Happy, even uplifting news.
In graduate school I had a friend (Genius Dan) that engineered a rather crude communications solution for a person (Steven Hawking) paralyzed from the neck down, and could not speak. While Steven Hawking was indeed not Steven Hawking he was in fact a Genius Programer.
While I wish I could say this uplifting news involved Genius Programer, I cannot. I lost track of Genius Programer soon after finishing graduate school. But, what you may not know, in those days we could see this coming, so close!!, yet so far!?!?
Brain implants turn imagined handwriting into text on a screen
"Electrodes in a paralyzed man’s brain turned his imagined handwriting into words typed on a screen. The translation from brain to text may ultimately point to ways to help people with disabilities like paralysis communicate using just their thoughts."
Doing my happy dance I will imagine this 65-year-old man is at the least a grateful stand-in for Genius Programer wherever he may be ...
If you don't care for www.sciencenews.org this was published May 12 in Nature. Have a good day.
RIP
Comments
This may be GREAT news
Thank you for the alert! The fact that no outwardly-visible medium can keep up with the my speed of thought has hamstrung me for many years.
I have to say I don't agree with your tag, though.
There is also the matter of the deeply unsettling "Related Stories"....
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
Adversity Stimulates Creativity
, is not appreciated by some and I can respect that. Just like "no two people think alike", "no two people live the same lives" is not metaphorical trope. For me adversity was a long time companion that was only shed as the result of very complicated processes over time.
My enthusiasm is tempered by knowing the realities of "progress" and how certain people can "Clockwork Orange", or "Idiocracy" any life affirming technological development. Some might prefer a "1984" allusion.
"Be ever vigilant" certainly must be part of the mix.
I'm getting REALLY sick of "certain people"
There are inevitable limits to how accommodating or inclusive any system - real or social - can be, and we are reaching them. I am sick of being tethered to your "certain people" and their ability to impose a ceiling all the way from the basement, to NO BENEFIT of those whose potential lies so far beyond theirs.
How long before we must confront the posthuman reality - not a conceit based on bullshit divisions, but a reality - in which there is no more sense in grouping some humanoids in with others than there is in doing so with all the animals who've been pretty well proven to rival "humans" for intellect; why should your Idiocrats be allowed to ruin these things for the rest of us any more than we allow gorillas/cetaceans/parrots/corvids to have a say in the fate of THEIR world (many of them would make BETTER judgments, after all)?
Dumb as his argument against transhumanism may be in many ways, Francis Fuckyomama may actually have a point - but some of us have already been living, as a matter of baseline existence, what he's trying to abort. "Identity politics", in tandem with all the countless things and people of equal or greater value I've seen and am continuing to see tossed down the drain with hardly a word of mourning, has forced me to REALLY reflect on what - and who - I value...and some of the conclusions are as foreboding as they are justified.
I literally just had a very upsetting argument with some online stranger who...suffice to say, we were born and raised for two antithetical worlds and cannot truly co-exist, and what one of us was right about just proves the other one right in a kind of spiraling impasse in which deeper understanding offers nothing constructive.
The best shot I see out of this jam is a resurrection of the Postwar Consensus, and the moral compass set at Nuremberg and Geneva, that the last 20 years (at minimum) have so thoroughly desecrated and so many people my age and younger have all but forgotten.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
Interesting comment, TLM
"The best shot I see out of this jam is a resurrection of the Postwar Consensus, and the moral compass set at Nuremberg and Geneva, that the last 20 years (at minimum) have so thoroughly desecrated and so many people my age and younger have all but forgotten.” …
I'd like to add, even with all the daily reminders.
For your interest possibly, I am linking an interview I heard today on radio about the extraordinary physical and intellectual development of the Octopus.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018795479/da...
And if you haven’t already seen, this amazing documentary visualising it.
https://youtu.be/3s0LTDhqe5A
... and for fun
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/160414-inky-octopus-e...
This is fascinating
It made me wonder what else might be possible.
You and me as well...
, but for good not evil. For far too many in my life this would have meant so very much, so I take it all so very personal. The sad truth, however, is that for many this is a scary development because of the potential of that which I alluded to above. So very much of the tech we had a hand in developing
My generation went through the mental exercise of exploring consequences (both positive and negative) but during the most recent decades (primarily because of budget constraints, a complicated conundrum) that segment of education has been given short shrift. So very much of the tech we had a hand in developing has slipped into the "dark side of the force" and the evil lords just keep piling on.
But, even so I keep a positive attitude, because I know those (and they are legion for the good of all, literally) that still work to advance rather than to profit.