Redesigning people: how medtech could expand beyond the injured
February 28, 2012 | Source: The Atlantic
Ekso exoskeleton (Credit: Ekso Bionics)
The exoskeleton manufactured by Ekso Bionics in Berkeley, California, is one harbinger of what’s coming in the next decade or two to treat the injured and the ill with radical new technologies.
In a few more years, you might be wearing your own eLEGS to carry heavy loads around the house, or as a soldier on patrol in some distant corner of the world (assuming we aren’t using only drones). Flash forward a few more years, and you may have the option of permanently implanting in your legs the “eLEGS LXII,” an endo-skeletal implant that stays with you like a futuristic hip or knee implant does today.
Other portents include first-generation machines and treatments that range from deep brain implants that can stop epileptic seizures to stem cells that scientists are using experimentally to repair damaged retinas.
Which leads us to the crucial question for the approaching age of human enhancement: How far would you go to modify yourself using the latest medtech?
Would you replace perfectly good legs with artificial ones if they made you faster and stronger?
Would you take a daily pill that not only stimulated your brain to help you do your best on a test, but also bumped up your memory?
Would you sign up for a genetic alteration that would make you taller and stronger?
Comments (6)
by Patrick McHargue
Pretty pedestrian, it looks to me. (pun intended) How about nano-technological robots that selectively replace/enhance bones with carbon fiber, joints that continuously rebuild themselves, and (really strong) plastic muscles. Same form factor, better performance.
Really dense photo-receptors in the retina, neural cell replacement for higher bandwidth thinking, better oxygen carriers in the blood stream.
Replace the gut with a system that feeds cells individually from the blood stream, and then start replacing all that internal space with material/mechanisms that are specific to a need.
Heck, work on shrinking the frame so that space travel/exploration is more workable.
Anyway, eLegs seems like a toe-in-the-water concept.
by anthrobotic
Damn. Totally got Steam-Engine-Timed on this one. New section at anthrobotic: http://anthrobotic.com/category/transhumanism-test-pilots/
by Giulio Prisco
@Singme – yes, exercise is good, fun and healthy… as long as our bodies can do it, which is not forever. I look forward to all the enhancement technologies discussed in the article, and more.
by Tellyou
Genetic Engineering? Sure. Take the brainpill? Hand it to me! Replace your legs? Well I would wait with that…Instead give me some artificial or engineered muscles or some subdermal boy armor or some nanotech eye-implants or…
by Pete
Yes, yes, and yes. I would prefer the enhancements available to the Special Circumstances members in Iain Bank’s Culture series, but the above would do.
by Singme
It would be useful if doing hard labor, but for the most part I would prefer not to have them. People don’t get enough exercise as it is.