Finals Discussion Question

arlynne.awayan wrote:FUTURE SHOCK!

Research on technologies being developed today that can affect the way we live tomorrow (eg. robotics, nanotechnology, etc.). How will these technologies change us?

Personalized Medical Monitors
John Guttag says using computers to automate some diagnostics could make medicine more personal.

In late spring 2000, John Guttag came home from surgery. It had been a simple procedure to repair a torn liga­ment in his knee, and he had no plans to revisit the hospital anytime soon. But that same day his son, then a junior in high school, complained of chest pains. Guttag's wife promptly got back in the car and returned to the hospital, where their son was diagnosed with a collapsed lung and immediately admitted. Over the next year, Guttag and his wife spent weeks at a time in and out of the hospital with their son, who underwent multiple surgeries and treatments for a series of recurrences.

With the help of the algorithm, the researchers identified seizure patterns specific to each patient.

arlynne.awayan wrote:FUTURE SHOCK!

Research on technologies being developed today that can affect the way we live tomorrow (eg. robotics, nanotechnology, etc.). How will these technologies change us?

Neuron Control
Karl Deisseroth's genetically engineered "light switch," which lets scientists turn selected parts of the brain on and off, may help improve treatments for depression and other disorders.

In his psychiatry practice at the Stanford Medical Center, Karl Deisseroth­ sometimes treats patients who are so severely depressed that they can't walk, talk, or eat. Intensive treatments, such as electro­convulsive therapy, can literally save such patients' lives, but often at the cost of memory loss, headaches, and other serious side effects. Deisseroth, who is both a physician and a bioengineer, thinks he has a better way: an elegant new method for controlling neural cells with flashes of light.


The technology could one day lead to precisely targeted treatments for psychiatric and neurological dis­orders; that precision could mean greater effectiveness and fewer side effects.

arlynne.awayan wrote:FUTURE SHOCK!

Research on technologies being developed today that can affect the way we live tomorrow (eg. robotics, nanotechnology, etc.). How will these technologies change us?

Soul of a New Mobile Machine

From conception to buzz, from three-way spring to soft-touch paint: inside the design of a multimedia communications gadget.
The streets are packed with teens and 20-somethings--whose business is coveted by the mobile-communications startup, Helio. The company aspires to hook them on the ultimate multimedia device.

This is something perfect for talking and messaging, gaming and Web searching, social networking and finding buddies via GPS.

arlynne.awayan wrote:FUTURE SHOCK!

Research on technologies being developed today that can affect the way we live tomorrow (eg. robotics, nanotechnology, etc.). How will these technologies change us?

Robots are already a part of our lives. Industrial robots widely used in manufacturing. Military and police organizations use robots to assist in dangerous situations. Robots can be found exploring the surface of Mars, and vacuuming the floors in your home.

Within a few more years a whole host of robotic adaptations could be running many aspects of our lives. "I think in the next thirty years, we're going to see a transformation between the industrial sorts of robots, to personal robots," says Brooks. Brooks' company, IRobot, markets floor cleaning robots for homes.

The more advanced the technology becomes, the more it forces us to focus on those things that are fundamentally human who believes robots will help shift the humanity from an information economy to a 'care' economy. "We call the future economy the care economy because its dominated by caring skills, interpersonal skills, emotional skills if you like, and the human contact is essential.

There will always be a need for human involvement since there will always be things that are uniquely human -- like having a conscience.

The effect of robots clearly has implications for the economy.

Research on technologies being developed today that can affect the way we live tomorrow (eg. robotics, nanotechnology, etc.). How will these technologies change us?

We usually imagine what would be the help of modern technologies in our lives and we sometimes think and even wish for it. here are the advantages of those technologies:
-work could easily be done.
-we can save a lot of time and energy.
-we can avoid frustrations.
-we could avoid mistakes in the things we do.

disadvantages:
-we will rely our lives to that technologies.
-we are avoiding to use our own analytical skills while working.
-we cannot practice our own knowledge.
-it will have also effects on how we treat others.
-people tend to be more lazy.
- it will even change our own perception to our life since it may also influence people.

