Art Bell welcomes cybernetics pioneer Kevin Warwick, whose March 14 nervous system implant in Oxford—20 wires interfacing with a computer—mirrors the FDA’s same-day approval of the VeraChip, an RFID medical device raising privacy alarms. Warwick’s experiment, approved by UK ethics committees for potential spinal injury applications, risks static electricity or infection disrupting neural signals, while his wife adapts to "little zings" and daily life with exposed wires. He plans internet connectivity next, sparking debates on cyber-world immersion, military robotics, and post-human evolution, from autonomous fighter jets to The Matrix-like interfaces. Dismissing NSA mind-reading claims as fringe but acknowledging secretive risks, Warwick’s upcoming book iCyborg—written in real time—details technical hurdles like electrocuted hands and brain fault tolerance, hinting at a future where humans become data nodes or energy sources for machines. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest eventual, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, where you may be in the nursery 24 times on my bell, and this is post, post, post, posting with you.
I was supposed to welcome a radio station to discover, but I don't know what I've done to welcome.
So hello there to the General Manager and Program Director, Stevie J. Thank you very much for uh including us in the way of 500 stations now carrying this program.
I can't I see a significant amount of conflict in the first two real scary stories there.
Now, looking at the real scary stuff, what's going on, for example, in the Middle East, under pressure to curb Middle East violence, President Bush urged Israel today to pull his troops back from Palestinian cities and dismiss Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a failed leader who, quote, betrayed the hopes of his people, end quote.
Now, what I don't get here is a U.S. envoy, this is second story, a U.S. envoy was Zen to meet Friday with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat after the Palestinians in Israel welcomed a new peace initiative by U.S. President George W. Bush while Israel continued its offensive in the, you know, in the West Bank.
Israeli forces there conducting house-to-house searches in Nablus and other cities, and they're just going to do as much as they can, I guess, which is probably what I told you last night.
I think we probably told Israel more or less, you know, go in there, you have so long, go in and route them out, and then you've got to stop.
Now, of course, the risk in all of that is a war.
Of the likelihood, probably slim in my estimation.
In other words, I don't think this is going to end that way.
However, eventually it will.
They say.
The FBI has failed to comply with a presidential order that requires agents who work with the nation's most closely guarded secrets to disclose details of their money finances.
Now, that's not good.
I mean, that's how you find spies.
I mean, spies are the people who otherwise wouldn't have a lot of money.
They're civil servants, right?
And, you know, if they have a yacht and they have a house in Zurich or something, you know, and a little cottage down in the Bahamas somewhere, these are reasons you might want to look at them.
Right?
They haven't been doing that.
Shocking details of how two bored teenagers butchered husband and wife Dartmouth College professors in their home in a plot to steal their ATM cards.
There's a good reason to kill people, right?
Spilled out in court today, case ending with the two getting life sentences or 25 to life.
An 18-year-old, 17-year-old get 25 to life.
Now, in the other news, this just broke today on MSNBC.
You can read all about it if you want to.
In an extraordinary case of looking in the right place at the right time, astronomers recently spotted an asteroid previously detected 50 years ago.
Observing the asteroid gave the researchers enough information to predict the asteroid's path over the next eight centuries and to discover a chance that the kilometer-sized space rock may collide with Earth on March 16th of 2880.
Well, not too many of you are going to get real concerned about something that far ahead, huh?
You'll be dead, buried, and so will your children, and maybe theirs, and so forth.
So, in a lot of ways, for a lot of people, even though March 16th, 2880 is going to be a bad day for Earth, one would imagine by then we're going to figure out how to alter its path that really is headed.
You know, it's actually a slim chance, but there is a 20-minute window of time when it could hit.
And if it did hit, it could kill millions of people.
But, you know, still, 2880 is a very long way away.
The thing that you have to worry about, and what they don't tell you in these articles, you know, it was a big deal today, I guess.
Some of the major networks reported this major collision at 2880.
Worry more about the ones that you don't hear about, the ones that you hear about a day or two after passage.
The news stories will always begin the same way.
It was discovered today that two days ago, Earth had a close call.
That is inevitably the way the wire stories begin.
And the fact of the matter is, you don't really see the ones that are going to hit you.
Just the way it is with a bullet, you know?
Because actually you don't hear the bullet that hits you, it just goes thunk, and then, of course, you're concerned with the thunk and you're not hearing the bang at all.
Check this out, folks.
The Food and Drug Administration has cleared the way for Applied Digital Solutions Inc.
to begin selling an implantable chip that would contain personal identification and medical data, said the company on Thursday.
It said it had received a letter indicating the FDA does not consider the chip a medical device under its jurisdiction.
VeraChip, a small device about the size of a grain of rice, emits a radio signal and has been derided by some for its, quote, big brother, end quote, implications.
Applied Digital has said it could prove invaluable in emergency situations.
The patient is either unconscious or can't otherwise reveal information.
It should sell for about $200.
Now, you're going to have to get in line to get yours.
A scanner used to read the information contained in the chip would cost between $1,000 and $3,000.
So here come the chips, folks.
And while we're on that subject, you may recall we had Professor Kevin Warwick on the show.
You may or may not have heard that program.
And so let me read you the Associated Press story on Professor Warwick.
Surgeons in Oxford have carried out groundbreaking operation on a cybernetics professor so that his nervous system can be wired to a computer.
Professor Kevin Warwick, the world's first cyborg, part human, part machine, hopes that readings can now be taken from the implant in his arm of electrical impulses coursing through his nerves.
So in other words, when we had him on the program, this is a fascinating story.
You know, when we had him here, he said, well, he was going to do it.
He was going to have the operation, and the operation was coming, you know, in the next week or two.
And I said, well, we did a great program on the subject.
And I said, well, Professor, when the operation is done, how about coming back?
Well, it's done.
And now he is the world's first cyborg.
And tonight, he will be back.
And in the meantime, you can go get your own.
As a matter of fact, after this announcement by the chip maker, shares of Applied Digital rose $0.04 or 8% to 52 cents in Thursday trading on the NASDAQ stock market.
And it's tough to rise on the NASDAQ on any day.
So I guess we all may be in line eventually.
Now, the Professor, of course, has gone far beyond Verichip.
But it is interesting that again, on the day that we're going to be interviewing the Professor, the FDA has cleared the way for any or all of us to get chips implanted in our bodies.
Oh, gee, I can't wait.
Now, I don't know whether I should be telling you about this or not, because I don't want to...
But I'm going to err on the side of caution.
I'm getting a lot of emails, a disproportionate number of emails from people who suddenly feel a catastrophic event of some sort is imminent.
And most of them are not saying what, and then you get the usual sprinkling of earthquakes and volcanoes and all the rest of it.
Asteroids, who knows.
But just a disproportionate, suddenly all these emails from diverse, different kinds of people saying that they feel something catastrophic is imminent.
And so I'd be remiss in not mentioning how many of those I'm getting.
I suppose I could bring more by just mentioning it, but, well, here's one as an example, and I intentionally picked the one I picked here because of who these people are.
They say they're pagans.
And it reads, Art, many in the pagan community are suffering from disturbing or violent dreams for the last two weeks.
I'm a member of several online pagan groups.
