> Another panelist shut them down immediately: doctors and scientists aren’t even close to solving the phantom pain and limited mobility that most amputees face, let alone building something uniformly better than a human limb.
To repost a slightly tounge-incheek description of features your "standard model" has:
1. Supports a very large number of individual movements and articulations
2. Meets certain weight-restrictions (overall system must be near-buoyant in water)
3 Supports a wide variety of automatic self-repair techniques, many of which can occur without ceasing operation
4. Is entirely produced and usually maintained by unskilled (unconscious?) labor from common raw materials
5. Contains a comprehensive suite of sensors
6. Not too brittle, flexes to store and release mechanical energy from certain impacts
7. Selectively reinforces itself when strain is detected
8. Has areas for the storage of long-term energy reserves, which double as an impact cushion
9. Houses small fabricators to replenish some of its own operating fluids
10. Subsystems for thermal management (evaporative cooling, automatic micro-activation)
Many of the things the human body was optimized for aren't really that important in the modern world. E.g. I'd take a body (or brain...) that was 10 times stronger but required ten times more energy. Energy is abundant now.
Another serious downside is fragility. Sure it can self repair. But it's very slow and only works for minor damage. Id prefer to just swap out the broken part and fix it quickly.
And the whole fluid system is connected, so if a single part breaks it can drain the whole system. Not to mention the whole pain thing. It can't even extreme temperatures or environments at all.
So you want a body that can withstand extreme temperatures, something not an issue in the modern world. A less optimized brain that consumes more energy, something not strictly correlated to intelligence (finback whale metabolizes 5x more energy per hr), or even cognitive engagement/load. Body parts that must be purchased when damaged instead of self repairing. You want to disable your ability to sense noxious stimuli. And a compartmentalized fluid system that would require multiple pumps, and some novel method to transport energy from fluid, over tissue, back to fluid; from the gut compartment to the chest compartment, and finally to the head compartment, to fuel your inefficient as fuck brain?
>So you want a body that can withstand extreme temperatures, something not an issue in the modern world.
Do you live someplace without weather, because I sure don't.
>A less optimized brain
Who said anything about less optimized? Energy conservation was the dominating constraint for evolution. The brain has to run on only 10 watts of power, which is tiny. Remove that constraint and its likely the brain could be much more powerful. Comparisons to completely different classes of animal with completely different types of brains is irrelevant. Within primates, species with more energy consuming brains are more intelligent, with humans at the top.
Also the brain uses very slow and inefficient chemical reactions to send signals, compared to transistors.
>Body parts that must be purchased when damaged instead of self repairing.
Healthcare is by far one of the greatest expenses of the modern world. I'll take just purchasing a new robot arm, assuming cyborg insurance doesn't cover it.
>You want to disable your ability to sense noxious stimuli.
If you mean pain, hell yes. I'll take an alert "you've been damaged!" over excruciating pain any day.
>And a compartmentalized fluid system
That doesn't sound so bad at all. In fact a robot body probably doesn't require fluids at all if power is distributed electrically. Even simple emergency shutoff valves could fix the fluid system. A simple cut shouldn't be enough to kill you.
Reminds me of the P-51 radiator. One tiny leak, the slightest battle damage, and the engine was toast. I have to admire the badass mofo's that flew them over long stretches of the Pacific. The P-48 (air cooled) would keep running with a lot of engine damage.
My truck sprung a leak in the heater hose last week (the fan belt ground a hole in it), and I was able to limp it the mile home before all the coolant was gone and the engine melted, but it wouldn't have gone any further.
Noted and begs the question of why "human augmentation" tends to popularly mean "partial replacement." (I'll assume because artificial limbs read better in visual media)
In reality, there are plenty of opportunities for true augmentation. F.ex. a friend was discussing the pacemaker his mother recently had implanted after an episode of tachycardia. Fairly small, continuously monitors vitals & syncs to communicate with base station (which can contact physician if needed), internal battery. And works in conjunction with the existing biological heart!
Why not focus on actually augmenting our already-amazing bodies?
Anyone remember the "6 Million Dollar Man"? Steve Austin had an arm and both legs replaced with bionic ones with super powers. He'd do thinks like break handcuffs by spreading his arms.
But only one of his arms was bionic. It would have just ripped the other hand off. Similarly, his running at superspeed would have just shattered his spine.
I.e. you can't increase the power of the engine without increasing the strength of the drive train.
Yeah, with most technologies all the most useful applications are, well, more boring by the time you get them than what people imagine beforehand.
I imagine some of the best augmentation tech is going to be about diagnostic data and about coaxing/training our bodies away from maladaptive states. Consider already-existing stuff like insulin pumps or anti-seizure implants. Extend that to dealing with obesity, panic attacks, allergies...
Absolutely agreed. What's the effectiveness difference between doing something your body already does well... better? Vs doing something biology is terrible at... well?
It's engineering. Get the low hanging fruit first.
The wide separation between whats done and whats talked about makes the topic interesting. The technology isn't here yet and may never arrive, most of it's thinly veiled magickal fanfic. So they play with magnets instead.
In the example of the pacemaker, it would be like techies 50 years ago talking about how cool a computer controlled pacemaker would be, while they implant a 12AT7 dual triode vacuum tube in their belly doing roughly nothing.
> Sure it can self repair. But it's very slow and only works for minor damage. Id prefer to just swap out the broken part and fix it quickly.
That presupposes one lives in a certain part of the world. There are substantial reaches of the planet where even with commercial shipping access, letting your body heal itself would be faster.
> Many of the things the human body was optimized for aren't really that important in the modern world. E.g. I'd take a body (or brain...) that was 10 times stronger but required ten times more energy. Energy is abundant now.
Energy is abundant only in certain areas of the world. As a species, many of us still face malnutrition.
