[MINOR SPOILER ALERT]

Wow.  Bleak.  Maybe I shouldn’t have watched all five episodes in one afternoon, but I haven’t been this depressed since Dark Knight.  What happened to the randy, swashbuckling Captain Jack that we loved?

On the SciNoFi front though, Torchwood gives us the opportunity to revisit the topic of eyeball spy cameras, last seen in an episode of Dollhouse this spring.  As Stephen noted in a post at that time, scientists have been working on plugging directly into the brain (in cats at least) to locate and interpret visual processing activity.

Interestingly, the Torchwood contact lenses appeared to be a much more basic technology: essentially small video cameras that could transmit images back to a laptop and also display text messages to the wearer.

Given how far we have to go in understanding the brain, a contact lens camera is probably a more straightforward and only marginally more detectable solution for this kind of surveillance.  Eyeball sized cameras are already commercially available.

If you don’t have  time to watch the video you can read recaps and quotes from the panel here, here, here, here and here.

Big thanks to Jennifer at SEE, to all of our panelists, and to the Bad Astronomer, who found time to moderate our panel while he wasn’t partying with Hollywood starlets (Phil – we kid because we love).

Surrogates—which opens September 25—features a world where people jack into robotic avatars and send the bots out into the world in their stead (trailer here). Not only was this Venditti’s freshman graphic novel, but it’s publisher Top Shelf’s first credit as a film producer.

“Bruce Willis is one of the few actors who can do the action sequences and personal moments,” Venditti told me during a break signing his novel at Comic-Con. “A big theme in the book is the relationship the main character has with his wife. He’s a police detective who can do his job without worrying about the hazards of his job. He’ll go home to his wife and she’ll only react with him through her surrogate, because she’s uncomfortable with aging. So it’s a strain on their marriage.”

The story (illustrated by Brett Weldele) mines the psychology of wanting to be something than who we are. Venditti got the idea from books on Internet addiction and TV shows like Extreme Makeover and Dr. 90210. But its theme was eerily prophetic.

“What would society be like if there was a technology that enabled us to stay in our homes and send these idealized versions of ourselves to the real world?” said Venditti. “Since I wrote the book in 2002, fans have sent me articles about some of this technology starting to take place,” such as long-distance surgery through robotic arms and electrodes that enable individuals to move items by thought. “Some sociology professors told me the used the book in their classrooms.”

His next project—The Homeland Directive, a political medical thriller out next summer, also from Top Shelf—examines another technology-oriented theme. “Do we live in a time when personal privacy and national security can coexist?” he said. “But that’s as much as I can tell you right now…”

One hopes he’s including a role for Willis—wouldn’t want to freeze out his big Hollywood connection.

—Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

This morning, io9 demonstrated that in addition to putting out an awe-inspiring blog every day, they could also put on a mind-expanding Comic Con panel.  With no Hollywood celebrities and just a couple of special guests, our favorite sci-fi bloggers ran through the TV shows, movies, comics and books of the past year that “blew our minds without blowing up any giant robots.”

Here are a few of their recommendations:

Moon -Duncan Jones’s new movie topped the list for both Annalee Newitz and Meredith Woerner.  Like a lot of the works recommended by the panel, Moon explores what it means to be human in a rapidly approaching era where humanity can be technologically upgraded or artificially created (note: this is not a spoiler, the lead character realizes very early in the film that he is a clone).

Julian Comstock – In this novel, Robert Charles Wilson depicts a 22nd century American that has sunk into barbarism and theocracy.  In response, the hero undermines the regime in part through trying to popularize ideas about Darwin in a world that has forgotten about science.

Rest -  What if someone invented a pill that meant no one would ever have to sleep, with no adverse side effects?  Panel guest Bonnie Burton from StarWars.com picked the Devil’s Due comic Rest, which explores this idea and its implications on society, the environment and mental health.

Wonton Soup – James Stokoe’s comic, recommended by Graeme McMillan, investigates what humans would do if they had to be out in space for a really long time.  Apparently the answers are get high and cook alien recipes.

