The age of enhancement
March 5, 2013
Spiderman (credit: Columbia Pictures)
Technology is starting to give us superpowers once reserved for comic-book heroes, Slate reports.
Human enhancement is happening all the time, largely through incremental improvements on existing technologies.
Wearable technology is taking off. Muscle suits are starting to look more plausible. The military is working on “Spider-Man suits” that let the wearer scale vertical walls.
Devices that interact directly with the human brain can use things like your skin conductance, facial expressions, and perhaps even brain waves to detect your emotions and intentions, albeit crudely. In the medical realm, cochlear implants can restore some hearing to the deaf. Future neural implants could allow humans to manipulate real-world objects with their minds.
In North Carolina in 2008, researchers got a monkey thinking hard about walking — and in Japan, a pair of robotic legs began to do just that, controlled by the monkey’s brain activity via the Internet. And last December, a quadriplegic woman in Pittsburgh used electrodes implanted in her motor cortex to feed herself chocolate with a robotic arm.
Comments (31)
by Bob Vasquez
Superpower enhancements need to be coupled with the assent of the mind; otherwise, we will have to deal with a bunch of ….. (well, let’s not give it a name just yet).
by Christopher
Supervillains. The word you are looking for is Supervillains.
by Ian Clarke
Personally, I think there should be some sort of mental assessment required before an individual is permitted superhuman enhancements.
by Dennis R.
Who assesses the assessors in your scenario? Are humans qualified to assess their potential superiors? Are the myriad pathways of human evolution to be decided by committee or subject to majority rule? We don’t get to determine the future. And very few of us will have a meaningful effect. Because the future will last beyond all our lifespans.
by Cybernettr
the future will last beyond all our lifespans
Not if these technologies get powerful enough.
by robb
All these technologies are still very crude. I’ll give it another decade for them to become anything close to widely common and usable
by RobinSongs
I wonder how this will “enhance” the ego?
by Astrojensen
I made it to the future. Or maybe it just snuck up on me, while I was looking the other way.
by Editor
Or perhaps the future is getting more evenly distributed?
by alvaro
the wall betwen fiction and reality is vanishing .
by Editor
Yes, so which one is winning out?
by Joel C.
The wall never existed.
Fiction and reality are simply byproducts of the mind attempting to discern what’s coming through the five senses we have. When you unravel your brain physically, reality gets distorted as a result.
by Fabian L.
@ Joel C. This is very true – once a super computer is able to map every nuance of reality backwards we’ll essentially have a non-linear time machine in our hands and what once appeared to be science fiction will be science fact.
by Joel C.
So from this perspective, two-way time travel is indeed possible. :-)
by Bri
Yes but it will branch out. You will alter events and a new time line will be created. The original will still be there.
by Guillermo
Well that’s the many world interpretation of time travel. There’s also the possibility that we can go to the past and do whatever as long as paradoxes are avoided. As of now, there isn’t much evidence to support any of them I think
by Sea bass
Science fiction always turns into science fact that just hasn’t happened yet. Evidence requires the action to have already happened. If Shrodengers cat is alive and dead, then science fiction is really just science prediction.
by Christopher
More like all the timelines are already there, and you will just view/traverse them. The set of all possible universes is the set of all possible universes.
by Bri
Bingo. If I see something in the future and it happens it make me think it was already there. Shrodengers cat.
by Bri
I like how Kurt Vonegut wrote it in Slaughter house five. Humans perceive time as if they are strapped into a chair on a train box car, while looking through a telescope
by Dennis R.
I think there’s some overlap in our thinking about existence and experience. The sound of a tree falling in a forest could arguably be reproduced at another place and time. But it wouldn’t be the same, it would be a different iteration. If our perception is flawed enough (and it is) we could be convinced that the sound was identical. Since we can conceptualize the original and the iteration, we’re given the option of believing they are identical. Parallel universes are similar arguments. We can’t experience them simultaneously. If something seems different, it may be our consciousness remembering a similar situation, but “knowing” that this one is different. Or possibly thinking that this situation we’re experiencing now should be slightly different. I can accept the possibility that there are parallel universes. I can accept the fact that there’s an iteration of me in a different universe. I don’t accept that an iteration and an original can be in two places at once. My argument is that similar experiences– like similar beings– are not identical. Schrodinger’s Cat isn’t both dead and alive at the same time. It’s merely unknown. As is much of our universe.
by Carl Brooks
This is exactly what i was thinking a few months back. Take for example the philosophical question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” yes it does, if you have a powerful enough Super intelligence, that can precisely map the entire universe. This intelligence would be able to recreate the exact sound the tree makes without a recording devise, without even being in the same galaxy.
by Tsuarok
The uncertainty principle will give your supercomputer problems.
by Carl Brooks
Will it tho???
You predict it to be a problem but we are entities that are not super intelligent so it is almost impossible for our “small” minds to see past the singularity let alone predict consequences of it, which is why its called the singularity. With enough intelligence you can do anything!!!!
by Bri
Which tree, which forest, which universe?
by Carl Brooks
that one over yonder
by Editor
… and since the concept of “reality” itself is a fiction, the wall is a consensus delusion
by Carl Brooks
the universe itself does not exist unless it has a mind to perceive its exsistance
by Bri
The only way a consciousness can perceive it is because it is it. ( that a real heady one. Think about it. How does consciousness perceive.)
by asiwel
Hi, Bri. I think .. we (and neuroscience) are long past Descartes and “I think, therefore I am.” Recently at PhysicsWorld.com there was a discussion about a “quantum coin toss” amplified to the macroscopic level …
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/feb/13/the-quantum-coin-toss
… where comments verged toward the illusion of reality. In part my own comment, which seems relevant here too, was this:
“I honestly do not think that the “world out there” is an illusion. (If it is, that changes the meaning of illusion quite a bit.) I also certainly do think we can talk both sensibly and practically about “nature ‘as such’” .. if in fact we can talk “objectively” at all. First of all, our knowledge (even our own personal knowledge – built on giants, not just us, etc) is an inter-personal construction — i.e., a part of “culture” – not just us individual sophists. And further, in so far as “data” is a form of knowledge, data comes from external and presumably independent physical systems measuring and reporting on other independent physical systems – to wit, nature reporting on nature. This is similar to the argument about sound in the forest with no ear (and no “I”) to hear it …”
by Bri
Tear down the wall!!!!! ( Pink Floyd).