This story about advances in creation of artificial limbs and muscles caught my attention:
Scientists have developed artificial, super-strength muscles which are powered by alcohol and hydrogen. And they could eventually be used to make more advanced prosthetic limbs, say researchers at University of Texas.
Writing in Science, they say these artificial muscles are 100 times more powerful than the body’s own. They said they could even be used in “exoskeletons” to give superhuman strength to certain professions such as firefighters, soldiers and astronauts.
As we ponder the flow of day-to-day news, it is easy to overlook the tremendous advances going on in fields like this. As the article mentions, applications of such medical technologies apply not just to repairing existing injuries or coping with the terrible effects of losing a limb (a sobering reality for victims of terror, car accidents, conflicts, etc), but even for perfectly healthy people looking to augment their physical strength.
The story demonstrates how blurred the boundaries now are between medical technologies that can be used to repair or heal injuries and those used to make what we have picked up in Darwin’s great lottery draw even better. The genetic fatalists will decry all this for tampering with God’s Will or whatever, but I don’t see any difference between this and say, laser surgery for the eye, or technologies to make it possible to vastly increase our hearing strength, or enhance our cognitive capacity, and so forth.
Mind you, it makes me wonder how this technology, if it really works, is going to affect sport. At the moment the sporting authorities controlling events like the Tour de France cycling event, say, or the Olympic Games, treat any form of human augmentation or performance enhancement as off-limits. I guess so long as participants agree in advance not to use such techniques, then they cannot complain if they are caught breaking the rules. But in some occupations like those mentioned in the story, such as astronauts experiencing the effects of zero-gravity environments, this sort of stuff might be a basic necessity rather than a luxury.
Meanwhile, here is an interesting story about nanotech and possible cures for blindness. And I can recommend this book by Ronald Bailey.
Makes a change from writing about Tony Blair, anyway.
. . .powered by alcohol . . .
Say no more!
I mean, alcohol has always made me better looking and more intelligent, and now it will make me stronger, too?
Yes RC and more confidence to boot!
I wonder if the quality of the alcohol, like say an expensive Single Malt, would affect the anticipated enhancements.
I seem to recall the Italians developed synthetic muscle tissue at Pisa in the early nineties, using biomimetic molecules in a vast array, which had something like 10,000 times the strength of the human equivalent.
Regarding the blindness cure I wait with bated breath for the day I see David Blunkett with 2 red dots in his eyes saying, “David Cameron you are hereby terminated”.
Enhancement should be the end goal with repair a strong motivator.
You mentioned enhancing our cognitive capacity. I think folks drastically underestimate the potential of a drug or treatment which could reliably increase IQ by even 10 points (presumably more for those with lower IQs) without side effect or serious addiction.
Just think about the effect on the research community exploring better ways to enhance cognition! It is one of the more direct positive feedback loops I can imagine.
Also, it is absolutely necessary to have enhanced human thinking in order to prevent an “us vs. them” result in a singularity. The “them” would be superintelligent software and robots, of course. With enhancement, it because shades of us. I suppose those without enhancement would be pretty shabby in a fight, so it wouldn’t really even matter. If you think I’m talking sci-fi, you note really paying attention to the very real possibilities of the near future 😀
A final note: am I the only one who thinks a good ending to Battlestar Gallactica would be a race of only human-cylon hybrids, with all other pure human & pure cylon wiped out?
IKbot,
I still can’t get used to the Cylons as humanoid babes instead of the metallic monstrosities that clunked about on the original 70’s vintage series.
Let’s see, a super strong, super smart enhanced machine with shades of humanity. Does that include ALL the things that make us human like faith, hope, love, devotion, independence, patience, creativity etc. but at the same time hate, envy, greed, fear, self adulation, cruelty? I’m not a shrink, but it seems we all have some of each virtue and vice and it is the degrees of each that determine personality. Do you really thing some dweeb in a laboratory could get that recipe right?
You talk as if these ehhancements are just a simple improvement for humans, but the truth is if we adopted all of the stuff that will be possible, enhanced muscles, eyes, hearing, smell, cognitive capacity, etc, humans could advance (evolve?) more in the next 100 years than in the last 4+ million, a lot more.
Would we still be humans?
Personally I don’t think so, we would be the next step in evolution.
Initial genetic improvements woud be limited to those both willing and able to afford them – a vanishingly small number in a gene pool of 6 billion individuals.
The most interesting take on a possible (SF) future can be read in Nancy Kress’s award-winning book “Beggars in Spain”, (and its sequels), which also name check Libertarianism as well.
You mentioned enhancing our cognitive capacity. I think folks drastically underestimate the potential of a drug or treatment which could reliably increase IQ by even 10 points (presumably more for those with lower IQs) without side effect or serious addiction.
I suspect that a drug that made people smarter would quickly cause serious psychological addiction, even if the physical symptoms were insignificant (weight loss? hell, that’s a feature!).