A digital umbilical cord for life extension

A project at Lifenaut aims to create a digital image vault of your life history where avatars of the future will live forever. At least, that is my interpretation. It reminded me of a project Ray Kuzweil has to bring his father back to life. He has a store room full of bankers boxes of information about him. Probably that is all digitized now. This is not an actual eHealth application like the Virtual Self, which can be used for diagnostic simulations.

Create a Mind File

How it Works

Upload biographical pictures, videos, and documents to a digital archive that will be preserved for generations.

Organize through geo mapping, timelines, and tagging, a rich portrait of information about you. The places you’ve been and the people you’ve met can be stored.

Create a computer-based avatar to interact and respond with your attitudes, values, mannerisms and beliefs.

Connect with other people who are interested in exploring the future of technology and how it can enhance the quality of our lives.

Perception ethics and machine brain interfaces

Melanie Swan, aka, "La Blogga", has a great article/video on her blog which was also listed on the Institute for Ethics of Emerging Technology website entitled "Killer Apps of Cognitive Nanorobotics". The title alone is enough to suggest what is out there these days and what is someday possible, and thus having a remote semblance to ehealth and the purpose of my blog. She made the video in French and Spanish as well. The YouTube talk is called the "Introduction to Ethics of Perception in Nanocognition".  There is a longer, and I think much greater, version < here >.

The YouTube video is kind of fun because if you don't want to try and listen to the lecture in the different languages, you can also click the Icon for Transcript on the youtube dashboard (beside Statistics and Reports) and see a line number machine translation output of it, which is almost accurate. I say almost because the machine algorithms pick up "epic" instead of "ethic" frequently. It also transcribed "Azimovs Robotic Laws" as "Mom's Law of Robotics" (in the shorter Introduction video).

I liked the references to philosopher Henri Bergson who's ideas about creativity I have always valued. "Machine Ethics Interfaces"? In the realm of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI), the nanorobotic and perception technology is a little advanced or science fiction-like. You need to get some background in nanomedicine or reading Ray Kuzweil's articles about how nanorobotics injected into the brain will be able to alter perception, if not entirely create alternative virtual realities. On the other hand, current BCI (Emotiv, Personal Neuro, Muse, etc.) might be able to augment a kind of ethical space. My 2 bit intellectual comments on the article and the video lecture would be a waste of your time (and probably a challenge to your wit) so I recommend going to the source.

IEEE conference in Toronto: Theme - SmartWorld

If I find the pocket change for registration - I am there in a heartbeat. Two panelists or speakers  of interest to eHealth students are Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and Dr. Alex Jadad, who is founder for the Centre for Globale eHealth Innovation lab at the University of Toronto. Having Ray Kuzweil, Steve Mann, Marvin Minsky, et al there is just "icing on the cake".

Website for IEEE ISTAS'13: http://veillance.me

Theme - "Smartworld"

Living in a Smart World - People as Sensors

ISTAS'13 presenters  and panellists will address the implications of living in smartworlds - smart grids, smart infrastructure, smart homes, smart cars, smart fridges, and with the advent of body-worn sensors like cameras, smart people.

The environment around us is becoming "smarter". Soon there will be a camera in nearly every streetlight enabling better occupancy sensing, while many appliances and everyday products such as automatic flush toilets, and faucets are starting to use more sophisticated camera-based computer-vision technologies.  Meanwhile, what happens when people increasingly wear these same sensors?  

A smart world where people wear sensors such as cameras, physiological sensors (e.g. monitoring temperature, physiological characteristics), location data loggers, tokens, and other wearable and embeddable systems presents many direct benefits, especially for personal applications. However, these same "Wearable Computing" technologies and applications have the potential to become mechanisms of control by smart infrastructure monitoring those individuals that wear these sensors.

There are great socio-ethical implications that will stem from these technologies and fresh regulatory and legislative approaches are required to deal with this new environment.

This event promises to be the beginning of outcomes related to:

1. Consumer awareness
2. Usability
3. A defined industry cluster of new innovators
4. Regulatory demands for a variety of jurisdictions
5. User-centric engineering development ideas
6. Augmented Reality design
7. Creative computing
8. Mobile learning applications
9. Wearables as an assistive technology

"Smart people" interacting with smart infrastructure means that intelligence is driving decisions. In essence, technology becomes society.

