Starting today, Japanese company Cyberdyne will mass-produce its HAL ("Hybrid Assistive Limb") exoskeleton:
The 22-pound battery-operated computer system is belted to the waist. It captures the brain signals and relays them to mechanical leg braces strapped to the thighs and knees, which then provide robotic assistance to people as they walk.
Cyberdyne plans to rent these suits for USD $2,200/month.
For her perspective on this announcement, human-robot interface design, and our future as cyborgs, Nora talked to Quinn Norton. You can listen to their full interview below, or download the MP3.
Play audio:
(Cyberdyne announcement via AP)
Original photo by semihundido.
Bionic technologies from an anthropological sense have been troublesome.
I draw the example of the bionic ear. Many deaf communities throuought the world consider the bionic ear an assimilationist paractice by the hearing majority and an attack on their own culture and identity. The term used is ‘Audism’.
Deaf communities tend to consider the bionic ear a false hope as the results are well below ‘regular’ hearing. Instead they hope that there is a shift in what is considered ‘normal’ in how the body works and how people communicate.
I think the same could be said for these suits for the differently abled. More lifts and ramps are more likley to be useful than an exoskeleton.
In future generations this may be different.
(Note: Cyberdyne was the name of the company making the robots in the ‘terminator’ films. Coincidence for forshadowing? ha ha)
@ Jack,
Yes, I don’t know if it bodes that well to have the company name from the Terminator films, and to be making a product with the same name as the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey!
You really need to interview Prof. Steve Mann
http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~mann/
Any time you bring a digital device into your life, you really need to ask who is writing the software it runs. It is not the hardware that differentiates between a technology that we control and a technology that controls us, but the software.
For a prosthetic, the person who the hardware is attached to must control the software, and it must obey their commands and not that of any third party. The implications of remote control of a prosthetic makes for a nasty science fiction story (Makes Orwell’s 1984 seem bright), but we must strongly oppose this becoming science fact.
It would be great if this could become a key question asked of any guest talking about digital technology: who authors the software, and whose interests are thus being served by the hardware.
Did they really have to call themselves freaking Cyberdyne, and the suit HAL of all things?
It’s like they want them to go crazy and enslave us.
“It is not the hardware that differentiates between a technology that we control and a technology that controls us, but the software”.
In fact, both hardware and software control us. This is the essence of McLuhan’s mantra “The Medium is the Message”. Hardware matters, unless the prosthetic is an exact duplicate of the missing limb or sense. I think it was Mark Twain who first said that “To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. In essence this is what is happening with computers, we are noticing new things they can do, and contriving uses for these technologies, however, some are obviously practical for use by human beings, others have almost no practical human applications. Bionics are not practical yet because they are not sufficiently advanced, just as a square wheel is not useful until someone comes up with the technology to make it round.
Remote control is not what we need to worry about, this is blatantly obvious and comes with ample warning signs. What needs to be noticed are the most subtle effects of new media – particularly those where we ignore what we are doing to ourselves and others to get to content. Think of the impacts of the iPod or a mobile phone on your day and you will get an idea of this. What are you gaining, and what are you losing?
Wait a sec…
A corp named “Cyberdyne” is making cyborgs and one is named HAL?!?!
I smell shenanigans…
oh please let it be shenanigans!
“Remote control is not what we need to worry about, this is blatantly obvious and comes with ample warning signs.”
Remote control is not blatantly obvious, except to a few technologists. These technologists are often ignored. For most people, when technology doesn’t do what we want to do they blame themselves or think it is a technical defect, long before they would recognize it as remote control.
A growing number of people are choosing communications devices that are locked down and under remote control every day. Often the justification for the owner not being in control is something as simple as “copyright infringement”, and other times they use some other boogyman like child pornography. In each case these are excuses to install remote-control in our technology, and in each case they don’t work as advertised (IE: DRM can’t help creators, and is their greatest threat) but do work to control how the technology is used.
The Conservative government has already said they intend to table legislation like C-61 that legally protects locks put on hardware by other than their owners. This is the same party that otherwise recognizes tangible property rights as a founding principle of the party. It is obvious to me that this party doesn’t understand the issues (Maybe they need a CTO?)
In another thread on this site we have people willing to have software decide the outcome of elections. The question wasn’t worded that way, but every time I see people compare online voting with online banking I am reminded that people don’t really understand software, banking or voting. I can easily see someone claiming that having remote-control over our communications technology is the only solution to stopping online voter fraud. This assumes that it is the citizen that is the greatest threat, and not the companies authoring the very software that will ultimately decide the outcome of the election.
Hardware is something people can see and touch. Hardware is far easier to understand than software. Software is unique, but is is more like policy (Lessig’s code as law) than any of the other comparisons we have tried to make to it.
I thought this discussion was about cyborgs? Remote control software is a medium, just like hardware. People ignore the medium to get to the content. This is nothing new and certainly not unique to software. If software is written with a remote feature, then it is serving its design parameters. Questioning the ethics of remote software is like questioning the ethics of the crossbow. If governments want to control it they have to regulate it.
I am an AK amputee. I have dealt with assistive devices for 44 years now. The early ones were horrendous. I now use a so called high tech carbon composite prosthetic limb that is controlled by a sophisticated hydraulic valve mechanism that looks like a shock absorber and is $2500 to replace new.
An Otto Bock computer chip controlled limb runs around $35000.
These exoskeleton devices will never be available to people that that could really use them in any of our lifetimes. It is stuff of dreams that I hope will become an affordable reality for those unfortunate amongst us that really need such devices.
For now the affordable technology is a mechanical device that has a built in obsolescence of about two years, or so it seems.
It is great to see the advancements science in these fields, but one must ultimately realize that these great ideas are only dreams at this stage and only available to highest income people out there.
Stonyb