And the question has been floating around only within the last couple of days regarding the quality of dreams and sleep of many pagans lately.
And I'm sure a lot of you out there, Christians, say, well, they're pagans.
Of course, they don't sleep well.
Anyway, the response to these queries has been quite disturbing.
It appears that for two weeks prior to 9-11, many pagans were having disturbing and or violent dreams.
Well, they're having them again.
Most of us are having very vivid dreams or are unable to sleep at all.
Some of us fear the current trend in dream disturbance means something absolutely horrible is on the horizon, particularly with what's going on in the Middle East.
The earth is screaming in pain at what's happening.
She's letting those of us tuned in to her know something horribly is wrong, and we may just find that in the next few days, our world will have radically changed yet again.
So I thought I would just bring you one of the unusual ones, and that there it is, from pagans.
Well, it may be, you know how I've always said that I believe that cloning is about to either take place or has already done so.
This is a pretty interesting story, and it comes from Dubai, you know, where Dubai is, right?
A woman taking part in a controversial human cloning program for infertile couples is now eight weeks pregnant, according to Dr. Servino Anatori, the well-known Italian doctor involved in the cloning project banned in his home country, and of course here in the USA.
Speaking on his flying visit to the UAE, that would be Dubai, to lecture at the conference on future of genetic engineering and debate on cloning programs throughout the world, he revealed, quote, our project is at a very advanced stage.
One woman among the thousands of infertile couples in the program is eight weeks pregnant.
He was replying to a question on the status of his project, which he had outlined last year along with another doctor, a Kentucky-based infertility expert.
He refused to reveal the country from which the woman comes.
He said we have about 5,000 infertile couples in the project now.
So not having to read between the lines here, it would appear as though the first public clone is on the way in the cooker.
And I wonder what you all think about that fact.
In other words, it was inevitable.
I knew it.
You knew it.
Everybody knew the clones were coming.
But now in less than nine months, one of them is going to be here.
Maybe it'll just be a sort of a happy, normal child.
But I have severe reservations, severe reservations.
Well, here's a cheery little story entitled, it's from ABCNews.com.
Polluted Coastline.
Check this out.
Nearly half of all the waters off the coast of the United States, that would be everywhere, folks, East Coast, West Coast, everywhere, Gulf, nearly half of all waters in the U.S. are so damaged that they cannot fully support aquatic life.
For instance, more clams once came from the Great South Bay on New York's Long Island than any other place in the U.S. But the harvest has deteriorated steadily since 1976.
Certain clamming areas now are closed after rain because of runoff.
EPA gave poor marks to the northeast and great lakes.
The worst coastal waters, it said, were in the Gulf of Mexico, where in some places there is no fishing at all.
Best marks went to the waters off the southeast and west coasts, but those were graded only as fair.
So in other words, half of all our coastline is polluted to the degree that so damaged they cannot fully support aquatic life anymore.
Now it seems to me that ought to be a pretty big bell going off.
This one is not, of course, from Mother Nature.
This is not some long cyclic thing that occurs.
This is all of us.
You know, what we're dumping into the oceans one way or the other, either directly or indirectly.
You know, most things make their way to the ocean, right?
And so the hand of man directly is involved here.
You think about that.
Half our entire coastlines can no longer fully support aquatic life.
And that's from us.
That's not from some mysterious new bug or algae or bloom or whatever.
Well, what I'm saying is, though, that a piston in a combustion engine is usually driven up and down by the little explosions caused by the gasoline, right?
So if it was just electric and you had to drive the pistons, wouldn't you be doing extra work?
unidentified
You could use magnetism.
If you put a magnet on the end of the piston and an electromagnet at the bottom of the cylinder, you alternate the magnetic current and it moves the piston up and down.
Well, I must say, you know, when you think about that a little bit, I wonder, you know, if you modify what he's said a little bit.
So he would use electromagnets.
Well, that might be one direction, or another direction simply might be permanent magnets.
What if pistons were outfitted with very, very strong magnets, whether they be electromagnetic or whether they be simply magnetized, very strong permanent magnets?
As the piston did its work, it would attract, repel, attract, repel, attract, repel, wouldn't it?
And so, gosh, I wonder if that young man some of you great thinkers out there might apply some of your thinking to what he just said.
He's kind of got an idea there.
I just suddenly got my head ticking.
You know, there might be some sort of magnetic aid.
I'm not talking here about some sort of a machine, mysterious machine that'll get, you know, 5,000 miles to the gallon, but you might suddenly get a whole lot better mileage if you used magnetism in the piston process.
What an interesting thought.
Thank you, young man.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Post to Coast A.M. In the nighttime with open lines between now and the top of the hour, and then the professor who's got the implant in his arm now.
unidentified
Now.
Sweet dreams are made of this.
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the seven seas.
Everybody's looking for something.
Some of them want to use you.
Some of them want to get used by you.
Sweet dreams are made of this.
Jack jumps over the candlestick.
He jumps so high up above.
He landed in the cradle of love.
Well, rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop.
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.
So, rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop.
When the wind blows.
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
And the wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
To reach Art on the toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
the wind blows gonna wonder if the wind is not just not blowing our cradle is not just about rock anyway stay right where you are open lines straight ahead and into the night we go east of the Rockies you're on the air hello hi all right this is Jenny in St. Petersburg Jenny how are you okay Jenny what's up well I was a little disturbed about the email you got from the pagans
unidentified
You know, I think that a lot of people confuse Wiccans and pagans with Satanism.
it's not going to be a dirty site it's not going to be pretty okay I I'll tell you what based on what you've already said and identified I won't take it any further on the air and you the way you're going to have to do this is contact me by email.
And then I'm going to have to make a decision.
Now, I'll tell you something, folks.
The other day, about a week ago, some guy called, you may recall, and really, you know, put me in a jam.
I mean, he said, you know, Art, I know why holes that are greater than 10,000 feet drilled into the earth are classified.
That's what he said.
And I said, oh, why?
You know, I want the answer on the air, really.
And he said, well, if I give you the answer, it would hurt the national security of the U.S. Do you still want me to tell you?
I sit there and, you know, what are you going to do, right?
You're on the air nationwide and beyond to half the world or the whole world.
And what are you going to say?
Oh, no.
Let's go ahead and slaughter the security of the U.S. Go ahead and tell me.
So I said, no, send it to me an email.
Well, it never showed up.
So what do you expect?
Do you expect that I was told a tall story on the air just so somebody could hear the sound of their own voice rattling through a speaker?
Or do you think the guy really knew something and did send an email, which then got intercepted?
We know they can do that, right?
Or that he was just, you know, so I don't know.
And I don't know what you do with calls like the one I just had either.
something so horrible that she doesn't want to talk about it and she has inside knowledge all i can say is email me uh...
or Who do you trust anymore?
Do you trust your email?
Probably not.
Is it being monitored?
Is my email being monitored?
Oh, you can bet your bottom dollar my email is being monitored.
You know, they've got that big computer and it can look everywhere, you know, telephones, email, all the rest of it.
We all know what's really going on.
And even if it's not legally going on here in this country, England does not quite have the same law as we do, and they could monitor something from the U.S. and then, of course, the information would make it back to the U.S. So technically they've not violated the domestic law against listening to us all.