Professor Mann University of Toronto will be speaking in the opening keynote panel with acclaimed Professor of MIT Media Arts and Sciences, Marvin Minsky who wrote the groundbreaking book The Society of Mind  and has helped define the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) among his major contributions.

General Chair of ISTAS13 and formerly a member of the MIT Media Lab under the guidance of Nicholas Negroponte in the 1990s Mann is long considered to be the Father of Wearable Computing and AR in this young field.

Brain research projects - no more digital computers or programming!?

There are several huge "artificial brain" research projects going on now. There is one in Israel, United States (biggest NIH research grant in history), and the one in Europe is called the Blue Brain Project. One of the leading directors of the BBP is Henry Markham. I was listening to an interview with him in which he stated that within 10 years, once the virtual brain is created, it will mean computers will no longer need to be programmed - it would mean the end of the line for digital computers! These computers would not need to be programmed because they will have ability to learn by themselves. This really astonishes me. He further stated that the desktop computers in the future will be both digital and artificial brain.

The eHealth implications for the BBP are astronomical. At first the goal of such a virtual brain would be simulations to test drug reactions for Parkinsons or Alzheimers. Of course, those are more translational bioinformatic type of applications, but it would mean that every ordinary computer device would have access to a Dr. Watson type of medical intelligence.

In the spirit of this movement towards neuroscience integration of knowledge and huge research, I am reading Ray Kuzweil's new book "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed". Parts of the book are beyond my ken, especially the chapters describing how the brain grid is constructed and how it works, but I like reading Kurzweil because his theories of the evolution of computers is compelling. Not everyone appreciates the Kuzweil vision, and I found very humorous a review of Kuzweil by Don Tapscott in the Globe and Mail where he quotes a detractor of his writings:

He also has many detractors. Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, once said that Kurzweil's books are “a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad.”

I have to return "How to Create a Mind" to the library now, but I almost finished. Can't say I completely understand the "hidden Markov models". I also don't fully agree with Hofstader. Kurzweil even has quotes from Albus Dumdeldore and one of the Weasley clan, and I don't think that detracts from the scholarly work. Many times throughout reading the book I get the feeling that the book was written for both a human and a computer audience. Future "Hals" from 2001 a Space Odyssey are a target audience, and I think this book is a great contribution for computer understanding of human intelligence and how the brain works. br />

The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays

This was from the mailing list of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology. Quite a frightening list of chapter titles when I first read it. The future will be stranger than we think, but now that I think about it, maybe the future will just be normal, because it seems to be kind of normal now. Isn't that strange?: http://ieet.org/