Also, the situation of abundant food in certain parts of the world, has only been present very recently in evolutionary history - maybe 60 years / 200'000 years of homo sapiens. With the efficiency of food production threatened by climate change, this isn't something our genes will bet on.
Agriculture accounts for a third of worldwide carbon emissions. So energy still isn't abundant enough to fuel 10x humans, unless you change the fuel source from food to something more efficient.
I don't understand how you came to that number for agriculture though. Growing crops like corn consumes very little energy relative to the amount of food produced. Transportation and processing requires a bit more, but I can't see how it adds up to anywhere near that much.
Nitrogen fixated feltilisers, our agriculture industry at its current scale is only possible due to fertilisers produced at mass from natural gas. There are other side issues that contribute too.
> our agriculture industry at its current scale is only possible due to fertilisers produced at mass from natural gas.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
Growing organic food on a healthy soil, will give you a certain amount of yield. Using fertilisers and modern techniques on that soil will give you a tremendous temporary boost. But most such techniques kill the soil in the process, and you eventually run out of natural fertilisers.
Using fertilisers and modern techniques on dead soil will have yields similar to organic food on a healthy soil. The only real advantage at this point is the reduced human labour required (organic food is more labour intensive overall).
Of course, organic food on dead soil will be crap.
We can stop relying on fertilisers, if we have a healthy soil. Fortunately, there are techniques to resurrect dead soils (basically have some wood rot on that soil), and some other things. It takes about 2-3 years, though, and generalising those technique will definitely require more farmers.
Currently in our civilization, blind calories aren't that expensive. I think the bigger issue is how you carry that energy while moving, since I don't think anyone wants to operate tethered to an outlet.
In terms of stored energy per kilogram, regular old fat kicks the ass of any consumer battery tech.
Suppose that your augmentations rely on battery-fed electricity, and you eat 2,000 kcal per day for your bio-bits, and charge 18,000 kcal each night for your mech-bits...
In that scenario, you'd need to carry around an extra 120 kilograms of lithium-ion batteries to cover your daily activity, which probably won't involve much jumping.
Affordability of food is because food prices exclude most externalities (and subsidies). Food is one of the biggest global warming drivers. So we cannot afford more food consumption unless our diet composition changes.
> Food is one of the biggest global warming drivers.
I'd say meat is one of the biggest global-warming drivers. That's why I referred to "blind calories", as in, calories and you don't care where they came from.
a 2000 food calorie diet is ~2.4 kilowatt * hours, if units(1) hasn't failed me. 10x, 24 kilowatt * hours, is still little more than a few dollars at today's energy prices.
getting 24kWh out of a wall and into a portable something in less time than a person spends eating in a day, though, would require some serious cabling.
An interesting analogy is the war on transformer based battery charger wall warts, because as much as 24 watt hours of "Energy vampires" will destroy the earth when multiplied by a billion or so people and their cellphones. 24 billion watt hours per day is a moderately impressive electric power plant, so there is some truth in that. Of course the fancier construction and shorter life of the elaborate chargers almost certainly causes more environmental damage in total (classic greenwashing). Hence the short lived hot running expensive switching power supply wall wart we've all come to know and tolerate. You're talking about all or most of humanity using over a thousand times as much energy, yeah that's not going to go over well.
Another example is it costs about $1 per watt-year where I live, and people completely freak out about using old desktop computers that draw 100 watts (aka $100/yr) and suggest the usual greenwashing solutions of spending hundreds of dollars on exotic new hardware that will pay for itself in only 50-100 years (of course its realistic lifespan is more like 5 years tops ...). 2400 watts continuous draw means $2400 per year to the electric company, roughly, aside from demand for air conditioning from all those sweaty heads. Most people are very poor in our current pyramid so this would likely be an issue only for 1%er types.
I would find it more interesting in terms of reducing total death rate to be able to drop burn rate to 10 watts or so and genetically engineer some photosynthesis in to skin. So in a famine you seem to exist by doing little more than sleep while sunbathing, not entirely unlike an elderly housecat. Or in the winter even without photosynthesis, turn the dial down to hibernate levels.
Odd that solitary animals like bears seem to hibernate pretty well but supposedly (note, supposedly...) hyper social hyper extroverted humans don't hibernate although a tribe structure would seem to enormously benefit... Probably some pre-conception is wrong or there's something about higher human consciousness that doesn't tolerate dreamworld for 23 hours per week.
> genetically engineer some photosynthesis in to skin
The "infrastructure costs" for making that possible will probably outweigh any benefit, unless you also genetically engineer people to be immobile brains connected to bat-wing-like collection surfaces.
Even with energy-conversion inefficiencies, it makes much more sense to construct/build something big and immobile that indirectly collects that energy which we can then tap.
It would be more expensive yes, but a lot of the cost is currently in getting unique flavors and in the preparation which is a bit of a fixed cost. People also throw out large amounts of food. If you just wanted large amounts of calories you could just eat pounds of grains or potatoes
100 times more energy would result in heat dissipation problems. The stock human body runs at roughly 100W, the brain runs at around 20W or 25W. So it'd probably be worth it to upgrade a brain at your ratio, but I'd need confidence that the engineering problems are solvable. (2kW of power for the 100x brain cost, times 24 hours, would cost me about $5 a day if I bought it as electricity... $2000/year... pretty affordable).
I'd glaaaadly take a 10% brainpower upgrade that required 100% extra energy, though. I can afford the extra 500 kCal per day of food intake. My understanding is that most first-worlders like their food enough that they'd take a 0% improvement in trade for being able to eat another 500kCal per day of food without weight gain.
I mean, all that assumes that a "10x stronger brain" actually results in a useful performance upgrade. That part is pure fantasy speculation.