But I'm well aware that it's monitored, so it's chancy saying email, but I don't know what else to do.
But, you know, as you said, I've been getting a lot of emails, and a lot of people are having a feeling now, close in, that something's coming pretty quick.
The thing was over in the Middle East, that horrible situation, you know, we've talked about Nostradamus quite a bit in the past.
But when they went into Nablus just in the last few days, first thing that jumped to mind was Mabus.
You know, we've talked a lot about we beat that to death.
But I just wondered if there's a correlation between Mabus and Nablus, because at the end of that Quantrain, which is 62, he talks about we'll run the comet.
In other words, the passing of a comet, and we actually do have that this period of time.
But, you know, it really, what I get from that night and the night before and all the rest of it is that we definitely survive death with some form of consciousness.
And I don't know about you, but the last place I'd want to be is present at my own autopsy.
Well, that's because people who investigate the unusual and are open-minded have no other path to travel.
This is true.
So, you know, I can't make any promises, but, you know, I get all kinds of guesses here.
So you never know.
You never know.
I'm reminding you again, tomorrow night is Ghost to Ghost.
Now, listen to me closely.
We only take the best, scariest ghost stories.
And there's such a plethora of ghost stories available that we can afford to be choosy.
So if you only have a mediocre ghost story, don't call.
If you have a premium ghost story, then call.
battle b tomorrow night ghost to ghost all the way if you have encountered But if you have encountered that which was alive in the physical sense at one point, then tomorrow night is your night.
First time colourline, you are on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi.
My name's Mark, and I'm actually a pretty new listener to your show.
It was on 51st Street, and our house sat in the back of our lot.
The neighbors to the rear of us, their house was in the front, so their backyard was like the playground for all the local kids, the neighbor kids and whatnot.
This is an interesting program for a number of reasons.
News story dated April 4th.
FDA clears implantable chip for market in the U.S. That's right.
Clears implantable chip for market in the U.S. The FDA has cleared the way for applied digital solutions to begin selling an implantable chip that would contain personal ID and medical data.
You can get your chip for about $200.
I don't know what it's going to cost to get put in you, but about $200.
The reader costs between $1,000 and $3,000.
It'll be a little transmitter inside of you.
So on the NASDAQ, their stock rose $0.04, or 8% to $0.52.
We had, I don't know, now, a couple of weeks ago, Professor Warwick on, and here's another Associated Press story.
How coincidental, huh?
Surgeons in Oxford have indeed carried out a groundbreaking operation in cybernetics, in a cybernetics professor, actually a cyborg now, I guess, isn't he?
So that his nervous system can be wired directly to a computer.
And the Associated Press story goes on from there.
But when we had him on last, he said he was going to have the operation.
And tonight we actually have him here to talk about the operation because it's all over.
Dr. Kevin Warwick is, in fact, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, UK, where he carries out research in artificial intelligence, control, and robotics.
His favorite topic is pushing back the frontiers of machine intelligence.
Kevin began his career by joining British Telecom, with whom he spent the next six years.
At 22, took his first degree at Aston University, followed by a Ph.D. and research post at Imperial College London.
He subsequently held positions at Oxford, Newcastle, Warwick Universities before being offered the chair at Reading at the age of 32.
Oh, that's definitely prodigy age for that kind of position.
Kevin has published over 300 research papers.
His latest paper back, In the Mind of the Machine, gives a warning of a future in which machines are more intelligent than humans.
He has been awarded higher doctorates both by the Imperial College and the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Prague has been described as Britain's leading prophet of the robot age.
He appears in the 1999 Guinness Book of Records for Internet Robot Learning Experiments.
In 98, Kevin shocked the international scientific community by having a silicon chip transponder surgically implanted in his left arm.
That experiment allowed a computer to monitor him as he moved through halls and offices of the Department of Cybernetics at the university with, you know, as he would use an identifying signal technique emitted by the implanted chip.
He could operate doors, lights, heaters, other computers without so much as lifting a finger.
And now the professor has entered the second phase of the investigation.
On March 14th, an operation was carried out at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, UK, to implant a microelectrode array into the median nerve of Professor Kevin Warwick.
This new custom-built implant should be able to send back signals, in fact, actually two-way between the professor's nervous system and a computer.
Both movement and sensory signals are to be investigated along with attempts to measure signals associated with physical emotions like anger, shock, excitement.
This is the world's first operation of this type, and coming up in a moment, we've got him on the line from Great Britain.
You know, just before we get started, Professor, I heard that, of course, we have daylight savings time here, too, which I think is insanity.
We should have it all year long, but we're going to have to spring forward the clocks here this coming Sunday.
And someone earlier today told me when they were setting up the interview with you for tonight, that you folks in Great Britain change your clocks a week before we do.
Well, now, you know, I've got to thinking about that.
And while I would want to ask about your personal situation, do you think the average guy would want to have his wife monitoring the Internet, let's say, watching whichever room her husband was in, you know, 25 miles away?
There's always the big brother issue, like you're saying, whether it's a person's wife or husband, because women could have chips like this as well.
That's true.
But also computers monitoring.
I think there is a worry that that aspect of it.
But again, with smart cards and the sort of credit cards we have now, in a sense, it's more looking at it that way.
And hence I would see, as well as there being potential worrying aspects, there are potential positives that you could use something like this as a very safe credit card, something that is not going to get stolen.
In other words, our FDA here in America has basically said it's none of their business.
And so they've said, go ahead.
So this company is going to get to go ahead, and I guess that means everybody gets to go ahead, that it really has nothing at all to do with the FDA, period.
Well, that one, that one was powered, it had a little induction coil.
I think this is similar to the ADS system.
So it doesn't have a battery or anything in it, and you need to pass, put a bigger coil nearby, which you have in a barcode reader or we have in various doorways here at Reading.
And quite simply, the bigger coil induces electricity in the smaller coil, which is in the coil of wire, that is, which is in the implant itself.
So that provides, by induction, magnetic induction.
It was just at that moment, you had the energy, it could transmit signals, it could receive signals at that time, but once you moved out of range, that's it.
Yeah, well, it did take quite a bit of time to bring about, both technically and getting through ethics committees and things like that.
So a lot of paperwork involved.
But the main intent is to link my nervous system with the computer, either by literal hard wire, so literally the one possibility is with wires that go from my nervous system into the computer, or which is the more usual route that we'll be using, and that is we've got a radio transmitter pack, so mainly it'll be connecting my nervous system to the computer by radio.
The moment in the operation when there's an array of 100 pins, essentially, which make a hardwire connection to the nerve fibers.
And the moment before that was fired in, the surgeon checked with me, okay, you ready for this?
And it's one of those moments in your life that you, you know, I was there, okay, I've built up for this for several years, but he's about to fire it in, and you think, well, this is it.
You mean so if you could picture this little tiny millions of little brushes, little connection points, and it's fired into the nerve, how do they match or do they just assume that they're going to get X number of connections to the nerve firing it in?
I mean, medical research in this area, people may be tend to think, oh, we know about how all the nerves work.
Very little, very little is known.
