I want to take a look into the relationship between the human body and technology.
I am a huge fan of the symbiotic relationship between us and machines, but whenever I talk to my mother or someone who is not into technology, they get alienated by the idea of letting electronics into their body.
This is understandable, but I want to believe that there is something great that we can achieve if we leave our fear behind and solve the problems and risks that come with the fusion of humans and machines. There are many more steps to take before we become cyborgs as we know them from movies or games. We are taking them and we are already beyond the point of no return.
Maybe you heard people calling each other out for behaving like zombies when using their smartphones and the smartphone is the most prominent indicator of this kind of change, but there is more.
I will go from apparent things to some that you maybe never thought about.
Let’s start with “wearables”, small devices like watches, trackers, headphones, and glasses.
I think we can agree that they all are part of our path to merge with machines even if some people try to argue that they just use them as a tool and
can live without them. The truth is our brain is so adaptive that once we use a tool often enough and it is always available our brain will just accept it as part of our body. This may sound strange, but experiments and studies show that this happens quickly. One experiment that I want to bring up as an example was done by the University of Pittsburgh, which used a brain-computer interface to connect a monkey to a robotic arm.
It didn’t take long for the ape to use the robotic arm like his own.
He performed tasks like eating intuitively with his extra arm and became visibly confused after they removed the brain-computer interface again. Of course, a BCI is a much more extreme example than a smartwatch, but don’t make the mistake to think there is a huge difference between
a brain-computer interface and normal tools, just because the connection is more direct.
If you use your thump only to type messages and for nothing else, then the part of your brain that controls your thump is reprogrammed just like the brain of the ape. I will talk about the brain-computer interface later when we come to the next steps in human-machine merging,
but first, let us go back to the more subtle things that influence us and merge with us: Drugs. Ok this may sound strange but drugs are not as far away from machines then you might think and the road ahead of us is quite clear. Modern medicine and medical tools like CRISPR become more and more complex.
From simple molecules that stop pain or help our stomach, we moved to complex molecular structures that perform actions like cutting DNA and killing viruses. The idea of nanomachines that perform sophisticated actions in our body is not science-fiction but is already in development. 2022 made one thing clear,
people are afraid of medicine they don’t understand. So the question is, will people accept machines in their drugs? I think yes. Not because I have a lot of trust in humanity, but because I have a lot of trust in the greed and envy of people.
If you combine the greed of the pharma industry with the desire of people to stay healthy and some good marketing, you get a big market for the next generation of medical devices and drugs. Now that we have already looked at the future, let me explain what I imagine will happen in the next 10 years.
I will differentiate between people who grew up with a smartphone (2001 and younger) and those who are older ( 2000-1960 ). I am sorry but for everyone older than that the following topics are not that interesting (I will probably write another blog post about Longevity escape velocity, but that’s another topic).
The next step after the smartphone is AR glasses. I am not talking about full VR,(Metaverse is another topic I will write about at some point) but light AR glasses that are indistinguishable from normal glasses. They will be an important step since they will merge our virtual life with the real world.
Many people in the younger group spend more time awake on the internet than in the real world.
This may sound extreme for some people but having 6-8hr on a smartphone and pc combined is not that rare nowadays. Ar-glasses will increase these numbers and every person using one will be online whenever they are awake. This means our brain will interact even more often and directly with the machine.
The technology will be available in the next few years. As usual, the younger group will adapt first and the older generation will take 1-2 years more. For people who want to completely dive into the virtual world, contact lenses will be available just one or 2 years after glasses.
These are not just wild guesses of mine, the technology already exists, even the contact lenses, and just must become cheaper to produce. These non-invasive technologies will be adapted way faster than real brain-computer interfaces like Neuralink, where the barrier to entry is way higher and the risks are even greater.
Though in the end, the ultimate step will be such a device. It is hard to imagine how productive a human with a computer-enhanced mind can be.
I would guess that the overhead of bringing your thoughts and ideas into a useful form by using a keyboard, mouse, and some randomly designed computer interfaces is around 80%. Human productivity will skyrocket even with just a few million brain-computer interfaces.
There are a lot of risks though. While the first brain-computer interfaces will be unidirectional and only take inputs, at some point we will use the other direction too, to increase our input of information and to keep up with our own thoughts.
This step is incredibly dangerous and it is not hard to see how much could go wrong when a potentially dangerous device can manipulate our thoughts. Some might say these devices should be banned but as Fridrich Dürenmatt wrote in his book “the physicist”
Everything, that is thinkable, will be thought.
What Solomon found can also be found by someone else.
Fridrich Dürenmatt
we can’t stop the machine from being built and we also can’t stop anyone from using them, just like we failed with drugs, nuclear weapons, and many other things.
Body-machine merging
While mind-enhancing machines are the most powerful and life-changing devices, enhancing our bodies will also be possible.
If you imagine a cyborg you think about metal limps and build-in weapons, but we already have prostheses that surpass human legs in some aspects.
You may remember the debate about whether Pistorius and other disabled athletes had an advantage at the Olympics. But you probably never heard about someone cutting off their legs to get artificial ones.
I don’t believe it will become a trend to exchange limbs if it is not necessary from a medical standpoint, even if they become better than human limbs in every aspect.
Way more popular and already used are small implants with a variety of abilities.
From small NFC chips in our hands to replace keys to small devices under the skin that measure the blood sugar level and inject insulin automatically.
Another implant that is already used by some enthusiasts is a magnet on the tip of their finger.
It allows feeling electromagnetic waves like wires in the wall or the microwave in the room next door.
It sounds like a gimmick at first glance, but if you ask a group of aliens without ears if they want to attach something to their heads to feel pressure changes in the air, they will probably think the same.
I would argue that the number of senses we have is an entirely random outcome of evolution and increasing this number is the best way to enhance our worldview.
Every time we use technology to leverage our senses we will have a similar experience to a person who sees colors for the first time. We can live without it,
but it is just nicer to have it. Enhancing our senses is the second-best thing that we can do after enhancing our mind with machines. The last and least popular step will be increasing the motoric functions of our body. We could add arms to our body or have a small robot that we control with our minds, but at this point, we are already back at Brain-computer interfaces. I will end the post here to have a readable length. I hope the topic sparked your interest and I promise I will go into greater detail the next time I write about the merging of flesh and silicon.
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