As all futurists, you seem to solve unexisting problem here. Only limbs are required to be local. If you can make artifical brain or parts without erasing your original, then you can easily offload new parts to datacenter, leaving only TCP/UDP interface inside your skull.
BrainHub. Additional brain processing and storage for $25/mo for your team of 5. Free for public memories.
Otoh, I already have various memory latency and processing issues, having just 1x conventional brainpower.
If not complete military-grade win, it would be nice tradeoff anyway. Alternatives are: placing new heavy brain in abdomen (because stock digestion can't produce so much power by design), or replacing back, coxal and leg bones with carbon variants with embedded batteries, which should be far more expensive than subscription to low-latency BH channel for additional $1000/mo SLA per team. Also consider servicing and failure costs for businesses depending on 5*10x brainpower teams, and reduced labour market.
For 10% increase one would guess you could just overclock the brain, if we knew enough about the brain to connect hardware to it.
I think you'd be more likely to get an arithmetic co-processor to start, wire neurons in such a way up to a small circuit that you get precise mathematical intuitions based on it. Being incredible at math from birth would likely change your life indescribably.
If we move away from optimal, then energy needs are likely not gone g to SoCal linearly. And ya, some of that extra energy wil,be used for cooling and such.
I would take the 10% upgrade also, but if everyone did...well...it could become a problem. As food isn't transformed into energy uniformly, obesity could still be a problem.
It will probably be cheaper and easier to grow a new arm in a dish and surgically attach it rather than cybernetic alternatives - this has already been done with donor arms. I can't see the economics of fully synthetic prosthetic limbs ever being viable in the current era.
While I don't disagree with your level of skepticism necessarily, I'd like to take this moment to make a point --
this kind of negative sentiment seems so characteristic of HN lately toward anything new and difficult, in spite of the fact that this is a community generally aimed toward entrepreneurial, forward-looking, highly-technical types.
Instead of such a short stop "it would be expensive, so why bother, it won't happen for a long, long time" sort of sentiment, why does't the community make more pointed suggestions about flaws. Simply and vaguely saying "the economics look bad to me" generates only sentiment, and no real knowledge to be shared. I can be guilty of it, too, but usually because of emotional response and not a technical criticism. This sounds like a technical criticism with no reasoning.
Do you realize the irony replying to a comment that's basically saying "I don't think we'll go full cyborg soon, since growing new body parts in a lab will be cheaper." with the implication that it's not forward-looking?
Both of these ideas are currently in the basic research stage and far from becoming mainstream, so they are just looking in a different direction that is still "forward".
I agree that the lack of reasons for the economic differences is disappointing, though.
Personally, I believe we will use whatever solution makes sense in a given context. If you need a cosmetic replacement for you lost ear, you get appropriately shaped connective tissue colonized with fresh cells, so that it looks like the real thing. If you need something to restore your lost hearing, you get a cochlear implant.
I actually agree with you -- and personally I'd prefer having natural tissue replacement as a more ready and viable solution, I guess I really approached a response the wrong way. Rather than saying they weren't forward looking, I think I meant the vision espoused was too limited?
I do think we're closer to cybernetic/bionic options, though (as referenced in my original comment as an example).
HN is probably on a backswing. For a while a few years ago, it seemed like everyone would have expected to be able to create a better-than-flesh prosthetic in 18 months with a team of five coders and a little vc funding.
I guess some of us are just sick of the hype, and the frankly demented hubris that's so often on display along with it.
I'll be honest, all this biomod stuff looks like LARP to me. Just look at the article, this person literally got a magnet installed so they could play-act at being in a lesser Neil Stevenson novel, while, as noted in these comments, the actual science is nowhere near delivering the advancements that were promised. It turns out not all problems can be solved with a little Javascript.
Maybe that makes me a cynic, fair enough, but all this valley hype is exhausting.
I did enjoy the note about gatekeepers (insurance companies and the medical profession).
These scientifically conservative organizations are great for not letting terrible things happen to people, but not at all geared towards radical innovation. Viz the medical community just starting to realize that systemic outcome-tracking might be beneficial towards informing what procedures are more effective in the real world.
The market for a useful cybernetic limb is extremely small, despite the amount of media attention this kind of thing gets. It would be limited to injured soldiers, the very small number of civilians that lose limbs, and the even smaller number of biohackers that would consider voluntarily replacing a limb. Each prosthetic limb would need to be custom built to size constraints and other characteristics of the amputated limb. Think about how much effort it took to create a good consumer experience for a smartphone where the market size is essentially the entire population on the planet and there are massive economies of scale.
The other factor is that even the limb prosthetics we have today require a significant amount of ongoing support to resize and adjust to the user. You can appreciate therefore that a highly sophisticated and customised synthetic limb would require very thorough ongoing follow up and maintenance for the lifetime of the user, and this incurs a significant cost.
Another factor is competing technology - growing organs extra-corporeally benefits from a much broader scope and therefore larger market, and possibly even easier engineering hurdles. Also, it is likely that there will be robots which you can ask to pick up your coffee cup etc long before a useful prosthetic limb. This isn't as good as having your own arm, but the engineering hurdles are much easier and the market for robotics is obviously massive.
I would suggest therefore that in the next 30 years, a useful prosthetic limb, with acceptable latency, strength and durability is probably not possible for less than several hundred thousand dollars initial cost, and perhaps that much again for life long maintenance. I also doubt that the potential market is big enough for someone to invest enough to turn it into a really good consumer product, including setting up supply chain and maintenance systems.
Thanks for adding detail! I haven't delved as much as I'd like into the field, so I appreciate any info I can get. However, I'd love if you could throw some references for some of these points.