And one thing we're hoping to do is actually move things on a little bit by Professor, that's kind of like firing a shotgun.
Yeah, well, very much so, yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, it was at that time, it was very much, maybe I could have lost at that instant a lot of movement or sensations in my fingers, thumb, and so on.
Well, not difference in the sense of loss of feeling or so on, but when he fired it in, yeah, there was a sort of like a bolt of electricity running down thumb and finger and so on.
And to be honest, I mean, jumping ahead, we talk more about the operation, but jumping ahead over the last few weeks since then, I get occasional Zings, as it were.
I don't know how else to describe it, but sort of electrical impulses that sort of shoot down a finger.
It's not painful at all.
In fact, from a scientific point of view, it's quite exciting.
I think there's the possibility simply of the connection settling in and the nerves regrouping.
But there's also, because I've got a connector pad linked to the outside, so I mean, they might be picking up some static or something like that, and I'm literally getting signals picking up radio stations or something like that.
When we were actually developing it, at one time we were looking to go for a complete implant, so everything would be self-contained, which I think from a medical point of view is the preferred option long term.
But really, scientifically and medically, it's very much a step into the unknown.
And hence we needed most of our electronics on the outside so we could try it out.
And, well, it's not working as well as we hope.
Let's change something.
Let's modify it.
Let's try this instead of that.
And if it was implanted, of course, we'd have to open my arm up every time we wanted to try it.
So we've got some inside and some outside.
So I've got literally a connector pad.
There's some wires coming out of my arm, and I've got a connector pad which then we connect up to our interface unit from time to time.
The surgeon wanted to, I mean, he was in control of the situation, and he wanted at least one week before he was happy that everything, just from a medical point of view, that it looked as though it was healing up, that it looked as though there was no rejection, that in particular, that there wasn't any sign of infection getting in.
Of course.
And that was the critical thing.
I think because we got wires coming out, the big, big worry was that if you get some infection around the point where the wires come out of the body, it can just zip down those wires like wildfire and get straight into the nerves.
And then you're into a dead hand time.
The whole hand could just stop.
You get all the nerves infected directly.
Because the nerve fibers have this sheath, a coating around them, which I suppose we've evolved for protection.
But I guess, again, because no one's done it before, there is that in the extreme case, but because no one's done it before, you're taking risks, but you don't really know what the risks are until you've done it.
And here, I think infection getting down into the nerves, because we've broken through the covering, the sheath that covers the nerves, so we're opening up the nerves to possibilities of infection that haven't really been done before.
I'm still terrible on the piano, just as I always ever was.
Yeah, no problem.
It's really, I mean, as we were saying before, when he fired the pins into it, I mean, it was at that moment that sort of you really feel in yourself, wow, this is it.
Well, now, since those nerves are hooked, when they fired it in, which is kind of an odd term, when they fired it in, then obviously the local anesthetic didn't mean much to the nerve chain that went further up your arm into your body, right?
I mean, well, it seemed all right going back up to my brain.
I didn't know that I had any, but of course the feelings were coming through from my fingers, so I suppose it was going both ways.
It felt like a small electric shock when the array got fired in.
I mean, as it happened, because it was a bit of a research thing in itself, the operation, when he had a first go with it, we hadn't quite got the system wired up right, and it didn't, I described it as a bit like a pneumatic drill hammering the things in, and it didn't actually work properly first time, so we had to have a go at it again.
I see.
But people think, oh, the operation's all scheduled, and it goes ahead and there's no problems with it.
We've got 20 small, very, very small wires, and they come out onto a connector pad, which is about the array itself is positioned just up from my wrist.
There's a two-inch incision, which you were saying about cutting me open before.
There's a two-inch incision, and that's where the array is positioned on my median nerve.
There's then a bunch of wires.
The surgeon had to tunnel up my arm about 15 centimeters, and the wires actually come out a little bit down from the elbow.
Here in the desert, we have very low humidity, and when you walk across a rug and you touch somebody, you get a shock.
I mean, even my little cats, you touch them, both of us get a shock, you know.
Now, Great Britain is pretty humid, so you may not face that problem, but I was wondering, oh, my God, I mean, what if somebody should shuffle across a rug and touch you at the wrong moment?
Yeah, we've actually looked at picking up signals, monitoring.
We've not yet gone ahead with any putting signals down.
And the good reason for that is that because it's doing it for the first time, actually trying to make sense in any shape or form and understand what the signals are all about is proving to be a little bit more of a challenge than we previously imagined.
So in other words, you hook up some of the wires to an interface and you're looking at a computer readout which is monitoring, I suppose, subtle voltage changes.
I think it is something that, and one reason we're doing it is probably to stir people's emotions so we can start discussing it.
And it's great you're giving it airtime because unless people understand what technology can do now, what is available, I mean, this is not science fiction we're doing here.
This is science.
This is actually having things connected to my nervous system, linking it to a computer.
There are enormous positives to go with it for helping people with disabilities.
But as your caller is saying there, there are enormous potential negatives.
And unless people start discussing it, as perhaps people have been discussing the whole cloning issues and genetics, then things are going to go ahead behind closed doors and things might happen and we're not realizing it.
By the way, I don't know if you got the story, but Dr. Servino, apparently in Dubai, is announcing that the first human clone is eight weeks along in the cooker.
No, the one board just said, yeah, go ahead with it.
The other one, because the median nerve is the main bunch of nerve fibers going down from the brain to the hand, the thumb and fingers.
And there are one or two more periphery nerves.
The ulna actually operates on the small, the little finger.
And there was a question there, well, are you sure you want to go for this main nerve?
Because of the dangers associated.
If something goes wrong, it could be pretty serious.
But so we had to substantiate that the positive point with going through this nerve because we're doing it to help a lot of people with spinal injuries if we can move things forward in that area.
And if we went for a lesser nerve, the results we felt would be in themselves much less.
So, in going for it, we thought it's best to go for the main one.
Well, I think there have been quite a few animal studies now with this particular type of array.
But of course, with any animal, a non-human animal that is, you don't really get the same sort of feedback.
You can't really say, is that hurting, or how does it feel, or can you move your fingers around, or your claws, or whatever it is, and what does that feel like in terms of what are you sensing?
And hence, the whole investigations are very, very restricted.
You don't even know whether the animal is in pain or not.
I mean, it could be, and this was a big question for us.
Okay, a chicken has an implant, and how does the chicken show pain?
You don't know.
And really, one of the things we're looking for on the positive side with this implant is the potential for use on people with spinal injuries.
The prime popular example would be Christopher Reeve that people know about, his brain is fully functioning, but he's paralyzed from the neck down.
And in the future, for people like him, can we at least restore some movement?
Or can they control their environment to a small extent?
That would be the big hope, and that's really a key aim of what we're doing.
My guess would be it could do if he's willing to carry out.
Yeah.
I mean, I would have thought within the next decade, what we're doing here should have some pilot studies at least carried out, which will be helping people.
I mean, for somebody like that, if he could just move a finger or two to pick up a cup or press a button or something for his dignity, for his ability would be enormous.
device of some sort of what if i mean if you can essentially fire as as you would put it uh...
fire at these nerves and get some sort of connections why shouldn't a person like myself imagine that you could do You can splice in a piece of wire and all of a sudden get a connection again.
