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.
Somehow in the last 100 years, every time there is a problem of getting more spectrum, there is a technology that comes along that solves that problem.
Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.
The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.
When you factor in population growth, it's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow. Four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars, and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam.
There is people who make stuff with words. There is people who make stuff with programs. And I really believe that that whole creative culture, people didn't realize how creative programming is. And anybody who's done it of course knows that not only is it creative, but it's incredibly absorbing.
Being flooded with information doesn't mean we have the right information or that we're in touch with the right people.
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