Do you know tat robots has also laws to follow?:

1.A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2.A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3.A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

does this creation of robots could really help a human being or it can bring harm to human beings like us

Dirty, dangerous, dull or inaccessible tasks


There are many jobs which a human could perform better than a robot but for one reason or another the human either does not want to do it or cannot be present to do the job. The job may be too boring to bother with, for example domestic cleaning; or be too dangerous, for example exploring inside a volcano. These jobs are known as the "dull, dirty, and dangerous" jobs. Other jobs are physically inaccessible. For example, exploring another planet, cleaning the inside of a long pipe or performing laparoscopic surgery.

* Robots in the home: As their price falls, and their performance and computational ability rises, making them both affordable and sufficiently autonomous, robots are increasingly being seen in the home where they are taking on simple but unwanted jobs, such as vacuum cleaning, floor cleaning and lawn mowing. While they have been on the market for several years, 2006 saw an explosion in the number of domestic robots sold. By 2006, iRobot had sold more than 2 million vacuuming robots. They tend to be relatively autonomous, usually only requiring a command to begin their job. They then proceed to go about their business in their own way. At such, they display a good deal of agency, and are considered intelligent robots.



* Telerobots: When a human cannot be present on site to perform a job because it is dangerous, far away, or inaccessible, teleoperated robots, or telerobots are used. Rather than following a predetermined sequence of movements a telerobot is controlled from a distance by a human operator. The robot may be in another room or another country, or may be on a very different scale to the operator. A laparoscopic surgery robot such as da Vinci allows the surgeon to work inside a human patient on a relatively small scale compared to open surgery, significantly shortening recovery time.[45] An interesting use of a telerobot is by the author Margaret Atwood, who has recently started using a robot pen (the Longpen) to sign books remotely. The Longpen is similar to the Autopen of the 1800s. This saves the financial cost and physical inconvenience of traveling to book signings around the world.[48] At the other end of the spectrum, iRobot ConnectR robot is designed to be used by anyone to stay in touch with family or friends from far away. One robot in use today, Intouchhealth's RP-7 remote presence robot, is being used by doctors to communicate with patients, allowing the doctor to be anywhere in the world. This increases the number of patients a doctor can monitor.

* Military robots: Teleoperated robot aircraft, like the Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, are increasingly being used by the military. These robots can be controlled from anywhere in the world allowing an army to search terrain, and even fire on targets, without endangering those in control. Many of these robots are teleoperated, but others are being developed that can make decisions automatically; choosing where to fly or selecting and engaging enemy targets.Hundreds of robots such as iRobot's Packbot and the Foster-Miller TALON are being used in Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. military to defuse roadside bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in an activity known as Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD). Autonomous robots such as MDARS and Seekur are being developed to perform security and surveillance tasks at military facilities to address manpower shortages as well as keeping troops out of harm's way. The Crusher Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) is being developed to perform military missions autonomously.

* Elder Care: The population is aging in many countries, especially Japan, meaning that there are increasing numbers of elderly people to care for but relatively fewer young people to care for them.Humans make the best carers, but where they are unavailable, robots are gradually being introduced.

with those helps of robots, people make their lives more easier, in which they can give all the task to their robots, but with that we are not sure if that robot really performs better and can meet our expectations.

New Scientist Special Reports On Key Topics In Science And Technology: Robots. As stated in Duncan Graham-Rowe's Instant Expert - Robots:"Today, over one million household robots, and a further 1.1 million industrial robots, are operating worldwide. Robots are used to perform tasks that require great levels of precision or are simply repetitive and boring. Many also do jobs that are hazardous to people, such as exploring shipwrecks, helping out after disasters, studying other planets and defusing bombs or mines. Robots are increasingly marching into our lives. In the future, robots will act as carers, medics, bionic enhancements, companions, entertainers, security guards, traffic police and even soldiers.".

they can help us in which people can avoid to do jobs that are dangerous to their lives and health, robots can help us in a way that they can perform jobs that human cannot do.; with those help people can really have advantages of having robots in our surroundings and even to our workplace.

