Game Theory: Humans Are Obsolete (Warframe)

who wins in a fight humans or robots i mean robots are a force to be reckoned with they're practically indestructible super strong and can calculate anything in a matter of micro seconds which gotta admit puts our puny human abilities on the ropes but we humans have advantages too we're far more flexible we can adapt to our surroundings and our bodies naturally heal themselves over time when you think about it we're pretty darn impressive too so can you imagine what would happen if you combine the strength of human and machine oh yeah the future can't come soon enough hello internet welcome to game theory the show that's the ultimate hybrid of interesting video game knowledge and cringy dad jokes today's episode is sponsored by warframe a free to play third person action game set in the origin system a solar system that's been torn apart by war where factions fight for resources and dominance over what remains of society there's drama there's betrayal with the latest story-driven update the new war the stakes have never been higher as we fight against the synthetic ai faction the galaxy's biggest and oldest threat the sentience now in the game we control the titular warframes beings that were created to fight off these invaders centuries prior at first glance these things appear to be armored robot space ninjas which gotta admit pretty cool potluck of adjectives but in reality these things are even better because they're not just machines they're actually a fusion of man and machine they're humans that have been mutated by a weaponized parasite known as the infestation giving them steel-like armored skin hardened organs and the ability to perform incredible feats like super fast running massive jumps and shooting lightning out of your hands i mean who wouldn't want abilities like that and then you can make it all even better as you upgrade rpg style throughout the game you can even create companion pets to assist you in battle which are also modifiable who's a good boy who is a good boy yes you are yes you are my little killer alien missile launching doggo but perhaps the coolest thing of all is that all of this sci-fi world building isn't just some far-off fantasy the fusion of organic and inorganic material is a relatively new realm of science in real life but despite it still being in its early days it's already yielding some mind-blowing results results that look a heck of a lot like the capabilities of warframes seriously it's like scientists saw games like this and said hey can we get a grant to make this real and the donors were like please take all of my money and now here we are at the beginning of an era of bio machinery so when can you expect your own metallic super skin empowering you to take down a race of invading synthetic aliens that my friends is the question we're answering today first off what do i mean by biomechanical hybrids well as the name suggests it's a hybrid of biological matter and mechanical parts now that might make you immediately think of something like a cyborg and you're not too far off with that cyborgs by definition are cybernetic organisms with both mechanical and organic body parts but they aren't quite the same as biomechanical hybrids where a cyborg may have a robot arm that is itself completely mechanical a biomechanical hybrid is built using organic material within the mechanical element think about it this way robotics and biology share a lot of things in common for instance when you want to get up from the couch and grab yourself your sixth diet coke of the afternoon your brain sends information using electrical signals through nerves in your spine which stimulates motor neurons in the muscles causing them to move similarly a robot trying to move will have a main processing chip send electrical data signals through wires to have an action be taken like getting up and getting me another diet coke come on theory bot hurry up by combining these ideas you end up with bio hybrid actuators and there are a few examples of it working in real life the first is from back in 2012 a team from harvard university in caltech created a silicone jellyfish that was coated in the heart muscle cells from rats by using electrodes they were able to stimulate the heart muscles which caused them to pulse and propel the jellyfish forward more recently harvard created a swimming robot that looks a lot like a rayfish it has a golden skeleton and a rubber body but it's once again filled with those rat heart muscle cells 200 000 of them who says machines are heartless quite contrary they have thousands they even genetically engineered the muscles to react to light rather than electrodes and so the robotic rayfish can now swim using the power of organic cells all of it is a fusion of organic cells with the wires and motors of robots now look at our warframes in the game we know that they're mutated humans with three additional parts the neuroptics the chassis and the system a closer inspection of the system makes it look like some kind of mechanical structure within the body a metallic skeleton of sorts something that feels oddly similar to the golden skeleton from that rayfish robot why the need for an organic component well strong and flexible muscles are vital for the warframe's battle capabilities organic muscles allow for much greater flexibility when you're running about battlefield dodging enemy fire trying to stealthily infiltrate your enemy's base all of those things require flexibility and finesse something that is very difficult for robots to do without those organic muscles don't believe me well here's a clip from boston dynamics it's definitely cool robots doing parkour who would have thought but did you notice the key detail they're slow and in all honesty a bit stiff it's an amazing feat of engineering don't get me wrong but if you try to put the atlas in a fight it's not going to be able to dodge or sneak anywhere alone doing so in a timely fashion muscles offer that physical flexibility that pure machines just don't have take a look at this biohybrid finger that was made by researchers at the university of tokyo institute of industrial science sure it's a bit rudimentary but it represents the principle of fine motor skills that muscles can offer to machine elements something that pure robotics still struggle to master the warframe in the game then represents the future of this sort of balance as you'd expect completing missions in the game levels up your warframe making it stronger and faster wouldn't really be too much of a game without a feature like that but what would seem like just a gameplay mechanic actually makes a real world sense in the context of biohybrids organic muscle can grow when you go to the gym