- Sunday, 29 November 2009
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The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense - Tom Clancy
Hybrid animal computers to tip up within twenty years
THE MAN who put the brain of a moth into a robot claims that in the next 10 to 15 years all our computers will have something living inside them.
Charles Higgins, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, built a robot with the brain and eyes of a moth. It works quite well but has a nasty habit of banging into the light bulb.
What Higgins wanted to do was build a computer chip that handles visual images in the same way as the brain. Currently the closest thing to a chip that behaves like that will set you back $60,000.
He said he could make it cheaper if he used the brain of an insect. After all there were a lot of them around and no religious fundamentalists or animal rights groups made your life a misery over a moth's brain.
He said evolution* produces some jolly good live brains that have sensory systems far better than anything mechanical that humans can build.
Higgins ideally he would like to grow a brain which does what he wants it to using biological engineering then hook it into a computer.
He said that it would involve growing tissue that has no more intelligence than a liver or a heart so he thinks that there are no ethical issues. Some strains of religion think they can get Jesus into their heart, which might cause some problems for a working operating system.
According to Computerworld, Higgins thinks that hybrid robots will be in the shops in 10 to 15 years, if the zombies don't eat the brains first.
More here. µ
* Some readers might want to substitute the word 'God' here while readers of the Kave might want to use the word 'Jeff' instead.
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from the linq:

"a strapped down moth trying to move in a certain direction would actually propel the robot."

if there are no ethical issues with a strapped down moth, there wont be any ethical issues with just about any other living creature the megacorps will later on use as biomachine slaves.

INCLUDING HUMANS.
I hereby declare the founding moment of the "Free The Brains!" non-profit organization. As president-for-life and sole founding member, I will constantly and continually berate, pester and otherwise badger any and all scientists I find denaturing brains of any kind, as will all of my soon-to-come masses of associates, honorary members and subscribers (only $5 per month, call 1-800-FREETHEBRAINS now !).
The evil scientists will come to fear the masses in favor of freedom for all brains, however small !

Free The Brains!
Oh great, now when someone say their computer just died, they'll mean it litterally.
The great wheel of reincarnation ... is reincarnated. Bugs within bugs ...

'In 1947, engineers working on the Mark II computer at Harvard University found a moth stuck in one of the components. They taped the insect in their logbook and labeled it “first actual case of bug being found.”'

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=30
Not to be too panicky but I hope someone keeps an eye on that guy and his dubious experiments, they might expand into areas..
IF this is a real story, because there's a 'professor higgins'? now really.


Thru advanced bio-enginering you could produce thousands of organic chips using the amount of live tissue from only one insect brain, so there's no need to build anything close to a "brain farm", which would really be a ethical issue.

The sacrifice of one insect life to generate a large amount of organic chippery would really help we prevent a lot of waste... Imagine: living chips could be so much more specialized, also cooler-runner and energy-efficient, that way we will be using chips that use less energy, and also are by far more easier to recycle, as they are biomass in the core.

Imagine the benefits in Medicine... faster diagnosis, more accurate procedures... and that's just the tip of the iceberg...

It could lead us to a new information era...
My NOD32 shows there is a VIRUS attached to the download for this URL:
"Variant of Bat/Emaila.D Trojan"

Earlier today I left voicemail at the London offiice phone number which is on website.