass and people like that in the President's Council on Bioethics. They go so far as to defend pain and suffering as being essential to what it means to be human. And I don't necessarily agree with them but I give them plenty of points for style...
LAUGHTER
Cascio: I really wonder how many people, especially people who have gone through the very painful death of a loved-one, would accept that argument.
Naam: Can I just step in here a little bit? I think when we get into these conversations we're again succumbing to wild exaggeration of what is possible.
We will never eliminate death. We will never eliminate pain. We will never eliminate people who have personalities that are not exactly what they want. So we may talk about changes to the degree of those, but you could easily argue that aspirin should be subject to a moral debate about whether or not pain is a good thing. Well we've got lots of aspirin and other painkillers but that hasn't eliminated the phenomenon.
Garreau: Right. Well, do we want to discuss the bio-conservatives argument? These guys do exist and they are raising interesting questions. The way we got to this was because of the question of what's going to be politically possible. Right now these guys have the ear of a lot of powerful people.
Cascio: I think one thing that's interesting to me about this is that it underscores a point that James made earlier: that the course of these technological transformations is greatly shaped by the nature of the societies from which they spring. So yes, what you're describing, Joel, is a very accurate depiction of the way things stand in the U.S. but the U.S. is not going to be the only place that's dealing with the onset of these kinds of technologies.
Garreau: Right.
Cascio: So one thing that will be very interesting to watch will be the divergence between the U.S. and Europe and India and China -- about how these technologies are made available. The cost. Would there be old people sneaking over the border to Canada to get anti-aging treatments because they aren't paid for by Medicare?
Garreau: I'm particularly interested in seeing where the Europeans go with this. If they can't take genetically altered food I wonder what's going to happen when they start being offered the possibility of, as you say, exceedingly long lifetimes or any of the other things. Lord knows Asians have plenty of their own taboos, but they are frequently different from the taboos that you'll find in the West. My understanding is that the idea of mucking around with your body to enhance it, increase muscle mass and stuff like that -- the whole Barry Bonds thing -- just totally perplexes them. They don't understand why we're getting so upset. It's going to be interesting.
Take the guys at the University of Pennsylvania who are genetically enhancing the so-called Schwarzenegger-mice [and cattle]. Lee Sweeney, the guy who does this, believes that the Athens Olympics was the last Olympics without genetically-modified participants. I keep on wondering what's going to happen if, for example, the entire Chinese Olympic team in 2008 comes out looking a whole hell of a lot different from a lot of their competitors and doing so in a fashion that you can't test. Is that going to be like Sputnik? Is that just going to rock people in a similar way?
Hughes: I think China is one of my biggest questions about the future because I, of course, like most people, never foresaw that the Soviet Union would collapse. And as soon as it collapsed I thought that in a matter of very short time that China would collapse as well, the Chinese Communist Party would collapse, and I thought that Tienanmen Square was the beginning of that. It hasn't been. China has established a relatively stable authoritarian model of capitalism and they're extremely enthusiastic about the GRIN technologies and they've poured a lot of money into them. Fifty percent of all bachelor's degree graduates in China are getting engineering degrees and we know that they have that kind of prowess. And I think if you imagine the authoritarian application of those technologies to a whole population of a billion and a half people the kinds of consequences in terms of social productivity that you could have. So I think that's my big fear, that authoritarian capitalist techno-savvy model might become the dominant model for a lot of the world in the coming 50 years.
Naam: I think both Joel and James make good points about Asia and the different culture there and I think James' concern about authoritarian models there is a good one. If that doesn't happen, I think there's something very interesting here which is that there is a world market independent of whether governments decide to pay for these technologies. It seems that the different social mores in Asian countries -- where not just the state but individuals are much more friendly to enhancement technologies, and genetics in particular -- mean that these things are going to be on the market and you can imagine that even in a non-authoritarian model that ends up producing an awful lot of competitive pressure on the U.S. and the European nations. If an economically strong country like South Korea or China starts to see wide-spread adoption of things like memory enhancers which are not adopted here in the U.S., and those things give a productivity boost, you can start to imagine people in D.C. talking about that as an economic disadvantage for the U.S. and about how we have to address that in the same ways they talk about college enrollments and the number of degrees coming out of universities and so on.
Garreau: Oh well, hell, how about the military implications?
Hughes: Nukes would be the only thing we would have left as an advantage.
Garreau: By the way, can we come back to that nukes proposition?
Naam: Sure.
Garreau: Are we in agreement with Mez's statement that the most dangerous thing for the next 50 years is going to be nukes? Because I'm not sure I'd agree.
Hughes: I'm not. I think there's gonna be a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction coming out of these technologies. Although we didn't actually go to war because of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - there weren't any there and we know the problems with that - we do actually need to create a much more interventionist and backed-up model of international action to track down weapons of mass destruction. And they're gonna become a hell of a lot more complicated to find because they are gonna be coming out of labs the size of the recording studio I'm sitting in right now.
Garreau: Right. This is the underpinning of Bill Joy's Hell scenario. He makes a big distinction between weaponized versions of the GRIN technologies and nukes. He says nukes require an industrial base that is at least the size of a rogue nation and it involves rare minerals and it's difficult and costly and blah, blah, blah. Whereas he argues the GRIN technologies are easily within the reach of a bright but demented graduate student. The reason he is totally convinced that the end of the species is nigh is because regulating nuclear weapons is child's play compared to regulating the GRIN technologies. Very few people want to have a nuclear bomb go off. Lots of people want to have brighter, healthier, more beautiful children. There enhancements are dual-use, he would argue, would be impossible to regulate.
Hughes: We need technological police. But I want to go back to a point that Ramez made earlier which is that we also need to imagine the ways that free people armed with the free use of technology can prophylactically protect themselves. So I think there's both a libertarian argument here that we need to give people as wide an access to things like the next version of Symantec Anti-Virus systems will be, for your body and for your ecosystem, but we also need to have regulatory police at an international level to track down and close down the most dangerous operations.
