The Evolution

So you want to know a little about how prosthetics will contribute to our, in my opinion, twisted future? Alright. To put things in perspective, I’ll start with taking you back to where it all started. The supposedly first prosthetic was made a long time ago. All the way back to the Egyptians. However they were made of fiber and are believed to have been worn for a sense of “wholeness” rather than having any actual function. Later on, in The Dark Ages, the hand hook and the peg leg saw the light. They where mostly made of a mix of wood, iron, and bronze and outside of battle they were reserved for the rich. In the mid-late 1500s things got more advanced. An above-knee device that was a kneeling peg leg and foot prosthesis that had a fixed position, adjustable harness, knee lock control and other engineering features was introduced. This is where things started to remind of today’s devices.

The biggest leap within prosthetics, which happened just recently, is the “bionic” limb. The integration of digital technology, giving the user some sense of cooperation with the prosthetic limb. With integrated motors and circuits that picks up on the electrical signals from the brain, the patient is able to actually move the limb with only his mind. This may sound amazing, and it is, but what’s the very essential ability still missing, that sets it far apart from a biological limb? The sense of touch. The ability to feel what you’re touching. Being able to feel the textures of an object, and to touch and feel your loved ones. What if this is possible? I will come back to this in a later post.

The Precedent Factors

I mentioned some of the more remarkable progressions within the technology earlier, and it seems that it progressed very slowly until the last century. Why is this? My guess; if you lost an arm or a leg back when the wars were fought in hand-to-hand combat, your chances of surviving were pretty slim. The amount of amputees was probably much smaller, which led to less research on the technology. So with the gun and explosive production accelerating during the 18-1900s, and with wars like the Civil War, World War One and Two, and the Vietnam War, the amount of amputees skyrocketed and put pressure on the prosthetic technology to advance. Without having seen any statistics, I would think war is the biggest factor when it comes to the amount of amputees. As long as there is war, there will be some demand for prosthetics. But it is still a technology made for a fairly narrow target group. Prosthetics are still lesser functioning replacements for our biological limbs. What happens when the artificial limbs exceed the level of our original ones? Will human enhancement become the new plastic surgery?

How does this influence the theory of Digital Divide?

On a global scale, the technology of prosthetics is still reserved for the “rich”, as back in the 1500s. Unless you live in a country with health benefits, where the government can help you financially. If you live in a poor country, you will most likely never have a modern, up to date prosthetic. This divide will most likely become bigger and bigger as the technology moves forward. Not only between rich and poor country’s, but also between the rich and poor people within a society. With advanced digital integration comes a high price tag, and my guess is that this will increase the gap between rich and poor drastically. Imagine if we come to a point where the average rich person is enhanced in some way. Will “enhanced” become a bullet point under future job requirements?

Future speculations

I’ve already thrown out some speculations on this amazing, creepy future of ours. In an earlier post, I briefly wrote something about the possibility of having the sense of touch through a prosthetic. This is what I find mind blowing. In a research led by Silvestro Micera of Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, they achieved this by connecting electrodes onto the nerves in the test subjects’ stump, and zapping them with a weak electrical signal. The subject could feel his missing fingers moving. They then connected sensors to a robot arm, blindfolded the subject, and handed him different objects. The subject could now feel a distinct difference between soft and hard objects. “Suddenly I could tell if it was a hard object,” Sorensen recalled, describing sensations that changed along with his grip. “The response, the feedback from the arm to my nerves and to my brain, they came very strong.” (Fox News Latino, February 06 2014)

This in itself shows the amazing potential of the human body, and considering this is the first experiment achieving this, imagine what the future brings. Look at computers twenty years ago, and compare them with todays technology. But at this point, the experiments have been done trying to achieve extensions of the existing body. What if it could be taken even further? Take a look at this. Its even more mind blowing.

A research led by Sliman Bensmaia, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, shows that monkeys with electrodes connected directly to specific areas of the brain, react in the same way they responded to physical touch. “To start, Bensmaia and his colleagues trained monkeys to focus their gaze in different directions depending on whether their index finger or fourth finger were being prodded. Microelectrodes were then placed in an area of the brain called the primary som atosensory cortex. This area represents an entire map of the body, with each neuron responsible for sensing when a different part of the skin is touched. Next, the team recorded what activity occurred and where it registered in the somatosensory cortex when a monkey had its index or fourth finger poked.” (Alyssa Botelho, 14 October 2013)

So by training the monkeys to react differently to varieties of physical touch, and then stimulating different areas of the somatosensory cortex, the scientists were able to replicate different sensations of touch without physically touching the monkey. This leads me to believe that we, at some point, will be able to replace our whole body and still have full functionality. Creepy? Awesome?

Then we have this guy called Dmitry Itzkov, the founder of the 2045 Initiative. His ultimate goal is to become a human hologram, and he has gathered a bunch of scientists and rich people wanting to fund and research this. Firstly he wants to make an avatar remotely controlled by a brain interface, the next step is to physically transplant a human brain into a functioning avatar, then he wants to upload a persons personality into an avatar, letting the person continue his or hers life with the new immortal body. Presumably. Then, by 2045, he says he’ll have the first human hologram good to go.

People are debating whether all of this is possible or not. What defines a person? Is it all in the brain? Or is it a combination of brain and body? Soul? And if we were to upload a persons mind into an artificial vessel, wouldn’t it just be cloning? What about brain transplantation?