Robots and the Rest of Us. View by Bruce Sterling. Wired Magazine (May 2004; Issue 12.05). "Since when do machines need an ethical code? For 80 years, visionaries have imagined robots that look like us, work like us, perceive the world, judge it, and take action on their own. The robot butler is still as mystical as the flying car, but there's trouble rising in the garage. In Nobel's vaulted ballroom, experts uneasily point out that automatons are challenging humankind on four fronts. First, this is a time of war. ... The prospect of autonomous weapons naturally raises ethical questions. ... The second ominous frontier is brain augmentation, best embodied by the remote-controlled rat recently created at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn. ... Another troubling frontier is physical, as opposed to mental, augmentation. ... Frontier number four is social: human reaction to the troubling presence of the humanoid. ... If the [First International Symposium on Roboethics] offers a take-home message, it's not about robots, but about us."

SYSTEMS ETHICS
What benefit is gained for an ethics of technology from insight into the
altered character of technology, from insight, namely, into the character of
technology as a system, which it has become? Recognition of the systemic
character of technology makes clear to us the need for a conceptually new
approach to ethical questions. Once we understand that technology has become the
new habitat within which we move, it follows immediately that traditional ethical
approaches no longer measure up to the problems we face. That is why the last
two decades have witnessed a great deal of discussion about the need for a new
ethics. The underlying idea is that traditional morality, and reflection upon it, are
tied to particular action situations. As a result of the development of science and
technology, however, we have moved ever further from the "traditional"
situation and the conditions for human action given with it. The shifts that have
taken place are captured in the concept of the technological society, a type of
society in which technology has become the habitat in which human actions
ordinarily take place. Now, the crux of the matter is that both the particular
context of action and actions within that context have become objects of ethical
reflection. While the context was traditionally given and was, as such, a fixed
point of departure for ethical reflection, that context itself has now become, as a
result of the altered, systemic character of modern technology, an object of
human action and manipulation. Ethics of technology therefore can no longer be
only a matter of asking how a person should use a particular machine or artifact
for some purpose or another. At least as important today are the normative
questions concerning how we should shape, rearrange and adapt the
infrastructures of our technological environment to form a healthy and sane
habitat for humans to live in.

Sometimes we should ourselves if modern technologies could really help us. because it may also affect our lives.


In this connection information technology and computer technology are of
much greater importance than is ordinarily perceived. Insofar as the influence of
the technological environment on people’s thinking is concerned, the German
information pedagogue Haefner (1984) has observed that the autonomous
self-determining subject of traditional humanism has long since been eliminated in
the strongly integrated and highly structured technological society. Since the rise
of information technology, freedom of action has been tied more and more to
various networks, and there is in many places just a rudimentary remainder of
responsibility and personal competence. Haefner (1984, 89) adduces many
examples from everyday life. The ground stewardess no longer organizes the
seating for passengers on board, reservations and bookings are done by an
apparatus with a built-in calculating program; the pilot in the cockpit is dependent
upon automated navigation systems; the soldier who wants to know about troop
movements in enemy territory no longer looks at the situation through his own
binoculars but must instead pore over computer enhanced satellite images. Here
two things are going on that affect the individual’s position. First, specific human
competencies pale and are transferred to integrated systems, entailing at the same
time a devaluation of specific responsibilities. These are now located somewhere
in the systems of which people have become components and over which they no
longer have any individual control. Many people feel entirely lost in this situation,
run aground, as it were, in a network of electronics. In this way modern
information technology sets tottering one’s belief in his or her own autonomous
competency to act and to bear responsibility. In this situation many people become
deeply uncertain of their own identity. Who is the person, really, that is being
increasingly integrated into collective structures? Information technology
radicalizes the situation of the technological society, as we described it briefly
above. It makes possible the full integration of human beings into technological
infrastructures. People and things come to function in the same way as elements
within comprehensive systems; this degrades the being-as-a-subject of the
individual into an object of manipulation.

