I’ve always been fascinated by science fiction, bionic men and even much more by the real science miracles; each day I watch determined scientists and engineers make our wild and sometimes horrific dreams come true.
The advancement in prosthetics is growing in leap and bonds. Many being tested are now getting connected to our neural bus – quite a few can be controlled by thoughts.
So this is where it gets interesting. Each year we get to hear about better and more versatile prosthetics. I assume that at a random time in a not so far future, we would get to a point where these man-made attachments would be as good as any natural appendage.
What happens the day after? Would we stop making them better? Absolutely not! The day after would have prosthetics better than the real-life organs.
Take artificial eyes for example – scientists are using different methods to build. Some have even gotten FDA and CE approvals. Soon they would be mainstream and then some dude would offer an artificial eye that could see infrared and ultraviolet, overlay your sight with additional information streamed over the internet – like when I see a colleague and then a visual tag pops with his name and number on my vision.
Like a Google Glass on steroids.
Or a cochlear implant that could hear sound beyond the normal human range. Or an artificial leg that can’t break or you won’t get tired running because it has hydraulics that could give a range boost. Down the line I imagine people would willingly start giving up their limbs, eyes, ears, etc. to have the artificial ones. I recently started wearing glasses but in the future, I could pop my eyes out and put in something snazzy from Samsung that can see in the dark, overlay navigation map for me or even deliver some delirious porn.
Would it stop there?
One day, mark my words, someone would deliver a complete bionic body and we would all port our consciousness to it. That’s it.
The future is bionic. The future is exciting.
But then let me be gone before we get there.