Personally, I'd love to have to have natural regrowth as a more viable option (though I also like the idea of cybernetic enhancement). For example, I have soft teeth and have had an issue maintaining their health without dental work my whole life. If anybody could ever make that such a non-issue as I might be able to have my dentin and enamel regrown, I'd be soooo happy.
Refreshing and similar in sentiment to what the article expressed. Thanks for posting, even if meta. (And keep on increasing the HN SNR with information-heavy posts!)
Funny, I was watching a video of a guy with a prosthetic hand. He loved it. He said he went from almost committing suicide to being ok with life again. When he talked about his bionic hand, he said "I'm not left handed, I'm other-handed", as he turned his hand a full 360... It was pretty funny.
That's the use case I was imagining too. Something like in Mega Man, Metroid or Bionic Commando where the arm acts like a super fancy swiss army knife. Seems like something there could be military applications for, or something espionage agencies may want to have available.
> [C]onsider that you are an enormous colony of vicious nanomachines, shaped by millions of years of fighting and cooperating with other varieties for survival.
> Your mobile swarm contains thousands of tools for finding, neutralizing, disassembling and anything useful it comes in contact with... including techniques for identifying and destroying possible intruders. Now, those tools aren't perfect -- and everybody else has their own tricks -- but the fact that you're around means you're competitively equipped and you're at least somebody's else's nightmare. All the really bad players were eaten long ago.
Obviously this article is full of self-modification for fairly whimsical reasons. It's easy to make fun of.
But this kind of problem is more serious and discouraging when you think about aging. You know cells in each organ are going to mutate, get protein aggregation, fibrosis, and so on. Instead of trying to figure out something to do about each of those things individually at the molecular level, it might seem simpler to just replace organs periodically. Every 20 years, just get a new heart, etc.
Nontrivial and risky, of course, but perhaps less so than the even less-developed alternatives. But as TFA points out, surgery is hard on the body, and the body likes to reject transplants, be they biological or mechanical. Integrating vasculature is hard, integrating nerves is REALLY hard.
So in short, I think even if these particular applications are frivolous, hopefully people who are doing this will help push forward knowledge on the general question of "how do you add/replace/integrate body parts safely and robustly". They are truly pioneers, in all senses of the term -- they're pushing forward the frontier at great personal risk.
In the mean time, there's also some work that can be done on the the anti-aging front by picking very simple mutations that cause delayed aging phenotypes (skip to "longevity" section): http://diyhpl.us/wiki/genetic-modifications/
I work in aging research. A very nice set of notes you have there. The field is not really thinking in this direction. By "picking" mutations, I suppose you mean gene therapy.
As you probably know, NIA does not consider aging a disease, just a risk factor for other diseases. So we cannot possibly test anything remotely risky in humans for the treatment of aging, and that certainly includes both transplants and gene therapy. We have to backdoor our way in via stuff like Alzheimer's, dementia, sarcopenia, etc, and it seems unlikely that most gene therapy interventions that target aging per se would have enough efficacy on that kind of disease to justify the risk. They are too advanced already.
Even so, this is the kind of thing I think about while driving to work, frustrated at the slow pace that occurs while working within the system :)
I am inclined to agree that the problems with transplantation, both biological and mechanical, are mostly solvable though. I think the kinks will have to be worked out in other fields where prosthetics, surgery, and gene therapy have a better perceived risk/reward ratio than aging.
Well dude, I have some funding for crazy gene therapy projects, so let me know if you want to work on things that matter. But it's all somewhat outside of academia, so it doesn't really appeal to everyone.
Some very high-level background on where this is coming from: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/hplusroadmap/ (we hang out mostly on IRC and would love to hear your project ideas).
That sounds interesting. This is a really busy period but within the next few weeks I hope to check it out.
In general, I love meeting with the non-academic side of this work. I met de Grey and some of his associates at last year's AAA meeting. The relationship is complicated, as you know.
I see the value in both types of research -- people working outside the system don't have to worry about IRBs, paper-writing, etc, and can take risks we can't. OTOH, there are a lot of very smart people on the inside who are working on "things that matter". For example, Jim Kirkland and senolytics. They have access to expertise, funding, samples, and personnel that the non-academic community cannot realistically match. Although the entrance of Calico et al is a new quantity and it will be interesting to see how that turns out.
As a very short summary of my focus, I came into the field, read a lot of papers, and came to the conclusion "no one knows what causes aging". So my focus is on bioinformatics systems to process a lot of data and help me figure out what direction should be most fruitful to focus on. I work with wet-lab people but don't do it myself.
I hope the new generation of academic aging researchers will reach out more to the non-academic side more, though. I plan to do so.
After a conference once, Aubrey sat down with me at whatever bar we were at, and he told me that one of the dirty little secrets about the field of aging research is that nobody really reads that many papers.
I laughed it off, I thought he was pulling a fast one on me. At the time I was intentionally reading about 10 papers/day ( http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/longevity/ not all of them on longevity, of course). I told him my personal target, and he basically said nope, other people are reading at most a few papers per month.
I don't really think the academic system is working :-). Biology is crazy complex, there's just no way for anyone to get enough context if they are just grazing around.
That is very true. Nowadays, a good day for me is 3. We're too busy writing papers, writing grants, writing code, answering e-mails, filling out forms, or whatever. But I work at an institute that does a lot besides aging. I don't get the impression this is specific to the aging field.
But on the other hand, the truth is that most papers do not have very much relevant information in them. There are millions of papers published per year. Aging is so interdisciplinary it would be foolish to think that if you just read J. Gerontology (now "GeroScience" lol, that was done to suck up to Felippe Sierra), Aging Cell, and a few others, you'll be caught up.
That's why I went to the data. Even IF a human could read them all, most of the interesting data nowadays is high-throughput and is analyzed in the most shallow way within the text. The real beef is deposited in GEO or SRA.
