If the idea of turning consumers into true
cyborgs sounds creepy, don’t tell Intel researchers. Intel’s
Pittsburgh lab aims to develop brain implants that can control all
sorts of gadgets directly via brain waves by 2020.
The scientists anticipate that consumers will adapt
quickly to the idea, and indeed crave the freedom of not requiring
a keyboard, mouse, or remote control for surfing the Web or changing
channels. They also predict that people will tire of multi-touch
devices such as our precious iPhones, Android smart phones and even
Microsoft’s wacky Surface Table.
Turning brain waves into real-world tech action
still requires some heavy decoding of brain activity. The Intel
team has already made use of fMRI brain scans to match brain patterns
with similar thoughts across many test subjects.
Plenty of other researchers have also tinkered
in this area. Toyota recently demoed a wheelchair controlled with
brainwaves, and University of Utah researchers have created a wireless
brain transmitter that allows monkeys to control robotic arms.
There are still more implications to creating a
seamless brain interface, besides having more cyborgs running around.
If scientists can translate brain waves into specific actions, there’s
no reason they could not create a virtual world with a full spectrum
of activity tied to those brain waves. That’s right — we’re
seeing Matrix creep.
A former soldier who handed a discarded
shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for
“doing his duty”.
Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing
a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding
the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20
this year.
The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction,
and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment
for handing in the weapon.
In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said:
“I didn’t think for one moment I would be arrested.
“I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get
it off the streets.”
The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony
of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a
black bin liner at the bottom of his garden.
In his statement, he said: “I took it indoors
and inside found a shorn-off shotgun and two cartridges.
“I didn’t know what to do, so the next morning
I rang the Chief Superintendent, Adrian Harper, and asked if I could
pop in and see him.
“At the police station, I took the gun out of
the bag and placed it on the table so it was pointing towards the
wall.”
Mr Clarke was then arrested immediately for possession
of a firearm at Reigate police station, and taken to the cells.
Defending, Lionel Blackman told the jury Mr Clarke’s
garden backs onto a public green field, and his garden wall is significantly
lower than his neighbours.
He also showed jurors a leaflet printed by Surrey
Police explaining to citizens what they can do at a police station,
which included “reporting found firearms”.
Quizzing officer Garnett, who arrested Mr Clarke,
he asked: “Are you aware of any notice issued by Surrey Police,
or any publicity given to, telling citizens that if they find a
firearm the only thing they should do is not touch it, report it
by telephone, and not take it into a police station?”
To which, Mr Garnett replied: “No, I don’t
believe so.”
Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury
that possession of a firearm was a “strict liability” charge
– therefore Mr Clarke’s allegedly honest intent was irrelevant.
Just by having the gun in his possession he was
guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it, he added.
But despite this, Mr Blackman urged members of
the jury to consider how they would respond if they found a gun.
He said: “This is a very small case with a very
big principle.
“You could be walking to a railway station on
the way to work and find a firearm in a bin in the park.
“Is it unreasonable to take it to the police
station?”
Paul Clarke will be sentenced on December 11.
Judge Christopher Critchlow said: “This is an
unusual case, but in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has
no defence to this charge.
“The intention of anybody possessing a firearm
is irrelevant.”
“I’ve done a Christian [-based] training
program; I have a Muslim training program and a Jewish training
program coming up, also a Hindu program coming up. I trained 200
Christian ministers and lay leaders here in Nashville in a version
of the slide show that is filled with scriptural references. It’s
probably my favourite version, but I don’t use it very often because
it can come off as proselytising.”
Nobel winner adapts fact-based message
to reach those who believe they have a moral duty to protect the
planet in Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis
Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth sequel stresses
spiritual argument on climate
by Suzanne Goldenberg
Al’s Gore’s much-anticipated sequel
to An Inconvenent Truth is published today, with an admission that
facts alone will not persuade Americans to act on global warming
and that appealing to their spiritual side is the way forward.
In his latest book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,
the man who won a Nobel prize in 2007 for his touring slideshow
on disappearing polar ice and other consequences of climate change,
concludes: “Simply laying out the facts won’t work.”
Instead, Gore tells Newsweek magazine in a pre-publication
interview, that he has been adapting his fact-based message –
now put out by hundreds of volunteers – to appeal to those who
believe there is a moral or religious duty to protect the planet.