Infoquake – io9 editor Charlie Jane Anders picked a series of novels by David Louis Edelman.   In Edelman’s future, people can hack and upgrade their own bodies and brains, impacting human relations in both the literal and business senses of the phrase.

The Acceleglove is clunky and ungraceful by comparison. The cloth is thick, because it has to conceal circuitry, and long metal rods reach from the wrist up past the elbow to capture arm motion. (Former DISCOVER columnist Jaron Lanier pointed out that one problem with the interface that Minority Report made famous was that it caused a lot of arm fatigue; presumably, the metal rods will not improve that situation.) Sometimes warts emerge when a sci-fi device becomes real.

Earlier versions of the data glove have been around for years in the form of motion-capture suits or virtual-reality gloves (and, of course, the old-school Nintendo Power Glove). Fifth Dimension, a leader in virtual-reality equipment, has gloves that run from $2,000 to $40,000 for a top-of-the-line, 21-sensor, wireless pair. But those prices have limited it to high-end markets, like mainstream motion pictures and TV commercials.

The Acceleglove, which will come in at about $500, uses an accelerometer in each finger to measure its position. These devices measures use tiny crystals to measure changes in the finger’s orientation with respect to gravity, the force that puts the “accele” in accelerometer. (Accelerometers tell iPhones when to switch between portrait and landscape mode, and they’re used in laptops to turn off the hard drive the poor thing is dropped.) As a finger of the glove moves, the crystals’ charge changes, indicating the finger’s location and orientation to a computer. The accelerometers transmit the data to a circuit board at the back of the hand, which in turn uses a USB cable to link to a computer. (Here’s a demo video.)

Applications for the Acceleglove are still under development, but there are some pretty nifty ideas out there.  Researchers at George Washington University (where the glove was first developed) hope to use the glove to allow speakers of sign language to translate their signs directly into text on a computer screen, or even into speech. The military, naturally, wants to use the gloves for fine control of unmanned drones, and games makers see incredible new forms of entertainment entertainment.

The AcceleGlove is also easily capable of manipulating images on a screen, like a mouse, and it hardly seams a stretch to imagine that one day we too will be able to say, Scotty-style, “Keyboard. How quaint.”

The most fascinating robot hand has to be the Shadow Hand, which relies on air compression for its “muscle” power. By filling and draining a flexible tube with air, the shadow hand achieves a level of precision not available to typical robotic hands. It can grasp things more gently than traditional robot hands, and it’s far lighter in weight than a big all-metal hand. And it has far greater range of motion. Granted, the Shadow Hand is intended for industrial applications rather than attachment to a person, but it seems to offer certain critical advantages that Massive Dynamics might have considered.

For an actual prosthetic robot hand, consider the Fluidhand, tested last year in Heidelberg, Germany. It’s the first hand to allow individual control of each finger, and it has soft latex pads at the end of each finger to allow for gripping. With these soft, grabby fingers, the hand can make precision movements, like gripping a credit card, that were previously impossible. The hand has been tested only once in daily use, by a teenager born with only one hand, but the operation is a success so far.

All of which raises the question of why Sharp even needed a robot hand. In these modern times, surgeons have successfuly transplanted real human hands on to those who once had them. Kentucky-based surgeons have succeeded on four of the five transplants they’ve conducted since 1999. If Massive Dynamics was going to send in a crack team to help Ms. Sharp adjust her robot hand, couldn’t they have just brought her a new one?

The series has long-featured a T-1001 model terminator with unknown motives. For those of you not up on your terminator model numbers, the T-888 models features your classic Arnie-style metal endoskeltons wrapped in human flesh, while the T-1000’s are made from ‘liquid metal’ of the sort featured in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. These terminators can form themselves into pretty much any shape they like, and real world researchers are already trying to develop materials with similar properties.

These research efforts generally come under the heading of smart materials. One approach is create a single material which can be controlled—for example electrorheostatic materials are normally liquids, but become more viscous or solid when an electric field is applied to them, or shape memory alloys can be set into a particular pattern and then deformed. If the alloy is later heated, it will return to its ‘programmed’ original pattern.