I am inclined to think that biology works in a way that is not very comprehensible to the human mind. For example, when humans design a system, it's modular, and you try to minimize the number of interdependencies between modules.
In biology, it seems almost everything affects everything else, to the point that if someone publishes a paper saying "X upregulates Y", I find it almost irrelevant; they have, assuming everything was done correctly, characterized one edge in a very highly connected network. Probably the "X upregulates Y" is contextual as well.
I don't know the solution to all this. I just wanted to do this as a career, and as a graduate student we very clearly learned that there are certain lines we need to color within if we wanted to be paid to do research.
This mention triggered 30 visits to the blog post in the last 1.5 days. Next time I make a blog.kitmatic.com progress post, I'll mention it here also. Busy working on the 3D carved electronics safety enclosure. Using FreeCAD 3D is tough lately because the devs have made tons of change without new docs for it, but it means culture shock's design is OSHWA certified reusable in new designs.
Just wondering, if you "have some funding for crazy gene therapy projets", what does that mean? Where does "outside funding" usually come from? I imagine Larry Ellison flying you over in his private jet and saying "kanzure, I want to live longer, here's some cash please make it happen". Is it like that?
.... Eliezer leaned back in his chair. "Mr. Musk, what can I do for you?". The two engaged in a blissful staredown as their eyes locked. After several overbearing teary-eyed moments, Elon replied with a simple request. "World peace." And thus began a long, unproductive partnership between Big Yud and Peter Thiel-- I mean, Elon Musk -- a partnership focused not on the practical realities of actually building relevant transhumanist technology, but rather a venture focused on theories of world peace-- er, I mean, friendliness-- and writing fanfic instead of executing on important engineering/lab skills to achieve technological goals.
More seriously... Some projects don't really require that much funding to happen. Often you can use specialized knowledge to forego otherwise hugely expensive efforts. It mostly starts with skill and knowledge, not money. As an example, trying out random CRISPR-Cas9 projects can actually be really cheap, less than $5k/project if the projects are structured just right. The trick is to pick projects that happen to be within budget and interesting enough to everyone involved. And if there needs to be a larger budget, sometimes the project is interesting enough to attract outsider funding.
Where were you planning on getting all these organs, though? There's a shortage now, even though transplantation is an unpleasant last resort; unless xenotransplantation is sorted out or we go full Niven (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gift_From_Earth), it doesn't seem interesting as a routine procedure, even if rejection isn't an issue.
If you can perform all these tasks with your smartphone cheaper and without invasive surgery, you can't really call it an augmentation or upgrade. Frankly, if implantable magnets and NFC/RFID chips are the full extent of the contributions of the biohacking community, then the community completely lacks imagination and creativity.
We can use radio waves to measure heart rate and breathing and use that data to measure a person's emotional state. It would be interesting to see someone hack together an internal sensor that does this and have it attached to implantable led's, so your body could "glow" particular colors based on your emotional state. Or use electronic ink tattoos to make an animated gif on your body.
Just copying the same two uninspired trends isn't what I would call hacking.
> Frankly, if implantable magnets and NFC/RFID chips are the full extent of the contributions of the biohacking community, then the community completely lacks imagination and creativity.
Don't let the grinders get in the way of progress :-) There are many at-home genetic engineering folks that don't proselytize implants every n seconds: https://groups.google.com/group/diybio
Yeah, I got mine out after a few years. It lost sensitivity as magnets do, and I didn't want to pinch a nerve. They have new ones that are much slimmer now, but also much more difficult to remove...I passed.
We actually do have promising 'batteries' for this sort of application as of 2017, though; lithium hybrid supercapacitors. They're roughly an order of magnitude worse than Li-Po batteries today, in energy density and cost. But the advantages over LiPos are a higher ~10C charge/discharge rate, no thermal runaway "Galaxy S7" issues, and a maximum charge retention rate on the order of 80-95% after 10,000 cycles should let them last decades at least. A very compact 100F/24mAh module is available today at 1.8-2.7V from Murata, and I think Taiyo-Yuden has offerings too.
I think we're still making progress. Anyone buying one of those magnets knew they were buying into an alpha version of a product; it's not like we asked the FDA to approve things first.
Not a good choice for implanted batteries, but possibly the replacement for the power storage unit for EMALS. The electromagnetic catapult on the Ford-series carriers apparently works fine; it's the flywheel energy storage system which powers it that's giving trouble. They need something they can charge up in a minute or so and then discharge in a few seconds. Ultracapacitors are starting to look good compared to the flywheel thing.
Just the description of the nonsense these two have done gave me a shiver. The toward the MRI part, I prepared for the worse. Had he forgotten about the magnet, it could have gone really bad.
Yea, even the most basis research would tell you that you can't have an MRI with anything magnetic in your body. A microwave from an inch away has about a 1 Gauss magnetic field, where his implant "outright buzzed". And an MRI field is multiple Tesla, i.e., larger by 4 orders of magnitude.
> My earlier internet research suggested you could secure it with tape during a scan, but this confidence was apparently misplaced.
If the patient isn't able to answer or is unsure it gets a little complicated based on the risk factors, how soon the image is needed, etc.. Sometimes screening imaging of the orbits (eyes) is done if there is a history of metal working or a CT head/orbits (bullet fragments in brain = no bueno), chest X-ray if you can't get documentation on a pacemaker, and so on.
While I don't know enough about metal detectors to know how sensitive they are, I suspect someone has looked into it because there would be a lot of money to be made/saved if you could, for example, use a detector to confidently rule out metal fragments in the eyes. Bear in mind these fragments are <1 mm, and if you are wrong and the powerful magnet moves it even a couple mm you could blind a person or worse!
