Quadriplegic woman flies F-35 simulator with nothing but her thoughts | Hacker News Reader

Quadriplegic woman flies F-35 simulator with nothing but her thoughts

defensetech.org

62 pointssmacktoward32 comments

Very cool - did she have to think in Russian?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f55QFVx470

I've been messing with something like this for wheelchairs for about a year, but nothing to report.

that was a very disturbing direction for the game to go with many players. considering the ease of losing squad members it got a bit macabre hacking them up for this. heck there is incentive to do it to fully healthy members

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-uzsw0kqw

More appropriate I think

A human "brain in a jar" (as in Motoko Kusanagi) may well be the ultimate fighter control system for a short window of time. (They would have higher G tolerance, lacking a long body to produce pressure gradients.) It would only be a matter of time before G tolerance and processing power were surpassed by electronics based AI.

(Not saying militaries would adopt this as standard. But for a brief time, such pilots would be the smartest, most G tolerant flying sentients.)

R-Type III had a similar setting, where the pilots' limbs are removed in order to withstand the combat environment, and the pilots are connected directly to the pilot unit. http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-TYPE_III#R-9.C3.98.EF.BC.88.E...

Why can't we just have the pilot in a pods/simulators in base and have him/her control the plane remotely? Too much latency?

Seems much safer for the pilot, makes the plane smaller, and there's no worries of G's on the pilot.

The remote pilots will be circling near the battle zone in a 747-400.

A long distance hypervelocity missile, using the same rockets that now can threaten aircraft carriers from many hundreds of miles away, would then be able to take out many squadrons of fighting craft with a single warhead.

There will be a massive replacement of pilots by AI and remote control. At the same time, pilots will persist for longer than some of us technologists think, because it will take us a very long time to surpass or even match the flexibility of a human being on the scene.

We already have drones that are piloted from afar, I don't see why this will ever be needed.

Long distance comm latencies become really significant when you have combined closing speeds well in excess of Mach 2, and aircraft that can accelerate laterally at dozens of g's. Try to solve that with line of sight lasers, and you make yourself vulnerable to an entirely different class of countermeasures. There will be a place for remotely piloted drones, but history has shown that pilots will disappear more slowly than the pundits predict.

It does not say what she actually did though. Some more specifics should have been included as to what she was able to control and the actions of the plane.

Here's the youtube of her flying: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9aMVB7_Mic

She's pretty shaky, I don't think they'll let her fly a real one any time soon! I imagine it gives her an euphoric sense of freedom though.

Weird, the headline says "nothing but her thoughts" but the article describes all kinds of intermediate gear. I know this without even reading the article because the ritual headline tells me its precise content: for some reason every single article on the complex and expensive gear used to replace body parts like arms and legs in this kind of research is referred to as "nothing."

If I ran a startup in this space I'd call it "Nothing Inc" and sell it with the line "Control your world with Nothing!" because apparently most people find that catchy and clever rather than inaccurate and annoying. The life of a pendant is a hard one, I tell you.

It's not that I don't think this tech is cool. I just wish we'd stop referring to complex and expensive equipment as "nothing".

This stuff is amazing.

I think I'm going to add a clause to my living will asking to be hooked up to an EEG and a "see with tongue"[1,2] kind of feedback device if I ever end up in a vegetative or paralyzed state. I don't know if it would work or not, but the results here seem suggestive that it might be possible to learn a whole new set of senses given the time and appropriate gear.

1. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/device-lets-blind-...

2. http://www.seewithtongue.info/

I'm more surprised that there's a conference named "Future of War".

If it leads to better artificial limbs this would be great, though I am curious how small of movements can be detected and acted upon, say to manipulate a pill or syringe. Flying an airplane while neat likely only was changing pitch, direction, and such. If they expand the control where she could by thought manipulate more of the planes cockpit controls it would be very impressive.

Because it takes sophisticated surgery and machine learning to get quality control input from the brain, there is no point in implementing a control fine/responsive enough to handle a syringe. You'd build a robot with enough AI to do the job and just control the general parameters like which syringe to stick to whom.

So that's how the navigators worked in Dune! Now she just needs to think very very fast... Spice must flow.

Key points here are that this brain to computer interface is using electrodes implanted under the skull, for the express purpose of interacting with the outer world, and that the F-35 simulator probably took control input like "left, right, level" etc.

If you'd have read the article a little more carefully and examined the picture, you wouldn't have needed the 'probably' and would have seen that she was controlling her prosthetic limbs, and those are what operated the simulator.

Very impressive.

The lobby will love this. Defense spending with civilian application. I'm thinking small telepresence drones.

Helicopter-parenting via small follow-mode drones.

I don't think I value helicopter parenting enough to spend that much Essence on rigger gear. ;)

Macross Plus!

Haha! One of my most favorite anime from the 90s.

Really glad to see that mentioned on here.

Video of the related neural interface (for the YF-21 "Omega One" fighter aircraft): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSkhkX-MmmE

The highlight of such an interface is increased reaction time and finer-grained control over the vehicle's activities.

However, it pales in comparison to the unmanned fighter, the X-9 "Ghost." This UAV is driven by an AI rather than a human.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hJepWBUqZk

(The X-9 is the red one.)

This seems prescient to current debates regarding UAV and their military capabilities.

nice one, but Clint Eastwood pulled this off way back in 1982 in Firefox (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083943/)

At first glance, the chocolate bar in the title image seems out of place. Pseudo-edit: Upon further reading, it looks like it is part of demonstrating the dexterity of the robotic limb.

P.S. Obligatory Macross Plus reference.

Firefox, not the browser.

a new era for drone strikes,

Wouldn't that be amazing, not only can she be quadriplegic but also depressed

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-g...

Url changed from http://sploid.gizmodo.com/mind-control-breakthrough-quadripl..., which points to this.

If that is the case, how have you solved the problem of increased signal degradation inherent to organo-synthetic transmission?

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