Cascio: I think that's one crucial point about the Bill Joy argument. He uses the phrase "knowledge-enabled weapons of mass destruction" and it's important to remember that the responses are also knowledge-enabled. Because there's a strong correlation between the ability to develop and apply knowledge and collaboration between numbers of people, we'd be in a much better position to be able to respond or develop prophylactics, as James puts it, with a scenario of knowledge-enabled problems.
Naam: I think that's a good argument. Just to come back to why I made that statement about nukes, I think that Joy's assessment -- that self-replicating technologies are inherently more dangerous than nukes in the long-run because they can spread like wild fire from a single source and potentially be manufactured using a much smaller base than nukes -- is correct.
The problem is not the manufacturing. It's the R&D. And the reality out there right now is that no one knows how to make a self-replicating nanobot. No matter what they say, no one is anywhere near this. In fact, if they could, you could imagine that they could build it out of macro-sized parts. The self-replication is not necessarily something that is a feature only of things built at this scale. It is a kind of a systems design problem, a complexity problem similar to complexity problems of large-scale software, but massively larger than anything that we've faced to date.
The other approach to kind of self-replicating agents that could be weaponized is the biological one, starting with existing pathogens and so on. I think that's much more plausible in the next few decades, but those things also take a bit of time, they run up against the kind of naturally evolved defenses that we have, and even there, while the synthesis might happen in a room as big as the one that James is in, the design takes a rather large infrastructure of a different sort which is potentially hundreds or thousands of scientists working on it, places to test it, try it out, and so on, and those things aren't that easy either. So overall I just think that designing any weapon of this sort is a much harder problem than either extreme enthusiasts or deep pessimists or those who fear these technologies make it out to be.
Cascio: One other data point I'd throw in here is that for a variety of reasons, the "gray goo" scenario -- which you didn't mention, but alluded to -- of self-replicating disassembling nanobots is essentially impossible, at least according to work done a few years back by Ralph Merkle at the Foresight Institute. The replicating threat issue is really overblown.
Garreau: Yeah, I agree. I'm in this kind of awkward position where I don't want to be constantly counterpunching people with whom I basically agree. But there are all these guys I talk to like Bill Joy who, if he were here, would bring up certain points. I guess it's my role to say what Bill would worry about. He's not worried about nanobots. That's a ways down the road. He's worried about accidents in a bio lab with a bright biology student. He points to the Australian mouse pox incident. Australia is one of those isolated ecosystems that has invasive species that sometimes run amok because they don't have any natural opponents. Apparently one of these species is mice. From time to time it's just mice everywhere. It just drive them nuts. So they're very keen on controlling mice. They were working on a mouse contraceptive and what happened was that they altered a gene in mouse pox and this new enhanced mouse pox virus was 100% fatal. Every mouse died. So they then tried it on mice that had supposedly been inoculated. And half of those died.
It was one of these kind of "oops" moments. Up until then, people had thought that if you genetically altered a virus it would necessarily become less effective. But in this case it became more effective. It was a surprise. Joy is terrified of surprises like this. Especially because what these researchers then went and did was publish their findings. It's available on the internet. You can go out there and create all the enhanced mouse pox you want today just by going to the literature. Mouse pox doesn't affect humans. But it's a close cousin of smallpox and this information, this knowledge-enabled weapon, is out there on the web right now. That just drives Bill Joy nuts. He thinks that this is suicidal behavior and that we're going to pay for it with hundreds of millions of deaths in the not too distant future.
Hughes: The problem with Bill's argument is that he's not even willing to argue for the global technology police which I'm arguing for. He wants some kind of vow of renunciation on the part of all technologists and I don't think that that's a realistic policy solution to this. I think that we need to have a more open source approach to the prevention of these kinds of disasters. We need to have everything out in the open as much as possible. And I think that could go along with having a technology police. Like the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, it's not that certain kinds of countries aren't allowed to do certain kinds of research, it's that we have to be able to inspect and make sure you're not making weapons out of the stuff.
Garreau: Do you think that's realistic?
Hughes: I think that that's the kind of regime we have to develop. The more open source solutions we have, the more we'll be able to detect when people are doing bad stuff and the better kinds of prophylactic measures we'll be able to take when they do. So with the case of bioweapons and bioterrorism, if a country was not preparing actively for the prospect of bioterrorism that would be crazy so I think we need to know that there are these threats out there, we need to know what kinds of threats there are and we need to be preparing for them.
Cascio: Well I wrote a piece a couple of years ago arguing for a strongly open-source approach to these kinds of technologies...
Garreau: To what end?
Cascio: Well precisely because of the security question. Because you're right, these Australian scientists discovering this thing about mouse pox and publishing that, that would make it simpler for somebody else to do the same. But the Australian scientists were not the only ones in the world who could discover that about mouse pox. And if it was a black lab somewhere that discovered this about mouse pox and did try to create a weaponized version of small pox out of it we're in a better position now to be able to respond to it because the biologists of the world have access to this information than we would if this had all been done in secret and nobody had any ability to even recognize what was going on.
Garreau: I think you're displaying a touching faith in the Department of Homeland Security.
Cascio: I'm not talking about homeland security. I'm talking about the global community of biological scientists.
Garreau: So a jar of this stuff gets opened up on Capitol Hill tomorrow and you think we're going to be able to respond to it correctly?
Cascio: Fast enough to save the Congress and the President? Probably not. But I will refrain from any further comment there.
(LAUGHTER)
Hughes: One of the few things the Bush Administration has recently said that I agree with is that we need to create a global system for the monitoring of emergent infectious diseases. I remember way back when I first got terrified by the prospect of bioterrorism. I started interviewing folks from the Federation of American Scientists and they said "look, SARS, avian flu, AIDS, these are killing real people. Bioterrorism incidents have not killed very many real people yet but these other diseases that emerge naturally have killed real people. What we need is a global monitoring system and an emergency fast response set of technological solutions for dealing with emergent diseases. Then it doesn't make any difference whether they come out of bioterrorism or not because most of the ones we're gonna have to deal with won't come out of bioterrorism."
Naam: One point I'd add is that when SARS came on the scene I think the gene sequencing of SARS happened in like eight days after people started working on it. A lot of the same technology that is making it much easier to develop these weapons is also making it much easier to decode them and figure out the cures.
(The interview continues at Human Changing (Continued))

