DARPA’s to-be built wetware to prove immensely beneficial in medicine field

Implantable brain-machine interfaces (BMI) that will allow their users to control computers with thoughts alone will soon going to be a reality. DARPA has announced its plans to make such wetware. The interface would not be more than two nickels placed one on the other.

These implantable chips as per the DARPA will 'open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics'. Though DARPA researchers have earlier also made few attempts to come up with a brain-machine interface, previous versions were having limited working.

The wetware is being developed a part of the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program. The device would translate the chemical signals in neurons into digital code. Phillip Alvelda, the NESD program manager, said, "Today's best brain-computer interface systems are like two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem. Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics".

DARPA expects that the device will bring immediate effect in the medical field. It has been said so, as the planned interface would connect with million individual neurons that will provide patients with vision or hearing loss with unprecedented gain in the response from their assistive devices.

In fact, patients who have lost their limbs will also be benefitted in their responsiveness and capabilities of their prosthetics. But initial applications of DARPA's device will most probably be within a military context.

Read more @ http://nhv.us/content/16013968-darpa-s-be-built-wetware-prove-immensely-beneficial-medicine

Terminator-Type Robots Would Be Mistake: Scientists


The world must act quickly to avert a future in which autonomous robots with artificial intelligence roam the battlefields killing humans, scientists and arms experts warned at an elite gathering in the Swiss Alps.

Rules must be agreed to prevent the development of such weapons, they said at a January 19 to 23 meeting of billionaires, scientists and political leaders in the snow-covered ski resort of Davos.

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Angela Kane, the German UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs from 2012-2015, said the world had been slow to take pre-emptive measures to protect humanity from the lethal technology.

"It may be too late," she told a debate in Davos.

"There are many countries and many representatives in the international community that really do not understand what is involved. This development is something that is limited to a certain number of advanced countries," Kane said.

Read more @ http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/terminator-type-robots-would-be-mistake-scientists-160122.htm


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~