On his book Inventing Iron Man: The Possibility of a Human Machine
Cover Interview of November 24, 2011
In a nutshell
Inventing Iron Man is a kind of sequel to my earlier book Becoming Batman. That book was about asking how far can our biology take us toward the performance of the ultimately-trained Batman. With Inventing Iron Man the focus is on amplifying human ability with technology and the very question of how we interface with all our technology in the first place.
We have some pretty clunky interfaces (I am using one right now—it’s called a “keyboard”) when we use technology. If the Iron Man suit of armor existed we would never be able to control it with the conventional ways we use technology. Instead I suggest that the Iron Man suit would need to be directly connected to the brain and spinal cord of the user. It would have to be the most complex “brain machine interface” ever developed.
I illustrate this concept using ideas about how the nervous system works, and how things can adapt and change as a result of changes in activity. There really are fewer bigger changes in activity than riding around in an articulated, instrumented, and motorized suit of high-tech armor connected directly to your mind.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Inventing Iron Man is a kind of sequel to my earlier book Becoming Batman. That book was about asking how far can our biology take us toward the performance of the ultimately-trained Batman. With Inventing Iron Man the focus is on amplifying human ability with technology and the very question of how we interface with all our technology in the first place.
We have some pretty clunky interfaces (I am using one right now—it’s called a “keyboard”) when we use technology. If the Iron Man suit of armor existed we would never be able to control it with the conventional ways we use technology. Instead I suggest that the Iron Man suit would need to be directly connected to the brain and spinal cord of the user. It would have to be the most complex “brain machine interface” ever developed.
I illustrate this concept using ideas about how the nervous system works, and how things can adapt and change as a result of changes in activity. There really are fewer bigger changes in activity than riding around in an articulated, instrumented, and motorized suit of high-tech armor connected directly to your mind.