More then human

2006-02-07T20:29:00.000-05:00

http://www.morethanhuman.org/contents/chapter1.htm

Excerpt from Chapter 1 - Choosing Our Bodies

In 1989, Raj and Van DeSilva were desperate. Their daughter Ashanti, just four, was dying. She was born with a crippled immune system, a consequence of a problem in her genes.

Every human being has around thirty thousand genes. In fact, we have two copies of each of those genes--one inherited from our mother, the other from our father. Our genes tell our cells what proteins to make, and when.

Each protein is a tiny molecular machine. Every cell in your body is built out of millions of these little machines, working together in precise ways. Proteins break down food, ferry energy to the right places, and form scaffoldings that maintain cell health and structure. Some proteins synthesize messenger molecules to pass signals in the brain, and other proteins form receptors to receive those signals. Even the machines inside each of your cells that build new proteins—called ribosomes—are themselves made up of other proteins.

Ashanti DeSilva inherited two broken copies of the gene that contains the instructions for manufacturing a protein called adenoside deaminase (ADA). If she had had just one broken copy, she would have been fine. The other copy of the gene would have made up the difference. With two broken copies, her body didn’t have the right instructions to manufacture ADA at all.

ADA plays a crucial role in our resistance to disease. Without it, special white blood cells called T cells die off. Without T cells, ADA-deficient children are wide open to the attacks of viruses and bacteria. These children have what’s called severe combined immune deficiency (SCID) disorder, more commonly known as bubble boy disease.

To a person with a weak immune system, the outside world is threatening. Everyone you touch, share a glass with, or share the same air with is a potential source of dangerous pathogens. Lacking the ability to defend herself, Ashanti was largely confined to her home.

The standard treatment for ADA deficiency is frequent injections of PEG-ADA, a synthetic form of the ADA enzyme. PEG-ADA can mean the difference between life and death for an ADA-deficient child. Unfortunately, although it usually produces a rapid improvement when first used, children tend to respond less and less to the drug each time they receive a dose. Ashanti DeSilva started receiving PEG-ADA injections at the age of two, and initially she responded well. Her T-cell count rose sharply and she developed some resistance to disease. But by the age of four, she was slipping away, no longer responding strongly to her injections. If she was to live, she’d need something more than PEG-ADA. The only other option at the time, a bone-marrow transplant, was ruled out by the lack of matching donors.

In early 1990, while Ashanti’s parents were searching frantically for help, French Anderson, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health, was seeking permission to perform the first gene-therapy trials on humans. Anderson, an intense fifth-degree blackbelt in tae kwon do and respected researcher in the field of genetics, wanted to show that he could treat genetic diseases caused by faulty copies of genes by inserting new, working copies of the same gene.

Scientists had already shown that it was possible to insert new genes into plants and animals. Genetic engineering got its start in 1972, when geneticists Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer first met at a scientific conference in Hawaii on plasmids, small circular loops of extra chromosomal DNA in which bacteria carry their genes. Cohen, then a professor at Stanford, had been working on ways to insert new plasmids into bacteria. Researchers in Boyer’s lab at the University of California in San Francisco had recently discovered restriction enzymes, molecular tools that could be used to slice and dice DNA at specific points.

Over hot pastrami and corned-beef sandwiches, the two Californian researchers concluded that their technologies complemented one another. Boyer’s restriction enzymes could isolate specific genes, and Cohen’s techniques could then deliver them to bacteria. Using both techniques researchers could alter the genes of bacteria. In 1973, just four months after meeting each other, Cohen and Boyer inserted a new gene into the Escherichia coli bacterium (a regular resident of the human intestine).

For the first time, humans were tinkering directly with the genes of another species. The field of genetic engineering was born. Boyer would go on to found Genentech, the world’s first biotechnology company. Cohen would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 1986 for his work on cell growth factors.

Building on Cohen and Boyer’s work with bacteria, hundreds of scientists went on to find ways to insert new genes into plants and animals. The hard work of genetically engineering these higher organisms lies in getting the new gene into the cells. To do this, one needs a gene vector—a way to get the gene to the right place. Most researchers use gene vectors provided by nature: viruses. In some ways, viruses are an ideal tool for ferrying genes into a cell, because penetrating cell walls is already one of their main abilities. Viruses are cellular parasites. Unlike plant or animal cells, or even bacteria, viruses can’t reproduce themselves. Instead, they penetrate cells and implant their viral genes; these genes then instruct the cell to make more of the virus, one protein at a time.

Early genetic engineers realized that they could use viruses to deliver whatever genes they wanted. Instead of delivering the genes to create more virus, a virus could be modified to deliver a different gene chosen by a scientist. Modified viruses were pressed into service as genetic “trucks,” carrying a payload of genes loaded onto them by researchers; these viruses don’t spread from cell to cell, because they don’t carry the genes necessary for the cell to make new copies of the virus.

By the late 1980s, researchers had used this technique to alter the genes of dozens of species of plants and animals—tobacco plants that glow, tomatoes that could survive freezing, corn resistant to pesticides. French Anderson and his colleagues reasoned that one could do the same in a human being. Given a patient who lacked a gene crucial to health, one ought to be able to give that person copies of the missing gene. This is what Anderson proposed to do for Ashanti.