Another approach is to create an object out of a collection of tiny robot like entities, sort of like intelligent Lego bricks. These efforts tend to fall under the rubric of programmable matter (programmable matter is an umbrella term for a number of futuristic technologies, including the ability to create psuedo-atoms on demand). Carnegie Mellon has a “claytronics” projects with a spiffy speculative[1] demo that looks like it could be right out of the Terminator backstory. (Seriously. I half expected Sarah Connor to kick down the conference room door screaming “Death to Skynet!”) MIT has projects along the same lines at it’s Distributed Robotics Lab, and there are other groups around the country working on ways that allow collections of small, relatively dumb and ineffectual sub-robots to come together to make large, resilient and very effective composite robots—just like a certain Scottish-accented terminator we know.

[1] i.e. not real — yet.

This is a technology that has already seen a proof-of-concept demonstration. In 1999, researchers from Berkley and Harvard inserted electrodes into the brains of anesthetized cats that monitored the activity of 177 neurons located in the lateral geniculate nucleus, a key visual processing center. Using a computer to process the signals from the brain, the researchers were able to reconstruct different test images places in front of the cat’s eyes, albeit at a low resolution. While some people see this work as a possible pathway to give sight to the blind, by feeding images into the lateral geniculate nucleus instead of extracting them, it would require (as demonstrated on Dollhouse invasive brain surgery that would carry commensurate risk.

Brook’s thesis is that it’s a bad idea to try to program artificial intelligences from the top down–that is, attempting to create a disembodied A.I. in a computer that then tries to make sense of inputs from the world, e.g. from a video camera, or have its outputs hooked up to control a robot. Instead of starting with the mind, Brooks believes that the robot’s body should come first, and that sophisticated behavior can emerge from the bottom up as a computer embedded in the robot struggles to control its body and interact with the real world. The interaction is critical, as it provides a feedback loop that enables the A.I. to figure out what works and what doesn’t in a way that’s intimately matched to its body and its environment.

In A.I. circles, this idea is known as embodied cognition or embodied intelligence. Brooks and his students have used this approach to build some impressive robots that can accomplish seemingly quite purposeful behavior with limited computational resources. For example, Cynthia Breazel’s Kismet is a robot that convincingly mimics the emotional responses of a small child. But probably the most familiar standard bearer of Brooks’ approach is the humble Roomba, built by iRobot, a company cofounded by Brooks. The Roomba is a robot vacuum, and the first really successful home robot.

In many ways the Roomba is a lot less sophisticated than earlier attempts to build home robots. Navigating around the crowded, irregular, and ever-changing spaces that humans live in is a particular challenge for robots, and many earlier designs featured sophisticated sensors and powerful processors that allowed the robot to build up a map of the rooms it found itself in and chart a path around objects. Instead the Roomba simply works through a small repertoire of movement behaviors, not caring about exactly where it’s going. It detects objects by bumping into them. It monitors the amount of dirt it’s picking up, and once an area appears clean it simply wanders off in a new direction until it finds some more dirt. In this way eventually the entire room is covered. It’s not incredibly efficient, but it’s not you that’s doing the work, it’s the robot, and it gets the job done. The Roomba’s limited intelligence is perfectly matched to the idiosyncrasies of being a vacuum cleaner, allowing iRobot to churn out a successful consumer product instead of getting hung up on trying to perfect the most efficient general purpose robot A.I. possible.

Making a bioweapon requires more than just finding a disease thats suitably lethal and contagious. You need an infectious agent that can be stored under a range of conditions for at least some time, which can dispersed effectively, and which can be made in bulk. You can’t just grab one human, inject him with something at your convenience, and then send him back to infect all the rest — this might work once or twice, but then a simple quarantine protocol for all new arrivals or escapees would drastically limit the effectiveness of the weapon. You need some way to infect lots of people in a short period of time. In the shadowy world of bioweapon development, the favored approach is aerosolization: essentially creating a spray or mist of particles containing the infectious agent, which is then inhaled directly into the lungs.