Shall humanity use modern technology to attain a new level of integration
in which the personal ego is subordinated to a "collectivity"? Shall the picture of
the autonomous person as the equal image of God be replaced by a
collective-integrated "human system" as a counterpart of the divine creator? Can
and may people resign from their individual responsibility and leave guidance and
control to an integrated system?


those questions may also affect our decisions in using modern technologies in everyday life.

The questions Haefner poses arise from his broad knowledge and
experience with the computerization of society. Computer and information
technologies reinforce certain tendencies that make people appear to be prinsoners
of the technological environment they themselves have created. Many see no
alternative but to adapt to the technological systems in which they live. In this way
the technological environment generates a systems ethics that we may call an
ethics of adaptation. The normativity of human actions is derived from the
rationale of collective infrastructures. Haefner illustrates what we observed
earlier, namely, that the technological environment has an influence on the
framework of ethical thinking that one ought not to underestimate. The field
influences the direction of thought: people around the world begin to think in a
manner consistent with what they experience in everyday life. However, the
direction of thought may also influence the field: it is not difficult, especially
where information technology is concerned, to find an illustration of how a
technologically conditioned direction of thought, namely a technological world
view, influences the field of the technological society, which is to say that the
world begins to appear as people see it to be. An example from the systems
thinker Smon will help to make this clear. For this article a few observations will
have to suffice.

ETHICS AND THE SYSTEMIC CHARACTER OF
MODERN TECHNOLOGY


A distinguishing feature of today’s world is that technology has built the
house in which humanity lives. More and more, our lives are lived within the
confines of its walls. Yet this implies that technology entails far more than the
material artifacts surrounding us. Technology is no longer simply a matter of
objects in the hands of individuals; it has become a very complex system in which
our everyday lives are embedded. The systemic character of modern technology
confronts us with relatively new questions and dimensions of human
responsibility. Hence this paper points out the need for exploring systems ethics as
a new field of ethics essential for managing our technological world and for
transforming it into a sane and healthy habitat for human life. Special attention is
devoted to the introduction of information technology, which will continue
unabated into coming decades and which is already changing our whole world of
technology.

Cloning is the process of creating an identical copy of something. In biology, it collectively refers to processes used to create copies of DNA fragments (molecular cloning), cells (cell cloning), or organisms. The term also covers when organisms such as bacteria, insects or plants reproduce asexually.

For me, cloning has its set of advantages and disadvantages. For one, cloning can be very helpful most especially in the near future where endangered or extinct animals can be reproduced. In a way, people will be able to revive what animals have been lost. On the other hand, cloning endangered species is a highly ideological issue. Many conservation biologists and environmentalists vehemently oppose cloning endangered species — not because they think it won't work but because they think it may deter donations to help preserve natural habitat and wild animal populations.

Research on technologies being developed today that can affect the way we live tomorrow (eg. robotics, nanotechnology, etc.). How will these technologies change us?

There are many advantages to human cloning, and several reasons why it would be necessary to do so. If people are exceptionally intelligent, or exceptionally attractive or possess a desired quality then to clone this person would create more of the same intelligent/attractive people but cloning a human being may cause many problems, as the individual and his clones will all be the same.

In the future, cloning can change our lives because it has the capacity to reverse our own aging process. Each cloned body cell is a brand new cell. It is the exact copy from an existing cell but is has the advantage that it is not as old as the model.
Cloning could also help infertile couples if they want to have children. The solution is called "in vitro fertilization": One single egg cell has to be taken from the woman′s ovary and put into a dish where it is fertilized with a sperm cell of the man. The fertilized egg cell is than placed into the woman′s womb.

I myself do not agree with cloning bec I think it's inappropriate to mess with the natural order of things...

mark ramos wrote:New Scientist Special Reports On Key Topics In Science And Technology: Robots. As stated in Duncan Graham-Rowe's Instant Expert - Robots:"Today, over one million household robots, and a further 1.1 million industrial robots, are operating worldwide. Robots are used to perform tasks that require great levels of precision or are simply repetitive and boring. Many also do jobs that are hazardous to people, such as exploring shipwrecks, helping out after disasters, studying other planets and defusing bombs or mines. Robots are increasingly marching into our lives. In the future, robots will act as carers, medics, bionic enhancements, companions, entertainers, security guards, traffic police and even soldiers.".

they can help us in which people can avoid to do jobs that are dangerous to their lives and health, robots can help us in a way that they can perform jobs that human cannot do.; with those help people can really have advantages of having robots in our surroundings and even to our workplace.

