I, Cyborg

Rating:
Summary: Mostly about the guy, not much about the experiment
Review: Don't bother. This guy is a systems and process engineer, a robotics genius - and a megalomaniac who thinks he does real science. Surprise! He went to do his experiment and discovered that there are rules to real science, like Human Subjects Protection laws. This is a guy who thinks that if you feed each group of 10 schoolkids a different breakfast for a month and find a 3 point difference in IQ in the group that ate bacon sandwches, that proves that bacon raises IQ. He mixes up his psychological, biological and philosophical concepts, mostly because he really doesn't seem to have much grounding beyond the logic of systems - and his own desire to become the first cyborg. That huge book, and 95% is "me, I, me, I" about his papers, his trips, his projects, his jobs, his TV appearances, his publicity.

The experiment isn't much. Big deal, he implanted a small array of electrodes in his lower arm with some wires attached, wore it around for 3 months, connected it to a computer once in a while, and then he ran some simple tests on it, the most important of which, in my estimation, was making the virtual hand work at a distance by moving his own hand - a nice future worth developing for robotics working in dangerous environments, something that didn't seem to have occured to him. The part about sending electrical currents from his hand to his wife's hand was interesting, but he imbued it with semi-mythical power. My question is, does it count as brain-to-brain electrical communication if the nerve stimulation doesn't pass through the brain but only works in the arm and spinal column, or just the arm to the implant? Issues he didn't consider because of his limited knowledge in anatomy, neuroanatomy (he had to open a textbook at every step of his experiment), etc.

I think cyborgs are coming, and I think neural control of objects is a good thing. I want to be able to write and make art from my brain directly, when that is possible, and would even be willing to volunteer to help along the way. But I don't think Warwick counts as the first real cyborg. He wasn't even the first implant - the first and second implants were done in 1996 by a group in Atlanta, headed up by Philip Kennedy (Science News, 1/29/05, p. 73). I think Warwick's effort was an engineer-being-a-science-dilettante publicity-hound's quick-and-dirty effort to grab a lot of ink and a Nobel Prize, which he thought to deny in the book - why bother to mention it if you're not thinking about it?

Read the news stories about his experiments, they get to the point faster. Read his books about robotics, which is where his expertise lies, if you're interested in his real work and significant ideas. Read other people's work on cyborgs. Check out the good work being done with blind people and paraplegics by different groups, work that goes into serious scientific looks at what Warwick just played with. They just don't write self-aggrandizing books about things, they go through peer review first!

Rating:
Summary: Interesting book
Review: I would have liked to hear more of this experiment. From the writer experience, it appears that a body can be directly linked to a computer to do simple tasks like driving a wheel chair.

The possibiliy of directly linking a computer to a brain as quite an exciting possiblity. I also agreed with the writer that it could be quite a blessing to many people that are incapicitated in some way.