Why couldn't you imagine doing a splice?
In other words, firing one set into the bottom set of nerves and one set into the top set of nerves.
And the hope would be that maybe that will be possible in the next few years.
Maybe pretty quickly.
I think we still have an awful lot to learn about the spine and nerves and so on.
So I don't think we can imagine as yet it's going to be a one-for-one, that each nerve can be connected up.
But even if firing in an array like I've got, and then on the other end firing in an array lower down over the brakes, I think that would bring about something.
And it's certainly a very exciting way to go ahead.
Now, how likely is it that as time passes, all this array of connections that you liken to like a hairbrush, a teeny weeny little hairbrush, will begin connecting to nerves.
In other words, will begin forming connections that at the moment of the operation were not fully complete and sort of grow into it, as it were.
Philip Kennedy's work at Emory, he had been working really with single electrodes with stroke victims, and there the results after a while implied very heavily that that was going on.
I tend to feel that probably what happens is if your body, particularly your brain, feels it is gaining something from this piece of technology, then it tends to go for it and it may well grow together very much.
If conversely it feels it's doing something negative, then it probably tries to reject it.
So we're particularly excited about looking at giving me extra sensory input, which is one of the things we want to do, ultrasonic senses, which humans don't have.
And then I think we may well see that the nerves start to link up more strongly with the technology, really become one with it.
In other words, when we get back, I'll be interested to know if I guess this is in parallel with your nerves.
Obviously, they haven't been broken, so it's in parallel, which means that the wires are also connected to the professor's brain.
We'll be right back.
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As of this last Sunday, it's a nine-hour spread to where Professor Kevin Warwick is.
He's the first human cyborg in the world.
And so we are spanning those nine hours at the speed of light for you, and that's who we're interviewing.
Think about that.
The first at anything.
How often do you get to be the first at anything, the first human cyborg?
More in a moment.
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All right, back now to Great Britain and to Professor Kevin Warwick.
Professor, I was thinking about this, and of course, in the case of somebody with a spinal cord severance or any nerve that is severed, you would go in with the kind of thing that you've got and a shotgun fire at one of the severed ends, I suppose, in an early experiment.
However, in your case, essentially, you fired into a parallel situation because your nerves are all still connected both to your fingers and your arm and your brain on the other end, right?
Now, do we know for a fact, we know so little about nerves, do we know for a fact, and I know we touched on this in the last program, but it's so intriguing to me, that the nerves that go or make their way from the brain to the hand and the arm are only pathways that have to do with the movement of the fingers and the arm and the articulation and all the rest of it.
Or is it somewhat possible that the neural connections that you're establishing that are going to your brain could deliver messages in a bi-directional manner that would have nothing at all to do with your hand or your arm?
As well as the movement, which is down from the brain to the fingers, you've got the root back as well.
The touch and pain, all of those sensations, they're being delivered back up to the brain.
And then there are some other nerves knocking around that nobody really knows what they're doing, whether it's sort of evolution and they were there for some other purpose or something.
But yeah, I mean, what we want to do is tap into some of the sensory nerves which are normally, which we hope we've got.
We hope we've got some.
We're finding that out at the moment.
But instead of use them for touch, for feel, is to feed down ultrasonic signals.
We have a bunch of robots that use ultrasonics, which is a bit like a bat senses the world, a high-frequency sound.
Humans don't have that sense, but we want to feed down onto the nerves the output from those sensors.
So to try to give me an alternative sense directly to my brain.
And that's where we'll really be looking at the point you're making there.
Can we feed in different information directly to the brain and get the brain to hopefully make sense of it, make use of it?
I mean, you're really in the Twilight Zone because then all of a sudden you could begin, I mean, potentially at the far end of the possibilities at this, you could begin to interface with a computer in a way that no human being on the planet would even have a clue about, right?
I mean, we're looking at some specific signals there, ultrasonic, that we know what they're about and that my brain hopefully can make some sense of them.
But of course, it's looking at a whole range of signals, maybe signals that nothing like have been on the nervous system before.
What the brain is going to make of those signals, I think when we get towards the end of the experiment, we'll probably try a few weird things.
as long as I'm still okay for it, we'll try a few weird signals and see what happens.
When I am connected, yeah, it's a different matter.
It's linking myself up to the computer.
If the computer is linked to the Internet and the web, then it is opening things up in that route.
I think if the previous caller referring to the possibility of governments and so on being very intrusive and maybe implanting people against their will and having them connected up all the time, that is a different matter.
And that for sure, I think the caller there saying that it's an invasion on privacy, I would agree completely.
There are all sorts of ethical questions and issues.
It's only society, maybe, and society is different in different countries.
Even what I was describing, an extra sensory input, an ultrasonic input, for me, it's something extra.
Humans don't have that.
It's sort of upgrading humans, and you might think, oh, that's negative.
We shouldn't be doing that.
But on the other hand, for somebody who's blind, then it could be good, not to repair their blindness, but to give them a different sense, to help them to move around.
So you say, well, should somebody be able to have this because they're blind and somebody else not because they're not blind?
It's a very, very difficult line to draw.
And as with genetics and cloning, there are enormous issues, positives and negatives at the same time.
I think it would have, whatever it is, it would have to be an international body.
I can't see the, okay, one government regulates that may act against itself as a country, because if other countries are going ahead and you end up with the military, particularly working with soldiers that are upgraded, they have extra senses, maybe they have infrared senses, they could have a bit of a one-up on the opposition.
And particularly when we look ultimately at direct connections to the brain and the possibilities of upgrading memory capabilities and, in particular, communicating directly from the brain, which I see as a distinct possibility, if some countries have regulated against that and other countries have said, well, it's all right by us, then it's giving those countries quite an edge.
So I think it has to be international, which means a big sign-up by all countries, which is a very, very difficult thing to bring about.
If the wildest thing happens and you find out that the neural pathways mate and mate and mate, and as that develops, and as you hook yourself up finally in a bi-directional manner to a computer,
Professor, and you find out that your neural pathways to your brain are capable of transmitting information that would have nothing to do, perhaps, with the movement of your hand or your arm, but just directly to your brain, and you begin to experience an actual interface with a computer.
I mean, it is, for those around me, and I guess myself, the mental changes are a very worrying one because the brain is quite an adaptable thing.
It changes in itself.
But this way, we're sort of enforcing changes onto it.
And you might change One aspect of it, but that has repercussions elsewhere in the brain, and you have all sorts of side effects which may not be exhibited immediately, but may appear in years to come.
I mean, she's known that it's been a scientific drive for me to carry this out.
And hence, she, I suppose at first, are you sure?
You know what you're doing?
It could mean, and some of the issues you're raising, it could mean that mentally you're changed, are you want to go through that?
And it's the same with my family asking those questions.
But she's known for some time, yes, we're going for it.
And so she's been sharing with me the feelings when there's been a delay due to some paperwork or there's been a problem with the technology and it's delayed us.
And she's known that that's, I don't know, it's affected everything in our lives.
I mean, I think we've got an awful lot to learn, and this investigation we're going through, we are learning every day.