“I’ve done a Christian [-based] training program;
I have a Muslim training program and a Jewish training program coming
up, also a Hindu program coming up. I trained 200 Christian ministers
and lay leaders here in Nashville in a version of the slide show
that is filled with scriptural references. It’s probably my favourite
version, but I don’t use it very often because it can come off
as proselytising,” Gore tells Newsweek.
Gore’s book arrives at a time of intense international
scrutiny of America’s moves on the environment ahead of an international
meeting on global warming at Copenhagen, now just more than a month
away.
It draws on the scholarly approach Gore developed
for Inconvenient Truth. Since 2007, the former vice-president has
been calling experts together from fields ranging from agriculture
to neuroscience to discuss possible solutions to climate change.
The book draws on 30 such “solutions summits”,
as well as Gore’s countless telephone conversations with scientists
at America’s best institutions. According to the book’s press
release, “Among the most unique approaches Gore takes in the book
is showing readers how our own minds can be an impediment to change.”
New polling last month showed a steep decline in
the numbers of Americans who share Gore’s sense of urgency in
acting on climate change.
The book aims to reach those Americans by familiarising
readers with emerging alternative energy sources, such as geothermal,
biomass and wind power, as well as the possibilities of making cleaner
coal power plants, and developing a more efficient and responsive
“smart” electrical grid.
Gore also explores how deforestation, soil erosion,
and the rising world population are multiplying the effects of rising
greenhouse gas emissions.
Much of the material was developed through the
series of brainstorming sessions organised by Gore. Since 2007,
the former vice-president has been calling experts together to discuss
possible solutions to climate change. He has also held countless
telephone conversations with scientists at America’s best institutions.
“He is one of the only politicians that takes
the time to actually talk to scientists who are producing the cutting-edge
stuff and he comes in with questions. He doesn’t ask us how our
results impinge on a particular policy he actually asks about science,”
said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute
for Space Studies, who spoke to Gore along with colleagues four
or five times for the book. “Nobody that we have dealt with has
ever taken as much time to understand the subtlety of the science
and all the different complications and what it all means as Al
Gore.”
Those conversations led Gore to politically inconvenient
conclusions in this new book. In his conversations with Schmidt
and other colleagues at the beginning of the year, Gore explored
new studies – published only last week – that show methane and
black carbon or soot had a far greater impact on global warming
than previously thought. Carbon dioxide – while the focus of the
politics of climate change – produces around 40% of the actual
warming.
Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings
could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the
need to limit carbon emissions.
“Over the years I have been among those who focused
most of all on CO2, and I think that’s still justified,” he
told the magazine. “But a comprehensive plan to solve the climate
crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all”
of the greenhouse culprits identified in the Nasa study.
The former vice-president has been working behind
the scenes to try to nudge the White House and Congress to move
forward on a 920-page proposed law to cut America’s greenhouse
gas emissions and encourage its use of clean energy sources like
solar and wind power.
On Saturday, he told the German newspaper, Der
Spiegel, he was “almost certain” Obama would attend the negotiations.
The White House has so far refused to make a commitment.
But Gore has also been confronted with almost daily
fresh reminders of the difficulties of prodding Americans to action.
The proposed legislation has set off a ferocious
debate about the costs of dealing with climate change – with conservative
Democrats and Republicans saying reducing America’s use of oil
will deepen unemployment and hurt average American families.
Republicans in the Senate have threatened to boycott
a session today that had been called to move forward a draft of
a 920-page proposed law to deal with climate change.
Progress on the bill is seen as crucial to getting
a binding deal at Copenhagen. Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Senate’s
environment and public works committee, said yesterday she was ready
to move ahead without any Republican participation.
__________ Glenn Beck-Lord Monckton Debate Global Warming
The system, developed by a team at the
University of Southampton, is said to be the first technology that
would allow people to send thoughts, words and images directly to
the minds of others, particularly people with a disability.
It has also been hailed as the future of the internet, which
would provide a new way to communicate without the need for keyboards
and telephones.
“This could be useful for those people who are
locked into their bodies, who can’t speak, can’t even blink,”
said the lead scientist Dr Christopher James.
The scientists claimed the research proved it could
eventually be possible to create a system where people sent messages
through their thoughts alone, although they conceded it was many
years away.
Scientists used “brain-computer interfacing”,
a technique that allows computers to analyse brain signals, that
enabled them to send messages formed by a person’s brain signals
though an internet connection to another person’s brain miles
away.
According to Dr James, during transmission two
people were connected to electrodes that measure activity in specific
parts of the brain.
