CYBORG ANCESTORY
->The First Cyborg:
The world's first cyborg was a white lab rat, part of an experimental program at New York's Rockland State Hospital in the late 1950s. The rat had implanted in its body a tiny osmotic pump that injected precisely controlled doses of chemicals, altering several of its physiological parameters. It was part animal, part machine.
The Rockland rat is one of the stars of a paper called "Cyborgs and Space," written by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960. This engineer/psychiatrist double act invented the term cyborg (short for "cybernetic organism") to describe the vision of an "augmented man".
By the mid-1960s, cyborgs were big business, with millions of US Air Force dollars finding their way into projects to build exoskeletons, master-slave robot arms, biofeedback devices, and expert systems. For all the big bucks and high seriousness, the prevailing impression left by old cyborg technical papers is of a rather expensive kind of science fiction. The cyborg was always as much a creature of scientific imagination as of scientific fact. It was not only the military that was captivated by the possibilities of the cyborg. The dream of improving human capabilities through selective breeding had long been a staple of the darker side of Western medical literature.
Now there was the possibility of making better humans by augmenting them with artificial devices. Insulin drips had been used to regulate the metabolisms of diabetics since the 1920s. A heart-lung machine was used to control the blood circulation of an 18-year-old girl during an operation in 1953. A 43-year-old man received the first heart pacemaker implant in 1958.
Of course robots, automata, and artificial people have been part of the Western imagination since at least as far back as the Enlightenment. Legendary automaton builder Wolfgang von Kempelen built a chess-playing tin Turk and became the toast of Napoleonic Europe. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein built a monster out of body parts and activated it with electricity. Even the Indian national epic, the Mahabharata, composed in about 300 BC, features a lion automation.
->90’s cyborg :
The '90s cyborg is both a more sophisticated creature than its 50’s ancestor - and a more domestic one. Artificial hip joints, cochlear implants for the deaf, retinal implants for the blind, and all kinds of cosmetic surgery are part of the medical repertoire. Online information retrieval systems are used as prosthetics for limited human memories. In the closed world of advanced warfare, cyborg assemblages of humans and machines are used to pilot fighter aircraft - the response times and sensory apparatus of unaided humans are inadequate for the demands of supersonic air combat. These eerie military cyborgs may be harbingers of a new world stranger than any we have yet experienced.
->Most Recent Cyborg Breakthrough – March 22, 2002 :
A British university professor has been fitted with cyborg technology enabling his nervous system to be linked to a computer.
The ground-breaking surgery on Professor Kevin Warwick effectively makes him the world's first cyborg -- part human, part machine. Surgeons implanted a silicon square about 3mm wide into an incision in Warwick's left wrist and attached its 100 electrodes, each as thin as a hair, into the median nerve. Connecting wires were fed under the skin of the forearm and out from a skin puncture and the wounds were sewn up. The wires will be linked to a transmitter/receiver device to relay nerve messages to a computer by radio signal. In 1998 a silicon chip, which turned on lights and opened doors when he walked into his office, was implanted in his arm. Such has been the advancements till date in the fiction turned reality technology-the Cyborg/Cybernetic technology.
One thing makes today's cyborg fundamentally different from its mechanical ancestors - Information. Cyborgs, Donna Haraway explains, "are information machines. They're embedded with circular causal systems, autonomous control mechanisms, information processing - automatons with built-in autonomy."
1.3 WHY CYBERNETICS?
Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory. Both in its origins and in its evolution in the second half of the 20th century, cybernetics is equally applicable to physical and social (that is, language-based) systems. Cybernetics is most applicable when the system being analyzed is involved in a closed signal loop; that is, where action by the system causes some change in its environment and that change is fed to the system via information (feedback) that causes the system to adapt to these new conditions: the system's changes affect its behavior. This "circular causal" relationship is necessary and sufficient for a cybernetic perspective.
