The Robo-Spians already walk among us

In 50 years, new creatures will be walking among us, a new breed of people. It is not impossible that in the future they will make up the majority of humanity. They will be called robo-sapiens

By: Yuval Dror

50 years ago the favorite prediction of some scientists was a robot housewife, but instead we got a computer that plays chess. The updated prediction of Dr. Amir Karniel from the Technion is that in the future people will be able to choose for themselves artificial hands, feet and eyes to improve their function and the difference between man and machine will blur. Karniel says man-machine hybrid manufacturing is already alive and well. For what is a person in whose chest a pacemaker has been implanted if not Robo-Spins?

"In 50 years there will be new creatures walking among us, a new breed of people. It is not impossible that in the future they will make up the majority of humanity. They will be called robo-sapiens." This statement was not heard from the mouth of the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, but from Amir Karniel, Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Technion. Karniel is engaged in the study of a field called "motion control", the purpose of which is to discover how the brain controls the movement of the body, how it gives instructions and how it receives feedback from the nervous system. One of the research methods is to connect biological systems to mechanical systems and thus create cyborgs, combinations of living systems and robotic systems. The final goal of the research is to produce organs, prostheses, that will replace hands, legs and other organs. Karniel believes that eventually people will prefer the artificial organs over their original, natural organs.

It all started with the vision of scientists in the 40s and 50s of the 20th century. They wrote scholarly articles in which they claimed that already at the beginning of the 21st century, humans will spend time in the company of robots whose main advantage will be that they can clean the house. The illustrations that accompanied the articles seemed to be taken from science fiction books: a robot, humanoid, made of tin, holding a broom and sweeping the room. The scientists did not take into account two facts, which in retrospect make their predictions look quite ridiculous. The first is that computers specialize in complicated computational operations. For this reason, they know how to play chess very well, something that scientists hardly thought about. The second fact is that even if the wisdom of the robots can be used to clean the dust from the dresser, they must first be made to walk like humans.

"The main function of the brain is to control movement. Even speech is a form of movement. A person's nervous system is also built entirely for one purpose, to move: to flee or attack, but to move all the time," explains Karniel. "The fact that we do not know how to build robots that knew how to walk like a five-year-old child on a dirt road, shows that we have not been able to get down to the root of the brain's operation and the way in which it activates the muscles through the nervous system."

Read a monkey's mind

Next Tuesday, there will be a conference organized by Karniel under the auspices of the Israeli Association for Automatic Control (IBA), at the Daniel Hotel in Herzliya. The conference will be dedicated to the field of control and biological systems. According to Karniel, one of the possible applications of movement research will be directed to the world of robotics, which will make it possible to get rid of the wheels that are currently used as legs for most robots. Another application of research in the field of movement is a medical application. "If we know how the brain sends instructions, we can develop solutions that will help people who suffer from brain problems. We will know how to activate muscles that are silent because the brain does not send them instructions properly".

Karniel, as part of his post-doctorate, participated in some fascinating experiments at the University of Chicago. In one experiment, researchers separated the brainstem of an eel-like fish from its body and left it alive while floating in a tank of oxygenated salt water. To the floating brain they connected, by means of electrodes, a standard Swiss robot known as Capra, which looks like a disc with wheels. The electrodes were attached to both the left side of the eel's brain and the right side. The container was surrounded by a ring of light bulbs and each time the researchers flashed the light from a different direction. The robot equipped with light-sensitive sensors transmitted to the fish's brain information about the location of the flashing light. In response, the brain sent the robot an instruction to move towards the light, and it did move there.

Karniel knows how to tell about other studies aimed at learning about the brain's operating system: "In the United States, researchers taught a monkey to operate a mechanical arm, then connected electrodes to its brain to decipher how the brain gives instructions to the hand to move the mechanical arm," says Karniel. "The research went one step further. The monkey's brain was connected to the robot via electrodes, and the electrical pulses from the brain were translated into instructions for the robot, which moved its arm in parallel with the movement the monkey made with the mechanical arm. In fact, it's a form of 'mind reading,'" says Karniel.

