The Pursuit of Intelligent Machines – Mass Customization & 3D Printing

New 3D technology allows for precision printing on a nanoscale. In a process called two-photon lithography, tiny structures on a nanometer scale can be printed. Using a liquid resin hardened by a laser beam, the printer can create structures as little as a hundred nanometers in width. The big breakthrough by the materials science team at the Vienna University of Technology is not just about the precision of the 3D printing but also about the speed of the device. Although the scale is nano the device can lay down resin at a rate of 5 meters per second.

Technical University of Vienna has developed a 3D laser printer capable of nanoscale printing. The object in this picture is a mere 285 nanometers. Source: Vienna University of Technology

When the resin is exposed to the laser light it becomes solid. Unlike conventional 3D printers that create models one layer at a time, the technology developed at the University can print solid material anywhere in the design.

What are the applications for this type of 3D printing? Here are just a few:

1. Organic Tissue – Creating scaffoldings for living cells to attach to in growing organs and human tissue for transplant and laboratory study.
2. Medical Devices – nano-sized technologies for diagnosis and repair related to human diseases
3. Electronic Devices – micro level components for semiconductors and chips
4. Optics – nano-sized lenses for photonics and lasers

Biomedicine – Part 8: Robots to the Rescue – Robots that work on the inside

In our last blog we introduced HeartLander, a device that when inserted into the chest cavity can deliver medication, ablation therapy and provide assistance in lead placement for pacing the heart muscle. HeartLander’s developers hope to shrink it to 3 millimetres from its current size, 8.5 mm. Devices of this type represent the start of a new use of robotic devices built to operate autonomously within a human body. We’ll look at where the technology is today and what we can expect in the near future.

In the world of internal medical robots HeartLander is a giant. Researchers have much smaller in mind when they conjure up micro-robot designs. These researchers develop robots on a nanoscale. We have broached this subject before in a blog and stated at the time of writing that there were no existing biomedical nanobots. That remains true but researchers at ETH Zürich have been building what they call micro-robots that are bacterial-scaled measuring lengths of between 5 and 15 nanometers.  Called Artificial Bacterial Flagella or ABF for short, these devices swim like bacteria with corkscrew tails.

ETH Zürich are building micro-robots as small as bacteria, observable only under a microscope. Source: Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems/ETH Zürich

Made by depositing vaporized indium, gallium, arsenic and chromium onto a surface substrate a few atoms thick, the ABFs are patterned using lithography and etching. When thin sliced they naturally form the curled ribbon corkscrew you see in the picture above. The ABF head seen on the right contains a tri-layer film of chromium, nickel and gold. Nickel’s magnetic properties make it possible to use an external magnetic field to provide locomotion. The ABF uses helical propulsion (the same method of locomotion used by many bacterium) to swim through liquid at speeds of up to 20 nanometers at present with plans to increase it to 100 nanometers. Compare that to E. coli which swims at 30 nanometers per second.

To give ABFs autonomous power researchers are looking at thin-film rechargeable batteries. Currently these batteries can be manufactured and shaped with thicknesses of less than 50 nanometers. Chemical fuel sources may prove to be even more promising. An ABF running on energy it harvests from the blood would be capable of running indefinitely within a body harvesting glucose and oxygen to provide motive and computing power. Some researchers are looking at using bacteria as an ABF, modifying a living cell by attaching nanoparticles to it so that it can be mobilized for biomedical purposes.

What can ABFs do that current biomedical technology cannot?

• Targeted delivery of drugs to a specific area in the body reducing the total risk to the body of side effects. This kind of therapy can even be sub-cellular, delivering medicine to alter genes within a chromosome.
• Placement of radioactive seeds near tumor cells. Called brachytherapy, targeted radiation therapy delivers a killing dose only to selected cells, leaving healthy cells alone.
• Delivering heat therapy called thermoablation to selected cells to destroy them without damaging healthy surrounding tissue. The ABF’s magnetic properties would prove useful for this type of therapy.
• Implanting of stem cells using the ABF as the carrier. Stem cells could then be delivered to an area of the body to regenerate hearing, site, organs and bones.
• Collecting tissue samples for biopsy. The ABF would excise a small sample and when excreted or removed from the body allow for quick on-the-spot analysis to determine if cancer is present.
• ABFs could be used as scaffolding material similar to the way stents are used today. But the ABF scaffolding would be on a nanoscale to act as cellular building blocks for regrowing blood vessels, nerves and organs. As small as today’s stents are, an ADF could act as a stent in the smallest of blood vessels, or a group of them could be combined to form a larger scaffold.
• ABFs could be used to block or occlude blood vessels feeding a tumor causing the tumor to starve and die.
• ABFs with specialized implanted electrodes could be used to restore severed nerves in a spinal column or provide neural connections to reverse brain damage.
• Remote sensing represents one of the most promising uses of ABFs. An ABF could be packed with instrumentation to measure blood-oxygen levels, arterial flow, blood pressure and other vital signs instantly transmitting the results to external monitors.
• ABFs introduced into a patient suffering from multiple injuries could hover at sites where organ damage or  internal bleeding has been identified and constantly provide status updates to physicians dealing with the emergency.
• Fetal surgery represents a promising field for the use of ABFs, providing doctors with the means to correct congenital heart defects in utero, or performing ablation therapy to deal with congenital malformations, or clearing obstructions in blood vessels and the urinary tract, or replacing needles to collect samples for amniocentesis and other fetal tests

Currently ABFs are confined to the research laboratory. But soon we will microscopically see these devices applied to all kinds of medical procedures reducing the need for surgical procedures, minimizing the side affects of cancer chemotherapy, and giving biomedical professionals a new set of tools for tackling conditions for which current medical practice has few solutions.

For those developing this technology it’s a question of tinkering with the power source to come up with the best way to deploy micro-robots.

