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Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons . By Nathan Ahlgrim If we want to – to paraphrase the classic Six Million Dollar Man – rebuild people, rebuild them to be better, stronger, faster, we need more than fancy motors and titanium bones. Robot muscles cannot help a paralyzed person stand, and robot voices cannot restore communication to the voiceless, without some way for the person to control them. Methods of control need not be cutting-edge. The late Dr. Stephen Hawking’s instantly recognizable voice synthesizer was controlled by a single cheek movement , which seems shockingly analog in today’s world. Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are the emerging technology that promise to bypass all external input and allow robotic devices to communicate directly with the brain. Dr. Chethan Pandarinath, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, discussed the good and bad of this technology in March’s The Future Now NEEDs seminar:  " To Be Implanted a...

By Sunidhi Ramesh The main dome of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). (Image courtesy of Wikimedia .) The morning of February 1, 2018, MIT President L. Rafael Reif sent an email addressed to the entire institute community. In it was an announcement introducing the world to a new era of innovation—the MIT Intelligence Quest , or MIT IQ. Formulated to “advance the science and engineering of both human and machine intelligence,” the project aims “to discover the foundations of human intelligence and drive the development of technological tools that can positively influence virtually every aspect of society.” The kicker? MIT IQ not only exists to develop these futuristic technologies, but it also seeks to “investigate the social and ethical implications of advanced analytical and predictive tools.” In other words, one of the most famous and highly ranked universities in the world has dedicated itself to preemptively consider the consequences of the future of technology ...