Engineered Enhancers Closer Than You Think

Roland Piquepaille writes "Happy 2035! Thirty years from now, we'll use bionic eyes giving us 'zoom vision' for faster reactions. Nanobots injected in our bloodstream will complement our immune system. Artificial muscles built with electroactive polymers will help us to be stronger and faster. So you think it's science fiction? Not at all. You'll see that some people are so convinced that this kind of human enhancements will happen that they predict than in a few decades, all sporting events 'will be split up to accommodate enhanced and unenhanced athletes.'"

Comments

I hate Slashdot so much......

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like Jerry Springer for geeks. Please kill me.

The real question....

[TrumpetPower!]

In thirty years, will Roland Piquepaille still be spamming Slashdot?

Cheers,

b&

It's not a bug, it's a feature

[GuyMannDude]

As an interesting aside, I have said this before on Slashdot, but human eyes are pretty pathetic in terms of their sophistication. Birds, fish and many reptiles have much more sophisticated retinas that perceive what we would term a multi-spectral visual world. A visual scene much richer that the simple three-space world we currently see.

Evolution gives organisms the tools they need to survive, not necessarily what those organsims might put down on their wish lists. The ability to sense the world in such detail is much more important to the survival of those creatures than it is for human beings. This is a feature, not a bug. Since this is slashdot, I'm going to assume that you are very familiar with the epsiode in Star Trek where Kirk outmaneuvers aliens with vastly superior intellect and technology. How does he do it? In order to operate the Enterprise, these creatures had to fit themselves into human bodies which have senses that are much more hightened than those of their normal form. Kirk simply overloads their senses to the point that they can't think straight. Just yesterday we had an article here on slashdot about how people are having trouble dealing with the flood of new information available to them. Be thankful that our eyes are more limited than those of birds, fish, and their ilk. Our brains are already having trouble keeping up with the world around us. The day we start seeing in the IR and UV parts of the spectrum, that'll be all the more for us to process on a second-by-second basis.

Good luck with the research. I'm gratified to know that at least someone thinks that this technology should be used first to assist those who are disabled and then used to give super-powers to the rich. All too often medical research caters to stupid things like baldness cures instead of focusing on cures of cancer and Alzheimer's.

GMD

Re:It's not a bug, it's a feature

[Paradise Pete]

the sensory overload of modern life is precisely what causes vision loss.

It is? Is there evidence of that, or are you just guessing?

"science" + "fiction"

[Scrameustache]

Thirty years from now, we'll use bionic eyes [...] science fiction? Not at all.

When you're making predictions about the future, hypothetical applications of current scientific research, you are making science fiction!

ignorance of underlying biology

[lukesl]

I feel like I see articles like this all the time, and the underlying current is one of thinking that there are all these engineering breakthroughs that will make things that operate better than the native biological system. Engineers often tend to think this way, not unlike the carpenter who thinks the moon is made of wood. As a biologist, I may be somewhat guilty of the opposite bias, but the truth of the matter is that engineers have seldom been able to make materials and machines that operate as well as their biological counterparts. For example, artificial joints and teeth are all vastly inferior to their biological counterparts, and they will be for a while yet.

My point is that human enhancement will occur, but this article grossly underestimates the role molecular biology will have in the near future. For example, to make soldiers with more endurance, you could try replacing their blood with an artificial substitute, or you could give them recombinant erythropoeitin to increase their red blood cell count. The EPO injections are trivial (ask professional bicyclists), but after years and years of research, we still don't have an acceptable artificial blood substitute.

As far as artificial muscles go...that is just ridiculous. To think that in 30 years we will be implanting stuff like that into peoples' bodies. We will be growing muscle tissue in vats and implanting long before we deal with artifical stuff. However, first we will be using relatively simple methods to locally control muscle growth (like small molecule inhibitors of receptors for hormones that inhibit muscle growth, etc.) That alone will be huge.

I think the real lack of conceptual understanding has to do with the evolutionary perspective. Basically, humans are incredibly good at doing things that humans have to do in the wild, and the only easy enhancements that we can make are "enhancements" that actually decrease our fitness from the hunter-gatherer perspective. For example, stronger muscles require a huge food intake, so they're selected against. In this day and age, that's easy to get around, with steroids or other technologies. It's easy to increase endurance with EPO injections, but there are obvious problems (e.g. death) associated with that as well. People seem to think that it will be as easy to improve cognitive abilities or immune system function, but that's just wrong. Our brains and immune systems already operate pretty much at their optimum, and claims that we could simply inject "nanobots" that improve the function of either are ridiculously ignorant.

Re:ignorance of underlying biology

[MiLK_MD]

Decrease in fitness is relative to the enviroment. An organism that my be fit in one niche may be completely unsuited to survive in another. Humans are not the pinnacle of evolution; they are simply well suited to living in temperate climates on a planet with Earthlike qualities. Would humans survive "as is" on Mars? No. Humans for example do not have protective fur to walk with aplomb unassisted in arctic enviroments nor large lung capacities and high oxygen carrying capacities to plumb the depths of the ocean. I like to think of enhancements as adjuncts or logical extensions of adaptive responses. Enhancements would provide humans with the ability to explore heretofore difficult or unreachable places. And what is so ridiculous about artificial muscles? Human muscle has a finite upper bound with regards to strength vs. mass ratio. Certainly not the strongest nor most efficient stuff around. Could we not replace human muscle with a more efficient compound? (Some of my research deals with exactly this issue.) Stronger muscles do not necessarily imply greater energy intake: that can be achieved by increasing efficency, of which the human muscle is not a perfect example (think exothermia). And to state that our bodies already operate at their optimum, again there is the caveat that optimum is dependent on the environment and the task at hand. Enhancement in regards to recall/attention ability for example, is not only possible, but present (methylphenidate for example has been shown to increase cognitive function for "normal" people). Certainly there is room for "improvement." And there is also the issue of helping those that are diseased or disabled with respect to the norm. In this case can one not redefine enhancement as "repair?" As an aside, where is the differentiation between "nanobots" and "molecular biology." Targeted molecules, receptor specific proteins, cell mediated hormones..."nanobots!" they are simply points on a continuum.

Here's another prediction

[Alceste]

In thirty years slashdot will still be enamored with poorly researched, jargon infused, poorly written future-bation.

Re:Medical needs

[Jerf]

Birds, fish and many reptiles have much more sophisticated retinas that perceive what we would term a multi-spectral visual world.

We'd call it "multispectrum" because we don't see there. But we see "multispectrum" too... otherwise what do you call red, green, and blue? The curves for those receptors don't completely overlap.

Of course human eyes aren't a proper superset of every eye's capability in the world. There isn't room in one eye for that, and if you did jam it all in you'd be bitching about our crappy resolution! But they are quite good for what they do, and the brain behind them is unsurpassed, if you consider seeing not just as raw pixel collection but as understanding the world. Nobody else has a visual system that can read.

Artificial eyes will be cool but it's going to be hard to jam any more info down the optic nerve and through the visual system that we already are unless we do a full brain replacement.