I agree. Robots could really be of help to human work. Machines and the like can make endeavors easy in ways which there are limits to what human can do in the aspect of safety. Unless the robot has a biomechanical structure, it is immune to diseases. In diffusing bombs and mines, in cases that these accidentally explode, these robots have tolerance for injury for robots do not bleed. They may shutdown or break but never will they leak blood.

From www.robotstxt.org

Robots have been operating in the World-Wide Web for over a year. In that time they have performed useful tasks, but also on occasion wreaked havoc on the networks.
The World Wide Web has become highly popular in the last few years, and is now one of the primary means of information publishing on the Internet. When the size of the Web increased beyond a few sites and a small number of documents, it became clear that manual browsing through a significant portion of the hypertext structure is no longer possible, let alone an effective method for resource discovery.
This problem has prompted experiments with automated browsing by "robots". A Web robot is a program that traverses the Web's hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced. These programs are sometimes called "spiders", "web wanderers", or "web worms". These names, while perhaps more appealing, may be misleading, as the term "spider" and "wanderer" give the false impression that the robot itself moves, and the term "worm" might imply that the robot multiplies itself, like the infamous Internet worm. In reality robots are implemented as a single software system that retrieves information from remote sites using standard Web protocols.

ROBOT USES

1.Statistical Analysis
The first robot [3] was deployed to discover and count the number of Web servers. Other statistics could include the average number of documents per server, the proportion of certain file types, the average size of a Web page, the degree of interconnectedness, etc.

2.Maintenance
One of the main difficulties in maintaining a hypertext structure is that references to other pages may become "dead links", when the page referred to is moved or even removed. There is currently no general mechanism to proactively notify the maintainers of the referring pages of this change. Some servers, for example the CERN HTTPD, will log failed requests caused by dead links, along with the reference of the page where the dead link occurred, allowing for post-hoc manual resolution. This is not very practical, and in reality authors only find that their documents contain bad links when they notice themselves, or in the rare case that a user notifies them by e-mail.

3.Mirroring
Mirroring is a popular technique for maintaining FTP archives. A mirror copies an entire directory tree recursively by FTP, and then regularly retrieves those documents that have changed. This allows load sharing, redundancy to cope with host failures, and faster and cheaper local access, and off-line access.

4.Resource discovery
Perhaps the most exciting application of robots is their use in resource discovery. Where humans cannot cope with the amount of information it is attractive to let the computer do the work. There are several robots that summarise large parts of the Web, and provide access to a database with these results through a search engine.

Disadvantages of Robot-Assisted Surgery
There are several disadvantages to these systems. First of all, robotic surgery is a new technology and its uses and efficacy have not yet been well established. To date, mostly studies of feasibility have been conducted, and almost no long-term follow up studies have been performed. Many procedures will also have to be redesigned to optimize the use of robotic arms and increase efficiency. However, time will most likely remedy these disadvantages.

Another disadvantage of these systems is their cost. With a price tag of a million dollars, their cost is nearly prohibitive. Whether the price of these systems will fall or rise is a matter of conjecture. Some believe that with improvements in technology and as more experience is gained with robotic systems, the price will fall.[6] Others believe that improvements in technology, such as haptics, increased processor speeds, and more complex and capable software will increase the cost of these systems.[9] Also at issue is the problem of upgrading systems; how much will hospitals and healthcare organizations have to spend on upgrades and how often? In any case, many believe that to justify the purchase of these systems they must gain widespread multidisciplinary use.[9]

Another disadvantage is the size of these systems. Both systems have relatively large footprints and relatively cumbersome robotic arms. This is an important disadvantage in today's already crowded-operating rooms.[9] It may be difficult for both the surgical team and the robot to fit into the operating room. Some suggest that miniaturizing the robotic arms and instruments will address the problems associated with their current size. Others believe that larger operating suites with multiple booms and wall mountings will be needed to accommodate the extra space requirements of robotic surgical systems. The cost of making room for these robots and the cost of the robots themselves make them an especially expensive technology.


www.medscape.com

Nanotechnology refers broadly to a field of applied science and technology whose unifying theme is the control of matter on the atomic and molecular scale, normally 1 to 100 nanometers, and the fabrication of devices with critical dimensions that lie within that size range.

