It's the first time an exoskeleton has been controlled by brain activity and offered feedback to the patients. Doing a demonstration in a stadium is something very much outside our routine in robotics. It's never been done before.
Interpretation
This quote highlights a groundbreaking achievement in robotics through brain-computer interfaces.
Miguel Nicolelis emphasizes the transformative nature of using brain activity to control an exoskeleton, which not only represents a significant advancement in technology but also offers patients a new way to experience movement. The demonstration in a stadium symbolizes the unprecedented nature of this achievement in robotics, showcasing the potential for brain-machine integration to revolutionize rehabilitation and mobility for those with physical disabilities.
In practice
This quote can be used to inspire students in a tech presentation about advancements in robotics.
Even two of humanity's most intimate possessions - a sense of self and a body image - are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain's mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less than a second's notice.
We want to galvanize people's imaginations. With enough political will and investment, we could make wheelchairs obsolete.
We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.
With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.
Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.
Everybody right now, they look at the current technology, and they think, 'OK, that's what artificial neural nets are.' And they don't realize how arbitrary it is. We just made it up! And there's no reason why we shouldn't make up something else.
First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people.
[The internet] ought to be like clay, rather than a sculpture that you observe from a distance.
Together, we could open up government and invite citizens in, while connecting all of America to 21st century broadband. We could use technology to help achieve universal health care, to reach for a clean energy future, and to ensure that young Americans can compete - and win - in the global economy.
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