I mean, it really is so exhilarating from a scientific point of view to sort of go past the cutting edge or go past the frontiers and to not know what you're going to expect from when you do something.
You just don't know.
nobody's done it before.
But the whole thing in the years ahead of a full interface, a full connection, for sure, I really feel...
Yeah, the computer would be, just like a telephone network connects one human to another in terms of speech, so the computer network, the internet, to connect people from nervous system to nervous system and brain to brain.
So I think there's an awful lot we can do just by thinking about it.
Well, I think different people mean different things by it.
I think there are some more philosophical views of it.
My own view would be that the cyborg, an upgraded human with capabilities, I would see it more from the mental side, not the $6 million man type thing with physical capabilities, but more with much, much more mental capabilities.
And the post-human would be that, simply cyborgs that have the ability to communicate by thinking to each other, have different senses that humans don't have, and because they have a brain linked to a computer, have the power of thinking in many, many dimensions, which humans are very much restricted to thinking in three or four dimensions.
So in other words, ultimately, you could imagine with a high bandwidth connection, an interface to a human brain, which would mean that the brain would be on the Internet.
Morning, everybody, getting information that there's just been an earthquake, a small one, relatively small one, Palm Springs, California, about half an hour ago, 4.5 on the Richter scale would appear.
I felt, and a fairly wide Indio felt it, certainly.
So I'm getting a lot of messages that the ground is shaking nearby here in California.
No big surprise.
And jumping ahead now, Professor, there was once a book, and I think a movie that followed it called The Forbin Project.
And I bet probably you saw it or read it or something.
Anyway, it really took it on out to the point where machines became the masters of humans to the degree.
And there was an interesting story on the last newscast.
The head of the New York Stock Exchange was talking about how disruptive 911 was to their communication.
September 11th destroyed their communications and how they're taking steps now to protect, and they're worried about hackers and all what would happen if a hacker ever got into the New York Stock Exchange, that sort of thing.
The Forbidden Project, it got to the point where a machine decided that the folly of human endeavor and human war and human behavior was going to lead to human extinction, and it began to take steps based on pure logic.
In 1998, I had a book, I don't think it's out in the US, unfortunately, but in the UK and just about everywhere else in the world, called In the Mind of the Machine.
And that was really scientifically looking at the possibilities of exactly that, how it could come about and so on.
I think the idea, though, that machines necessarily use logic that we would regard as straightforward human logic, even that is not necessarily the case.
I think with machines nowadays, computer-based machines, they learn, they can adapt, and hence come up with their own conclusions based on their own.
We've got, what, us, five or six billion human beings on the planet now?
Isn't it entirely possible?
i mean we worry we are human so you know work we're not likely to say except the very lowest of us or the highest of us depending on how you look at this that uh...
there need to be less humans and something has to be done immediately to control the population will machine uh...
might come to the same conclusion about the available resources versus the number of consumers and it could make a fairly radical arbitrary decision uh...
And we, as humans, I think we're driven along very much by short-term goals often, and often personal goals.
And quite a few countries have problems with populations that are really exploding at the moment, and it's very difficult for them to apply any overall long-term goals and seeing where everything's going.
I think we are very, very bad at looking at the long-term and saying, oh, long-term, Even in terms of five, ten years, never mind next year or so on.
And then if they're interfaced to the Internet, for example, they might have the capability of actually acting at some point to implement what they had decided.
All the time we are deferring to computers for decisions much, much more, and allowing the computer network to not only make the decision, but carry out or implement in some way.
I don't think we've quite got to the stage that we're talking about here.
Yeah, I mean, again, you can start to look at human consciousness, but then there's also the potential for machine consciousness.
And for us to say, oh, this machine is not conscious, therefore we don't have to worry about it.
I mean, I think that is so crazy as to be, you know, we should ignore that straight away.
Just like saying this bat or this cow is not conscious.
It's a creature that's living in a different way from what we are.
And we know that computers have, in the way they operate, a lot of advantages over humans.
The memory capabilities, the speed that you're referring to, the accuracy, the repeatability.
There are so many things that we know for sure, how many other things can Well, if you accept that speed and storage are the two things that when they reach some juncture or some point, there will be consciousness, then you could almost sit down, it seems to me,
Yeah, but again, it's a different thing, and therefore I don't know that it has to approximate that as a human.
It's more when it's got the power, and we've deferred to it enough, that it can make some decision and carry out some decision that, in a sense, from a human point of view, is irreversible.
We can't stop it.
We can't switch it off.
And it has a profound effect on humanity of the type you were talking about.
It decides, well, we're going to cut off the supplies of food in this area, and there's nothing we can do about it.
It's carried out.
Or we are suitably convinced, suitably at the, I don't know, not slaves, but we feel we have to do it.
Otherwise, we're not going to have the machines working in the way that we want them to.
Well, I would see it as a distinct possibility, but once again, from society as a whole, it raises enormous moral, ethical questions and I guess religious questions when one looks at it.
Would you, for example, one can easily imagine either through the kind of hookup you have or a more complex one in the future, an actual interface to a computer and then to another human being so that, for example, you could have downloaded into you the thoughts and experiences of another person on the other side of the world.
In other words, you would be it'd almost be like a Star Trek thing where you were suddenly throw a switch and you're in a different world altogether.
Yeah, oh, I think it is completely blurring the whole issue of what's real and what's not because through our normal sensory route, the human brain is just trying to make sense of the messages that are coming in.
If you start throwing other messages at it through another route, then it's going to try and make sense of those in a different way.
And if they are either simulated messages or messages, as you say, from another human somewhere else in the world, then it will try and make sense of them in its own way.
So, okay, it's maybe not next year or the year after, but the possibilities of signaling are certainly emotional.
When you're feeling excited, I think that's not far off at all.
That being blasted from one person to another.
It's all sorts of questions.
What does the other person make of it?
Will their brain feel excited in the same way, or will it simply not be able to cope with the signals?
And then subsequently feeding in perhaps some memories, perhaps some certain little game playings or different experiences.
Yeah, I mean, we'd have to say that's a possibility.
I don't think we need to understand fully how the human brain works before that happens, but it's really giving the human brain a port, a communication route to the outside world, to the Internet, and so on in that way.
I guess you've done a lot in robotics, and we did touch on this in the last program, but robotics has not lived up to its promise.
I mean, when I was a child, we were reading about robots and that we'd have them serving us, and oh, gee, whiz, you know, the dishes would be done, and all the drudgery work and the garbage would go out without the wife saying a word, and robots would be helping us, and we're not there.
I mean, we have, there are some robots that walk around.
The Honda group of robots, P3 and Asimo, which is a bit like a child, physically, they look something like humans, and it is amazing when you see them moving around.
You think it's somebody inside a robot suit, but they are, in fact, robots, and they're physically mimicking what humans do, but not mentally in any way.
And they have cost millions and millions of dollars to put together.
So I don't know, there are sociological questions.
Do people really want a human type of robot, a bit like what was that film?
There was a film recently with, I can't remember the guy, but a robot potential operating around the home and so on, or in the film AI, I guess, a robot that's something like a human.
Would we actually want that?
But technically, we do seem to be way, way off something like that.