The first person generated a series of zeros and
ones, where they imagined moving their left arm for zero and right
arm for one.
After the first person’s computer recognises
the binary thoughts, it sends them to the internet and then to the
other person’s PC.
A lamp is then flashed at two different frequencies
for one and zero, the Times reported.
The second person’s brain signals are analysed
after staring at this lamp and the number sequence is picked up
by a computer.
“It’s not telepathy,” Dr James told the paper.
“There’s no conscious thought forming in one
person’s head and another conscious thought appearing in another
person’s mind.
“The next experiments are to get that second
person to be aware of the information that is being sent to them.
For that, I need to get my thinking cap on, so to speak.”
Technology futurists love to talk about
the Singularity as the point in time when technology starts to progress
so rapidly that machine intelligence melds with and surpasses human
intelligence. It is to futurists what the Rapture is to fundamentalist
Christians.
Those who welcome or fear this eventuality are
gathering this weekend in New York City for the fourth annual Singularity
Summit. Speaking at the summit are some of the better-known tech
soothsayers, including author and programmer Ray Kurzweil; Steve
Wolfram, the founder of the novel search engine Alpha; and Aubrey
de Grey, an expert on anti-aging science. Also giving talks are
Australian philosopher David Chalmers, whose idea inspired the Matrix
film series, and Pay-Pal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has donated
in the six figures to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence,
the organization putting on the event. Last year, the summit drew
1,000 curious academics and entrepreneurs in San Jose, Calif. (See
our story on the 2007 Summit here.)
Michael Vassar, the president of the institute,
gives the Singularity just under a 25% chance of happening by 2040
and a 70% chance by 2060. When we do cross that line, Vassar says
nothing will be the same. “Humans living in the post-Singularity
world will be as powerless as jellyfish are in today’s world,”
he says. His odds don’t take into account the chances of the world
plunging into rapid technological decline due to a nuclear war or
a worldwide collapse into barbarism.
Vassar’s six staffers at the Singularity Institute,
including Kurzweil, publish papers with titles such as, “Uncertain
Future Project,” “Global Catastrophic Risk Project” and “Economics
and Machine Intelligence,” and have developed software that supposedly
predicts technology’s trajectories and generates odds on the occurrences
of global catastrophes like nuclear war and global warming.
Singularists fall into optimist and pessimist camps.
Optimists, such as Kurzweil, look forward to living in an age in
which human intelligence is enhanced by brain implants that extend
our memories, enhance our senses and allow us to solve problems
faster and with greater accuracy.
The pessimists, and Vassar is one of them, see
threats to humanity from the rise of an unfriendly machine intelligence
that will want to enslave humans (think The Matrix) and use our
brain matter for endless computation, much as we’ve used computers
in the past 60 years.
Vassar says he and his colleagues at the Singularity
Institute are working on seeing that a Matrix-like future never
happens. Institute research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky coined the
term “Friendly AI” to describe an AI that could be built to
have a moral conscience. One of the institute’s chief goals is
to encourage other scientists to create this Friendly AI. (Read
“Vassar’s Machine Minds” in the AI Report.)
Many computer scientists and engineers remain very
skeptical of the Singularity and the cargo-cult enthusiasm that
surrounds it. They don’t believe in humanity’s ability to reach
a point at which technology will be so complex as to render us inconsequential.
It’s also likely that for economic reasons, technical progress
and computer hardware performance will never accelerate at the speed
required to reach the Singularity.
Will Wright, the creator of The Sims videogame
series, has gone on record saying that machines will never achieve
the kind of intelligence and creativity of which humans are capable.
But he does believe that machines will one day be able to make themselves
more intelligent, effectively reprogramming themselves until the
first real AI achieves its own sort of sentience, one that is very
alien to our own human cognizance.
Ariel Rabkin, a third year Ph.D. candidate at UC
Berkley’s Computer Science program, doubts that many technical
people take the Singularity seriously. “Human-comparable AI is
really hard,” he says, “And we’re nowhere close to achieving
it.” He adds, “I can tell you that nobody I work with at Berkeley
or elsewhere has ever mentioned it. And just to be clear, I don’t
just mean, ‘We don’t talk about it in courses.’ I mean, nobody
mentions it, at all, ever. We don’t think about it.”
But the Singularity continues to pique the curiosity
of the layman. Over the next 12 months, Hollywood will release several
movies with trans-humanist themes, such as Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates,
James Cameron’s Avatar, Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man and
The Singularity is Near, with a script by Ray Kurzweil. In a time
when the publishing industry is struggling, Better Humans LLC has
just launched a new magazine called H+ covering the trans-humanism
scene for fans of radical technological change.
