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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.'"
Perhaps in thirty years we could obtain some degree of enhancement for our eyes that would be optically based. However, a more pressing (and needed) benefit will be a cure or fix for folks with vision loss. "Zoom lenses" and such could relatively easily be accomplished with bionically enhanced optics, but the real trick is going to be designing and implementing the hardware/wetware interface and creating true bionic retinas. Bionic implants for retinal degenerations as currently implemented are not going to work for a variety of reasons (read my doctoral dissertation to find out why), but there are other approaches that can be taken or modifications that will be successful (part of my current work). Also alternative ways of implementing the interface cortically will likely have some success (not my work, but it is of my colleagues). Artificial retinas are going to be harder than artificial cochleas for the hearing impaired or cortical control of motor functions which are both applications that are having some success currently. The retina is a much more complex tissue with (in our eyes) 55-60 different classes of neurons all wired together in a precise manner to generate proper signals for image interpretability. 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.
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Sigs cause cancer.
30 years ago they said in 30 years we would all be driving flying cars and would have the moon colonized, so I'm not sure how much I can trust predictions like these.
Although it is easy to say with the speed technology is moving things like this will be invented, I am sure there are some giant problems that will need to be solved first, and unless we get lucky I dont think these new technologies will be available in my lifetime.
So that's what all these "enhancement" emails I've been getting are about.
Slashdot editors, WAKE UP! Stop posting everything Roland submits, please!
It's like Jerry Springer for geeks. Please kill me.
You'll see that some people are so convinced that [these] kind of human enhancements will happen...
;)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I keep getting email about "human enhancements".
But no nanobot is going to make this geek cool.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
, all sporting events 'will be split up to accommodate enhanced and unenhanced athletes.'"
Isn't that the difference between pro and amateur?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I hear that by the year 2000 we'll even have flying cars!
To the future!
Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better ... stronger ... faster.
/obligatory
In thirty years, will Roland Piquepaille still be spamming Slashdot?
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
There are athletes being "enhanced" right now. In my opinion, although those certain biotech innovations are probably not realistically going to arrive in the mass market in just a few decades, perhaps the use of technology in the medicinal/health sectors will spur the development of new ways of practicing traditional medicine that may ultimately have the same effect as the sci-fi-ish inventions we dream about.
Gene Roddenberry predicted a war between enhanced humans and regular humans. Remember? Khan? And then there was another war like that later in the 21st century I think. Either way, both sides had significant casualties. I wouldn't be surprised if it actually happened, would you?
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
What would this mean for pilots, given the strict perfect vision/no eye damage requirements they have?
And, more importantly, when can I get razor blades that shoot out from under my fingernails?
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Nanobots injected in our bloodstream will complement our immune system.
Actually, I do not think we will have a choice in the matter on this one. Before too long, there will be hostile (or just poorly designed and self-replicating) nanobots that will kill us when they get into our bodies. We will need some sort of immediate defense against this new threat; if anything, an outbreak caused by a malicious type of nanobot will spurn the development of the nanobot that complements our immune system and defends against the malicious nanobot. This sort of thing has long been addressed in science fiction novels, but it seems like something that is closer than we might imagine.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
...all sporting events 'will be split up to accommodate enhanced and unenhanced athletes.'"
Judging by the number of athletes that get caught for using different kinds of doping substances at every major event, this is reality right now.
I have been wondering if we should do a split now; ie. have separate races for "boosted" athletes and another series for "traditional". The boosted version could have all kinds of medical companies as sponsors...Think of that bodybuilder with Pfizer tattooed on his muscles. Of course, life expectancy drops to around 30 years until the heart explodes, but at least you get famous.
Maybe they could even have separate points for "athletes" and "teams" like in motorsports. Teams would have loads of MDs coming up with better and more powerful stuff...
Since I really don't care about traditional sporting events at all, but this version might be fun to watch from an (bio-)engineering point of view.
1) Augmented memory. No more forgetting names or passwords. Though it does add some real interesting issues for DRM (can you force me to forget a movie after remembering it X times)
2) Direct connect to the net - the ability to check GPS to figure out what I might be looking at, or the apocryphal doing google searches when asked a question would be very useful.
Just my .02 worth...
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It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a blog
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
watch this
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!
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
In thirty years slashdot will still be enamored with poorly researched, jargon infused, poorly written future-bation.
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.'"
What's the difference between enhanced and unenhanced?
Isn't the athlete from a rich country with well-equipped training facilities, tailored nutrition and good trainers already an enhanced athlete compared to an athlete from some small 3rd world country?
This dichotomy to what constitutes enhancement and what doesn't smacks of a medieval perspective of the human condition.
Because I can't see across the friggin living room to the TV without my eyeglasses.....
Only on
I can go down to the local crystal shop as well and find people that are convinced the unicorns and fey folk are coming back - this doesn't make it any less fictitious.
Sadly, in this world, wishing don't make it so.
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
I didn't RTFA (just the news story) and from what is covered there, just grab some steroids, cocaine and some over-prescribed glasses. No need to wait.
Karma: Neutered
... I will need a new handle.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
If so, I sure as hell don't want Microsoft providing it.
...and who's going to watch the non-boosted events? Will companies choose to sponsor the athletes setting records, or those who "just" take first place? Who will the networks cover?