If you are successful beyond all belief and you get a connection to your brain, interface to a computer that you didn't expect, a very full kind of connection, would you quickly back away from that?
And how would you treat that if all of a sudden your entire brain came alive with a whole new reality which was coming from a computer, which you plan to hook up to, I know.
We've got a team of guys here ready, but it's dependent on my reaction, I guess.
So if there is something that's extremely painful, a big negative, then the hope is that I will still be mentally capable of either saying to someone, okay, switch it off, cut it off, or doing it myself, even if physically I can't actually operate something with my hand.
If there is that kind of connection, as you point out, you might not get it again.
So you would sit there and immerse yourself into it.
But then there's a lot of questions about once that kind of connection has occurred, Professor, If the software should crash, if the machine should be turned off, yeah,
the psychological aspects of suddenly being pulled out of it, which I know for people in the virtual world, in virtual reality, some people are able to cope nipping in and out and cope with it very easily, but other people experience all sorts of problems in terms of sickness and even for days afterwards can have problems readjusting.
So it's a big unknown.
One would hope I'll be all right, but again, it might not be something that's immediate.
There may be immediate shock coming suddenly back into the real world, but I guess without going down that route, you just don't know.
And that is, with the whole of this, it's running on a bit of a knife edge as far as what we're doing because, again, nobody's experienced those sort of things before.
So, I mean, maybe what you're suggesting there, going on the right pathway, could be pretty cool.
One in which an entirely artificial world, you know, the world had been wrecked, and I forget some kind of disaster, but some totally artificial world was imposed on every human being, or mostly every human being.
And they ran it, and they told us what kind of world we were living in, even though it was actually devastation we were living in.
I must admit, various people before I saw the film had said, hey, you've got to go and see this because it's not too far away from the sort of things you're talking about.
And when I went to see it, I thought, yeah, this is great.
The only thing that I was disappointed by about the last 10 minutes of the film became pure Hollywood.
I think Keanu Reeves was down and out, and that was it.
And then all of a sudden, he got some mystical powers from somewhere.
I think they needed everybody to go home happy and content that everything was all right.
So I was all right until about the last ten minutes.
Then if you cut that out, then fine.
Yeah, there's very much that sort of world that I think is a distinct possibility, realistically.
That would even contemplate such a thing as well, but it's I think there are some science fiction, the fantasy side of things, well, I mean, that's a different thing Altogether, but quite a bit of the science fiction based on science is a guess as to what might happen in the future.
And some of it you have to take out of films like Terminator, books like Neuromancer.
Maybe some of it is not going to come about.
I think things like time travel are still big questions, but certainly in terms of intelligent machines and robots and what's possible when you hook humans up to computers, to technology, because our brains are the whole thing of what we're about.
They make an understanding of what we see and what we're about and so on.
And if you start changing the signals in the brain, you change what the human understands and what thinks going on.
Oh, well, I mean, there's definitely a technological war that we're looking forward to, technological warfare, and that, I think, is not too distant future.
So I suppose removing the human from the front line, but also removing the human from a lot of the decision-making.
That's what I would see.
So I mean, already, I know McDonnell Douglas and Boeing are both putting together fighter planes without human pilots on board, simply because the technology outperforms humans when they're piloting it.
The humans are too slow to assess a situation, to react.
So a technological war, and then you're down to which side has got the better technology.
So anyway, my question is, are you do we know what frequency we would correspond with electronically or even electromagnetically?
I mean, I know that scientists know how we resonate, but I mean, are you being extra careful that you're buffering yourself or grounding yourself somehow or that you don't get blown out?
It's a wonderful question because, I mean, it really is into the unknown.
Sure, grounding, we're trying to make sure everything's all right, but things like static pickup, and then we've got differences between DC signals and AC.
We're trying to make sure no DC gets down.
But, I mean, what we're finding already, the signals we're looking at, there's all sorts of things going on at different frequencies.
And it's one hell of a job trying to sort out what the hell does this mean?
And I operate a kilowatt rig over here, 1,000 watts.
If you were to be in the vicinity of a transmitter of some sort, particularly an HF or UHF transmitter that might resonate, say, with the length of the lines that you've got now, well, you could be in big trouble.
I mean, you said that you felt a few indecipherable signals, very sharp signals that could be radio stations or transmitters of some sort.
What about that consideration?
I mean, you're going to get on, for example, an aircraft where there's all kinds of UHF transmissions going on.
The first few days I stayed fairly isolated, really with respect to the surgeon that had carried it out.
He really, before we said anything to anybody about what we'd done, he really wanted to make sure everything was okay.
So I guess the first week it was very much trying to stay at home and not wander out too much at all, or when I went out.
But since then, it's very much out and about and hence that's been one thing importantly for the implant, that I've been doing very much normal things with my left arm.
I'm using it as an excuse not to do the garden and cooking and things like that.
I was calling to ask you if you had seen the newspaper article that came out last week about the new robot designed by Sony Corporation and the little war they got going against Mitsubishi and all that, all those other Japanese companies.
I haven't seen that particular one, but I know the war you're on about.
I mean, the last decade really has seen enormous advances, certainly in the physical side, but I don't know if that robot is an intelligent robot or what.
Maybe you could...
unidentified
And it can walk on carpet, you know, and they'll balance itself.
And if it falls down, it's programmed to get itself up.
And it'll walk just like a person.
And it says, you know, if you ask a question, they will answer you back.
It's got an extensive vocabulary.
And besides, I can play music, dance, and do all kinds of stuff.
I was over in Japan doing some lectures and so on for about three weeks and was able to work with the Honda team, particularly with their little Asimo robot.
And I mean, for me, it was absolutely fantastic.
So certainly on the physical side, yeah, I think they are way ahead.
And some of the things you were talking about earlier about us, it's not happened so quickly.
It certainly seems to be really speeding up at the present time, and the Japanese are very much part of that.
Isn't your government, since you're a Brit, isn't your government likely to be very interested in how your experiment comes out, particularly if you get more of a connection than you anticipated?
I have to admit, though, in the UK, whether government or otherwise, people tend generally, apart from myself, to be a little bit more conservative and a little bit slower to pick things up.
So I think there's probably more likely to be a knock at my door from either the Japanese government or the U.S. government in particular.
It's a role-playing game and it's evolved into a series of novels and all sorts of spin-off stuff has come from it.
It deals with futuristic technology and they have source books that go into theoretical, I'm sure that nobody has done scientific research on it, detail on the very subjects that you're discussing,
everything from, say, wired reflexes to make a human faster, to subdermal radio implants, to augmented strength and all sorts of other things using the techniques that you're talking about here.
And it's just really amazing to me to see it come to life.
You may find it an interesting subject to look at if you have free time and you want to do something to get away from your work.
Oh, I mean, there's so many different aspects of the answer to that.
I think the answer is very much yes.
If you look at a sportsman who feels he's pushing the thing to the limit, the possibilities with something like this of actually pushing a little bit further certainly come about.
I mean, if we can find out certain signals associated with the sports person when they're pushing it to the limit or going for the world record and record those signals as they're doing it, then maybe we can tweak them a little bit and that pushes the record forward a bit more.
So that woman with the car, if she had had an implant and we record those signals, perhaps she could repeat that very regularly.