It’s possible that because the Singularity is
a relatively new idea, it’s embraced mostly by the youth and dismissed
as a counter-cultural trend by an older generation of professors
and scientists. “I’m the older side of the Singularists,”
says Vassar, who is 30 years old.
The Singularity probably won’t destroy humanity
in our lifetime, but it’s productive to keep asking the question
of whether technology is serving us or if things are the other way
around.
HOLLYWOOD — Taken at face value, Bruce
Willis’ new sci-fi thriller Surrogates sports a premise every
bit as outlandish as the wig he wears during much of the movie.
In the film’s near-future setting, humans have withdrawn from
everyday life almost completely. Instead, they hole up in their
homes and send robotic versions of themselves, called “surrogates,”
into the real world.
The remote-control androids, which look vaguely
like the robots from 1973’s Westworld, perform the operators’
jobs and interact with other surrogates. Willis stars as both a
fresh-faced surrogate and its worn-out operator, who chafes at the
lack of personal interaction in his life.
“In this movie, people stay at home in their
underwear wired into this fantastic massagelike chair device for
16 hours at a stretch and operate this idealized version of themselves
that they can control like a puppet,” said Surrogates director
Jonathan Mostow as he previewed snippets of the film in his editing
bay on the Disney lot last month.
During the Wired.com video interview above, Mostow
expounds on surrogate technology and elaborates on the human/machine
dynamic in the PG-13 film, which opens Friday. “If your brain
waves say, ‘OK, raise your hand up like this,’ then that’s
what the robot does,” he said.
Human-machine interfaces have been explored before
in movies, from Sleep Dealer’s node workers, who jack in to a
network to operate machines remotely, to The Matrix’s humans-as-batteries
paradigm.
Pure sci-fi, right? Not entirely. Chad Cohen, science
producer for Discovery Studio’s upcoming Discovery Channel series
Curiosity, says Surrogates draws from real-world technology to sell
its central concept.
“There is certainly a lot of research out there
relating to neural interfaces that would help audiences make the
leap and buy the premise,” he said. In fact, as the movie starts,
it uses news clips citing real scientific experiments to set up
its story line.
Case in point: Last May, University of Pittsburgh
scientists implanted a monkey with electrodes that empowered the
subject to move a mechanical arm and grab food using willpower alone.
“It’s almost like Luke Skywalker using the
force to grab his lightsaber,” said Cohen. “From there, it’s
not such a stretch to think that one day researchers might help
paralyzed people control prosthetic arms.”
Another real-world example of brain-wave-activated
robotics comes from Duke University Medical Center scientists, who
wired a rhesus monkey with electrodes. When the monkey strode on
a treadmill in North Carolina, its cortex prompted a 5-foot humanoid
in Japan to start walking.
“We can read signals from the motor and sensory
areas of the brain, decode them, and send them this bipedal robot
that actually starts walking like a monkey,” Duke neuroscientist
Miguel A. L. Nicolelis told Scientific American.
And not unlike Surrogates‘ humans who operate
their robotic counterparts from the comfort of home, Hiroshi Ishiguro
has built a neuromechanical replica of himself that lets him engage
the real world by proxy. Ishiguro’s doppelgänger, dubbed Geminoid,
gives lectures in venues thousands of miles from the scientist’s
Osaka home office.
The type of advanced remote-control robots imagined
in Surrogates likely won’t materialize in the real world for decades,
if at all. Yet on a metaphorical level, Mostow, who earlier delved
into big-screen robotics when he directed Terminator 3, believes
people have already become overly attached to technologies that
threaten to make in-person face time obsolete.
Pointing to the near-addictive quality of social
networks like Facebook and Twitter, Mostow says: “What this movie
is really about is what it means to live in a digital age where
we’re connected to all these machines, yet we’re also so isolated
from each other.”
________
Related
“Within ten years, you’re gonna
have the world of the surrogates…”
University
of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam
Wilson has successfully tested a “brain wave monitor” to Twitter
publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by
thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging
service.
Either the gates of Hell have begun to
open or this is a grad student who really knows how to publicize
his work by riding the bandwagon of popular culture. Both are probably
true.
We get a fair number of press releases from Universities
about graduate research and we usually don’t write about them.
This one was freakish enough that we decided to.