Metal detectors don't (typically) detect body jewelery so I don't think they are very useful in a clinical setting since they'd have to detect that sort of thing.
Source: I have a bunch of body jewelery and been through a bunch of metal detectors and never set any off.
Well yes the ones used in security checkpoints are probably only set to detect big pieces of metal like guns and knives. It's a pain if they go off every time someone walks through with an earring or a metal button or zipper.
But people do use metal detectors to reliably find bottle caps, jewelry, coins, etc, under several inches of sand and soil.
I had to get an MRI for my knee (old injury) and all they did was ask me if I had any medical implants or sustained any injuries where I might have had metal enter my body.
It's merely a future that is much further out. Scientists and doctors aren't even close to being able to interface man made technology to nerve endings and brain waves in a way that could compete or enhance the natural. The same is true with AI and machine learning that is supposedly due to destroy humanity any minute now. It's all a bunch of hype.
I quit subscribing to Popular Mechanics and the like many years ago because they were always so hyped with the next big breakthrough that never happened. It was science fiction (which I do love to read, but not when it is proclaimed as reality).
People buy into these cults and do bizarre things like this all the time, people want so badly to believe the comic books.
The narcissism of man is on full display with things like this. Do you realize just how little we understand about anything? Any field of science, medicine, exploration, psychology, philosophy. All whose pillars of truth are overturned regularly. I wonder why people are so stupid as to believe the next thing the surgeon general recommends them to eat or not eat, just to have that completely changes 5 years later. People basing their child rearing on psychologists whose studies cannot be reproduces almost 90% of the time.
Here is my philosophy. Wither you believe in creation or evolution, look back to learn how our bodies should stay healthy. The things we should eat and not eat. The exercise we should do. Look back before man started screwing things up (I'm talking hunter gatherers here). Use common sense when taking care of the planet. Look how interdependent everything is and don't screw that up.
Use your head, don't listen to someone else's hype. They are just trying to make a buck or gain power and influence.
The things that get hyped when they're fiction stop being hype when they become real. I used to watch Beyond 2000 and marvel at the tantaluzing future it promised me: wireless phone calls using a grid of "cellular" microtowers, vision corrective surgery with tiny cuts made into the cornea, athletic shoes that provide extra cushioning with small gas-filled chambers in the heel.
Cellphones, LASIK, and Air Jordans are just part of the fabric of everyday reality now. We've seen their benefits but also their drawbacks. As they became widespread consumer products and services, not just experiments in a lab someplace, thwy lost their sheen and became the new normal.
But we still live in wonderful times, even if we choose not to see it.
I came to the same conclusion instantly at the moment of my first encounter of a finger magnet idea on YouTube - "Cool, but I want a ring that does that and that I can tune, replace and put on and take off at will...".
The better wearable devices get, the less sense it makes to permanently modify your body. Things like exoskeletons, smart glasses, and external brain-computer interfaces are safer and much easier to upgrade than their implanted counterparts. Plus, you can take them off in inappropriate situations: you won’t get stuck trying to swim with a metal limb, for example, or wearing a permanent version of Google Glass to a laid-back dive bar.
I really think wearables make vastly more sense for enhancing ourselves than this kind of body modification.
Yes, I read the article, that's why I said I came to the same conclusion ("wearables > implantables").
My 'ring' answer for magnet in finger was just an example of a counterpoint in such a debate between these two transhumanism approaches. I of course approve smart glasses, rings, bracelets, wearables, exoskeletons, etc. over implants, surgeries and metal bones (Wolverine from X-Men excluded ;). Of course nanites easily trump wearables but they are way too far into the future at this point I'd think.
I still want a finger magnet, because having it inside your body next to your nerves makes it way more sensitive than any external device could be.
On the other hand, I'd much rather have a North Paw anklet (https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/) than that implanted compass. I love the idea of using technology to augment my body and mind, but that doesn't necessarily require implantation.
On the third (cybernetic) hand, I totally understand the almost fetishistic excitement for full-on cyborgization. If I had to have a limb amputated, that would suck a lot, but getting to customize and show off a prosthetic would be a real silver lining for me. If I could electively replace a healthy hand or arm with a mechanical one that was categorically equal or superior, I would consider it. But I'd never accept a loss of real function just to look cool.
I considered the magnet but the problems are: it weakens over time, might break, might infect you, the scar tissue builds up and disables the feeling and it's still metal in you (MRI, etc.). Pain I'd not mind, it's a brief surgery after all, but some people mind surgeries too.
I checked out the biohack.me forum mentioned in the article and it's really disappointing that the only implants currently being tried are either magnets or NFC/RFID chips. I was expecting to find a vibrant sub culture with all sorts of new ideas for implants being tried out.
The bit about wearables reminds me of this quote from Neuromancer:
> He stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of vatgrown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade. ... it was tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous chip. Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking, while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry the thing around in your pocket?
I did the opposite, in a sense. I ignored my body for a future that did come, contrary to expectation. During the 60s-70s, every year without nuclear holocaust seemed like a gift. Now I deal with it. So it goes ;)
The thing is there hasn't been many (if any) technological break throughs in past 7 years (since the end of 2010) that would conceivably be used for bio hacking. The title is bad and the author should feel bad. How did she think magnet in finger would be "prepare" her for the future? It was a gimmick and it worked for years. What more could she ask for?
Would it be possible to re-magnetize an implanted magnet that has weakened over time? Or would that require exposing them to very strong magnetic fields, which would rip them out of the body? (I've seen videos of magnet manufacturing, and when they exposed the new magnets to strong fields to magnetize them, they were always firmly clamped in place so they would remain stationary).
Yes you need high magnetic fields to re-magnetize a magnet. Seems like you need between 1 - 2T magnetic field to saturate a rare-Earth magnet. So it's not something easily achievable in a homemade setup.
