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The third thumb

daniclodedesign.com

68 pointsfanf225 comments

The Verge has an article about The Third Thumb where they state "[...] the aim is to re-imagine what we think of as a prosthetic — something that adds capabilities, rather than just replacing those lost."

So much effort is put towards getting people back to baseline, and rightfully so. But it's the creativity of extending ourselves past baseline that gives me a child-like excitement for the future.

Good perspective. That started for me with the Nintendo Power Glove even though I never owned one. :)

The guitar playing example feels like stretching the believability a bit. I'm not a guitar player, but I imagine that having precise feedback from the strings and frets would be kinda important for playing. And then there is of course the question of latency.

In terms of practicality otherwise, the exposed actuating wire looks like it would cause trouble (getting caught in places etc).

Yeah, I'd think it is really a non-starter. I've been playing for 30 years, and can't imagine using something like that; reason being that I had reconstructive surgery on my left wrist about 15 years ago, and having had my hand in plaster for 3 months while the ligaments healed led me to a lengthy period where my hand 'wasn't mine', making it very difficult to play. And that was with a hand which was in truth functioning fully, just stiff and in need of physio. Without the feedback that you get from a real digit, I can't see it working other than as a makeshift slide to play with.

Not to say that it won't happen in the future, but I don't think this is it.

One of my cofounders has a daughter that had a 6th finger surgically removed (as an adult). It was fully functional, but she got really weary of people talking about it and being grossed out by it. It wasn't a thumb, but it seems relevant...

Somebody (Ross-Heim?) built a symmetrical robot hand with two thumbs and two non-thumb fingers in the 1980s. They gave the outer fingers another degree of freedom, so the outer fingers can rotate inward from the base. Back then, nobody had good control algorithms for robot hands, and it didn't work well as a waldo because humans can't do that. Worth looking at again.

When I was a kid, I dreamed of having a functional third arm, this seems like the first step in that direction.

My dad cured me of that by pointing out that if I had that third arm there would always be a project where I'd want a fourth anyway. It's the same argument that Danny Hillis gave me for the 1-bit ALU in the original connection machine design: "well, what number is correct? This way you can build any size you want" which was almost true.

However the second thumb is a great idea. I have long though that if there were some sort of god it must have been quite mean to choose five as the number of digits. Six, with an extra opposable thumb on the opposite side, would have been much much better (and even the same architecture but with a total of four would have been superior to the current setup).

Also annoying was turning the knobs for pi and e to irrational values.

Just because there are scenarios where you'd want a fourth doesn't invalidate the desire to want a third. There are more situations where a third arm would be helpful than where a fourth would be. The more arms, the fewer situations apply.

Well two is a good optimization: it gives you a portable opposition point (with one arm you spend a lot of time pushing something against a wall or something like that -- try living with your arm in a cast) vs needing enough musculature to make the arms worth operating yet not make it heavy.

Plus there's a path dependency issue (the world is set up with chair backs, shirts, whatever assuming bilateral symmetry). But evolutionarily (reimagining the evolution of humans rather than adding an auxiliary arm) the path dependency is not meaningful.

That argument only makes sense if your utility function were either monotonic and non-decreasing over arms or if it were monotonic and non-decreasing over a combination of arms and other things (e.g. legs?). Are you sure you'd always prefer having more arms?

I mean, I don't know about you, but I think most people would stop short of becoming a hecatoncheir. At best those extra arms would be useless, but in the worst case scenario you could be punished by the gods for your hubris. Either that, or be banished to Tartarus by Zeus.

Look at a parrot's foot some time, and let the envy over the gripping ability of their zygodactyl toes flow through you.

Perfect for soldering.

I'm surprised there was no mention of Stelarc's Third Hand project from the 80's/90's: http://stelarc.org/?catID=20265

I wonder what it would feel like to take this off after wearing it for a week.

A bit like losing a finger.

what if I want two? I can't have two third thumbs

Silly puns don't add to the conversation here.

A better comment would be addressing vulnerabilities or interference issues in bluetooth.

Regardless of the value of the pun, telling people that they should comment about certain things instead of actually commenting those things yourself feels a bit strange. If you want to have a conversation about the security implications, why not just start it yourself?

I think we have here an example of Poe's law.

my question still remains... is it, or could it be, designed so that I could wear two. If so, then the name itself is confusing and should be changed.

Also, I encourage you to go make your own "better" comment and start the discussion you want to see.

Good point on the question, and thank you for the advice. Sorry for taking your comment the wrong way.

Predicted by the Onion: Google Engineers Invent New Body Part To Strap Gadgets Onto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7T6CAKUVJ4

If anyone else is using uBlock Origin, at least for me the page displayed completely blank until I disabled uBlock temporarily.

Nice one.

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