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NEW BOOKS BY IEETers

The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays  (2013) by eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More Table of Contents Part I Roots and Core Themes 1 The Philosophy of Transhumanism, Max More 2 Aesthetics: Bringing the Arts & Design into the Discussion of Transhumanism, Natasha Vita-More* 3 Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up, Nick Bostrom* 4 Transhumanist Declaration (2012), Various 5 Morphological Freedom – Why We Not Just Want It, but Need It, Anders Sandberg Part II Human Enhancement: The Somatic Sphere 6 Welcome to the Future of Medicine, Robert A. Freitas Jr. 7 Life Expansion Media, Natasha Vita-More* 8 The Hybronaut Affair: A Ménage of Art, Technology, and Science, Laura Beloff 9 Transavatars, William Sims Bainbridge* 10 Alternative Biologies, Rachel Armstrong Part III Human Enhancement: The Cognitive Sphere 11 Re-Inventing Ourselves: The Plasticity of Embodiment, Sensing, and Mind, Andy Clark 12 Artificial General Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, Ben Goertzel* 13 Intelligent Information Filters and Enhanced Reality, Alexander “Sasha” Chislenko 14 Uploading to Substrate-Independent Minds, Randal A. Koene 15 Uploading, Ralph C. Merkle Part IV Core Technologies 16 Why Freud Was the First Good AI Theorist, Marvin Minsky 17 Pigs in Cyberspace, Hans Moravec 18 Nanocomputers, J. Storrs Hall 19 Immortalist Fictions and Strategies, Michael R. Rose 20 Dialogue between Ray Kurzweil and Eric Drexler Part V Engines of Life: Identity and Beyond Death 21 The Curate’s Egg of Anti-Anti-Aging Bioethics, Aubrey de Grey* 22 Medical Time Travel, Brian Wowk 23 Transhumanism and Personal Identity,James Hughes* 24 Transcendent Engineering, Giulio Prisco* Part VI Enhanced Decision-Making 25 Idea Futures: Encouraging an Honest Consensus, Robin Hanson 26 The Proactionary Principle: Optimizing Technological Outcomes, Max More 27 The Open Society and Its Media, Mark S. Miller, with E. Dean Tribble, Ravi Pandya, and Marc Stiegler Part VII Biopolitics and Policy 28 Performance Enhancement and Legal Theory: An Interview with Professor Michael H. Shapiro 29 Justifying Human Enhancement: The Accumulation of Biocultural Capital, Andy Miah* 30 The Battle for the Future, Gregory Stock 31 Mind is Deeper Than Matter: Transgenderism, Transhumanism, and the Freedom of Form, Martine Rothblatt* 32 For Enhancing People, Ronald Bailey 33 Is Enhancement Worthy of Being a Right?,Patrick D. Hopkins* 34 Freedom by Design: Transhumanist Values and Cognitive Liberty, Wrye Sententia* Part VIII Future Trajectories: Singularity 35 Technological Singularity, Vernor Vinge 36 An Overview of Models of Technological Singularity, Anders Sandberg 37 A Critical Discussion of Vinge’s Singularity Concept, David Brin*, Damien Broderick, Nick Bostrom, Alexander “Sasha” Chislenko, Robin Hanson, Max More, Michael Nielsen, and Anders Sandberg Part IX The World’s Most Dangerous Idea 38 The Great Transition: Ideas and Anxieties,Russell Blackford* 39 Trans and Post, Damien Broderick 40 Back to Nature II: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century, Roy Ascott 41 A Letter to Mother Nature, Max More 42 Progress and Relinquishment, Ray Kurzweil *IEET Fellow, Scholar or Staff

Automatic Tape-collecting Lathe Ultramicrotome (ATLUM) device - In search of Immortality

I have always thought that one of the goals of ehealth was towards life extension, and this research article is indicative of the advances being made towards immortality, specifically - mind uploading - and a new word that I wonder might make head way in the English language lexicon - connectomics!

The strange neuroscience of immortality

July 30, 2012

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Kenneth Hayworth with his Automatic Tape-collecting Lathe Ultramicrotome (ATLUM) device (credit: Kenneth Hayworth)

Neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth believes that he can live forever, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. But first he has to die.

“The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body,” he says.

He wants that brain to be his brain. He wants his 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion synapses to be encased in a block of transparent, amber-colored resin — before he dies of natural causes.

The connectome grand theory

To understand why Hayworth wants to plastinate his own brain you have to understand his field — connectomics, a new branch of neuroscience. A connectome is a complete map of a brain’s neural circuitry. Hayworth looks at the growth of connectomics — especially advances in brain preservation, tissue imaging, and computer simulations of neural networks — and sees a cure for death.

Among some connectomics scholars, there is a grand theory: We are our connectomes. Our unique selves — the way we think, act, feel — is etched into the wiring of our brains. Unlike genomes, which never change, connectomes are forever being molded and remolded by life experience.

A human connectome would be the most complicated map the world has ever seen. Yet it could be a reality before the end of the century, if not sooner, thanks to new technologies that “automate the process of seeing smaller,” as Sebastian Seung puts it in his new book, Connectome: How The Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are.

Hayworth looks at the growth of connectomics — especially advances in brain preservation, tissue imaging, and computer simulations of neural networks — and sees something else: a cure for death. In a new paper in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness, he argues that mind uploading is an “enormous engineering challenge” but one that can be accomplished without “radically new science and technologies.”

Hayworth has founded the Brain Preservation Foundation, which offer a cash prize for the first individual or team to preserve the connectome of a large mammal. A dependable brain-preservation protocol is possible within five years, Hayworth says. “We might have a whole mouse brain preserved very soon.”

The foundation has published a Brain Preservation Bill of Rights on its Web site. ”It is our individual unalienable right to choose death, or to choose the possibility of further life for our memories or identity, as desired,” the document declares.

