From: Brian D Williams (talon57@well.com)
Date: Mon Mar 18 2002 - 12:38:56 MST
The following is reposted from the "wearables" mailing list,I
thought the subject was appropriate for extropians...
On Wearables, Steve Mann <mann@eecg.toronto.edu>wrote:
> At 8:33 PM -0500 3/16/02, Andrew Plumb wrote:
>
>>I'd have to counter those questions by asking, how is Steve's
>>reaction to having his prostheses carelessly removed and damaged
>>any different than had the same been done to a near-sighted
>>person's glasses or a hearing-impaired person's hearing-aid or
>>cochlear implant?
>>Perhaps wrongly, that sounds to me like a "rhetorical question"
>>which suggests that the answer should be that it is a mild
>>inconvenience.
Thanks for your understanding.
>However, here's a different view: for many years Steve has used
>that system more as a powerful 'thinking aid' than as a sensory
>enhancement; he uses it not only to retrieve information (both
>graphic and text) and for many short-term memory uses. So perhaps
>the right question might be more like asking.
>"...how is Steve's reaction to having his prostheses carelessly
>removed and damaged any different than had he been deprived of
>various parts of his brain, or of the misery and grief of a
>closest and most intimate companion or of a large part of the
>machinery involved with his everyday activities, both personal and
>professional."
Despite my state of ill health, I am finding the energy to reply
to your insightful response, your understanding being refreshing
at a time when when so many others who have not read my books
are speculating, or commenting that it's no different from
a laptop and that I should simply remove it and run it through the
X-ray machine, etc..
And it was great to have had you on my thesis defense, since you
clearly have understood and appreciated my contributions.
The flurry of more than a thousand misinformed responses is
stressful and more than I can respond to individually.
>I don't know the answer, but the analogy with losing a sensory or
> motor prosthetic might not cover this new kind of situation. If
> Steve is not too badly disturbed, perhaps he could give us some
> insight into the non-sensory consequences of the situation.
Over the past 22 years, the system I wear has evolved, but still
consists of various phisiological monitors, actuators, etc., in a
multidimensional space that takes time to adapt to. Adaptation is
evolutionary, and, unlike George Stratton's simple upside down
glasses that only take a week to adapt to (and only a day or two of
tripping and falling or bumping into doorways after the glasses are
removed) it takes me 2-3 years typically to adapt to any major
change in the design of my apparatus (it has evolved through
changes every year or two). Early on, I did not wear it all the
time (but then again, most people don't wear their rigs all the
time, e.g. am I the only one who has never attended a wedding,
including my own, without having worn my rig?, e.g. despite social
pressures to conform to being not wired). If I take it off for a
short time, I can "get back in" quickly, e.g. while bathing or
splashing around in the pool (which is different physics, anyway,
than walking so it doesn't "erase" the adaptation), but if I go
more than a day or so without being exposed to it, I feel that I'm
suffering brain damage to the large collection of neural pathways
that I've "grown" around my rig.
I think of this "brainmod" as the next step beyond implantables.
Implantibles.com as we envision them, are merely a "bodmod",
not much different than the tattoo on the forearm of a prisoner,
and as I describe in my book (my experience at Schwabia, Q.,
for example), implantables are not much different from wearables.
However, what's next beyond implantables is to "grow" the brain
and let it evolve, so that the natural wetware forms, e.g.
1970s: wearables that look like headphones, headsets, helmets;
1980s: smart sunglasses and jacket or vest based computing
(wearcomp4);
1990s: covert eyeglasses, dermaplants, etc.;
2000s: vitrionic contact lenses, implantables.com,
but a common "thread" running through my book, is the idea of
"growables" (the next thing after implantables become old
fashioned) which i expect others to begin experimenting with and
using around the 2010s.
That being said, my doctors are still uncertain what component of
my ill condition is due to head injuries and what is due to changes
to the brain after going more than a day or so without stimulating
the "grown" portion, kind of like atrophy of a big part of my
brain...
I could go on at length, but since enough people in the wearables
community seem interested in this, perhaps I should submit a paper
about it to ISWC, assuming that the organizers would be willing to
receive a paper presentation as a cyborg webcast (e.g. so I could
present it without having to undergo air travel)???
Presently I have an immediate need:
When I got back from the hospital, eight of my students unpacked
everything and determined that the raw components that were damaged
would cost approx. $60k to replace, machining, some manufacturing,
assembly and calibration costs being extra. Perhaps folks have
some thoughts and ideas on how I could recover these immediate
expenses sooner than the typical 3 to 4 years a lawsuit ordinarily
requires.
I appreciate the outpouring of public sympathy and perhaps folks
have some thoughts and ideas on how to pressure the responsible
parties to mitigate their future liability by not prolonging the
damage that this "down time" is causing.
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