Starting in June of 1988, Anderson’s proposed clinical protocols, or treatment plans, went through intense scrutiny and generated more than a little hostility. His first protocol was reviewed by both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Over a period of seven months, seven regulatory committees conducted fifteen meetings and twenty hours of public hearings to assess the proposal.

In early 1990, Anderson and his collaborators received the final approval from the NIH’s Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee and had cleared all legal hurdles. By spring, they had identified Ashanti as a potential patient. Would her parents consent to an experimental treatment? Of course there were risks to the therapy, yet without it Ashanti would face a life of seclusion and probably death in the next few years. Given these odds, her parents opted to try the therapy. As Raj DeSilva told the Houston Chronicle, “What choice did we have?”

Ashanti and her parents flew to the NIH Clinical Center at Bethesda, Maryland. There, over the course of twelve days, Anderson and his colleagues Michael Blaese and Kenneth Culver slowly extracted some of Ashanti’s blood cells. Safely outside the body, the cells had new, working copies of the ADA gene inserted into them by a hollowed-out virus. Finally, starting on the afternoon of September 14, Culver injected the cells back into Ashanti’s body.

The gene therapy had roughly the same goal as a bone-marrow transplant—to give Ashanti a supply of her own cells that could produce ADA. Unlike a bone-marrow transplant, gene therapy carries no risk of rejection. The cells Culver injected back into Ashanti’s bloodstream were her own, so her body recognized them as such.

The impact of the gene therapy on Ashanti was striking. Within six months, her T-cell count rose to normal levels. Over the next two years, her health continued to improve, allowing her to enroll in school, venture out of the house, and lead a fairly normal childhood.

Ashanti is not completely cured—she still takes a low dose of PEG-ADA. Normally the dose size would increase with the patient’s age, but her doses have remained fixed at her four-year-old level. It’s possible that she could be taken off the PEG-ADA therapy entirely, but her doctors don’t think it’s yet worth the risk. The fact that she’s alive today—let alone healthy and active—is due to her gene therapy, and also helps prove a crucial point: genes can be inserted into humans to cure genetic diseases.

From Healing to Enhancing

After Ashanti’s treatment, the field of gene therapy blossomed. Since 1990, hundreds of labs have begun experimenting with gene therapy as a technique to cure disease, and more than five hundred human trials involving over four thousand patients have been launched. Researchers have shown that it may be possible to use gene therapy to cure diabetes, sickle-cell anemia, several kinds of cancer, Huntington’s disease and even to open blocked arteries.

While the goal of gene therapy researchers is to cure disease, gene therapy could also be used to boost human athletic performance. In many cases, the same research that is focused on saving lives has also shown that it can enhance the abilities of animals, with the suggestion that it could enhance men and women as well.

Consider the use of gene therapy to combat anemia. Circulating through your veins are trillions of red blood cells. Pumped by your heart, they serve to deliver oxygen from the lungs to the rest of your tissues, and carry carbon dioxide from the tissues back out to the lungs and out of the body. Without enough red blood cells, you can’t function. Your muscles can’t get enough oxygen to produce force, and your brain can’t get enough oxygen to think clearly. Anemia is the name of the condition of insufficient red blood cells. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide live with anemia, and with the lethargy and weakness that are its symptoms. In the United States, at least eighty-five thousand patients are severely anemic as a result of kidney failure. Another fifty thousand AIDS patients are anemic due to side effects of the HIV drug AZT.

In 1985, researchers at Amgen, a biotech company based in Thousand Oaks, California, looking for a way to treat anemia isolated the gene responsible for producing the growth hormone erythropoietin (EPO). Your kidneys produce EPO in response to low levels of oxygen in the blood. EPO in turn causes your body to produce more red blood cells. For a patient whose kidneys have failed, injections of Amgen’s synthetic EPO can take up some of the slack. The drug is a lifesaver, so popular that the worldwide market for it is as high as $5 billion per year, and therein lies the problem: the cost of therapy is prohibitive. Three injections of EPO a week is a standard treatment, and patients who need this kind of therapy end up paying $7,000 to $9,000 a year. In poor countries struggling even to pay for HIV drugs like AZT, the added burden of paying for EPO to offset the side effects just isn’t feasible.

What if there was another way? What if the body could be instructed to produce more EPO on its own, to make up for that lost to kidney failure or AZT? That’s the question University of Chicago professor Jeffrey Leiden asked himself in the mid-1990s. In 1997, Leiden and his colleagues performed the first animal study of EPO gene therapy, injecting lab monkeys and mice with a virus carrying an extra copy of the EPO gene. The virus penetrated a tiny proportion of the cells in the mice and monkeys and unloaded the gene copies in them. The cells began to produce extra EPO, causing the animals’ bodies to create more red blood cells. In principle, this was no different from injecting extra copies of the ADA gene into Ashanti, except in this case the animals already had two working copies of the EPO gene. The one being inserted into some of their cells was a third copy; if the experiment worked, the animals’ levels of EPO production would be boosted beyond the norm for their species.

That’s just what happened. After just a single injection, the animals began producing more EPO, and their red-blood-cell counts soared. The mice went from a hematocrit of 49 percent (meaning that 49 percent of their blood volume was red blood cells) to 81 percent. The monkeys went from 40 percent to 70 percent. At least two other biotech companies, Chiron and Ariad Gene Therapies, have produced similar results in baboons and monkeys, respectively.

The increase in red-blood-cell count is impressive, but the real advantage of gene therapy is in the long-lasting effects. Doctors can produce an increase in red-blood-cell production in patients with injections of EPO itself—but the EPO injections have to be repeated three times a week. EPO gene therapy, on the other hand, could be administered just every few months, or even just once for the patient’s entire lifetime.

The research bears this out. In Leiden’s original experiment, the mice each received just one shot, but showed higher red-blood-cell counts for a year. In the monkeys, the effects lasted for twelve weeks. The monkeys in the Ariad trial, which went through gene therapy more than four years ago, still show higher red-blood-cell counts today.

