Man Meets Machine/ Intro to Injustice Facts Edition

Hello to all, this will be a short post today. My sometime editor (and all-the-time wife) says I’ve been posting too much and they are too long. She’s worried about me overwhelming everyone. She hasn’t even read everything herself. When loved ones aren’t even keeping up, it might be time to take the foot off the gas.

Today’s story is the stuff of movies that depict our future. I stumbled across a story of a man who had a dock for his smartphone carved into his prosthetic arm. I kid you not. In the article, he says he loves it. He can text and use the phone with his natural hand. He can put the phone on speaker or bring the prosthetic up to his ear to talk. I’m happy for him, but I’m a little freaked out for the rest of us. Full story is detailed here.

I started to think how far along has this gotten? So, with only a couple of clicks on The Google, I found a couple of videos and an interesting article. I found that robotics have gotten much more advanced, seriously fast. Some of it I knew, some I didn’t.  Advances in prosthetics are detailed in this article. Here’s a portion of the article, worth a full read though. I also suggest you look up some of Dean Kamen’s work, a pioneer in this field. He’s done some amazing things himself.
As Rodney Brooks wrote in a recent IEEE Spectrumarticle:

Our merger with machines is already happening. We replace hips and other parts of our bodies with titanium and steel parts. More than 50, 000 people have tiny computers surgically implanted in their heads with direct neural connections to their cochleas to enable them to hear. In the testing stage, there are retina microchips to restore vision and motor implants to give quadriplegics the ability to control computers with thought. Robotic prosthetic legs, arms, and hands are becoming more sophisticated. I don’t think I’ll live long enough to get a wireless Internet brain implant, but my kids or their kids might.
And then there are other things still further out, such as drugs and genetic and neural therapies to enhance our senses and strength. While we become more robotic, our robots will become more biological, with parts made of artificial and yet organic materials. In the future, we might share some parts with our robots.

So, there you have it. We might have a couple more generations as normal humans. But, your great grand-kids will probably live forever. Here are the videos. In this first one, the woman is able to control her prosthetic arm with her mind. If you were wondering, Amanda Kitts lost an arm in a car accident. But, she was born with all her limbs and had to get used to the prosthetic at an advanced age.

And, the other is of a robot riding a bike. In the first clip,  they’re picking stuff up for us. Now, they can also take care of us for our work commutes. My guess for the next step is robot maids, like Rosie in the Jetsons. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. When you think about it, Rosie is just a next-next-next-next generation Roomba. How the hell did I get going on the Jetsons? Sorry, here’s the clip:

And, here’s another Twitter intro for everyone. This one is under the name “Injustice Facts.” He or she just posts some of the most eye-opening, horrid, shocking facts that have occurred/are happening in our world. If you want to follow on Twitter, you can here. Here they are:

- The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

- Every year 300,000 human beings die on the job, mostly due to deregulation and severe labor exploitation.

- 1% of the world’s population own 50% of the world’s wealth & resources.

- Kim Kardashian has more Twitter followers than all the professors, teachers and writers in the world combined. (me again: she has just under 12.6 million followers, I had to check this myself)

- During the Bush years the richest 400 Americans added $400 billion to their net worth, while unemployment doubled and poverty tripled.

- In a survey of 30 rappers, 28 said that they are coerced by music executives to mention drugs, cars and women because that ‘sells."

- A poll by Rasmussen Reports found that 15% of Americans say Fox News has a liberal bias.

- 95% of Americans and 97% of Australians allow the television to lull them to sleep each night.

- Heavy U.S. television viewers (more than 4 hours per day) think that there are 100,000 homeless in the U.S. when there are 7 million.

- If the minimum wage increased at same rate as CEO pay, then our new minimum wage would be about $31/hour.

- Researchers have shown that people who watch 1 Hollywood Blockbuster per month, will spend 22% more on goods than those who watch none.

- Khomeini, Saddam, Bin Laden, were are all trained by the CIA before playing the role of America’s evil enemy.

We’ll leave it there for today. See you tomorrow for my post on Amy Winehouse.

See you next time,

James