But I think on the strength issue, I think there's another aspect here.
Rather than looking just at upgrading the human as far as extra strength, of course, once you're connected to the computer, then a computer and the network can bring about all sorts of physical things for you.
So rather than you lifting the car or moving forwards, just by thinking about it, you can bring about some piece of technology to do an awful lot more for you.
So it's sort of externalizing your physical capabilities.
Yeah, but you were talking a little while ago about fighter planes flying themselves, essentially, because they can make decisions faster, or machines can, than human beings react faster, right?
Well, if, for example, you could induce any human being the kind of strength we talked about with the mother and the child in the car, then there would be applications for conflict for sure.
I mean, if you had a soldier who was capable in short spurts of that kind of strength, you would have an army that could not be defeated, wouldn't you?
I'm inspired,'cause it means the structure of instant life.
Wore me his tears,'cause I was above the line When their sons go to fight and lose their lives.
I said, "Wha!" Let's go!
Let's go!
I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm
like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." I'm like, "I'm a girl." Every night I hope and pray A dream lover will come my way A girl who holds in my arms And know the magic of her charms'Cause I want this girl to call my own I want a dream lover So I don't have to dream alone A
dream lover, where are you?
With a love oh so true.
A dream lover, where are you?
Call our bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Artel from the Kingdom of Nye.
If you follow me, there are some aspects of this that are so astounding that it's hard to even think about them.
It's like thinking about how high is the sky.
Dream lover?
Oh, yes.
All right, Professor Warwick has a couple of books.
You may want to investigate both of them, and you can get both of them.
The first one really isn't available in America, but if you go to amazon.com.uk, you'll get there.
It's called In the Mind of the Machine.
Sounds like an absolutely fascinating book.
His new book is The Quest for Intelligence.
You might chase after both of these.
I mean, when you're listening to somebody as committed as this man is to have actually turned himself into a cyborg, you might want to listen to what he has to say.
Professor, that's something that I just wanted to cover very quickly.
I was sort of joking about Brittany Spears there, but really, once you have a brain connection of this sort, one can only imagine some of the possibilities, which would include a full-blown sexual experience, for example, that you would experience as though you were there.
Maybe I think ultimately, maybe that it's a very good question because it would be unlikely, ultimately, that it's one human brain connected to one computer.
It would be one human brain connected to a computer network.
And then it's very difficult.
It perhaps is more the latter thing.
It's more that the human becomes a node on the network, something like that.
But it is, I think it would still be shared that it would be a mutual thing.
You could get halfway across the Atlantic if you were hooked up and suddenly divert to Seattle and go see, you know, be compelled to see Bill Gates or something.
But I think the thought of, the fingerglasses thought of saying the computer would be at your control, I can't really see that.
I think the best or most realistic thing would be a mutual sharing, that it has got things that it is good at doing and you have got things that you're good at doing, and you bring them two together, which is the whole concept mentally of a cyborg.
There's a fellow who's doing this, and his primary interest has been, up until now, amputees.
Because what happens with antlers is that this is a growth of bone that comes out through the skin, and then the skin forms a connection to it, which is then impervious to disease and so on and so forth.
And that research has been going on for quite a while.
And it's something that if you want to do long-term electrode through the skin, you might look into.
Yeah, but that might need a number of link ups, a number of hookups.
How much the brain could adapt or whether it was just used, the connection first up was just used for certain aspects rather than lots of different things.
I mean, I don't think we can look at a one-to-one link, each brain cell connected to one wire.
That's not realistic.
But putting a number of ports, communication input-outputs to the brain, yeah, I think that's possible.
But where they go, we've got a lot to learn for that, I think.
I interviewed a neurosurgeon professor that was doing spinal cord work, and he was implanting electrodes in a portion of the spinal cord, and he found out by accident.
This is unbelievable.
You might have read the story, I don't know.
He found out by accident, working on some women, that he could produce, just by pushing a button, he could actually produce an orgasm in a woman.
Yeah, well, to be honest, one of the things we're looking at here with the spinally injured, of course, someone with a spinal injury, their sexual capabilities are, in a sense, removed.
We said once you're hooked up to the interface, just in terms of it reading you or the computer reading what's coming, have you tried the old pain test yet?
In other words, creating, you know, sticking yourself with a needle or something or another and looking for the reaction?
And so it's not only scanning through all over my hand with a little pincushion, it's looking through all different frequencies and then you have problems with earthing.
So there are all sorts of technical problems, which is fantastic, really exciting scientifically, but it's very laborious at the same time.
Professor Warwick, I've talked to individuals, I'm a researcher, who claim that they have implants in their brain, and they claim that there's certain unnamed governed agencies, the NSA, and provided contractors.
In response to that, I have three quick questions.
They claim that their thoughts or maybe their sub-vocalizations are being read using portable devices like a Walkman in real time, and that there are these real-time experiments capturing their brain waves using magnetic amplifiers and satellite uplinks.
Now, they also claim that the NSA is trying to access their unconscious mind in some kind of cyborg experiments.
Yeah, but, Professor, my own government has a history of being exceptionally interested in mind control to the degree that they used guinea pigs in chemical experiments with LSD and all kinds of incredible things that nobody would have believed until they made it public.
If they were that interested in mind control, then obviously the technology that you're now immersed in would be, it seems to me, an irresistible temptation for them.
Sometimes it seems to be extremely fault-tolerant.
And people, such as stroke victims, they have a serious problem occur, and yet it is able to get back sometimes completely to normal, but other times there's a major problem.
unidentified
So now going back to what you were saying about and what you were saying, Art, about static electricity, if there's a sudden voltage, a sudden high-voltage signal that is sent, but if it's the right kind of signal, do you suppose that there is, like a computer virus, something that could be sent into the brain that would shut it down, send somebody into a coma?
I mean, I hope it's not going to happen with me, but if I suddenly stop talking in the next few seconds, then, you know, that might have been, let's hope I keep talking.
But, yeah, no, you're quite right.
Or certainly change the way it's working in a less serious way than that.
Yeah, there's got to be a distinct possibility.
unidentified
How long did it take you before they let you go from airport security when you kept trying to tell them, hey, I'm a human cyborg?
I mean, when I, up at Toronto, he carries it all, there's a load of technology he carries on the outside of his body.
For me, I did fly with my previous implant, which we talked about before, which is like an identification thing.
And really, there wasn't any problem with that one.
I'm just hoping that this will be the same.
I mean, I could end up actually getting to the United States and not being able to get back again.
So if somebody's got a spare room somewhere, I might need it in a week or so's time.
unidentified
You know, another movie that came to mind really quickly was Johnny Mnemonic, the fact that he could store hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes in his brain with an interface from the computer.
And I think that sort of thing, I mean, if it's stored in the computer, but the computer's linked to the brain, looking at it that way, then that sort of thing becomes realizable.
I don't know necessarily storing it in the brain.
I see more of a, rather than having the chips or the computer in the brain, more a radio connection to the computer is much more realistic, I feel.
Professor, it has been, again, first of all, wow, thank you for the I'm really glad the operation is an apparent success, but still, we've got to do another program because I have a feeling the big results are just around the corner.