back to article Captain Cyborg: Computers are alive, like bats or cows

Consummate attention-seeker Kevin Warwick has admitted to snooping on the public in a previous life. Warwick made the creepy confession on Radio 4, recalling an earlier job as a GPO engineer: "I remember taking ten different calls and plugging them all together; one call would continue, the other nine would listen in. Then I'd …

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  1. Dropper

    I have a question..

    If I superglue ICs to my forehead and staple RFID chips to my dog can I call myself a professor too? If not, any idea which website he bought his degrees from? Anyway he's wrong. Unless computers can provide sexual favours and then decide to withold them, women will still control men as neatly as they do now.

  2. Marky W

    Acrostically speaking...

    ...Kevin is a:

    Time

    Wasting

    Academic

    Tutor

    1. BorkedAgain
      Coat

      Indeed.

      Kevin, Ever Voluble, Is Not

      Terribly Humble, Even

      Considering Urgent National Treasure.

      1. Daniel 1

        Indeed

        Most people who insist on inserting solid objects into their bodies end up in A&E with implausibly embarrassing explanations as to how they got there.

        Kevin Warwick does this, and he becomes a "cyborg".

  3. Matthew Smith

    Radio 4 rentagob

    Michale Buerk and Kevin Warwick met a couple of years back on The Moral Maze. Mr Buerk wasn't very impressed with him then either.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Professor is a title, as is Fellow of the IEE.

    Warwick is a disgrace to his adopted profession, and anyone taking him seriously or helping him further his media-tarte ambitions (which I happily believed had ended, until recently) belongs in an institution.

    Warwick himself is already in at least two insitutions: in one, he is for some reason afforded the title Professor, and in the other he is not only afforded the title Fellow of the Institution (of Electrical Engineers, or some such), he is also given full glossy coverage in it's month journal (called T3 or something like that, I forget, as even the cat refuses to read it these days).

    Warwick was on BBC R4 Today not many weeks ago too.

    Presumably he has a book or TV series or pension shortfall or something to publicise?

    Paris has nice tartes.

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: Professor

      "Warwick himself is already in at least two insitutions: in one, he is for some reason afforded the title Professor"

      That's how academia works, with or without *formal* support for the idea of tenure. If you start sacking your professors as soon as they stray from your rather idea of sensible, you end up with mediocrity, which is generally considered a Bad Thing amongst elite institutions.

      Finding Nobel laureates is an expensive business. Think of dear Kevin as a down-payment.

  5. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
    Meh

    What a twonk that man is.

    I have no point to make, I just wanted to air my opinion of him again.

    GJC

  6. Z 1
    Facepalm

    Ach, is this joker still about?

    He's like a very ineffectual Davros, trundling around with RFID chips and other peripherals stapled to himself.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Thanks for the update

    Kevin Warwick really is the Geri Halliwell of the computing world isn't he? You're not quite sure why he's famous, you can't remember anything he's ever done and yet he's always with us.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Err...

      Cybernetics really isn't that much to do with computing though, is it?

      Not all machines are computers, after all.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Go

      Geri

      was in the Spice Girls. If you're over 20 and can't remember any of their songs, you're a liar or lived in a cave during the '90s.

      Kevin Warwick got an RFID implanted in him. Bit interesting, but mainly useless.

      He then got his nervous system wired up to his wife's (and, I think, a robot arm controller). That is really, really cool and fuck anyone who disagrees. Nervous system control over a robot arm and inter-nervous system communications are awesome.

      However, he does seem to be getting more mental as time goes on...

      1. Richard Taylor 2
        Thumb Up

        lived

        in cave. and enjoyed it

        1. Naughtyhorse

          then...

          I name you as Osama Bin Laden, and claim my five pounds

          1. Scorchio!!
            Happy

            Re: then...

            "I name you as Osama Bin Laden, and claim my five pounds"

            'There is no spoon'!

      2. nyelvmark
        Holmes

        Geri was in the spice girls

        <--- Enough said.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Trollface

        Well fuck me then.