Moth for detecting mines

Commercial applications of connecting biological systems to mechanical systems already exist in the market. Michael Simpson from the Oak Ridge Laboratory, National Institute of Engineering in the US, succeeded in producing a bacterium attached to a chip that causes it to glow when it comes into contact with certain chemicals. The development was sold to a commercial company that sells the "product on a chip" to various companies that need a cyborg of a type to mark the limits of the spread of chemical waste that was spilled into the sea. In Iowa, USA, the entomologist (insect researcher) Tom Baker developed a cyborg sensitive to explosives: he attached a tiny processor to the tentacles of the moth insect, which was sensitive to the smell of explosives. When the moth detects this type of smell, the processor emits a special sound, with which it is possible to locate mines hidden in the ground.

In Los Angeles, Michael Bowdry, a scientist who studies nervous systems, managed to connect brain strips taken from mice and rabbits to a tiny processor, and create a system that knows how to warn soldiers of the presence of dangerous, biological or chemical substances. The system works so that the animal's brain produces a pattern of a normal environment, and when the brain senses a change in relation to the pattern, it transmits information that is translated by the tiny processor into a warning signal.

"Once we learn what the brain's relationship is with the nervous and muscular systems, it will be possible to apply the conclusions in two directions," says Karniel. "The first is to build a prosthesis, let's say a hand, that will connect to the nervous system, so that the brain does not know whether it is a natural hand or an artificial hand. This will allow us to replace damaged organs with artificial organs that are just as good, and maybe even better. The second option is to connect to the brain and teach it to use a prosthesis, the way a baby learns to use its hands." According to Karniel, it is not impossible that in a few decades, people will prefer the artificial hand to a human hand, because its performance will be better. "Who wouldn't want to be 'Steve Austin'?" Carniel asks. "I'm sure people would be happy to have a bionic hand, a bionic leg, maybe a bionic eye. Why not?"

The first human cyborg

In fact, Karniel claims, the robo-sapiens, a person who uses robotics to improve their physical activity, already lives among us. "What is a person using a pacemaker if not robo-sapiens," he asks, "and what about people whose auditory nerve is connected to an artificial implant that serves as an ear for everything? This is a clear example of the connection between a mechanical system and a biological system."

One of the problems hindering scientific breakthroughs in this field is the difficulty of trying the systems on humans. "We need to find a way to connect electrodes to the brain without the brain rejecting them and without causing damage to the brain when the head moves. These are apparently technical problems, but they also need to be solved," Karniel explains.

There are some researchers who don't let problems hold them back. The most famous of them is Prof. Kevin Warrick, 48 years old from Britain, who since the 90s has been implanting mechanical and digital systems in his body that connect to his nerves. In November '99, Warrick announced that in 2001 he would make history when he became the world's first human cyborg, after implanting a system in his arm that would connect to his nerves and transmit the electrical signals to a computer that would record them via radio technology. The experiment was delayed for a year and in March 2002 it was launched. Surgeons implanted a three-millimeter silicon chip in Warrick's left wrist, which was connected to a hundred electrodes about the thickness of a hair, which were connected to the median nerve of the arm. "This is just one piece of evidence that robo-sapiens already live among us," Karniel says with a smile.

As with all scientific research, research in the field of movement control and brain research is accompanied by difficult and disturbing ethical questions. Karniel admits that this is a complicated issue.

"In Chicago, where experiments were carried out on monkeys, they used to kill them at the end of the experiment to check what the effect was on their brains. There is a moral issue here: are we ready to kill a few monkeys so that maybe in a few years people who until then could not walk will be able to do so using prostheses designed thanks to those experiments." Also, the question of whether humans are ready to entrust their brains to the scientists, who will pretend to give them instructions on many days, will trouble humanity as soon as Karniel and his fellow scientists present the first bionic hand to the world.