This is the first of eight stories in our Web feature on self-experimenters.

As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor had successfully wired the nerves of his forearm to a computer in New York City's Columbia University and networked them to a robotic system back in his Reading, England, lab. "My body was effectively extended over the Internet," Warwick says.

It's a far cry from his vision of transforming humanity into a race of half-machine cyborgs able to commune with the digital world—there is no spoon, Neo—but such an evolution is necessary, says 54-year-old Warwick. Those who don't avail themselves of subcutaneous microchips and other implanted technology, he predicts, will be at a serious disadvantage in tomorrow's world, because they won't be able to communicate with the "superintelligent machines" sure to be occupying the highest rungs of society, as he explains in a 2003 documentary, Building Gods, which is circulating online.

Something of a self-promoter, Warwick, or "Captain Cyborg" as a U.K. newspaper once dubbed him, has appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and other shows on the TV talk circuit to tout his work. In his 2004 book, I, Cyborg, he describes his research as "the extraordinary story of my adventure as the first human entering into a cyber world."

More reserved in conversation, Warwick says he wants to advance brain–machine interfaces (BMI) beyond current studies in nonhuman primates, such as a recent experiment that synched up a pair of robot legs with a jogging, BMI-outfitted monkey. He says the short-term benefits could be smarter prosthetics for amputees, infrared-based sensory systems for the blind and brain implants to treat Parkinson's disease.

Daniela Cerqui, an anthropology professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who has followed Warwick's work since 2004, says she "met people very fascinated with what he was doing." She adds: "I also met engineers who didn't think what he was doing was real science."

In 1998 Warwick was one of the first people to have a simple digital transmitter known as a radio-frequency identification device (RFID) implanted just below the skin in his upper left arm. For nine glorious days doors parted and lights switched on for him in the University of Reading Department of Cybernetics as the RFID alerted different sensors to Warwick's approach. In 2002 he had electrodes implanted in the nerves of his left forearm (prudent for a right-hander).

He used the implant to enslave the robot hand far away in Reading, an electric wheelchair and the lights in his lab as well as to communicate with his wife, Irena. She had agreed to receive a similar implant to see if hus-borg and wife could exchange electrical signals. "If she moved her hand," Warwick says, "my nervous system received one pulse. If she moved her hand three times, I received three pulses."

He hopes to have a sensor implanted in his brain by 2015 that will allow him to send signals across a computer network. Of course, a Brown University team has already moved the goalposts much closer: In 2006 researchers reported that a 25-year-old quadriplegic man had guided a computer cursor and moved a prosthetic arm via a brain implant. Warwick may have trouble finding a doctor to implant a similar device without a compelling medical reason, points out Charles Higgins, an associate professor of electrical engineering and neurobiology at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

8 Comments

1. 1. iPlant 01:08 PM 3/10/08

   I'd be really curious to know exactly what Warwick had to do to get ethical approval for this.

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2. 2. StarBlazer 03:32 PM 3/10/08

   As with most geniuses, Warwicks determination limits objectivity. The chances that brain implants be required for advanced man-machine communication dimishes with progress in other fields, such as the ability to scan and interpret brainwaves with non-intrusive techniques (See http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=translating-images-from-brain-waves&sc=rss)

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3. 3. JEANNIEMAC 01:11 AM 3/11/08

   I would hesitate to hook myself up to a central supercomputer. Who knows who could gain control over it in the future?

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4. 4. jknecht 09:39 PM 3/11/08

   Warwick is anything but a genius. He is a known publicity whore whose work has no scientific merit whatsoever. He is a bad joke among computer science researchers, but the media loves him because they say things like "becoming one with the matrix" and it sells copy.

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5. 5. jbrave 05:17 PM 3/17/08

   This is cool. I wonder what would happen if one just connected an 8 bit bi-directional interface to the brain - based on the research where the dude was able to learn to move a mouse cursor to communicate, it would seem that the brain is fully capabable of learning to control and communicate with directly connected hardware. After a training period might it not also be able to identify the full ascii character set as a series of binary signals, and transmit them as well? Why is research in this area so slow? I would imagine that a large # of people would be willing to get outfitted with even a low-bandwith, character only internet connection if they could, or to test such a device. I don't understand why research in this area is so slow.
   
   --
   Edited by jbrave at 03/17/2008 10:18 AM

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6. 6. iCowboy 05:43 PM 3/18/08

   Kevin Warwick is not a genius, he's someone who's managed to delude the media into thinking he's a serious researcher. Questions need to be asked why so little of his supposed research is written up in peer reviewed academic journals, and further questions about his ethics - such as when he proposed to chip a young girl in the immediate wake of a child abduction and murder.
   
   It'd help the field immensely if publications such as Wired stopped giving Warwick the oxygen of publicity - at least until he actually does something novel.

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7. 7. MarshallBarnes 05:19 PM 9/20/08

   I've got bad news for Kevin Warwick: A world run by superintelligent computers that put natural humans out to pasture ain't going to happen. The weapons that will shut such systems down already exist and are unstoppable. But keep on dreaming while you can. When it all goes too far, the plug will be pulled. Trust me.

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8. 8. Globularfunk 03:01 PM 5/21/09

   Yep! Can you say precursor to Skynet? Kevin "Miles Dyson" Warwick.

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