to get them sick gains you are building muscle this is a process known as muscle hypertrophy which is essentially the fusing of damaged muscle fibers when you work out you're actually damaging the muscles but your body repairs the damage and in turn creates larger stronger muscle this is great for the field of biohybrid robots because it means that your machines can literally get stronger over time speaking of repairs mechanical engineer ritu ramon gave an interview with science focus about her work with biohybrid robots and in it she explains that the benefit of using organic muscle is its healing properties our bodies are constantly repairing damage a damaged cell will multiply in order to replace itself if you break a bone your body will immediately produce new cells that heal that damage and while raman's work is for the most part theoretical my favorite type of work we have started to see this with fairly recent biohybrid experiments ladies and gentlemen meet the xenobots they are bizarre you see the xenobots are basically computer-designed clusters of biological tissue that are all mixed together mostly cells that have been scraped off of frog embryos but what's crazy about these newly formed cell clusters is that they're able to move towards a target pick things up and most importantly heal themselves when they're cut or damaged they are technically robots they have been designed by ai to perform a purpose but they have been built purely from organic material it's just mind bendy as you can probably imagine it's still very early technology and isn't fully programmable yet but in theory it is a first step towards these bio soldiers we know from the game that the warframe's organs are quote interlinked with untold resilience implying that they all function together as a solid unit the exact coordination we see coming out of these xenobots and the healing ability of the xenobots could be a first step towards developing some sort of rejuvenation aura that again we're seeing present with the warframes in the game and what about sight feels obvious for us as humans but if you take a look at these warframes do you see any eye holes or visors no no you do not so how on earth do you kick alien butt when you're running around the battlefield completely blind that's where the neuroptics come in neurons and optics it's the way that warframe sees the world around it to solve for this in real life we turn to a different part of biohybrid research this time in the field of cyborg botany that's right plant robot everyone thinks about cyborgs as being humanoid or animal things but plant cyborgs are a real thing that are being worked on right now these guys were created at mit and use a water soluble polymer to essentially create an electrically conductive channel inside of the plant's body allowing them to connect wires to it and receive electrical signals what does any of this have to do with sites well by doing this they've managed to turn the plant into an antenna plants have the ability to sense electromagnetic waves so by creating an organic wire inside of the plant they can now measure those changes and allow it to affect other processes like say creating a natural motion sensor this also proves that the warframes wouldn't necessarily need eyes to see this type of biohybrid tech could allow warframes to sense motion through differences in em waves around them similar to how sonar works finally let's tackle one of the toughest things to explain with science the warframe's shield abilities and no i'm not just talking about their armor warframes have a built-in shield ability an invisible barrier that lessens the damage that they take from enemies typically this means bullets but their shields also allow them to lessen the elemental or type damage done by certain weapons surely this sort of thing can't be explained using biohybrid robots right no no it can't they've only just managed to make a finger move with muscle you think they're really developing invisible shield technology for them too but where the jellyfish used rat muscles to operate scientists are using other types of animal parts to improve these biohybrid robots for example there's a robot at tel aviv university that has an ear of a locust attached to it in order to help it respond to noises so although it hasn't been done yet is there something from the biological world that could potentially give our warframes a natural shielding ability the answer to that my friends is a resounding yes ladies and gentlemen i present to you the water bear officially its name is tardigrade but come on who ain't calling this thing the water bear now these creatures are small less than one millimeter in length but they are amazing they can survive in extreme temperatures extreme pressures even in the vacuum of space these things are nature's greatest survivors but despite their huge resume of abilities there's one that i want to call out for our purposes today and that's how they protect themselves from uv light it's been documented that the water bear can absorb what should otherwise be a lethal dose of uv light and you know just roll with that sounds pretty nice to me i end up going through one bottle of sunscreen when i go outside to pick up the mail but how it copes with this uv light is especially interesting its cells have evolved in such a way that it means that they produce a protein that absorbs uv radiation and then releases it from the body which causes the water bear to glow blue and what color do our warframes glow when they're using their shields well sometimes green and sometimes gold but there are definitely blue ones but the principle still stands there is a biological way to create a natural shield from things like radiation which is also one of the type modifications that weapons in warframe can have so given enough time and scientific advancement it could be plausible to modify these cells to form glowing blue shields against all sorts of elemental damage and apply that biological matter into the designs of biohybrid robots so things are looking good right development of biohybrid robots only really began in the early 2000s less than 20 years ago and already we're making huge strides and learning how to fuse the organic with the inorganic we'll be running around with sword steel skin in no time right yeah there's still one problem with all this for as cool as warframes are there's one teeny tiny little issue with them that parasite that's used to convert humans the infestation yeah it kind of drives you insane you see in the lore of the game it wasn't possible to test the long-term effects that warframe conversion would have on humans they were in the middle of a war after all and kinda desperate at first everything went off