Body hacking of this nature hasn't gone away... It's just getting more sophisticated with actual medical uses. For example, a paper I coauthored at RFIC 2017 based on work done at Google[x] / Verily Life Sciences:
Abstract: A wireless system-on-chip with integrated antenna, power harvesting and biosensors is presented that is small enough, 200µm x 200µm x 100µm, to allow painless injection. Small device size is enabled by: a 13µm x 20µm 1nA current reference; optical clock recovery; low voltage inverting dc-dc to enable use of higher quantum efficiency diodes; on-chip resonant 2.4GHz antenna; and array scanning reader. In-vivo power and data transfer is demonstrated and linear glucose concentration recordings reported.
north, electro magnetic fields. Before we implant anything, we need an interesting small sensor in general.
Any small sensor that does anything interesting for me? Requirements: For prosthetic learning it must react fast and the signal should change with muscle/body movement.
How I wire the signal to my body is antoher issue, but first show me an interesting sensor. Best I can come up with is remote temperature sensing, still booring.
If the compass thing interests you, I find the North Paw (https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/) much more exciting. Implants are neat, but external augments are just as good for many things.
Right, while I still want X-ray vision, night vision might be more feasable.
Our body is pretty good at all the relevant stuff of our physical world :). And in the digital the interesting stuff is high-level or can be automated or removed.
I disagree, our body is pretty limited. Pretty limited field of vision and weak detection of dangerous gases and liquids, for example.
Also, flaky sensors too. My mother recently had a couple of episodes of BPPV[1], and in the process I found that a lot of people have it at some point in their lives. A friend of ours had vertigo for almost a month(!) and was absolutely incapacitated.
What about the field of vision? As cars become quieter, I'd love to be able to "sense" one coming from behind, especially when I'm walking in rural roads with small shoulders.
Didn’t people do this to seem counterculture/edgy? I mean, it looked kind of cool the first time I read about it, but that was only because of the novelty factor. That sixth sense doesn’t really help us, and I’m pretty sure that more animals would have a magnetic sensor if beneficial. Some pigeons have magnetic sensors to determine their orientation to the earth.
A little glad I missed out on this when it was fadish (even unused ear piercing can get males in trouble for being out of regs in the military).
Though it did for a while get me interested in senses we lose because we don't have words for them. Color identification along cultures/languages being the easiest to actually prove.
People who speak a language where two given colors have the same name will have more difficulty telling them apart than someone who speaks a language where those two colors have different names.
Eventually, sure, but I have crappy old fridge magnets that are still going strong after 30 years. What's different about little neodymium rods that they fail in 5?
I think it has more to do with that your body builds up scar tissue around the magnet that makes its wiggles inside your body less palpable, than that the magnet itself weakens.
I think that bio hacking has lost it’s initial hype but it does have a chance to jump the chasm if it got a killer app. Or even creating non invasive ways to perform the current set of tasks.
Has anyone attempted a modification (electronic or pneumatic) that lets you hear your own heartbeat 24/7? That might be useful for monitoring and controlling your health and emotional state.
Believe me, you don't want to do that. One of the side effects of my sinus trouble is that I "hear" my heartbeat (not just throbbing), and it took me years to learn how to tune it out and not have it feed a feedback loop that led to some very stressful moments (140bpm resting).
I second this. I don't know why, but I can feel my heart beat at all times. After strenuous exercise, it throbs very forcibly, but it's also very noticeable when lying in bed (I sleep in a prone position). It's not a great feeling, because, for one, it reminds you that you have a thing that's beating all the time and would kill you if it stopped, and also because it's just annoying to be feeling your heart pulsing inside you every moment of the day.
For me it's a lovely piece of mechanical sympathy I can have with my own body: it lets me tell if I'm agitated or soothed in ways I'm not immediately aware of.
If you're interested in doing this, with a little mindfulness training you can learn to passively notice the pace of your own heartbeat all the time, without modification.
How about a spiritual modification? During periods of prolonged meditation, I've been able to pay attention to my heartbeat. It wouldn't surprise me if more skilled meditators were in tune enough with their bodies to be able to monitor it during other times as well. Just because we've learned to tune out signals from the body like heartbeat doesn't mean that, with practice, we can't tune back into them.
The harder you're breathing, the more oxygen and food energy you're consuming, and the more Carbon Dioxide(CO2) is building up in your blood. That CO2 then has to be exhaled and Oxygen has to be inhaled. This is a continuous cycle and your heart rate is only a proxy for it.
Even if it were useful, you can already feel your heart beat if you are concentrating on it. Even if you lacked this ability you can feel, at least, changes in your heart rate. Even if you couldn't do either of those things you could just wear a heart rate monitor, they are cheap and readily available and have no side effects.
one futurist gushed over a visually striking prosthetic arm, musing that it might be worth amputating for the “upgrade.” Another panelist shut them down immediately: doctors and scientists aren’t even close to solving the phantom pain and limited mobility that most amputees face, let alone building something uniformly better than a human limb.
You can upgrade your current arm by eating better and going to the gym. If that isn't enough to get the visually striking look you are after, tattoos and the right clothes can help.
I can't believe there are nutcases in the world ready to embrace becoming a Borg. This is bizarre.
Your comment is silly. Accusing someone of being a "nutcase" is not constructive, nor is a comment about becoming a Borg.
Yes, at the moment it's not plausible to upgrade one's arm. In the future it will become plausible, though, and the upgrade will at some point be much better than what you can do at a gym. In fact, you can only get a stronger arm at the gym (or an arm with more endurance), but a bionic arm can be much better.
