Thought activated Controls

Well came across this article on thought activated controls which I could have done finding 6 months back. Seems they were thinking along the same lines as that posting I put on the USQ board.

(I dig it out and put it here for reference as well).When I looked at this exercise, I initially thought of a large plasma touch screen at work which is used to provide guests with an overview of the college. Then I realized that I use touch screens every day, to pay my electric bills and to withdraw money at ATMs. So I thought, “If I could, what would I like to try ?”


Well the other day, frustrated on a slow computer, this
came to mind. Thought activated mouse and keyboard control. Hmm, now I’d love a go at all that new-fangledness, I thought, and input through thinking appealed to my laziness. But is it really new? Searching back, I come up with this Clint Eastwood movie - Firefox.
Thought activated plane controls - back in 1982. That’s only a gap of 24 years!



So now, after reading about implantations of electrodes into monkey’s brains , and Dobelle’s (2000)

work on brain-computer interface (BCI), connecting video cameras to the cortex of blind people, this gets me to thinking about Neo’s (in the Matrix ) downloading of information to his brain.



SURE, WHEN? Depends. If you believe Kurzweils cititation of Moore's Law and the exponential growth of computing, then sooner rather than later.



Indeed, according to Brooks, (director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and therefore not to be dismissed lightly),





“… in just twenty years the boundary between fantasy and reality will be rent asunder.”



He then goes on to suggest that where previously teachers had to ban calculators in exams, they may soon,





“…have to start banning kids with neural Internet connection implants from having them switched on while taking the SATs”.



That soon? Well probably depends on the The Singularity I suppose.



As for output, well I was always bad at languages so when I need to say something on holiday I could think about it in English, use the translation software I just downloaded for whatever country I’m in and then output a string of verbal utterances that the waiter will understand as “Bring me two cold beers, please”.

Now that’d be the perfect fusion of education and technology.



Edit: Breaking up the links so that it fits on a single breadth screenshot





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Bostrom, N. (1998). How Long Before Superintelligence? In Int. Jour. of Future Studies, 1998, vol. 2. Retrieved May, 2007 from a http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligence.html



Brooks, R. (2002). Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Retrieved May, 2007 from
http://66.102.1.104/
scholar?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&q=cache:VgY4LrEAuVYJ:www.hp.com/
execcomm/itjournal/second_qtr_02/pdfs/article9.pdf+artificial+intelligence+implants



Dobelle, W. (2000) Artificial Vision for the Blind by Connecting a Television Camera to the Visual Cortex. In American Society for Artificial Internal Organs. Retrieved May, 2007 from
http://
web.archive.org/web/20041010113607/artificialvision.com/asaio1.html




Kurzweil, K. (2003). The Human Machine Merger: Are we headed for the Matrix? In Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix. Ed Glenn Yeffeth.
Retrieved May, 2007 from
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0552.html?printable=1



Pinto, J. (2002). The Singularity is coming. In InTech. Retrieved May, 2007 from
http://www.isa.org/Content/ContentGroups/News/2002/December9/InTech10/
Pintos_Point__The_Singularity_is_coming.htm



Wikipedia. Firefox (film). Retrieved May, 2007 from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film)



Wikipedia. The matrix. Retrieved May, 2007 from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix


Wikipedia. Moore's Law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law


Also this seems interesting. C3 vision, Mental image search.