Do you think that Major League Baseball is asleep at the switch, when they tell their players months in advance about an upcoming drug test, and 50+ players STILL get caught doping, and MLB does nothing? Do you think the government is asleep at the switch when they don't subpoena the hell out of MLB and throw every druggie baseball player into the slammer?
Phhbt. Dream on- MLB is thrilled at the doping. They "hate" it publicly, but privately they squeal like little children when Joe Dope smashes the baseball out of the park. Home runs and high scores bring in the crowds. Singles and scoreless games don't.
...And god forbid the government should interfere with baseball. It's a 'national pasttime'. It'd be like...messing with Apple Pie.
Please help metamoderate.
WHERE'S MY GODDAMNED FLYING CAR???
One idea that I rarely, if ever, see addressed is that we may very well have seen the end of natural human evolution. Before you reject this idea, think about it for a moment.
I'm sure we all know how evolution works, by killing off the least efficient *versions* of our species and allowing the most efficient to breed.
Well, in first world countries anyways, EVERYBODY can breed, and live and breed again. In fact, one might argue that some of the most intelligent of our species either (a) have difficulty breeding (ahem) and certainly in many cases (b) breed later in the game. And (b) is just as significant for if one group breeds 50% more than another group, the former group becomes dominant.
Now, I'm not saying smart people necessarily breed less and that unsuccessfully people breed more and earlier but there has always been a cultural tie between career oriented people marrying later in the game.
And certainly, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of natural selection. Until the next epidemic comes out and wipes out the non-immune half of the population, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of natural selection going on anymore. I wonder how this will affect our species a thousand, ten thousand or hundred thousand years from now.
Perhaps these human augmentations are the new form of evolution for humans.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Your subject line might be more appropriate than you think. I am actually concerned about the use of Viagra, because it is a phosphodiesterase inhibitor.......If you read about how photoreceptors work, phosphodiesterase does have a role in the transduction of vision and there is overlap with the activity of Viagra with the phosphodiesterase subtypes found in photoreceptors. Are we setting a bunch of folks up for vision deficits down the road a few years?
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We've had folks 3-4 times stronger than other folks for generations and nobody asked whether one or the other might not be human... okay so maybe they have, but they shouldn't have.
The questions for whether someone is human include; can they interbreed with humans? Are they sentinent? Are they responsible to themselves and a threat to others. If so, they should be legally and biologically be considered humans. Driving a car doesn't make you less human. Having an artificial heart doesn't make you less human. Having a bionic adaptation shouldn't either.
If you're going to exclude someone from the category of human you should have a functional moral, ethical, legal or biological reason for doing so, and your categorical exclusion would only be as broad as your reason was.
My question (borrowed from the X-Men) is; when should enhanced abilities be considered weapons or threats, in the same class as firearms or knives? Do you not let certain people into an area because they're unusually strong or capable?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
20/20 vision.
It's not an absolute system of measurement, but it's one relative to the general populace. If, at some underermined point in the future, just about everyone's got their eyes redone so that they have 20/10 vision by our standards, they'd have 20/20 by their own because the average person would see clearly, at 20 feet, just what any other average person would see at 20 feet.
-PS
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Pfft, you were born into a developed country with twentieth-century medical technology. You're way past using what was given to you by the luck of the draw to the best of your abilities.
Incidentally, if you are in favor of using what was given to you by random chance, then why aren't you against modifications which repair the human body?
I've never understood the idea that the form homo sapiens has had since it first evolved is somehow sacrosanct. It isn't. It's even less so in a technological society. Our bodies aren't special at all, if anything they're kind of mediocre. The mind is what's important, and people aren't going to be less human because they have better reflexes, or vision, or panimmunity, or whatever-else-have-you. Yet I keep hearing claims that they are, or that if they aren't it's bad anyway, and I've yet to hear a reason that doesn't come down to "it's just wrong, alright?"
-PS
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
What you just saw was a typical example of the "romantic primitivism" meme. Blame any unexplained problem on the sin of thinking and its byproduct, technology. All that manmade stuff is icky and polluting and makes people squint and go blind, because it's not "natural".
Slapping such idiocy down in the name of real science is doing the world a favour.
Would it not make more sense to prefer augmentation, for it is MAN'S achievement, MAN'S success, and MAN'S work to take pride in, not something happenstance? What pride can be taken in the luck of the draw? What have you to be proud of, when you have done nothing but been left victim of evolution, given a body inferior to your passions and desires, simply because of bad luck? And what greater way to be proud of mankind's accomplishments than to BECOME it's accomplishment?
I think you just fear being dehumanized. But you shouldn't. Machine's are the most human things there are, for they are the children of humanities efforts, not nature's. Nothing can be more human than that which nature has failed to do but we have. Nothing. Every cyborg, every AI, everything we create, THEY are who and what we are. Not our bodies, not are flesh and bone, that's incidental.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Did you really have to do this? Did you even bother to check the link in the article blurb, or did you just see Roland's name and fired away? I think you didn't even rtfa, because had you read it, you'd have noticed that this time, he actually linked to the original fucking article, not his own blog. You just ended up being the silly little boy that cried wolf. Tee-hee.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
The BBC program Tomorrows World came out with the classic line By the year 2000 computers will make the use of paper obsolete. This one is only really matched by the idea that in the 21st century, machines will be doing all the work and we'll have much more leisure time.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.