It is a highly multidisciplinary field, drawing from fields such as applied physics, materials science, interface and colloid science, device physics, supramolecular chemistry (which refers to the area of chemistry that focuses on the noncovalent bonding interactions of molecules), self-replicating machines and robotics, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, biological engineering, and electrical engineering. Much speculation exists as to what may result from these lines of research. Nanotechnology can be seen as an extension of existing sciences into the nanoscale, or as a recasting of existing sciences using a newer, more modern term. --wikipedia.org

Cancer
The small size of nanoparticles endows them with properties that can be very useful in oncology, particularly in imaging. Quantum dots (nanoparticles with quantum confinement properties, such as size-tunable light emission), when used in conjunction with MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), can produce exceptional images of tumor sites. These nanoparticles are much brighter than organic dyes and only need one light source for excitation. This means that the use of fluorescent quantum dots could produce a higher contrast image and at a lower cost than today's organic dyes. Another nanoproperty, high surface area to volume ratio, allows many functional groups to be attached to a nanoparticle, which can seek out and bind to certain tumor cells. Additionally, the small size of nanoparticles (10 to 100 nanometers), allows them to preferentially accumulate at tumor sites (because tumors lack an effective lymphatic drainage system). A very exciting research question is how to make these imaging nanoparticles do more things for cancer.

I say Nanotechnology can change our lives if in the future, we can find ways on how it can 100% aid in curing cancer. It will really be a big step in the technology era if it happens.

Three Laws of Robotics
Asimov also proposed his three "Laws of Robotics", and he later added a "zeroth law".

Law Zero: A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Law One: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, unless this would violate a higher order law.
Law Two: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with a higher order law.
Law Three: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with a higher order law.

source: http://www.wordquests.info/robotics.html

A basic definition: Nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. This covers both current work and concepts that are more advanced.

In its original sense, 'nanotechnology' refers to the projected ability to construct items from the bottom up, using techniques and tools being developed today to make complete, high performance products.

When K. Eric Drexler (right) popularized the word 'nanotechnology' in the 1980's, he was talking about building machines on the scale of molecules, a few nanometers wide—motors, robot arms, and even whole computers, far smaller than a cell. Drexler spent the next ten years describing and analyzing these incredible devices, and responding to accusations of science fiction. Meanwhile, mundane technology was developing the ability to build simple structures on a molecular scale. As nanotechnology became an accepted concept, the meaning of the word shifted to encompass the simpler kinds of nanometer-scale technology. The U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative was created to fund this kind of nanotech: their definition includes anything smaller than 100 nanometers with novel properties.

Much of the work being done today that carries the name 'nanotechnology' is not nanotechnology in the original meaning of the word. Nanotechnology, in its traditional sense, means building things from the bottom up, with atomic precision. This theoretical capability was envisioned as early as 1959 by the renowned physicist Richard Feynman.

"I want to build a billion tiny factories, models of each other, which are manufacturing simultaneously. . . The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big." — Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner in physics

Based on Feynman's vision of miniature factories using nanomachines to build complex products, advanced nanotechnology (sometimes referred to as molecular manufacturing) will make use of positionally-controlled mechanochemistry guided by molecular machine systems. Formulating a roadmap for development of this kind of nanotechnology is now an objective of a broadly based technology roadmap project led by Battelle (the manager of several U.S. National Laboratories) and the Foresight Nanotech Institute.

Shortly after this envisioned molecular machinery is created, it will result in a manufacturing revolution, probably causing severe disruption. It also has serious economic, social, environmental, and military implications.

source: http://www.crnano.org/whatis.htm