without a hitch just convert the bodies and minds of your best soldiers into warframes and you have yourself a super strong tactical killing machine but then stuff started to go wrong the soldiers began to lose their sanity and that's one side effect that's going to raise a few red flags except that's not where the story ends there's a big twist in warframe story that explains how we the player are able to control these insane warframes and the answer is children human children in game they're called the tenno special kids that got exposed to something called the void which gave him space powers allowing him to control the warframes remotely using a technique called transference but that's not what's important here the important fact is that they're children which scientifically explains how they can become amazing operators for these machines you see a child's brain isn't fully developed yet no offense to any children watching it's just science and it's actually a great thing this quote-unquote under-developed brain is actually the key to a lot of their success it is like a child's superpower by the age of two or three a child's brain will go through a period called exuberant synaptogenesis in this period they'll have twice as many synaptic connections between neurons in the brain than an adult this is why kids are able to pick up new languages so easily there are multiple neural pathways so their brain isn't locked into a particular speaking pattern or dialect or way of thinking yet however as we get older our brains begin to prune back the number of neural pathways only keeping the ones that we use regularly gotta admit at this point i've only really got neural pathways for connecting fnaflor this was tested by the university of california where 106 children between the ages of 4 and 5 were put up against 170 college students given a gadget that they've never seen before and then tasked with figuring it out the machine was actually based off of basic cause and effect the device had them place clay shapes and boxes in a particular order to make the box light up and place sounds you might have an idea of what happened here the four and five-year-olds crushed the college students they were faster at learning this new piece of technology warframes are complex weapons they're strong durable flexible and most importantly new to the human experience as such the people are going to be best at learning how to use them and integrating them into their organic lives are children with their flexible neuronally rich brains not only that but you also need a brain with lightning fast reflexes to make the most of the warframe's agility and again children are great for it a study of 3 305 people between the ages of 16 and 44 showed that after the age of 24 the brain's response time begins to decline at a slow but steady rate this has also been corroborated by dr todd sontag a doctor who specializes in esports injuries when talking about esports players quote their eye hand coordination starts to deteriorate by the time that they're 25 years old the 18 year olds have already been playing for 10 years and they're quicker than the older players it's hard to continue to compete past their mid-20s this is why the average retirement age for esports players is 25 they just can't keep up with the reaction times of the younger people whose minds can still learn new things much quicker and react much faster than the older human counterparts so there you have it friends not only are warframes totally plausible from a scientific standpoint but their strategy of using children was also totally on the money though i'd be lying if i didn't say i was slightly sad about all this by the time science has developed these bio hybrids to the point of human-sized killing machines i'm gonna be past my peak reflexes heck i'm already in my 30s and i'm already past them so boy do i feel it right now i can barely keep up with my toddler running loose around the house but it's fine grandpapad will just be sitting over here on the porch watching the next generation of biohybrid robots destroying everything from a distance just make sure you stay off my lawn but hey just gotta say thank you one final time to today's sponsor warframe this game has been around for a while so i kind of felt like i'd missed the boat on joining the fun but thanks to the years of updates and expansions there's actually no better time to join the new war update that i briefly mentioned today just launched with a massive new quest that'll provide hours of action and the thing we hear on the channel love more than anything else sweet sweet juicy lore if you have never played warframe before i highly recommend that you jump in and take a look for yourself again as a reminder it is free to play after hopping into the game to do research for this episode let me just say that i got a little bit obsessed with designing my clan dojo gotta make sure people know that they're walking into theorist territory so if what i've said today has piqued your interest in the game i encourage you to go and download it by using the link down in the description it's available on the switch it's available on the playstation it's available on xbox and pc and again it is totally free it is amazing to me that today we live in a world where you can get a game with triple a quality for zero dollars it's unreal plus if you're new to the game after you sign up go to warframe.com or use the in-game console after you complete the tutorial and enter the promo code tnwtgt for the game theorists tgt and you'll be able to redeem an epic pack of in-game items including some great starter weapons in-game currency and loads more but you gotta be quick that code is gonna expire on january 31st of 2022 so i'm gonna wrap things up here quickly you hop into the game complete that tutorial insert the code and start saving the galaxy i'm actually really curious as to where this new war storyline is gonna play out so who knows you might see us sometime in 2022 with a lore episode on the game so i'll see online watch out for the theorist dojo and as always remember it's all just a theory a game theory thanks for watching

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 2,053,786

Keywords: warframe, warframe 2021, warframe the new war, the new war, warframe trailer, warframe 2021 trailer, warframe the new war 2021, warframe gameplay, warframe octavia prime, sevagoth warframe, how to get morphics in warframe, warframe tips, warfr, cold below warframe, warframe sisters of parvos, warframe song, warframe best primary weapon, warframe theory, game theorists, game theory, matpat, game theory warframe, game theory scary, warframe guide

Id: L0BxpbisQBg

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021