This is not as easy as it sounds: a lot of agents can’t be effectively aerosolized for a number of reasons, including a short life span outside a living host, or because they are damaged during the aerosolization process. (This is why anthrax is a perennial concern to those tracking bioweapons as it naturally forms robust, long-lived, and infectious spores) When the U.S. stopped developing bioweapons in 1969, it had weaponized just seven agents. The Soviet Union worked on developing another 10 or so. Given that Skynet kills so many people and animals on Judgment Day, the pool of surviving diseases to weaponize would have been sharply reduced, limiting its options. (Most infectious diseases are essentially crowd diseases. Eliminate the crowds, or the animal reservoirs a disease can persist in, and you eliminate the the disease) All this means that one bioweapon, let alone two, would be a tall order, making it valuable enough to Skynet to send a terminator into the past to protect it.

In essence, what Dr. Babak Parviz has accomplished is to put an integrated circuit into a contact lens. Using a process called self-assembly, Parviz arranges nanometer-thick metal onto the organic polymer that makes up the contact lens, and then connects them to tiny light emitting diodes. The LEDs will be able to paint information on top of whatever scene you are looking at. They haven’t gotten to the point of lighting up the diodes, but they have begun testing them on animals. So far,  rabbits can withstand wearing the lenses for 20 minutes with no ill effects.

But once the microchip is in place, Parviz thinks it will be a short hop, technologically speaking, to getting those robot features built into the lens. Perhaps most of us don’t need targeting computers, but the zoom feature could sure be handy when I have to watch baseball from the nosebleed section, and I have to figure that recording video straight from the contact lens, Finder style, can’t be far behind.

Most of the gadgetry on the lens will be arranged into a ring that surrounds the transparent part of the eye. As contact lens wearers know, the sclera has no nerves in it, which makes it a great spot for putting wireless communications or other features for this lens. Actually, they’re  hoping to use that space for  solar panels. 

The one thing these contact lenses can’t do? Fix your eyesight. I imagine that wll be along soon.

From point of view of physical appearance, we’re already there—assuming the duplicate is allowed to sit down, and avoid expansive hand gestures. Creating even robot-looking robots that can walk and gesture like a human is still a tough order, but solid progress is being made. Making a robot that looks like a given human is pretty much within the gift of any half-way decent prop-making company–after all, Andy Warhol commissioned a look-alike robot back in the 80’s. Of course, making something that looks like a specific person act like a specific person is the really big problem.

Currently, animatronic heads designed to mimic an individual’s mannerisms rely on being controlled by skilled puppeteers to produce believable results. For a machine to act well enough to fool a friend of the original human for more than a few moments probably requires solving the problem of how to create true artificial intelligence in the first place (and so, perfectly believable within the Terminator universe).

However you might get some of the way there by copying some of the principles underlying today’s chat bots: more-or-less randomly weave together various canned gestures (copied from the original subject), in the way that video game makers do when they capture movements from real athletes to make games like Madden NFL.

In 1997, Australian researchers developed a system that could fool automated voice verification systems that authenticate users based on their voiceprint. By 2001, our future-overlord-enablers at AT&T had created software called Natural Voices that could copy any human voice.

The current non-killing-machine value of this type of software is for realistic text-to-speech applications—for instance the ability to listen to emails using a cell phone, without that note from your Aunt Jemima sounding like it comes from a Dalek, or for use with the screen readers that visually impaired people use with their computers. Combined with speech recognition systems, speech synthesis already allows some automatic language translation applications — in the future, the addition of the ability to mimic a given voice could allow you to conduct, say, a conservation in real time over the telephone in which your speech is translated into another language in your own voice.

Going beyond sneaky terminators, this would be something like a basic version of the universal translators many sci-fi shows use to get over the awkward fact that all the aliens seem to speak perfect, if somewhat North-American accented, english…

Work continues apace on invisibility. [Futurismic]

Stretchy electronic fabric presages wearable computers and robotic clothes. [Pink Tentacle]

New hemispheric camera could lead to artificial eyes. [SciFi Scanner]

Liquid metal defies gravity. [io9]

I for one welcome our new robot overlords.