This is a key difference between drug therapy and gene therapy. Drugs sent into the body have an effect for a while, but eventually are broken up or passed out. Gene therapy, on the other hand, gives the body the ability to manufacture the needed protein or enzyme or other chemical itself. The new genes can last for a few weeks or can become a permanent part of the patient’s genome.

The duration of the effect depends on the kind of gene vector used and where it delivers its payload of DNA. Almost all of the DNA you carry is located on twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that are inside the nuclei of your cells. The nucleus forms a protective barrier that shields your chromosomes from damage. It also contains sophisticated DNA repair mechanisms that patch up most of the damage that does occur.

Insertional gene vectors penetrate all the way into the nucleus of the cell and splice the genes they carry into the chromosomes. From that point on, the new genes get all the benefits your other genes enjoy. The new genes are shielded from most of the damage that can happen inside your cells. If the cell divides, the new genes get copied to the daughter cells, just like the rest of your DNA. Insertional vectors make more or less permanent changes to your genome.

Noninsertional vectors, on the other hand, don’t make it into the nucleus of your cells. They don’t splice the new genes they carry into your chromosomes. Instead, they deliver their payload of DNA and leave it floating around inside your cells. The new DNA still gets read by the cell. It still instructs the cell to make new proteins. But it doesn’t get copied when the cell divides. Over time, it suffers from wear and tear, until eventually it breaks up, and its effects end.

The difference in durations among drugs, noninsertional vectors and insertional vectors gives us choices. We can choose to make a temporary change with a drug, which will wear off in a few hours or days; a semipermanent change with noninsertional gene therapy, whose effects will last for weeks or months depending on the genes and type of cell infected; or a permanent change by inserting new genes directly into your genome. Each of these three options is appropriate in certain situations. In the context of EPO, the idea of semipermanent or permanent change by means of gene therapy has definite advantages. It cuts down on the need for frequent injections, which means that the gene therapy approach can end up being much cheaper than the drug therapy approach.

....

Excerpted from More Than Human by Ramez Naam Copyright © 2005 by Ramez Naam . Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

2006-02-05T03:04:00.000-05:00

HUMAN ENHANCEMENTS : For Good or For Worse?

The flip side of the steroid scandal in baseball is last week's announcement of the first cloned dog. Ballplayers are punished for using pharmaceutical technologies to improve their physical abilities, while scientists are rewarded for pushing toward a similar goal — in the words of artificial intelligence techno-visionary Ray Kurzweil, "reverse engineering our biology and then reprogramming it."

Biological engineering is not just about curing disease anymore. The incentives and profits are moving toward drugs, gene therapies and other technologies to enhance human performance — memory, creativity, concentration, strength, endurance, longevity. Asking athletes not to partake of these advances is not just hypocritical, it's likely to be increasingly futile.

2006-02-05T02:49:00.000-05:00

H.A.L (Hybrid Assistive Limb)

Two control systems interact to help the wearer stand, walk and climb stairs. A "bio-cybernic" system uses bioelectric sensors attached to the skin on the legs to monitor signals transmitted from the brain to the muscles. It can do this because when someone intends to stand or walk, the nerve signal to the muscles generates a detectable electric current on the skin's surface. These currents are picked up by the sensors and sent to the computer, which translates the nerve signals into signals of its own for controlling electric motors at the hips and knees of the exoskeleton. It takes a fraction of a second for the motors to respond accordingly, and in fact they respond fractionally faster to the original signal from the brain than the wearer's muscles do.

“The motors respond faster to signals from the wearer's brain than their own muscles”

While the bio-cybernic system moves individual elements of the exoskeleton, a second system provides autonomous robotic control of the motors to coordinate these movements and make a task easier overall, helping someone to walk, for instance. The system activates itself automatically once the user starts to move. The first time they walk, its sensors record posture and pattern of motion, and this information is stored in an onboard database for later use. When the user walks again, sensors alert the computer, which recognises the movement and regenerates the stored pattern to provide power-assisted movement. The actions of both systems can be calibrated according to a particular user's needs, for instance to give extra assistance to a weaker limb.

Aging Vulnerability Index

2006-02-04T00:33:00.000-05:00

The CSIS Aging Vulnerability Index represents the first attempt to develop a comprehensive measure of the global aging challenge that is comparable across the developed countries. The Index not only looks at the projected growth in pay-as-you-go public pension and health-care programs like Social Security and Medicare, but also takes into account the broader social and economic environment, including the “fiscal room” that countries have to adjust to the challenge and the availability of alternative means of support, from private pensions to extended families. The bottom line is a ranking of the major developed countries in terms of their “vulnerability” to rising old-age dependency costs.
The 2003 Aging Vulnerability Index:
http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/aging_index.pdf

Global Aging

2006-02-04T00:31:00.000-05:00

What is Global Aging?

For most of human history, until about a century ago, the elderly (people aged 65 and over) never amounted to more than 2 or 3 percent of the population. Today, in the developed world, they amount to 15 percent. By the year 2030, they will be around 25 percent. As recently as 1980, the median age of the oldest society on earth (Sweden) was 36. By the year 2030, the median age of the entire developed world is projected to be 45. In much of southern and eastern Europe, it will be over 50. As a whole, the developing world will remain much younger for the foreseeable future. Yet it too is aging—hence the term "global aging." Several major countries in East Asia and Latin America, including China, South Korea, and Mexico are projected to reach developed-world levels of old-age dependency by the middle of the century.