        Because I disagree. He didn't connect up "his nervous system", just one tiny bunch of fibers from one sensory-muscular nerve in the arm. So, he could twitch his muscles and have it picked up, and if a current was injected feel a little twinge. This is not particularly advanced in the field of implant technology, as already pointed out elsethread. Biofeedback-controlled artificial limbs have been around for a while now and he's not innovating there either. And, when it comes to it, connecting up his wife to a similar rig (and by the way, that either gives the lie to his bravado claims of how dangerous it was to get implanted, or it exposes him as a callous stonehearted fuck who would risk his wife's mobility to chase his obsessive dream - your choice) is equally far from genuinely interconnecting two nervous systems. So he can twitch his arm muscle and she can feel a twinge in her arm? You could do the same thing entirely externally with an electromyogram on him and a TENS stimulator on her. Or, he could just pull on a string and a boxing-glove on a spring could jump out and punch her in the face; it really isn't fundamentally different.

      4. DJV Silver badge
        Alert

        @AC 16:13 Geri

        "He then got his nervous system wired up to his wife's (and, I think, a robot arm controller). That is really, really cool and fuck anyone who disagrees. Nervous system control over a robot arm and inter-nervous system communications are awesome"

        The most surprising bit about that is the fact that some woman was mental enough to become his wife - what WAS she thinking?

        1. Scorchio!!
          Thumb Up

          Re: @AC 16:13 Geri

          "The most surprising bit about that is the fact that some woman was mental enough to become his wife - what WAS she thinking?"

          Perhaps she was the inspiration for his silliness? Maybe she programmed him:

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTFCwKvlKZo

          http://lyrics.filestube.com/song/9c7a40d451a9f67e03e9,Automatic-Lover.html

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Conway's Game of Life

    If I run Conway's Game of Life on a computer, does it mean the computer is alive? What if nobody is watching it?

    If I pass Kevin Warwick through the 3horsepower fan blades used to cool each rack cabinet of a 1970s mainframe, does it mean that Warwick lives on in the computer, despite being separated into millions and billions ((c) Brian Cox) of pieces?

    If no one ever hears Warwick again, how do we know if he is still insane or not?

    Sounds like Buerk's less of a berk than Warwick is.

  9. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    Happy

    I love our Kev!

    Whenever IT and tech in general are getting dull, up pops dear old Kev to give us a bloody good laugh!

    "Isn't this gloriously self-publicising scaremongering? It seems frankly laughable," wonders Buerk.

    Superb stuff, got our Kev down to a tee!

  10. david 63
    Terminator

    I listemed to this in the car...

    ...it's usually Question Time that has me screaming at the radio like a nutter.

    I think the man has done too many drugs.

    1. Richard Taylor 2
      Facepalm

      On the positive side

      Warwick does discourage the thinking individual from taking drugs......

    2. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

      I suppose many people make the mistake

      "It's usually Question Time that has me screaming at the radio like a nutter."

      Very much like a nutter, because [Question Time] is on BBC 1 television.

      The Radio 4 one is [Any Questions].

  11. OhFFS

    Hmm.. I heard the programme too

    How many of you super-tough armchair flamewarriors would have the balls to have electrodes implanted to your nervous system, without knowing whether it would even be reversible without great injury?

    1. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
      Mushroom

      I would

      If, and only if, there was any point to it. And there was no point to it, he didn't push the boundaries of medical or cybernetic knowledge any further forward, it was all completely average ho-hum, seen-it-before, no-advance-here stuff that was known to be perfectly safe. All it achieved, and all he wanted to achieve, was a load of publicity from a press that didn't understand what he was doing.

      GJC

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Facepalm

      None of us, we're not the fucking stupid!

      See above!

    3. Asgard
      FAIL

      @OhFFS, Seriously, WTF!?

      @OhFFS, "...would have the balls to have electrodes implanted to your nervous system, without knowing whether it would even be reversible without great injury"

      You've been listening way too much to Kevin Warwick's self-publicising bull shit. Much of his claim to fame hinges on his implants, being the first etc..

      Ok lets test that. For a start, "As of April 2009, approximately 188,000 people worldwide who have received cochlear implants".

      ("The first attempted clinical cochlear implant was in 1957 by Djourno and Eyriès. The recipient was implanted with a single channel device").