Technically, what Wilson did was come up with an
interface combining an Electroencephalogram, or brain wave monitor,
with an on screen keyboard for selecting letters. The system lights
up each key on the keyboard but is able to notice a difference in
brain activity when the desired letter for input is lit. Wilson
compares it to clicking through multiple letters when texting on
a mobile phone.
Once you’ve found a new way to input text –
what are you going to do with it? Use it to Twitter, of course!
Clearly, there’s some gimmickry going on in the
news of Wilson’s interface. Who knows if this is better or worse
than saying that a technology is developed to assist physically
disabled people when it’s really going to be used by the military?
Wilson does say that the technology will be helpful for people with
active brains but immobile bodies. Now they’ll be able to Twitter,
among other things, he says. Fair enough.
Here at ReadWriteWeb we’re proud to have the
#1 Google search result for the phrase “Internet brain implant”
for our post The
Internet Brain Implant: Why We Should Say No. Today could be
a good time to go re-read that post. New interfaces are cool, but
the sanctity of free, independent thought is very important. Wilson’s
work is no brain implant, but it does seem like an important thing
to check in with ourselves about.
To be fair, Twitter is clearly a revolutionary
technology that we use throughout every day. Anyone who wants access
to that tool ought to have it and Wilson’s work may increase access.
We presume many more uses for his work will be
found if proven commercially viable. For now, though, we can remember
today as the day we learned about the man who Tweeted with his mind.
Social networks such as Twitter may blunt
people’s sense of morality, claim brain scientists.
New evidence shows the digital torrent
of information from networking sites could have long-term damaging
effects on the emotional development of young people’s brains.
A study suggests rapid-fire news updates
and instant social interaction are too fast for the ‘moral compass’
of the brain to process.
The danger is that heavy Twitters and Facebook
users could become ‘indifferent to human suffering’ because
they never get time to reflect and fully experience emotions about
other people’s feelings.
US scientists from the Brain and Creativity Institute
at the University of Southern California (USC) say the brain can
respond in fractions of seconds to signs of physical pain in others.
But they show it takes longer to activate processing
of social emotions such as admiration and compassion, which are
critical for developing a sense of morality.
The study raises questions about the emotional
cost of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained
through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.
The impact could be most damaging for youngsters
whose brains are still developing.
USC researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang said ‘For some kinds
of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s
social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate
time and reflection.
‘If things are happening too fast, you may not
ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological
states and that would have implications for your morality.’
Mature celebrity users of Twitter such as Stephen
Fry, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand are behind the growing popularity
of the site used by around 10 million people worldwide.
Barack Obama used it as a tool during last year’s
US presidential elections to talk directly and quickly – only
140 characters can be posted at any time by website or mobile phone
– to thousands of followers.
But a new study led by Antonio Damasio, director
of the USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, suggests that digital
media may be better suited to some mental processes than others.
The study used compelling, real-life stories to
induce admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical
or social pain, in 13 volunteers.
The emotions felt were verified by researchers
in a series of interviews before and after, conducted using a careful
protocol.
Brain imaging showed the volunteers needed six
to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of virtue or social
pain.
However, once awakened, the responses lasted far
longer than the volunteers’ reactions to stories focused on physical
pain.
The study will appear next week in Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.
Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Annenberg
Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC, said ‘Damasio’s
study has extraordinary implications for the human perception of
events in a digital communication environment.
‘Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological
suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention.’
‘In a media culture in which violence and suffering
becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference
to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in.’
Although normal life events provide opportunities
to feel admiration and compassion, the researchers fear heavy social
networkers may not have time for traditional ways of developing
a moral sense such as reading books and seeing friends.
The study showed physical and social pain both
engage the posteromedial cortex, the region of brain related to
the sense of self and consciousness, but in different areas.
Professor Damasio said ‘The brain is honouring
a distinction between things that have to do with physicality and
things that have to do with the mind.
‘When it comes to emotion, because these systems
are inherently slow, perhaps all we can say is, not so fast.’
He said humans ’separate the good from the bad’
largely thanks to the feeling of admiration.
It is also deeply rooted in the brain and the sense
of the body, the study found, engaging primal neural systems that
regulate blood chemistry, the digestive system and other parts of
the body.
Prof Damasio called it proof, pending replication
of the findings, that social emotions have deep evolutionary roots.
He said ‘People generally don’t think of emotions
like admiration and compassion as having forerunners in evolution.
‘We reveal that these emotions engage the basic
systems of our physiology.’
