It’s The Future: Myoelectric Mitchell

Claudia Mitchell has a new arm that she controls with her brain. Annalee Newitz has the story on io9. “Mitchell’s arm is ‘myoelectric,’ which means it picks up electrical signals coming straight from her brain, down her nerves. Electrodes help the signals jump from her body, to the prosthesis, which uses a computer to figure out which motion Mitchell is thinking about.”

The designer, Todd Kulken, wrote an article about the arm. He reminds us that we’ve built “a humanoid robot that can walk up and down stairs, a robot that can rove on Mars, collect samples, and send images back to Earth, and robots that are used to help perform surgery.” But prostheses present unique challenges. Targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) is one solution:

The goal of TMR surgery is to utilize to the brain commands that still attempt to reach the missing limb… If these nerves are connected to different muscle sites, they can cause these other muscles to contract, producing the signals used to control myoelectric prostheses.

So the woman’s a cyborg. This kind of thing is not news, but it is still awesome.

It’s The Future: Chatroulette!

In the campy sci-fi classic Logan’s Run, our eponymous hero, in a funk, decides to put himself on the “The Circuit,” a cross between a television and a transporter. From the comfort of your living room, The Circut brings you face to face with a random sucession of fellow surfers looking for anonymous sex.

Chatroulette, the latest crazy thing to do on the internet, bears more than a passing resemblance to Logan’s machine. The site connects you to a series of video chats with randomized strangers, and you flip to a new partner with a cold “next,” just like in the film, but the similarities don’t end there. As described by Sam Anderson, in an arresting piece in New York Magazine, Chatroulette channels some of the same nihilistic boredom, sexual longing, and bracing loneliness as the fictional Circuit. It is also fueled by the same hope, however desperate and unlikely, that we can find real connections in impersonal, virtual spaces.

The stories he tells are funny, creepy, touching, and strange. If you’re tempted to interact with Chatroulette’s users, already 20,000 strong, be forewarned: “one out of every ten chatters is a naked masturbating man,” Anderson writes, and your lack of control (beyond that ever present “next”) leads to several flavors of unpleasantness. Still, he says, the effect is powerful, and the site not easily written off. Some interactions are quite affecting. And then there’s the possible evolution of this idea:

I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that.

If you want to check out the messy, unfiltered reality, give it a try. Full disclosure: I loved this article but have no desire to wade in, not in this form. But who knows where this idea will take us? I can imagine a real demand for randomized social contact, with significant implications, if in the future people feel boxed in to a narrow demographic. Nothing like a roulette to shake up group-think and other social stasis.

Logan certainly learned how disruptive it can be. When The Circuit pops Jessica 6 (the lovely Jenny Agutter) into his life, she refuses sex and instead leads him to an adventure involving love, the Library of Congress, and a homicidal robot named Box. It upends his whole world, and ends up freeing the human race. So, you know, anything could happen.

It’s The Future: Photosynth City

The first of an occasional series. It is the future: let your jaws drop.

Microsoft’s photosynth software constructs 3D models of individual monuments from tourists’ photos. This takes it a step further. You can begin to appreciate what the world will look like to our children.

Google Earth and Street View are only a few years old, and already we take them for granted. Don’t forget! These are miracles; we are blessed. For more on modeling Dubrovnik, read the Gizmodo article.

By the way: Facebook turns six years old tomorrow, February 4.

Delight of the Day

Today after work, I was talking with two coworkers, when in the course of our conversation one said she can not run on flat ground. When I asked what that meant, she said it’s because of a titanium rod in one of her legs. I immediately started grinning, and exclaimed, “Awesome! So you’re a cyborg! I’m a big fan of cyborgs! They are the future,” and then I gave her a high five. So that was pretty much the greatest thing ever: a high five for someone being a cyborg.

A related delight came to me later: we can’t tell who is a cyborg by looking at them. The future will be easier than anyone expects. It will be normal. Hell, this is the future. I work with a cyborg.

Afterward I walked west and discovered how easy the park is to walk across, and how beautiful a thing it is to walk across the park at midday. There’s no better vantage point to marvel at the blessings of our modern, cosmopolitan world. An observation: some people would do well to stop running so much.