The world of technology is ever-evolving, and by the nanoseconds at that. What you probably thought possible a minute ago, has already happened in some corner of the world day before yesterday. Today AI is everywhere, and unless you have been living under a rock for the last decade, you would have used it in some way in your everyday work.
Imagine a supercomputer that is half the size of a football field, and can complete two quintillion calculations a second. Welcome to the world of Aurora. The $600-million facility is powered by 60,000 semiconductor chips. When it is up and running in 2024, it will analyse the brain, predict the weather and discover new drugs, besides processing information and generating answers to challenging questions. Experts are mulling using the system for climate research and developing new batteries.
This, at a time, when AI is deciphering brain wave patterns and generating an image of what a person is looking at. It’s ChatGPT for the brain. It can help in controlling artificial limbs and using thoughts to communicate, instead of speech. With addition of VR headsets, a person can actually control being in a metaverse. It will also help tetraplegic patients (those who can’t move their upper or lower body) interact with the world.
Contact lenses to fix short sightedness; cochlear implants to restore hearing; prosthetic limbs to help the disabled... maybe we are turning into cyborgs. Sensory augmentation is not far behind. US company Second Sight has developed implants that restore vision to blind patients. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brain and identify ideas as they form.
Till Death Not Do Us Part
If this sounds far-fetched enough, how about necrobotics? Or, turning dead people into robots? Recently, a team of researchers turned a dead spider into a robot-like gripper, giving it the ability to pick up objects weighing over 130 per cent of the body weight. Can this evolve into other animals being turned into robots in the near future? It may sound weird and many would gawk at the idea, but according to scientists, necrobotics opens up the pathway to do the impossible. Will this mean that our friends and families will become immortal some day? Maybe they will, though not as living organisms, but rather as physical manifestation of 3D holograms. Scientists have also found a way to attach artificial neurons onto silicon chips, mimicking the neurons in our nervous system. This will help provide a robust method to reproduce the electrical properties of real neurons in minute detail. Maybe coupling this with necrobotics could be the next step?
The Brain Game
Talking of artificial neurons, can we create a robot that’s capable of making a cup of tea in the kitchen and then bringing it upstairs? Of course, many would argue that what’s the big deal in getting a robot to make tea. But what is of essence here is the fact whether the robot have enough intelligence to understand that the tea should be brought to the room, without the command being fed into its system? Little wonder that the Australian military is funding a project to grow intelligent “mini-brains” in petri dishes. The goal is to design better AIs by combining the two. The Australian researchers isolated brain organoids—tiny clumps of cells that resemble the structure and function of the brain—to make it functional enough to play a ‘pong’, a tennis-like game. One hopes that in the future these organoids can be simulated enough to act independently of prompts.
Metaverse Meetings
We often send hug emojis to people physically away from us. It makes us sometimes wonder if only we could share the sense of touch long distance. Well, now it can be a possibility. A wireless self-sensing and haptic-reproducing electronic skin (e-skin) developed by engineers at the City University of Hong Kong can provide tactile sensing and haptic feedback.
The e-skin senses the wearer’s movements and converts them into electrical signals passing it to another connected e-skin via Bluetooth. Similar to visual and auditory communication, it would give the sensation of touching one another. Likewise, can VR attachments let you smell stuff? A research team co-led by scientists from the City University of Hong Kong has invented a wireless, skin-interfaced olfactory feedback system. The new technology integrates odours into AR.
It is used through two devices—one, a small, skin-integrated, patch-like device comprising two odour generators, which can be directly mounted on the human upper lip, providing an ultra-fast olfaction response. Another is a flexible facemask design with nine odour generators of different odour types, providing hundreds of odour combinations. The system can be used in a virtual garden by releasing various fruit and flower fragrances. It can also be used for online teaching and 4D movie watching.
Space Wars
We read about satellites being launched into space, but what if you could catapult one into space? SpinLaunch, an innovative new space technology company, can put 200 kg class satellites into low earth orbit with the help of a catapult, using kinetic energy that would propel it skyward through a large launch tube. While rocket engines will still be used for the last mile propulsion, the system can cut down fuel use by 70 per cent. The company is in talks with NASA to realise the potential of this technology, and with fossil fuels running low across the world, it might not be a bad idea to use a catapult instead.