The accelerating pace of technological
progress means that our intelligent creations will soon eclipse
us–and that their creations will eventually eclipse them
Sometime early in this century the intelligence
of machines will exceed that of humans. Within a quarter of a century,
machines will exhibit the full range of human intellect, emotions
and skills, ranging from musical and other creative aptitudes to
physical movement. They will claim to have feelings and, unlike
today’s virtual personalities, will be very convincing when they
tell us so. By around 2020 a $1,000 computer will at least match
the processing power of the human brain. By 2029 the software for
intelligence will have been largely mastered, and the average personal
computer will be equivalent to 1,000 brains.
Once computers achieve a level of intelligence
comparable to that of humans, they will necessarily soar past it.
For example, if I learn French, I can’t readily download that
learning to you. The reason is that for us, learning involves successions
of stunningly complex patterns of interconnections among brain cells
(neurons) and among the concentrations of biochemicals known as
neurotransmitters that enable impulses to travel from neuron to
neuron. We have no way of quickly downloading these patterns. But
quick downloading will allow our nonbiological creations to share
immediately what they learn with billions of other machines. Ultimately,
nonbiological entities will master not only the sum total of their
own knowledge but all of ours as well.
Related
As this happens, there will no longer be a clear
distinction between human and machine. We are already putting computers—neural
implants—directly into people’s brains to counteract Par kinson’s
disease and tremors from multiple scle rosis. We have cochlear implants
that restore hear ing. A retinal implant is being de veloped in
the U.S. that is intended to provide
at least some visual perception for some blind
individuals, basically by replacing certain visual-processing circuits
of the brain. A team of scientists at Emory University implanted
a chip in the brain of a paralyzed stroke victim that allowed him
to use his brainpower to move a cursor across a computer screen.
In the 2020s neural implants will improve our sensory
experiences, memory and thinking. By 2030, instead of just phoning
a friend, you will be able to meet in, say, a virtual Mozam bican
game preserve that will seem compellingly real. You will be able
to have any type of ex perience—business, social, sexual—with
anyone, real or simulated, regardless of physical proximity.
Researchers say the “immersive” aspect of games
such as World of Warcraft means that the brain is particularly engaged
and can absorb complex issues
Online computer games could be used as a powerful teaching tool
for children as they are so popular and engaging, scientists claim.
Researchers believe interactive games such
as World of Warcraft and Second Life could be adapted so that children
learn skills from them that could be transferred to real life.
They believe that the “immersive” aspect
of the games in which the player suspends his belief means that
the brain is particularly engaged and can absorb complex issues.
The games real life feel also means that students could effectively
carry out “work experience” on the computer learning techniques
and skills they can apply back in reality.
Researchers believe that the games, which they
say are more active than passive traditional learning, could be
most useful for science based subjects with students able to carry
out imaginary experiments and improve their ability to “learn
to learn”.
“Compared with a similar, paper-based curriculum
that included laboratory experiences, students overall were more
engaged in the immersive interface and learned as much or more,”
said Professor Chris Dede, an academic in Learning technologies
at Harvard University in the journal Science.
Games such as Whyville and the ecology game River
City have already been developed specifically to teach children
and students but scientists believe established popular video games
could be adapted so that players could be “dosed” with knowledge.
Much like “flight simulators” they are so “real”
that many life skills can be learned from them. Early tests of these
learning games have shown unusual levels of student engagement.
Dr Merrilea Mayo, director of Future Learning systems
at the Kaufman Foundation, said the games can also help close the
gap between under and over-achieving children.
“Unlike lectures, games can be adapted to the
pace of the user,” she said
“Games also simultaneously present information
in multiple visual and auditory modes, which capitalises on different
learning styles.
“Although the field is still in its embryonic
stages, game-based learning has the potential to deliver science
and maths education to millions of users simultaneously.
“Unlike other mass-media experiments in education
(e.g., TV), games are a highly interactive.”
The new research is likely to add to the debate
about the pros and cons of video games.
Last year the culture minister Margaret Hodge called
for a film-style classifications for games such as World of Warcraft
which is said to have 10 million users worldwide.
There have also been concerns that the games are
addictive and that children’s education and lives are being disrupted
by them.
Matrix
creep: Mind Trip Intel wants into your brain. (Image Warner Bros.)
Al
Gore. Photograph by Graeme Robertson
University
of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam
Wilson has successfully tested a “brain wave monitor” to Twitter
publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by
thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging
service.