      Or perhaps you would like to talk to the people with a pacemaker?

      ("The first clinical implantation into a human of a fully implantable pacemaker was in 1958 at the Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden, using a pacemaker designed by Rune Elmqvist and surgeon Åke Senning").

      By the way, Kevin Warwick took his first degree at Aston University in 1976, some almost 2 decades after the above examples. Not such a pioneer now is he and that's just two example that utterly destroy his claim to fame.

      1. BorkedAgain

        Is it worth mentioning...

        ...the RFID implants that my cats had, what, fifteen years ago? Something like that?

        Mind you, they did go on a rampage of attempted world domination shortly afterwards, but that's cats for you...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Err...

          Having an implant inserted into/very close to your brain to monitor and interact with your nervous system is not the same an having an RFID implant, pacemaker or chchlear implat.

          1. The Jase

            phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range

            "Having an implant inserted into/very close to your brain to monitor and interact with your nervous system"

            Full details or I am calling bullshit on this one.

            What implant? How was it tied to the nervous system? How does it interact and monitor the nervous system? What is the point of it?

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              @The Jase

              Here you go from wikipedia, with citation:

              The second stage involved a more complex neural interface which was designed and built especially for the experiment by Dr. Mark Gasson and his team at the University of Reading. This device consisted of an internal electrode array, connected to an external "gauntlet" that housed supporting electronics. It was implanted on 14 March 2002, and interfaced directly into Warwick's nervous system. The electrode array inserted contained 100 electrodes, of which 25 could be accessed at any one time, whereas the median nerve which it monitored carries many times that number of signals. The experiment proved successful, and the signal produced was detailed enough that a robot arm developed by Warwick's colleague, Dr Peter Kyberd, was able to mimic the actions of Warwick's own arm.[26]

              "^ Warwick, K, Gasson, M, Hutt, B, Goodhew, I, Kyberd, P, Andrews, B, Teddy, P and Shad, A (2003). "The Application of Implant Technology for Cybernetic Systems". Archives of Neurology 60 (10): 1369–1373. doi:10.1001/archneur.60.10.1369. PMID 14568806."

              So call bullshit all you want, but it's written up in a respected peer-reviewed journal.

    4. Naughtyhorse
      FAIL

      what bollocks

      hes a dick but not an idiot there never was any risk.

  12. Asgard
    Happy

    Ahh Captain Cyborg has surfaced again. :)

    The guy is a clown. Its entertaining to listen to his laughable scaremongering and over inflated ego of what he has done, but that Wikipedia passage should be reinstated. Kevin Warwick makes some ludicrous attention seeking claims about his field of work and nothing he has done is original (it all has prior art, so to speak), yet his mainstream media persona promotes him as some kind of global research pioneer.

    His mainstream media persona needs some balance, like reinstating that Wikipedia passage.

  13. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
    Boffin

    Makes me glad...

    ...that I turned down the Cybernetics degree course at Reading - although it was before he arrived there, I'd have hated to be associated with him for the rest of my professional life.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Well...

      He was my personal tutor and took me for the subject which covered motors and generators. I have always found him to be a very nice person, who helped my through some pretty tough times (depression) while I was at uni.

      He was always very open about the fact that one of his main tasks was to publicise the department which, as everyone here is banging on about him, seems to be working. Don't let the publicity detract from the fact that he has done some very serious work in the field and raising awareness of the field of Cybernetics, which is still pretty much unheard of, less understood. I'd lay a tenner on the fact that the vast majority of people commenting here don't know what Cybernetics is - at least they don't know until they've gone to wikipedia to look it up...

  14. Alfie
    IT Angle

    This week I shall mostly be called Professor

    He reminds me of Tinribs from Viz.

    Just as funny and just as useful.

  15. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    That was on Tuesday,

    I thought you'd missed it.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    I don't know who this asshole is but . . .

    This reminds me of the time I was working at a newspaper office as the after hours switchboard operator.

    We had 28 lines to the outside, I was 16 years old, the temptation was too much to resist.

    I threw all 28 lines off hook and dialed 'O". I had as many as 28 operators all talking to each other and trying to figure out what was going on. I left them off hook until the operators started hanging up once I could see straight from laughing so hard.