I have had reason to become somewhat familiar with what happens to the body when organs are transplanted with natural organs from other people and when metal pins are used to repair damaged parts and so forth. None of it is anywhere near as good as keeping your own parts functional and healthy to begin with. It all comes with serious complications, and I think people vastly underestimate just how bad it really is. I think it is far worse than people think.
Sure, currently it is. But that's not written in stone. Lots of medical procedures used to have huge mortality rates and extreme side-effects, and are now much better, often even just a couple of decades afterwards.
The component parts they use are inherently problematic. You put enough metal in the body, it causes metal poisoning. This is a fundamental problem. You solve it by moving to other materials entirely. Other materials that have some hope of working tend to be more organic, and then we aren't talking cyborg-like outcomes anymore. We are talking some other paradigm.
I think you're focusing too hard on the chromesteel cyberpunk angle. A prosthetic made of silicone, plastic, and carbon fiber is still just as "cyborg".
And metal will still have its place. Most people are quite tolerant to titanium, and there's been some advances lately in hydrophobic coatings for implants that keep them from interacting with your blood. I think it's unlikely to be a primary component, though, because it's heavy and expensive and its primary advantage--strength--is useless if the body it's attached to gives out first.
Look, I am not arguing against creating prostheses for people who need them for some reason. If you are going to die without it or if your functionality is sufficiently impaired due to lack of a body part, there are certainly cases where it makes sense.
But I have difficulty imagining it will ever not be crazy to be willing to lop off a perfectly healthy arm to "upgrade" it. That was what I was reacting to. It isn't like I am decrying the evils of cochlear implants here.
That is exactly what I said in my first comment. And then a bunch of people piled on to have a cow about that statement. And the longer this discussion has gone on, the weirder it has gotten in terms of people trying to put words in my mouth and claim intent that isn't there.
You could just give it a rest yourself. It takes two to make for good discussion. Both people need to be engaging in good faith. It only takes one to undermine that process.
I used to read medical reports all day long as part of my job. This included surgical reports for when some implanted joint or such had failed, often for the umpteenth time.
I don't think we are "just getting started here."
Also, my understanding is that Edgar Caycee, a psychic, was the first person to suggest that a nail or screw be used to hold a bone in place so it could mend when it was failing to do so. I find it ironic that this has been so widely embraced by conventional medicine. It was suggested by a guy in a trance and we ran with it and now when you try to point out that it leads to metal poisoning, failures, infections, well, I'm somehow the one not being scientific enough or something.
Wait, are you suggesting that pinning broken bones is a bad idea?
Eight months ago I broke my ankle in four places. Today, I can walk with only a minor limp because a surgeon stuck the shattered fragments back together with a load of titanium. Maybe there's a risk of metal poisoning in my future, but I think we can all agree that it's better than a near-certainty of never walking unassisted again.
I'd much prefer nanites that silently aid you and can be controlled and repurposed and replicated easily and turned on and off like in DX1 and 2 (especially) than hunks of gross metal like in Bionic Command or DX3.
Want a stronger arm: get nanites programmed right that will aid the body in the natural strengthening process: helping repair the fibers, removing carbon dioxide and lactic acid, carrying in more oxygen and nutrients, etc.
In Deus Ex it actually went through mechs (who ended up being despised and ostracized) first to nanites then with nanites being more powerful (thus making mechs also obsolete) and seamless (you couldn't tell who had nanites in him just by looking).
People have always altered their bodies for improvement. Cutting off parts of their penises (circumcision), perforating their skin for earrings and piercings, shooting lasers at their skin to destroy their organs that produce hairs, etc.
Given that neither a piercing nor a tattoo, nor the desire to have such things, cause suffering nor poor ability to function in life - one of the key features of a "pathological" disorder - I'd be inclined to disagree. I don't think that tech implants cause suffering nor poor ability to function in life either.
Without picking a side here, I'd like to point out that piercings (and tattoos?) can certainly cause complications if an infection ensues from the initial modification.
Of course if that does happen and you successfully treat it, I imagine you aren't impaired in any way going forward, but that is entirely thanks to antibiotics.
On the other hand, the vast majority of activities can result in suffering. The difference is between "can" and "will", and the intentions - someone who performs an activity with the intention of something going wrong and causing suffering to them might be ill.
Of course they're risky. That's why we DO them. Tattoos and piercings, and possibly also circumcision, have their roots in ancient rituals designed to prove to the community that you are a hardass who can withstand pain and brave the risk of death. Important traits to have if you are going to be called upon to fight to defend your monkey tribe from invader-monkeys.
Ehh... for me, they're pretty and make me feel happy about my body. They're not for other people. I don't know anyone who's got a piercing or tattoo that they didn't want for their own reasons.
Author throws their uninformed and limited view of injectables against their previous empty and uninformed optimism for wetware grinding due to their #fingermagnetennui (which to be fair is No Joke™), is saddened.
Includes such deep insights as:
• Stitching a cellphone into your arm maybe isn't the future
• Replacing body parts for fun doesn't make sense yet
• biohacking is in decline because Trump was elected
To repost a slightly tounge-incheek description of features your "standard model" has:
1. Supports a very large number of individual movements and articulations
2. Meets certain weight-restrictions (overall system must be near-buoyant in water)
3 Supports a wide variety of automatic self-repair techniques, many of which can occur without ceasing operation
4. Is entirely produced and usually maintained by unskilled (unconscious?) labor from common raw materials
5. Contains a comprehensive suite of sensors
6. Not too brittle, flexes to store and release mechanical energy from certain impacts
7. Selectively reinforces itself when strain is detected
8. Has areas for the storage of long-term energy reserves, which double as an impact cushion
9. Houses small fabricators to replenish some of its own operating fluids
10. Subsystems for thermal management (evaporative cooling, automatic micro-activation)