Stargate SG-1: True Science Page #4

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Wherever they go, they become

more intelligent and even more powerful.

At Reading University, Professor Kevin Warwick

is revolutionising robot technology

by studying how they think

and learn.

Warwick's team have been experimenting

on what very basic robots do

when they react with

each other and their environment.

Each of the robots has, I guess,

only about fifty to a hundred brain cells,

so it's equivalent to basic slugs and snails, so

relatively they're quite simple

but we can still look at how they learn.

His robots were not told what to do.

They had to learn for themselves.

What they have is a goal,

and that is:

move forwards, but don't bump into anything,

and hence the robots come up

with different behaviours, different characteristics.

"Do I move to the left?

Do I move backwards?

Do I pirouette?"

And the robots ended up doing things

Warwick's team had never dreamed of.

You get good robots, you get bad robots.

It depends on what their learning experience is like.

We have had in one case a suicidal robot!

Everything it did was wrong

in the end it stopped doing anything!

Only one time we've ever achieved that,

but these extreme cases do happen.

Far from being things that you can programme

and they will always do what you want them to do,

learning robots almost surely

will do what they want to do.

For Kevin Warwick, this means only one thing:

a robot which learns for itself

could end up having ideas of its own

and they might not be that nice.

Machine intelligence has different values,

different ethics to human intelligence.

If it's learning and deciding for itself

who are its friends, who are its enemies,

it's almost surely

gonna be very dangerous for humans.

And me standing there saying, "Aha! You're not

conscious like I am, therefore you can't kill me,"

well, it would just blow my head off and that's it!

Sounds totally Stargate, doesn't it?

And he's taken the idea so seriously that he's been

thinking about an even more sci-fi way to deal with it.

The only possibility I can see

is to upgrade what we are as humans,

to make us into cyborgs,

essentially saying, "OK, if machines

are gonna be more intelligent than humans,

let's join them. Let's become part machines ourselves."

And if that sounds like total fantasy, then get this:

Professor Warwick had a microchip surgically

implanted into the main nerve in his left wrist

as part of a cyborg experiment in 2002.

His robots were then able to interact

directly with his nervous system.

He could control devices like a robot hand,

and a wheelchair, by thought alone.

That's left...

and right.

- Are you enjoying that, Kevin?

- Oh, it's excellent, yeah!

And the chip allowed

information to flow the other way too

from his equipment directly into his brain.

In one experiment, he attached radar sensors

to a baseball cap that fed signals into his mind.

Then, blindfolded, he found that

he was able to see like a bat.

It was a new feeling.

It was a new sensation.

It wasn't as though

it felt like somebody was touching me;

it simply felt

"something is close, on the right or the left."

Listen to me talking to you.

Come over this way. Keep listening to me.

Let's go back to the other way.

Warwick's next sci-fi like experiment will be

to implant a chip right into the middle of his brain.

This way, this way. Pay attention.

And where that takes him as part-robot,

part-human cyborg is anybody's guess.

D'you recognise me?

I am your terminator.

I would love to have some of the

memory capabilities, some of the abilities to

communicate just by thought,

even just having some extra dimensions in my brain

to think not in this limited human form of

three dimensions, but to think in five dimensions.

Wow, wouldn't that be fantastic?

The whole world would seem as a different place to me.

I can't wait for it.

After the break, we'll take on

the biggest scientific mystery of them all.

Time travel?

It seems difficult to believe.

Stargate has been on the air for over eight years,

and has become one of the most

popular science fiction shows in the world.

With its stunning visual effects, exciting storylines

and even if I do say it myself great characters,

it has galvanised audiences.

But the series has made a point of not just looking

at the science fiction of battling aliens, though.

- What?

- They're not multiplying, they're replicating.

What's the difference?

Living organisms multiply.

Machines replicate.

Machines inside the body?

How is that possible?

When I was at the Pentagon, I worked for a year

with a group that studied nanotechnology.

We were looking at it for a lot of different uses.

One of them was medicine.

Yes, you've guessed it.

At the University of Michigan, Doctor James Baker

and his team have combined medicine,

engineering and computer technology to make

nanoparticles.

These tiny particles are so small,

one hundred thousand could fit

into the smallest cell in the human body.

And believe me, at that size,

they are capable of the most incredible things.

We're actually doing surgery on the molecular level,

altering single molecules rather than

going in and grossly cutting things out.

So this is a whole new level of, well sort of,

human engineering that can occur.

His team can engineer these particles

so precisely that when they get in the body,

they act like tiny robot doctors.

They can locate unhealthy cells and

act on them with incredibly specific treatments.

His team have had some spectacular results.

For example, if you want to

deliver a drug to a cancer cell,

the nanoparticle first would find the cancer cells,

it would identify them with an imaging model

so you can actually see the cancer.

It would then tell you what

the genetic abnormalities are in the cancer

and allow you to activate a drug specific

for the abnormality for that cancer.

And that way you could get the cancer

killed without harming the individual.

So that's our real goal

to change cancer to a treatable disease.

And there seems to be no limit

to what nanoparticles can do.

We then could load things that would fluoresce,

under certain conditions, into your bloodstream,

so for example if you had the 'flu,

we'd know that you had a viral infection maybe

before you could even show the symptoms.

I think what nanotechnology could do

is move us from the point of treating disease

to truly the point of preventing disease.

I think nanotechnology has the potential

to fundamentally alter medical care.

From the very beginning,

the producers of "Stargate" have felt very strongly

about the design and feel of the series,

from the look of the military

institution that is the SGC here,

right through to the incredible detail

on the various aliens that we've encountered.

From the warrior Jaffa,

the parasitical Goa'uld,

the friendly Una,

and the all-powerful Asgard,

we've met a bewildering variety of aliens.

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