The death of the first cyborg in the human world hints at the technological future of ALS
arts/
June 21 is World ALS Day. ALS is one of the five major terminal diseases in the world, with a higher mortality rate than cancer. It is a problem that human beings have not broken through in the past two hundred years. The patient is paralyzed, weak, out of control and even unable to move, the body seems to be slowly "frozen", and even cannot breathe independently... Hawking, the famous physicist, was trapped in a wheelchair for most of his life because of this disease.
However, the development of science and technology will bring changes to this disease, especially the emergence of human-machine hybrid technology, which is also the key to the theory of human immortality. So why am I talking about this topic today, because on June 15th a very important thing happened, the first cyborg in the human world passed away.
Cyborgs, in simple terms, are human-machine hybrids. Of course, this is a relatively elementary stage, and has not yet reached the immortal stage of real human-machine hybrids. But this has a very huge historical significance, that is, human beings have truly taken the first step in the mixing of human and machine, and have successfully achieved it. Then the person who realized this is the British scientist Peter Scott Morgan, who is a typical representative of fighting against the disease of ALS with the help of modern technology. Peter was once an accomplished robotics scientist, holds a Ph.D. from Imperial College London, has published 8 books, and delivered over 1,000 lectures around the world.
In 2017, Peter was diagnosed with ALS, and the doctor judged that he had only 6 months left to live, but with the help of the machine, Peter directly input some of the nutrition of his life and some of the output of human metabolism through surgery. into an external loop. Then, with the help of brain-computer technology, he transformed himself into a "half-human, half-machine" through multiple operations, and evolved into "Peter 2.0" with the help of eye tracking, speech synthesis, virtual avatar and other technologies. So he died last week after doctors decided he had only six months to live, then lived five more years.
Then British scientist Peter officially opened the exploration of human-machine hybrid technology with his own personal experiments. And behind this gives us three very important inspirations:
Human-computer hybrid will eventually become a reality, and the ultimate human-computer hybrid technology lies in the fusion of human conscious brain and computer super brain, and then realizes an always-on "immortality" with the help of the body of a humanoid robot state;
The brain-computer interface will become a very important technology in this century, and these technologies have been deployed by Musk for many years, that is, the fusion of the human conscious brain and the computer's supercomputing brain, or the computer's super information brain. The changes brought about by human society will be very far-reaching;
In an era of increasingly blurred boundaries between technology and bioethics, human beings will enter an unprecedented state of moral challenge, and how to make neutral technology have goodness has become a problem that we humans need to think about now.