What Causes Global Aging?
Global aging is the result of two sweeping forces: falling fertility (fewer births per woman) and rising longevity (longer lives). Worldwide, the fertility rate has fallen from 5.0 to 2.7 since the mid-1960s. In the developed countries, it is has fallen to 1.5—far beneath the replacement rate needed to maintain a stable population over time. Meanwhile, since World War II, global life expectancy has risen from around age 45 to around age 65, for a greater gain over the past 50 years than over the previous 5,000. In the developed countries, life expectancy has risen to between age 75 and 80. Other forces are compounding the economic burden of rising old-age dependency: earlier retirement, rising health-care costs, inadequate personal savings, and declining levels of family support.

What are the Challenges of Global Aging?
The most predictable challenge posed by global aging is the mounting fiscal burden. Over the next thirty years, the rising cost of pay-as-you-go pensions and health-care benefits to the elderly is on track to push up government outlays by 12 percent of GDP on average in the developed countries—the equivalent of an extra 25 percent of worker payroll on top of payroll tax rates that often exceed 25 percent already. Countries above the average may have to choose between drastic policy reform and economic ruin.

As workforces age and shrink, the developed countries may experience widespread labor shortages, which in turn will give rise to extraordinary new immigration pressure. At the same time, demographically contracting societies may have to invent new macroeconomic policy tools to manage a "no growth" business cycle in which total output declines from one normal year to the next. Global aging could also threaten the stability of the world financial system if some of today’s fast-aging capital exporters (like Germany and Japan) become deficit-ridden capital importers.

Beyond economics, the social and cultural consequences are even wider-ranging. How will public policy deal with the rapidly changing shape of the family (often, with fewer grandchildren than grandparents)? Will fears of population decline lead to a new pro-natalism? Will the rising average age of voters block effective political reform of public benefit spending? Will the rising average age of savers and investors affect risk-taking and entrepreneurship? In what way, finally, will global aging transform geopolitics—through its differential impact, by region, on population growth, average age, migration patterns, fiscal balances, capital flows, voter attitudes, and military spending?

Population trends --Looking out to the year 2025

2006-02-04T00:25:00.000-05:00

About 8,700 people every hour, 146 people every minute, and 2.5 people every second are being added to the global population…
The key theme in population growth is stratification. In effect, many of the populations of developed countries will actually be smaller in 2025 than they are today. Over the same period, the developing world will experience an enormous youth bulge. Reconciling these two demographic movements is the primary challenge of the revolution in population.
The World Population: Currently at 6.30 billion, the total world population will grow by almost two billion by 2025. Eighty percent of the world's population will be in countries least capable of supporting further population growth.
Rate of Population Growth: The rate of population growth (i.e., the ratio of total increase in population each year to the mean population) has decreased drastically since the 1960s. It will continue to fall. By 2025, the world population will likely be growing less than 1% annually. According to the latest estimates from the United Nations, the global population could stabilize in the year 2100 at about 11 billion people.
Global Generation Gap: The population of the developed world is contracting. At least 33 countries across the world are expected to be substantially smaller than they are today. Populations in these developed countries are also getting old--and in the case of Germany and Japan and a few others, very old. In stark contrast, a number of developing countries will have very young populations that their economies may not be able to support.
Hyper-Urbanization: Another huge problem facing us is "hyper-urbanization." By 2025, the portion of the world's population living in urban areas will constitute nearly 60% of the total world population. Already, up to one-half of the populations in the largest cities in the developing world is living in unplanned and illegal squatter colonies that are highly vulnerable to disease and natural disasters.

And did you know?

Due to the combination of a high mortality rate and low birthrate, Russia is depopulating at the rate of 2225 people a day...

Eight countries--Bangladesh, China, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the United States, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo --will account for one-half of all world population growth through 2050…

By 2025, the population of Bangladesh could reach 206 million people, China 1.45 billion, India 1.37 billion, Indonesia 272 million, Nigeria 202 million, and Pakistan 250 million…

By 2015, 21 cities will have populations above ten million. The top three are Tokyo (27.2 million), Dhaka (22.8 million), and Mumbai (22.6 million)...

The Global Retirement Crisis

2006-02-04T00:08:00.000-05:00

“The whole world is aging.” With these words, The Global Retirement Crisis launches readers on a tour of one of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century. The report explains how population global aging will restructure the economy, reshape the family, and even rearrange the world order. Along the way, it compares and contrasts the outlook in different countries and regions of the world.
http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/global_retirement.pdf