Cybernetics was defined by Norbert Wiener, in his book of that title, as the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Stafford Beer called it the science of effective organization and Gordon Pask extended it to include information flows "in all media" from stars to brains. It includes the study of feedback, black boxes and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organizations including self-organization. Its focus is how anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks.
· Communication systems and biological systems, allowed psychologists, industrial engineers and sociologists to conduct conversations with one another.
· It was cybernetics that allowed people and machines to be described in the same terms.
· There is also a widespread view that cyborgs blur the distinctions between people and their machines or biology and engineering Organism.
· Cyborgs offer new ways of talking about existing arrangements of people, technology and therefore act as a metaphor for a combination of people and artifacts.
1.4 CONCEPT – INFORMATION FEEDBACK(CORE OF CYBERNETICS)
In 1948, Norbert Wiener wrote Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine. Wiener, an MIT mathematician, saw amazing similarities between vast groups of different phenomena. Catching a ball, guiding a missile, running a company, pumping blood around a body - all seemed to him to depend on the transmission of "information," a concept floated by Bell Laboratories' Claude Shannon in his founding work on information theory. More specifically, these processes seemed to depend on what the engineers had begun to call "feedback."
Wiener took the name cybernetics from the Greek kubernetes, meaning "steersman," and the image of a classical helmsman, hand on the rudder of a sailing ship, perfectly captures the essence of his idea. Palinurus, approaching the rocks, gets visual information about the ship's position and adjusts course accordingly. This isn't a single event but a constant flow of information. Palinurus is part of a feedback loop, his brain getting input from the environment about wind speed, weather, and current, then sending signals to his arms to nudge the ship out of danger. Wiener saw that the same model could be applied to any problem that involved trying to manage a complex system and proposed that scientists use the same framework for everything. Let us now try understanding this concept for few topics:
Feedback for Neural Networks
We have seen a need for systems to learn (a process which involves feedback) - but how can this be implemented? Can we in fact produce systems that are 'intelligent'? We could use a computer, suitably programmed - which in effect has one (or a few) 'processing' elements. However, even modern computers are not that advanced - perhaps it would be better to develop systems more like the most powerful learning systems - brains.
A brain comprises simple processing elements - called neurons - which act rather slowly - typically doing 1000 operations a second, whereas a computer does many millions. However, the brain has billions of neurons - connected together in a network - the net result of which is much more powerful than a normal computer.
Thus we 'borrow' from nature and try to develop artificial neural networks ANNs - being many neurons connected together. There are many ways of implementing these, but one method is to have neurons which multiply each input by its 'weight' being a value associated with the connecting link to the neuron, and the neuron output is the sum of all such weights. The neuron output may well provide the input to other neurons.
So that such a network can generate the 'right' results for any system, the correct weights are needed, but finding them is non trivial. So a 'training set' of inputs and correct answers is provided.For each set, the inputs are passed to the network, the outputs are calculated, and any error between this calculated outputs and the expected outputs are used to adjust the weights - it is a feedback process.
For Virtual Reality and Human-Computer Interface:
Feedback we have seen for control and for learning. It is also used in the interaction between humans and machines, such as computers : human-computer interaction or HCI.
In fact, when you use a mouse to position the cursor you are using feedback - you look at the cursor on the screen and move the mouse until the cursor is correctly placed - or is it that the computer moves the cursor until you have put the mouse in the right place?
This is very simple HCI - more sophisticated HCI is Virtual Reality. Here a computer generates the necessary information so that the human can seem as if he or she is in an artificial world - i.e. the computer generates what the world looks like, perhaps sounds like, smells like and feels like (for which haptics is needed - a speciality at Reading).But, were the human to turn his/her head, the world should look different - so the computer has to generate a new image of the world.
This means that the system is a feedback process - with information generated by the computer being communicated to the human, and information (e.g. position of head) about the human being communicated to the computer.Note, there are related topics such as tele-operation, where the information passed to the human is that of a real world. Also augmented reality where artificial information is added to real world information : e.g. head-up displays for pilots.
