Surrogacy and the Brain

So a while back I saw the movie "Surrogates", directed by Jonathan Mostow, and starring Bruce Willis. The movie was an adoption of the comic by Robert Vendetti which I've read awhile back also. The story is set in the year 2054, when almost everyone stays in their home, while androids (Surrogates) do everything in the physical world. The idea was that the can stay safe because their physical body would not be damage, via car accident, murder, etc. And how the Surrogates work, was that the human brain would be linked up with their surrogate and would therefore control the movement and various functions of the android body; just as we can to our own body. (very much like how the artificial blue aliens bodies in the 2009 hit movie AVATAR, directed by James Cameron, works)

Now the idea of us controlling robots are not far fetched. "The interpretation of getting brain signal on simple tasks to some extent worked out", stated Homayoon Kazerooni, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. So we can already do some of the more simpler things, that a Surrogate can do. We can maybe only see what the robot can see through a computer monitor, or hear what the robot hear through a digital speaker. But some scientist believe we are not far from that the ideology of Surrogacy. In fact the idea and science behind the movie was created based on what we can already accomplish with neuroscience and robotics. Trevor Blackwell, the CEO of ANYBOTS stated, "You can be virtually present with a robot, we can already do that; and from there its just a matter of making those robots more sophisticated, and more life-like".



The reason why we can't do yet do what a Surrogate can do is due to our limited understanding of how our brain work, and how android engineering technology work. Scientists have yet to exhaust the diverse patterns of the brain, both its patterns of unity as much as patterns of plurality.  The brain activity is impossible to interpret, the brain waves and groups of neurological pulses.

As of today, many test and experiments have been done that demonstrates technologies of this degree, known as biotech. Animals (mostly monkeys) have been the test subjects of many of these experiments, with possible results. In this Experiment Here, a monkey ate a banana with a bionic arm just by thinking. And this experiment Here is a monkey walked on a treadmill with bionic legs controlled by its thoughts.

But is this really what we want? Do we really want to stay home everyday, lying around and look at everything through a robot? In a way, we are already doing that, to an extent. As of 2010, there are 6,845,609,960 people in the world, and 1,966,514,816 of them are internet users. In America, teenagers could spend as much as 31 hours per week online alone, that excluding the time they spend on computer offline. Ironically, the story of Surrogate was written as a respond to obsessions with online gaming and social networking.

Other References:
http://www.realapologetics.org/blog/2010/01/19/surrogates-and-its-bioethical-implications/
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm