Selected from inputmag
Written by LaVonne Roberts
Machine Heart Compilation
Editors: Zhang Qian, Mayte
Scott-Morgan as a human is dead, and the future Scott-Morgan will continue to live as a Cyborg cyborg.
Dr. Peter Scott-Morgan, a famous British-American robotics scientist, was almost completely paralyzed—except for his sharp blue-gray eyes. Those eyes are moving all the time to control the mouse on the screen to type text and synthesize speech.
Still, Scott-Morgan, 63, is undaunted. "Paralysis is an engineering problem," he insisted.
He had a solution: to become a "cyborg."
Scott-Morgan and her husband Francis live in torquay, a seaside town in southwest England. In 2017, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neuron disease (MND). Hawking is also afflicted by this disease.
Scott-Morgan and Francis' wedding.
Scott-Morgan has been well known in the UK since the release of the 2020 prime-time Channel 4 documentary Peter: The Human Cyborg and its follow-up memoir, Peter 2.0.
ALS affects motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord that tell muscles what to do. As the disease progresses, the degeneration of motor neurons in the brain interferes with the information transmitted to the body's muscles, subsequently causing muscle atrophy, depriving the patient of the ability to move his arms, legs, and body. Eventually, they also lose the ability to speak, walk, breathe, or swallow. Most patients die of respiratory failure within three to five years of the first onset of symptoms.
In 2017, doctors told Scott-Morgan that he had two more years to live. But four years on, Scott-Morgan is still strong, and he doesn't want to die anytime soon. Dr Brian Dickie, research director at the MND Association in the UK, who is familiar with Scott-Morgan's case, said the roboticist had what the terminally ill community called "hopeless optimism".
At the end of 2021, Scott-Morgan gave an exclusive interview to the media and calmly waited for the first rays of sunshine in 2022.
Scott-Morgan didn't believe in God, he believed that technology would save him. "All of my early science education came from Doctor Who and Star Trek," he said, "and they taught me that if you're smart, brave enough, and have access to technology, anything is possible."
By this time, Scott-Morgan was almost completely "locked": unable to move any part of his body except for his eyes and a few facial muscles. His sense of smell and taste had even disappeared and he couldn't breathe on his own, but his clever brain was still intact.
He now relies on synthetic, custom-made voices to communicate with the outside world and generates a 3D animated image from facial scans. In public speaking, he would display the animated image on a screen on his chest. In order to prolong his life, he also underwent a series of surgeries such as total laryngeal resection, and used techniques such as OpenAI's text deep learning model GPT-2 to break through the limitations of "humans".
Scott-Morgan did this with a global team of technologists, designers, and doctors. He called them "The Rebels." In addition, his Scott-Morgan Foundation is working with companies such as Intel, CereProc, DXC and Lenovo. These companies can provide support for talent, hardware, software, artificial intelligence, and more.
Scott "speaks" through his custom synthesized voice.
The Rebels are working to improve the expressiveness of custom sounds, develop self-driving wheelchairs, and embed smart technology in Scott-Morgan's home.
"With the support of my husband Francis and countless good and distinguished collaborators, I have found that the future that was once dark is now incomparably bright," says Scott-Morgan. His ultimate goal is to control his synthesized speech, animated images, word predictors, self-driving wheelchairs, and exoskeletons through a single user interface. To this end, he plans to increase his reliance on AI.
"Cyborg is just a rhetorical term used to describe the state of a half-human, half-machine," he said, "and unlike the painful, horror stories of being trapped in a skin bag, the brain goes on." It sounds a little sad. If you give it a chance, most of the time, it will forget. As the days went by, I never remembered that I could walk, move, or even talk."
Scott-Morgan says he recently took part in that documentary about him to counter the defeatism surrounding terminal illness in our culture. "Statistically, society just wants people like me to curl up and die at a predetermined time," he said. But I'm going to be a human guinea pig and see how far we can turn science fiction into reality."
A "locked" body
The first time I received a message from Scott-Morgan was in July, when he sent me a 111-page email about his foundation, which he completed in just one month. "Sometimes, I can only design two slides a day," he wrote.
In one of the slides, Scott-Morgan describes a painful night when he couldn't communicate because of a cramp in his foot. Soon after, I noticed that my feet were cramping too. At first, I thought I was having nightmares under the psychological influence of Scott-Morgan, but after a few seconds, my feet were still cramping. It reminds me of Scott-Morgan: What if he couldn't control the cramping pain in his feet
The next morning, I sent Scott-Morgan an email to talk about my experience and express my concerns about him. He responded, "Objectively speaking, it may be painful to temporarily lose the ability to use a high-tech communication system, but what is even more painful is that there is no such system at all, so that you can only be locked in your own corpse, and fall into powerless silence and nightmares."
"Fortunately, we have a well-established high-tech agreement," he added. He suggested that I talk to Lenovo's CTO Thorsten Stremlau.
Lenovo is providing the smart hardware needed to realize Scott-Morgan's vision —smart cameras, eye-tracking headsets, and high-performance computing infrastructure. Thorsten Stremlau said: "In some rare moments, you will see the real power and potential of technology. In these moments, the possibilities seem endless and vital. Meeting Dr. Scott-Morgan was one such moment."
Stremlau was one of Lenovo's earliest project team members and helped Hawking with IT setup for wheelchairs and laptops. Building on this work, Stremlau plans to use cameras and wearables to detect Scott-Morgan's pain or vital sign abnormalities. If he is unable to communicate because he is not wearing a device, the technician will alert his paramedics.
Stremlau said, "The issues we addressed for Scott-Morgan helped advance our disability-related work."
Triple stoma
At the age of 16, Scott-Morgan, a teenager who grew up in Wimbledon, England, wrote an article about how the human brain will be connected to the electronic brain in the future, predicting that "we will be smarter to fuse together than the simple sum of our parts".
In 1984, he published The robotics revolution: The complete guide for managers and engineers, a book about the robots of the future. After earning a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence, he earned his PhD in Robotics from Imperial College London, the first of its kind ever awarded in the UK.
In 2017, Scott-Morgan was diagnosed with ALS. Before being "frozen", he realized that he needed to act quickly to transform his body. He envisioned three procedures: gastrostomy, colostomy, and cystostomy, in which tubes were inserted into his stomach, colon, and bladder, respectively. The surgery will allow Scott-Morgan to take on more nutrients and eliminate the need for a full-time caregiver to help him go to the bathroom. Scott-Morgan calls this "triple-ostomy."
The challenge is that no one with ALS has performed these three procedures. After making up his mind, Scott-Morgan and his family met with the head of ALS at a London hospital to describe his plans. However, as Scott-Morgan recounts in his book, before he could explain his inference, the doctor interrupted him: "I refuse to be involved in anything!"
So Scott-Morgan had to change to a doctor. The new doctor, named Tracy Thomas, couldn't understand Scott-Morgan's thoughts either. "When I said that I was going to put a lot of cutting-edge technology into my disease, the doctor told me that it would be a new frozen hell where no surgeon on this planet would damage a perfectly healthy organ."
This plan is quite radical. To make matters worse, most doctors are reluctant to operate on als patients because general anesthesia can hinder breathing. In addition, some doctors are concerned that surgery may cause patients to develop their disease more quickly.
Eventually, Tracy Thomas was captivated by Scott-Morgan's passion for extending his life and organized a meeting with anesthesiologist Dr. Maree Wright. "When I first heard about it, I wondered why Peter was doing this high-risk surgery," Says Maree Wright, "and there's only one Peter in the world, and he's a trailblazer." Frankly, we need people who can break the mold to make us think and reflect on why we do things a certain way."
Scott-Morgan's desire for life and the enthusiasm and candor he showed caught Maree Wright off guard. This shook her view of how the medical community can treat the disease. If she can help him, the impact on other ALS patients could be staggering.
But first, she had to develop an anesthesia plan, and there was little previous research data on how to anesthetize patients with ALS. Her biggest concern was that Scott-Morgan might not be able to get out of the ventilator after the surgery. Until the last minute, the hospital tried to convince Scott-Morgan not to undergo surgery, but he was determined to move on.
Ultimately, Scott-Morgan's team of doctors and the local NHS hospital made the bold decision to support his aspirations and advance the surgery that would be a milestone for his life.
On July 10, 2018, three surgeries were performed by multiple surgeons and lasted 3 hours and 40 minutes.
Everyone involved was surprised to see Scott-Morgan transferred to the general surgery ward after only one day in the ICU and then sent home 15 days after the operation. Scott-Morgan is proud to say that a medical paper on the procedure was selected as the 2019 Oxford Medical Case Report.
Scott-Morgan 2.0
Immediately after the triple stoma, Scott-Morgan began planning his next surgery, a total laryngectomy, to prevent being choked by his own saliva or unable to get enough oxygen. It was another radical idea that would deprive Scott-Morgan of his ability to speak, but would prolong his life indefinitely.
Scott-Morgan's anesthesiologist, Wright, helped him find the surgeon who did it: Dr Philip Reece, who is also one of Devon's top ear, nose and throat surgeons. Reece agrees with Wright that Scott-Morgan should be able to live as full a life as possible.
Before the surgery began, Scott-Morgan set out to solve another problem—how to create a synthesized sound that sounded like his. He contacted Dr. Matthew Aylett, an authority in the field of voice technology research and development. He is the chief scientific officer of CereProc, the company that created the text-to-speech solution. CereProc is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, where film critic Roger Ebert rebuilt his voice after undergoing throat cancer surgery.
Using the neural text-to-speech system CereWave AI, Dr. Aylett created a digital voice that sounds very close to Scott-Morgan's natural voice. CereProc reproduces emotions by asking speakers to read scripts in different ways, such as calm or tense tones.
As Scott-Morgan's condition progressed, he was unable to form facial expressions, so he wanted a 3D animated avatar that could express emotions and be able to speak. Aylett's team worked with Scott-Morgan to record more than 15 hours of audio and more than 1,000 individual phrases and create avatars.
On October 9, 2019, Scott-Morgan tweeted the last entry of "Peter 1.0."
The next day, Scott-Morgan was thrust into the operating room, the first time ever performed selective laryngectomy in the UK for a patient with ALS. Since then, the Scott-Morgan 2.0 version has been born.
"Being able to make my own sound completely eliminates the pain of giving up biological sounds," says Scott-Morgan. His digital avatar can even sing.
The first incarnation of Scott-Morgan didn't laugh. His new AI avatar was created by Pinewood Studios, a company that digitally copied Carrie Fisher's face for the latest Star Wars movie. The new AI avatar is able to display his emotions, such as laughing, smiling, blinking, and completing his signature move: raising his right eyebrow. The challenge is to synchronize in real time, with voices, lips, and expressions all working together to depict the same emotions, movements that humans take for granted.
AI system
Today, Scott-Morgan can only communicate letter by letter, word by word, through an artificial eye tracking system. DXC is working with the Scott-Morgan Foundation and partners to develop a new context-aware AI system that will radically improve the linguistic naturalness of Peter 2.0.
The next iteration of the software will include a system that will learn from Peter's previous interactions and provide him with a response appropriate to his situation. (Before freezing, Scott-Morgan underwent laser eye surgery to give him perfect vision at a distance of about 70 centimeters, the distance from his eyes to a computer screen.) ）
Esther Duran, director of design and innovation at the Scott-Morgan Foundation, partnered with Lama Nachman, director of Intel's Human and Artificial Intelligence Systems Research Lab, to help Scott-Morgan communicate. Previously, Nachman and her team developed Intel's Assisted Context Awareness Toolkit, a software platform that helps Hawking communicate through keyboard simulation, word prediction, and speech synthesis. They open source it so that developers can build different features on top of it.
After Hawking lost both hands, he began using his cheek muscles for communication. The computer designed for him relied on running word lists, and whenever the cursor reached a word or phrase he wanted to use, Hawking twitched his cheek muscles to select it. The process is extremely slow, about one word per minute.
Nachman explains that extreme accuracy is important to Hawking, so he's reluctant to give up control. "But if you look at Peter, he wants to interact naturally with people," she said. "It's not that I want to look exactly like Peter 1.0 before I was diagnosed. He's trying to merge with AI systems to make Peter 2.0 the best combination of his personality and AI."
"While much of the conversation around AI and humans positions the relationship between the two as confrontational," she continues, "I prefer to look at the future through the lens of people working with AI rather than competing with AI."
future
The next challenge The Rebels are tackling is movement, which is reinventing every element of the human psyche and mobile experience. DXC is helping to integrate Scott-Morgan's AI to control his dedicated robotic wheelchair, a complex device that, as Morgan put it in a tweet, can "boldly go where no wheelchair has ever gone."
"The development of self-driving wheelchairs has some clear first-mover advantages over cars," said Sukhi Gill, Chief Technology Officer, Europe, Middle East and Africa, DXC. "They mostly operate in known and controlled environments, think of homes, gardens, parks and local shops. They move much slower and have far fewer potential dangers to deal with. By applying some knowledge and technology from the automotive industry, the self-driving wheelchair represents a realistic medium-term goal for this project."
As an optimist, Scott-Morgan said his vision was "to be able to quickly pass the obstacle course, or safely through the porcelain vase showroom".
Meanwhile, Jerry Overton, vice president and head of artificial intelligence at the Scott-Morgan Foundation, said an ongoing project aims to provide Scott-Morgan with the smartest home possible. "We are designing Peter's home as a network of home automation devices and personal applications."
The network includes smart thermostats, smart light bulbs, motion sensors, cameras, his avatar and messaging apps. "Finally, we're using a central AI nicknamed CHARLIE to dispatch the network," Overton gave an example: What would happen if Scott-Morgan's biosensors showed his body temperature was overheated. "CHARLIE can proactively lower the room temperature and alert his healthcare provider to possible problems."
Aside from his upside-down optimism, the most unusual thing about Scott-Morgan is that he sees his diagnosis as a blessing rather than a curse. "Now, we may be able to rewrite the future of more people with disabilities."
His twitter profile was "Scientist-Author-Rebel" and added the phrase "Rewrite the future with a lifetime."
"I was supposed to be a candidate for the fast lane to death, but I dropped the offer," he added. "Frankly, I'm still busy having fun."
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