Rebuilt and improved
The photograph is of a hip cup printed with random porosity to facilitate bone growth and was brought by a student to one of my classes on the potential of 3-D printing.
Making prostheses like this is just one aspect of an increasingly active environment that combines different technologies to produce human body parts, either to rebuild or replace, or to increase their capabilities.
These can range from memory implants to stimulate brain activity in Alzheimer sufferers, electronic tattoos that can record our vital functions, capture subvocalized sounds, or help to identify us, NFC chips under the skin that allow us to interact with machines, auditory implants that replace headphones or that can help the deaf and hard of hearing, and rings that read texts to the blind.
There is some very challenging technology headed our way. Wearables, tools that we carry about with us to quantify many aspects of our daily life, are seen by many as overly intrusive, even though those wearing them have agreed to the terms and conditions involved, or at least those they bothered to read or understood. When we move into the realm of the embeddable, tools that are under our skin, then an ever-greater number of people are going to say that this is unacceptable. But what happens when embeddables are tools that actually improve our quality of life, and make it possible to rebuild damaged functions or improve the way others work?
The thinking behind embeddable is similar to the concept of the cyborg, part living organism, part machine, but in a context where, in many cases, the decision-making process will have been distorted: anybody who accepts an artificial implant to restore certain body functions does so because they perceive a need or deficiency, and therefore their ability to decide has been altered by this. Few factors are more convincing in the adoption process than this. As technology allows, we are going to see the development of this type of equipment, used by those who feel a genuine need to do so, and who will in turn normalize their use: soon there will be devices that improve the physical capability of a significant percentage of the population, and it will be hard to remember a time when they were not possible.
“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man.”
We really are looking into the future…
(En español, aquí)