Hayworth’s brain-preservation and mind-uploading protocol

Before becoming “very sick or very old,” he’ll opt for an “early ‘retirement’ to the future,” he writes. There will be a send-off party with friends and family, followed by a trip to the hospital. After Hayworth is placed under anesthesia, a cocktail of toxic chemicals will be perfused through his still-functioning vascular system, fixing every protein and lipid in his brain into place, preventing decay, and killing him instantly.

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Preserved in amber resin (Credit: Bad Robot/Fringe)

Then he will be injected with heavy-metal staining solutions to make his cell membranes visible under a microscope. All of the water will then be drained from his brain and spinal cord, replaced by pure plastic resin.

Every neuron and synapse in his central nervous system will be protected down to the nanometer level, Hayworth says, “the most perfectly preserved fossil imaginable.”

Using a ultramicrotome (like one developed by Hayworth, with a grant by the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience), his plastic-embedded preserved brain will eventually be cut into strips, and then imaged in an electron microscope. The physical brain will be destroyed, but in its place will be a precise map of his connectome.

In 100 years or so, Hayworth says, scientists will be able to determine the function of each neuron and synapse and build a computer simulation of the mind. And because the plastination process will have preserved his spinal nerves, the computer-generated mind can be connected to a robot body.

“This isn’t cryonics, where maybe you have a .001 percent chance of surviving,” he said. “We’ve got a good scientific case for brain preservation and mind uploading.”

REFERENCES:

• Kenneth J. Hayworth, Electron Imaging Technology for Whole Brain Neural Circuit Mapping, International Journal of Machine Consciousness, 2012, DOI: 10.1142/S1793843012400057

RELATED:

• ‘Mind uploading’ featured in academic journal special issue for first time
• A Connectome Observatory for nanoscale brain imaging

Sample Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence Weekly NewsFeed

Honeywell and Inmarsat to modernize global in-flight connectivity
Researchers boost efficiency of multi-hop wireless networks
Disruptive innovation — in education
Photoreceptor transplant restores vision in mice
New free online computer-science courses from Princeton, Stanford, UMich, Penn start Monday
Breakout Labs announces first grants to support radical scientific innovation
Brain-activated muscle stimulation restores monkeys’ hand movement after paralysis
How the presence of water changes the structure of an antibiotic
Low-cost mini-sensor measures magnetic activity in human brain
Nanomaterials offer new hope for cerebral palsy
Neal Stephenson on science fiction, building towers 20 kilometers high … and insurance
New microscope captures nanoscale structures in dazzling 3D
Serious Blow to Dark Matter Theories?
A statistical model of the network of connections between brain regions
Iris recognition report evaluates ‘needle in haystack’ search capability
Page, Cameron, Simonyi, Perot to back launch of new space venture to ‘ensure prosperity’
Spoiler alert: Your TV will be hacked
Fine-scale analysis of the human brain yields insight into its distinctive composition
Tim Berners-Lee tells U.K. that its latest snooping bill is ‘destruction of human rights’
Google Drive detailed: 5 GB for free, launching next week for Mac, Windows, Android and iOS
Nanotube electrodes may lead to solar cells at a fraction of the current cost
Nanocrystal-coated fibers might reduce wasted energy
Computer scientists build computer using swarms of crabs
Powerful X-ray technique reveals structure of printable electronics
Boron-treated carbon nanotubes soak up oil from water repeatedly
Scientists create nanoparticles that image brain tumors, increasing accuracy of surgical removal
Free videos for new iPad apps programming course at CMU now available
Fullerene C60 administration doubles rat lifespan with no toxicity
Designing the interplanetary Web
Mavericks invent future Internet where Cisco is meaningless
Homegrown labware made with 3D printer
Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin
Is there a Japanese plan to evacuate 40 million people? [Disinformation]
Will a Dutch discovery lead to understanding dark matter and a real quantum computer? UPDATE APR 17
UCLA-engineered stem cells seek out and kill HIV in living organisms
New genes linked to brain size, intelligence
Baboons can learn to recognize words
Discovery could help to develop new drugs to treat organ transplant and cancer patients

LIfe Extension for All: Global Future Congress Announces "Avatar"

I think life extension research is a major component of ehealth. I might even venture to say it is the purpose of ehealth, but I know that sounds like idle speculation. The Global Future Congress reminds me about something I read in one of the books by Ray Kuzweil, that if people really wanted to achieve an objective they could organize something like the historic "Manhattan Project" and make a super human effort. Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/595157#ixzz1o3UsaZbE