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Amazing merger of man and machineROGER UHLIG
AS HE walks through his front door, the lights go on, the music swells, the bath fills and the wine chills: it is another ordinary day in the near future as Mr Cyborg - half-husband, half-machine - comes home. The first steps towards making this scenario a reality within a few years were taken last month by a professor at Reading University in England. Like a latter-day Edward Jenner - the scientist who injected himself with smallpox vaccine to test his invention - Professor Kevin Warwick has become the first person to have a silicon chip implanted in his body. "The chip allows computers to communicate directly with my body," he said. "As I walk around the building, lights go on and computers burst into life every time I scratch my head. It can be scary." Warwick's experiment could see us controlling our environment by our thoughts and movements - or, if it goes wrong, giving machines the ability to control our lives.
He underwent an operation under local anaesthetic to embed a 23mm by 3mm glass capsule containing a radio receiver and several chips under the skin inside his left elbow. It is, he said, the "ultimate man-machine interface". He said: "Being a professor of cybernetics, which is all about the interaction between man and machine, it is particularly exciting to be the world's first cyborg." The skin-chip communicates with a network of sensors around his department in a manner that has more in common with science-fiction movies or visions of Big Brother surveillance than a sleepy British university campus. As he entered the cybernetics department, a synthesised voice intoned: "Welcome Professor Warwick," and switched on the lights. Warwick said: "Within a week or so the building will know me better and will greet me by my first name. It's just getting to know me, but it will soon prepare my office in just the way I like it." His secretary, Liz Lucas, can locate him simply by looking at a computer screen. She said: "It was often very hard to find Professor Warwick when he had a telephone call or a meeting, but since the implant, we always know where he is." The chip's uses are limited to confirming Warwick's identity, but the technology has the potential to become a common household aid. The skin-chip is capable of calling a lift and alerting a home automation system to switch on an oven, run a bath and cool a bottle of wine as soon as an employee leaves the office. More ominously, if the experiment is successful, employees could be automatically clocked in and out of work and traced instantly outside their workplace. The technology is already capable of carrying information such as medical and employment records, blood type, national insurance number and credit card details. Warwick said: "It could carry details of qualifications or past legal convictions, making it difficult for anybody to lie to cover up such information." The chip could have dozens of other uses, including enabling guns fitted with a similar chip to be fired only by their owners, or only authorised users to drive a car. However, Warwick warned there were many dangers associated with the operation performed on him by Dr George Boulos. He said: "If it all goes wrong and my arm explodes, which I have been warned could happen, my wife will probably sue Dr Boulos. "We don't know what might happen. For example, the chip could break up or float around my body." Although Warwick advocates that students should be fitted with chips to check attendance at lectures, he admits his research could mean that we lose control over some aspects of our lives. He said: "We have to ask ourselves if we want to hand over control to machines. It is a desirable technical advance, but we have to decide on the moral and ethical issues of 24-hour surveillance of everyone fitted with a chip." The next stage of the research will involve linking the chip to an element of Warwick's or another person's body, with the hope of finding a way for paraplegics to regain control of their limbs. The chip would read the paraplegic's thoughts and send a message to a computer that in turn would send a signal to the muscles needed, for example, to lift a cup of tea. Warwick said: "It sounds fictional, but this is reality. There are scientists working on a related system at Hammersmith Hospital." The ultimate application is to tap into the brain's thought processes - a mystery to scientists. He said: "Instead of having the memory and thought-processing capacity of your brain, you could have the capabilities of an extremely powerful computer. Where it goes after that I really don't know and would not like to envisage." - © The Telegraph, London
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