A New Form of A.I.

People fear that power of artificial intelligence, but the more that we bridge the gap between robotics and mind power, that suspicion starts to become more of a reality. The New York Times published an article titled, "Prosthetic Limbs, controlled by thought" which, as the title speaks for itself, follows the journey of Les Baugh, a 50 year old man without either of his arms. Like many amputees, his injury was provoked by dedicating his service to fighting in the army. Biomedical engineers from John Hopkins University are one of the forefront runners examining this new age of revolutionary prosthetics. Dr. Kuiken also works with John Hopkins to expand on prosthetics' surgical procedure of Targeted Muscle Reinnervation. The New York times briefly covered the extent of the procedure for the sake of reaching a wider target audience. Though, this idea allows doctors and engineers to pinpoint areas of remaining free nerve endings from the amputee's muscles. From there, engineers utilize real time myoelectric control to connect those nerves onto the newly engineered artificial arm. In one of Mr. Baugh's' reoccurring meetings with his doctors, they examine any ounce of sensation by touching around the patient's injured site. (This phenomena is also known as ghost limb) Next, the doctors can map out each sensation that would have be formally moved by the ghost limb. Mr. Baugh's surgery was a success and he can execute any action with ease and he can't be any more gratified and humbled. I love how his doctor put it simply: "the limb should be apart of them, not them becoming apart of the machine." Future research, which luckily is funded by over 120 million dollars, is looking to integrate sensory caps onto artificial limbs. In addition, the main trajectory of this process is to make the prosthetic more much commercialized so that patients don't have to deal with (at starting price) the $500,000 burden. To me, Artificial Intelligence is modeled after the human anatomy and physiology. So by perfecting mind control with prosthetics, I believe that a new of robotics are underway regardless of whether or not that may scare you. 

References: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/technology/a-bionic-approach-to-prosthetics-controlled-by-thought.html

Kuiken, T. A., Li, G., Lock, B. A., Lipschutz, R. D., Miller, L. A., Stubblefield, K. A., & Englehart, K. (2009). Targeted Muscle Reinnervation for Real-Time Myoelectric Control of Multifunction Artificial Arms. JAMA : The Journal of the American Medical Association, 301(6), 619–628. http://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2009.116