inside the machine - megan prelinger
The book talks about how the world has changed since engineers of the early twentieth century is able to control electrons, first is the radio, followed by television and later telecommunications. Today's micro devices, tucked imperceptibly into our bodies and our personal tools, are the direct descendants of those discoveries.(pg 10)
What is electron? Something that we can't see it with our naked eyes, and we have the trust that it exists. We only know that there are energies revolve around us, if we patiently sit quietly and you can feel nature. The energy involve that scientists is using is equivalent to what
the chinese called 'chi'. or the indians called 'mantra'. Both these two cultures in the ancient times understand that there is something very powerful flowing around us, but it is the scientist and engineers are putting in to good use for the benefit of the whole humankind, and not just your spiritual self.
In space sciences, the narrative arts anticipated and inspired the work of scientists and engineers for decades leading up to the development of new technologies, from Shelley's Frankenstein to Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis, established the chiseled(machine made) facial appearance of the prototypical robot and its characteristic passive facial expression. Robots appeared as spokesperson as early as 1928. (pg198-199)
The Bell Laboratories work on computer speech was the most advanced of several comparable investigations, both in England and the U.S., aimed at producing computers that could mimic human communication behaviors. The other nerve systems of acivity were the numerous programs to develp computation systems that could mimic human cognition and memory- literally 'neural' computing - and programs to simulate the behaviour of evvery other human sense. These were legion druing the Cold War; reserach institutions with programs of this type include the Rand Corporation, Bell Laboratories, and MIT neurology and biophysics laboratories, to name a few. (pg 213)
Why is men having such a fascination on robots? Is it narcissism? Or trying to create a myth like the old myth, and hoping to invent a higher intelligence than ourselves will give us the answer to life?
In the 1960 two scientists evaluated the implications for bionic space electronics in a way that few people had anticipated. In a paper titled "cyborgs and space", the scientists proposed integreting respiratory technologies into the human body that would spare us the hard work of breathing out of space. (pg 216)
The emerging future of human-electronic integration is progressing in a larger sense toward transhumanism, the state in which the combinartory result from our species-wide encounter with advanced technology is resulting in a new and hopefully improved state of being. In many instances, transhumanism is already here. (pg 218) The word "bionic" means utilizing eletronic devices and mechanical parts to assist humans in performing difficult, dangerous or intricate tasks, as by supplementing or duplicating parts of the body. My neighbour in Hong Kong, who is 80 years, is carrying a metal backpack, and he tells me that that was for his mechanical heart, which sustains his life for a few more years. He also told me that he is one of the 3 people in Hong Kong to have a mechanical heart. It is very rare to encounter very high technology in everyday life in Hong Kong, not like California, but then I relied on my portable device alerting me various things each day, for example, I used googlemap all the time to tell me I have reached my destination, or checking on the dictionary as I write my paper, using the blog as a research folio. That also makes me bionic, isn't it?
The prospect of electronic circuits that can dissolve within our bodies invokes the journey of the atom and the planet across dramatic steps in scale. Nanoscale bioelectronics represent not just a return to the atom as a reference point but a journey beyond the atom' wtihin it, to subatomic particticles, particles our bodies can metabolize and absorb.
Today the culture of technology is one of not-being-seen, a strategy that among other things hides the designs of technology in a cloak of invisibility. The author argues biodegradable machines could possibly be invented in the distant future as maker spaces and maker faires are booming and not only with analog materials. Children are using cloth and soft materials to create their own illumated and robotic toys. This is where art meets electronics. (pg221)
In my recent involvement with arduino and robotics, I learned that in the near 20 years, the British government is investing trillions of pounds in the technology sector, I am not sure about other countries, but in the UK, children have a class that teach them how to code. Suddenly from Wellcome collection to Science Museum there are books and simple devices that will allow you to build simple construction. I was amazed on many developers have popped up since the last year, there is littlebits who started several years ago, but now they have micro:bit, miro:bot, makey makey, just to name a few. There is certainly a lot of money to be made whether the chidren will pick it and make stuff, thus allowing them to be creative. We'll have to see.