    I only did it that one time, because I knew that I was at the only business in town with so many phone lines and they would figure it out if I kept doing it.

  17. as2003

    Irony much?

    An article about a "consummate attention-seeker Kevin Warwick".

    Mission accomplished. Again.

    1. nyelvmark

      @Irony much?

      Good point - but then he can't lose, can he?

  18. Anonymous Coward
    IT Angle

    Book, due September.

    "Presumably he has a book or TV series or pension shortfall or something to publicise?"

    Book, due September, apparently.

    Is all publicity good publicity, or is it better to use the next few months to widely publicise that he's still [1] a scientifically clueless Z-list media celebrity wannabe and hope the book ends up in the remainder shops sooner rather than later?

    [1] Just like ten years ago:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/08/29/warwick_watch_sfx_lies/

  19. oldcodger
    Joke

    An old joke, maybe its time has come around again

    @Daniel 1 Indeed # Posted Friday 17th June 2011 16:13 GMT

    Quote >>>> Most people who insist on inserting solid objects into their bodies end up in A&E with implausibly embarrassing explanations as to how they got there.

    When I read your comment, it reminded me of the old chestnut:-

    www.fugly.com/audio/585/armageddon_letter.html

    Remember

    Armageddon!!!!

    enjoy

    P

  20. LinkOfHyrule
    Mushroom

    Kev, this is an example of sarcasm

    The man is clearly a fucking genius - I mean come on, he's got a chip in him that opens a door for him - he's the Jesus of Reading!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      And...

      A chip in the brain (well, near it) which operates a robot arm for him...

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Kevin is my cleaning lady.

    n

  22. fridaynightsmoke
    Terminator

    Futility = voltage over current

    Mark my words; one day soon Mr. Warwick will be so hungry for publicity he'll stick a mobile phone up his arse and claim to be a real-life Borg drone, connected to the hive mind of the internet *directly*.

    Mark my words!

  23. nyelvmark

    New to me

    I must have missed out on this guy. I went back and read the stuff from 9-10 years ago. He's really funny. Sadly it seems that the Kevin Warwick Watch blog was discontinued. The URL now leads to an insurance broker (presumably of the same name).

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Running Man

    I think secretly Kevin looks ad Dynamo from The Running Man and thinks "I wanna be him"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Well, then we know the solution

      We need to find a hot babe with a spanish accent willing to turn on the spinklers at the appropriate time after one of his "experiments".

      It is a tough bill to match though: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093894/quotes?qt=qt0458401

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Terminator

    But does he have a Coltan Endoskeleton?

    I think not.....

    All he does is give us real cybernetic organisms a bad name.......

  26. Stuart Halliday
    Facepalm

    Annoying man

    He knows how to press journalist buttons and as long as articles like this gives him Press coverage, he'll make statement after stupid statement that the Press'll just lap up!

  27. anarchic-teapot

    If he really is a cyborg

    he's a pretty low-grade one, as I'm not convinced he'd pass the Turing Test. Unless of course it was administered by someone like Tom Cruise.

  28. Richard Scratcher
    Terminator

    Listen, and understand!

    Captain Cyborg is out there. He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel embarrassment, or stupid, or foolish. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until he is famous.

  29. Barney Carroll
    WTF?

    No scorn from me

    No idea there was this level of contempt for him! I think the man's a laugh. I, for one, welcome our new cyborg overlords' intermediary.

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    paragraph removed ?

    "Warwick's tendency to court the media has led some of his critics to accuse him of concentrating on publicity at the cost of research, grossly exaggerating the importance and implications of his "experiments". For example, the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour complained to the organisers of the 2000 Christmas Lectures about their choice of Kevin Warwick, prior to his appearance. They claimed that "he is not a spokesman for our subject and allowing him influence through the Christmas lectures is a danger to the public perception of science."

    OK, I don't mind. Paragraph re-inserted !

  31. Red Bren
    Coat

    With thanks to Linda Smith

    Don't give him the oxygen of publicity! Or better yet, the oxygen of oxygen!

  32. Peter X

    LulzSec should hack him!

    ...just for the lulz!

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