Challenges of aging society are economic and ethical

2006-02-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

American society is aging — dramatically, rapidly and, largely, well. More and more of us are living healthily into our 70s and 80s, many well into our 90s. With the baby boomers approaching retirement and birthrates down, we are on the threshold of the first-ever "mass geriatric society." Historically speaking, it is the best of times to be old. Yet the blessings of greater longevity are bringing profound new social challenges, several of them highlighted in "Taking Care: Ethical Caregiving in Our Aging Society," a report issued Thursday by the President's Council on Bioethics. Although we are living healthier longer, many of us are also living long enough to suffer serious age-related chronic illnesses, including dementia. Alzheimer's disease afflicts more than 4 million Americans, and the number is expected to triple before mid-century. Already the most common trajectory toward death — experienced today by 40 percent of us — is a lengthy period of debility, frailty and dementia lasting not months but years. Already millions of American families are struggling nobly to care for their incapacitated loved ones. Yet precisely as the need for long-term care is rising, the number of available caregivers — professional and volunteer — is dwindling. This is due in part to smaller and less stable families, greater geographical mobility, and the career demands of men and women. A crisis in long-term care will soon be upon us. The shortage of caregivers is made worse by our cultural refusal to honor the need for care. As a society, we have preferred to place our hopes in programs that promote healthy aging and in scientific research seeking remedies for incapacitating diseases. We offer little communal support to the millions of Americans, more each decade, who give demanding daily care to aged parents or spouses. Our culture's generalized anxiety about old age and dying focuses all too narrowly on end-of-life decisions and on preserving the fiction of autonomy in the face of unavoidable neediness. Public discussion of these issues is often driven by the "worried well," who live in fear that the curse of untreatable dementia and disability will descend on them, to ruin their final years, deplete their savings and burden their loved ones. In response to these concerns, our society has embraced the strategy of living wills, through which individuals try to specify how they wish to be treated should they become incapacitated. We are encouraged to believe that if only we execute the proper documents, we can remain in control of our future and avoid unseemly dependencies and indignities. But this emphasis on autonomy ignores the truth of human interdependence and of our unavoidable need for human presence and care, especially when we can no longer take care of ourselves. The moral emphasis on choosing in advance needs to be replaced with a moral emphasis on caring in the present. The emphasis on independence needs to be supplemented with a commitment to serve the lives of those we love, regardless of their disabilities. Written directives eschewing "heroic measures" cannot substitute for reliable and responsible caregivers on the spot, devoted to the daily welfare of the incapacitated person. To help caregivers in their difficult task, the report also articulates the goals and principles of ethical caregiving for those no longer able to care for themselves. We emphasize both the singular importance of seeking to serve the life the patient still has and the moral necessity of never seeking a person's death as a means of relieving suffering. Caring wholeheartedly for a frail patient or a disabled loved one is incompatible with thinking that engineering their death is an acceptable "therapeutic option." At the same time, we emphasize that good caregiving does not always oblige us to elect life-sustaining treatments, if such interventions impose undue burdens or interfere with a comfortable death of someone irretrievably dying. Even when the doctor's black bag of remedies is empty, care remains an inviolable duty. But sound ethical principles are not enough. And family caregivers should not have to go it alone. Our ability to care well for loved ones with dementia depends greatly on the economic, social and communal resources available to us — such as affordable insurance for long-term care; respite for the caregivers; reliable and reimbursable home care services; faith-based or civic support groups; technologies to assist in giving basic bodily care; and health care providers who will deliver continuity of care and oversee all medical and social service needs. Those who lack adequate resources to care for themselves need and deserve better public support. Incentives — including better training and better wages — must be found to increase the supply of nurses and other non-familial caregivers. Addressing the crisis in long-term care will be difficult and costly. It is not yet clear what roles the federal and state governments should play, though we should certainly re-examine how current government policies — such as Medicare reimbursement schemes — fail to support the most needed kinds of care. And even as we move to support the elderly, we can ill afford to neglect the young, who, unlike the old, have few organized voices to speak up for their needs. We must at all costs avoid a conflict between the generations over scarce resources. To help think through these very complex issues, we need first to face up to our dilemma. We need sustained research, hard thinking and a creative search for achievable reforms. And we need national leadership at the highest level. Accordingly, the report calls for a presidential commission on aging, dementia and long-term care — to focus the nation's attention, gather the relevant data, and catalyze the ongoing activities of relevant agencies and organizations. Yet we must also remember that the challenges of an aging society are finally not economic and institutional but ethical and existential. Against our confidence in mastery and control, we need to remember that old age and dying are not problems to be solved but human experiences that must be faced. In the years ahead, we will be judged as a people by our willingness to stand by one another, not only in the rare event of natural disaster but also in the everyday care of those who gave us life and to whom we owe so much.

International Retirement Security Survey

2006-02-03T23:40:00.000-05:00

Income security in retirement is a growing worldwide challenge as many nations face fiscal pressures, demographic challenges, and a redefinition of retirement among their populations. AARP commissioned a survey of the general population aged 30-65 in 10 developed nations--Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States--regarding their attitudes and behaviors surrounding retirement issues. The survey covered retirement expectations, preparations, and public policy options, as well as health care issues that these workers may face in retirement. Results revealed some unique approaches to retirement in the different nations, including attitudes on how retirement income security should be provided in the future. In other cases, results indicated the emergence of a potential consensus, as residents of different countries expressed common expectations and concerns regarding their approaching retirement years. An executive summary and power presentation of the detailed findings are available. Together with last year's survey of opinion leaders in the G-7 countries on this issue, the surveys provide provocative insight into how the developed nations are dealing with the future of retirement at a time of unprecedented demographic, economic, and social change. (116 pages)
http://assets.aarp.org/rgcenter/general/irss.pdf

Websites

2006-02-03T16:53:00.000-05:00

http://biomech.media.mit.edu/

Note:do not log on the xteamblackx to post...sign up your own account....do what the e-mail said...thanks

Global Aging report

2006-02-03T16:50:00.000-05:00

http://www.aarp.org/research/international/gra/gra_fall_2005/index.html

Looking Abroad to Meet the Demands for Caregivers

By Ron Hoppe, COO and Co-founder of WorldWide HealthStaff Associates Ltd.
photo: Ron Hoppe

As the American population ages, the need for qualified professional caregivers is increasing as well. However, what are organizations to do that provide long-term care when their nursing workforce is also aging? Not only is the nursing workforce aging but it is doing so at twice the rate of the general working age population.

Starting in the latter 1990’s some long-term care providers in the US started to experience chronic nursing vacancies as traditional recruitment methods were no longer attracting a sufficient number of qualified nurses. Recruitment strategies were soon bolstered by expanded retention programs designed to keep existing nurses in the workforce longer and to attract those that had left the profession back to work, if only on a part-time basis.

At the beginning of the 21st century long-term care providers continued to grapple with an increasing shortage of nurses while at the same time that planning was taking place for expanded facilities and programs to meet the burgeoning demand for services. These factors, combined with workforce data that was now projecting a sharp increase in the number of nurses retiring, motivated some to seriously explore the viability of international recruitment.

Long-term care employers discovered that there was an abundant supply of highly educated and skilled nurses in a number of countries, especially those with emerging economies such as the Philippines and India. Employers also found that there were some nurses in other developed countries, albeit in relatively small numbers, such as Canada, United Kingdom and Australia who were also interested in working and living in the US.