The Pursuit of Intelligent Machines: Part 5 – The Human-Machine Interface

Remember the Six Million Dollar Man? Colonel Steve Austin, an astronaut, crashes a test plane and is badly injured. Scientists and physicians reconstruct him using bionic parts. This TV series that aired from 1974 to 1978 speaks of a future when humans and machines become one.  The Six Million Dollar Man soon begat The Bionic Woman, ensuring that not only the male species but also females could be half human, half machine. The premise of the Robocop movies is similar, marrying machine technology with a badly injured human to create a cyborg. Not to be outdone, Star Trek introduced an entire galactic cyborg species called The Borg, a culture that acquired intelligent humanoid civilizations and integrated them into a collective through the implanting of nano devices, body parts with specialized tool appendages, and linked them together through a hive mind.

Is this our 21st century future, a dehumanizing of our species as we integrate machine parts to replace our mortal ones? This posting is sub-titled, The Human-Machine Interface. Technically a human-machine interface is defined as the means by which a person interacts with a machine. For example the mouse and keyboard on your computer are a human-machine interface. A joystick is a video game human-machine interface. A steering wheel on an automobile is a human-machine interface. That is not the kind of interface we are going to explore in this discussion.

On July 17, 2008, scientists got together for a conference in London, England, hosted by Dr. Nick Bostrom, Director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute.  In looking at the future of technology and our species conference scientists discussed biotechnology, molecular nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence and the potential usage of these technologies to improve humanity physically, emotionally and intellectually. This combination both human and technology would lead to a new form of post-human life according to Bostrom. “We will begin to….manage our own human biology….the changes will be faster and more profound than the very, very slow changes that would occur over tens of thousands of years as a result of natural selection and biological evolution.”

The futurist, Dr. Ray Kurzweil believes that “this will happen faster than people realize.” He goes on to predict “the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots.” Forever an optimal futurist, Kurzweil has been equally right and wrong in his predictions since he began his inventive pursuits in the latter part of the 20th century. But his ultimate prediction is based on some pretty hard science and technology that is rapidly evolving today.

Kurzweil talks about an approaching singularity, a point in time when we as humans will become interchangeable with the machine technologies we have created. Immortality will be the outcome with our biological entities morphing into the technological world. He predicts we will have the capability to upload our minds to the Internet. We will be capable of doing this because the pace of electronic evolution is such that machine memory and processor speeds will dwarf our human brain. When you consider the evolution of the transistor and  microprocessors, Moore’s Law, the development of biological computing, and neurogrid computing, Kurzweil’s predictions of machine intelligence surpassing our human brain within the next 30 years seems quite reasonable. He prophecies, “we will increasingly become software entities.”

The Biotechnology Revolution

Biotechnology will be one of the driving forces behind this evolution to a human-machine merger and we will be exploring this subject in greater depth in future postings. But it is clear today that medical research is giving us a better understanding of the way DNA and RNA operate. We are starting to see gene therapy emerge as a way of treating intractable diseases. Just look at three very recent headlines to get a sense of the rapid progress being made by scientists.

Gene Therapy May Stall Inherited Emphysema

Gene Therapy and Stem Cells Save Limb

In New Way to Edit DNA, Hope for Treating Disease

We are entering a medical age where we can target specific diseases with cures that manipulate the very basic constructs of life itself, our DNA and RNA. We are beginning to move out of the realm of hit and miss medicine and through gene manipulation and therapy we can begin to reverse the onset of disease and aging.

The Nanotechnology Revolution

Nanotechnology is another driving force behind the merging of humans and machines. Today one can subscribe to a journal called Nanomedicine. In this journal you can read about research on using nanobots and nano-particles for diagnostic and interventional medical procedures as well as for creating cures for diseases. Nanotechnology in medicine is being used to deal with appetite control, bone and blood replacement, cancer, diabetes and more. You can view a good list of current nanomedicine applications by clicking on the link provided.

We are today in hot pursuit of creating the first nanobots or nano robots that can navigate through our blood stream like the submarine of Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage.  These include:

• respirocytes, a robotic red blood cell
• chromallocytes, mobile cell-repair nanobots that can be inserted into the body on replacement therapy missions targeting specific tissues or organs
• microbivores, nanobots designed to destroy pathogens in the blood

Kurzweil states, “Nanotechnology will not just be used to reprogram but to transcend biology and go beyond its limitations by merging with non-biological systems.”

The Artificial Intelligence Revolution

Artificial intelligence is gaining rapidly on our human intelligence.  As background I encourage you to read my previous posting, When will computers become more human. Dr. Bostrom writes about the evolution of artificial super intelligence on his blog site. As we develop computer technology that is capable of being smarter than us and that can enhance its own intelligence, we get into the science fiction that movies like The Matrix portray. Of course The Matrix describes the dark side of such a super intelligence.

There is a far more promising line of research which combines artificial intelligence and biology to create the ability for humans to manipulate a cursor on a computer screen, or control the electronics and motor controls of an artificial limb using thoughts. Today the military is spending significant sums on developing these types of human-machine interfaces.

Speculating further one can envision the ability of humans to interface with avatars through the Internet or its successors experiencing virtual or real worlds where physically humans cannot go. Just such a scenario is portrayed in James Cameron’s new movie, Avatar, where a human interfaces with an artificial life created to survive on a planet that is inhospitable to our species.

Superintelligence through artificial means may go an entirely different route if current research into Parkinson’s Disease is evident. Today we are using nanotechnology to implant devices into the brain to not only treat Parkinson’s but other neurological diseases such as epilepsy and depression. These implants stimulate neurons to supplant the brain’s own signals or record actual brain signals and reroute them. Such technology has the potential to be used to enhance human intelligence by artificial means.