However in order for international recruitment to be included in an employers overall staffing plans, they needed to develop strategies to meet the stringent US Registered Nurse licensure requirements and the equally stringent US immigration requirements.
"Long-term care employers discovered that there was an abundant supply of highly educated and skilled nurses in a number of countries, especially those with emerging economies such as the Philippines and India."

International recruitment efforts were focused primarily on countries where:

* education standards for nursing were recognized as being equivalent to US standards;
* there was a general level of English language proficiency;
* there was some history of immigration to the US, and;
* there was a sufficient supply of nurses that could be recruited without devastating the workforce of the nurse’s home country.

The application of these criteria resulted in the Philippines and India as being the primary countries in which international recruitment activities were undertaken.

While international recruitment was providing additional nurses to the long-term care workforce, employers realized that this strategy was not without some risks. The aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001, changes to licensure rules and immigration regulations and sometimes lengthy immigration processing times all contributed to a process that was more complex than some employers had anticipated.

Employers who achieve the greatest success in recruiting internationally include a number of key elements in their strategies. These include:

* a strategic vision and commitment to the process;
* communication with existing staff throughout the international recruitment process to ensure organizational buy-in and support;
* contracting competent professional help to manage all aspects of the process;
* mentorship programs and structured orientations for nurses on their arrival in the US that specifically address the practice differences the nurse will encounter; and
* a clear understanding of the acculturation issues that the international nurse faces in integrating into the US long-term care workforce and into US society in general.

Concerns have been raised regarding the impact of international recruitment on the nurse’s home country. While these concerns are valid and need to be taken seriously when considering recruiting in some developing countries, countries such as the Philippines and India have a long history of purposely training nurses in numbers well beyond their domestic requirements specifically for employment abroad. Nursing curriculum in these countries has been developed with careful consideration of the US standards.
international recruitment

Also, the countries from which nurses have been recruited are receiving several significant benefits. Once nurses are employed in the US they tend to return a portion of their earnings to their home country specifically to support their extended families and some of the nurses return to their home country and are able to transfer the knowledge and skills they have gained in the US by assuming leadership positions in academia and in hospitals.

Although the nursing shortage eased slightly in 2004 as the result of domestic and international initiatives, US production of new graduates remains less than the current demand and the number of older nurses continues to increase at three times faster than younger workers.

Overall the international recruitment of nurses is having a beneficial impact on the delivery of long-term care services in the US. International nurses help to ensure that there are an appropriate number of nurses available to meet the demands of an aging population. With current US workforce and demographic studies predicting that the greatest shortage of nurses still lies ahead, international recruitment will remain as an important element of the staffing plans of many long-term care providers.

Aging in Canada

2006-02-03T16:47:00.000-05:00

Aging Everywhere
Canada

Canada

Reports/Speeches
Links to Governmental Organizations
Links to Non-Governmental Organizations
Quick Facts

Total Population (in millions)—32.5
Rank by Population—35th
Men Women
Life expectancy at birth (in years) 76.4 83.4
Median Age 36.9 38.8
Total Fertility Rate 1.61 children born/woman
Percentage of Population Aged 60+ 16 19
Percentage of 60+ Population in Labour Force 19 8
Statutory Retirement Age
Note; Statutory retirement age is the age at which person is eligible to receive state pension. 65 65

Sources: CIA World Factbook,(2004); United Nations Population Division, DESA(2004)

Contributors

2006-02-03T16:37:00.000-05:00

Finally i learn how to add members to the blog....a bit late tho...lol

this is what you do....

i sent a e-mail to you to invite....create a username and accept the invitation...then use that account to post stuff on the the site...there for we'll know who posted what.....we have to post all the stuff we found very very soon....

The project is due this week.... :(

Rapporteur found a few sites for u guys to chew on!

2006-01-19T00:27:00.000-05:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55582-2005Feb1.html
http://www.statcan.ca:8081/english/clf/query.html?col=all
e&ht=0&la=en&rf=0&qc=0&qp=&qt=+%2Bkeywords:%22aging
%20population%22
http://healthfullife.umdnj.edu/archives/population_archive.htm - a few good links
http://healthfullife.umdnj.edu/archives/aging_pop%20_archive.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5206a2.htm

http://www.prb.org/-useful for general population information

http://www.ageworks.com/course_demo/200/module2/module2.htm
http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/Papers/gkh1/

ran into this already:
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20040316corp.htm

these are done quickily, i didnt have too much time to look into the details, but this is a start to the research process...

i purpose that we all look into the world wide problem, and see what nation states are doing to counter the ravages that maybe soon upon us. After that, we can look into focusing further into better ideas!

see you guys tomorrow

timeline

2006-01-14T01:05:00.000-05:00

this is andy

i just realize that there is very little time to finish assignment 1. It is due on Feb 2, but jan26-jan 30 is the OCAD compitition, which cuts the working time down to 13 days. i think we have to come up with a plan and time table of which when things are going to be done. here is what i suggest.

by jan 18 we'll have our basic research done and figure out the main topics we'll do research on, then by jan 25 we'll have the research organize and complete which will leave us 3 days to make the book and hand it in on Feb 2.

any suggestions?

TEAM 5 BLACK
HUMAN AUGMENTATION AND THE AGING SOCIETY
Identifying the PSE opportunities and forecasting the social and economic
impact of intensified nano technology and its possible uses to augment
human capability particularly for the aging population. Better sight, grasp,
strength and increased mobility: what could be possible?

hopes this helps...

Welcome to Black Team

2006-01-12T14:19:00.000-05:00

hello everyone

this is Herman the reporter! just posting the first post up!

-Herman

let's get this done
Daven W: 416-826-8946/daven_wong@hotmail.com
Herman L. : 416-836-9454/kyriianx@hotmail.com
Bill Q: 647-896-8258/bq03db@gmail.com
Andy L: 647-688-9394/broomman1@hotmail.com
Rita L: 905-887-1466/ritalamchichi@hotmail.com