Science Can Build a Better You
Would you replace good legs with artificial ones if they made you run faster?
If a brain implant were safe and available and allowed you to operate your iPad or car using only thought, would you want one? What about an embedded device that gently bathed your brain in electrons and boosted memory and attention? Would you order one for your children?
Entire piece worth reading.
Ethical challenges will many doctors face when it comes to enhancing high-tech body part. My question is: Are we going to start implanting chips into humansto enhance productivity at birth?
aside from the many ethical questions- i would not simply because it is expensive and unnecessary
Definitely not.
This is not just about the ethical challenges it represents, as James said, or about how expensive and unnecessary it is, as Seyyed stated, but what about its side-effects? or any damage it could potentially cause?
There is always some room for error when it comes to man-made technologies. If it involves my health or any part of my body, then I wouldn’t want no part in that. There is no need to risk your health to artificially enhance your physical or cognitive performance if you can improve it “naturally” like every other person has done it previous to these innovations.
I would definitely wait until I saw what the long-term effects were. It would probably need a longer trial than my remaining life expectancy for me to feel comfortable with it.
Im more worried about accessing the areas of the brain I do have but dont use, rather than worrying about replacing it.
A dozen years ago there was an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called The 6th Day. The premise was about cloning — creating blank humans that could be injected with DNA that would modify the body blank into a clone of the original. All that remained was to restore the mind from a recent mind backup. A few wealthy peoples’ minds were periodically backed up (one was a Bill Gates-like tycoon) in the event something happened to them. If something happened to a person, their memories, emotions and personality would be restored to the cloned body.
The movie raised a question in my mind; is self-awareness nothing more than emotions and memories that could (theoretically) be backed up into a duplicate body? If so, could those thoughts, memories and experiences be restored onto an artificial human or cyborg? One thing that comes to mind that makes this scenario doubtful. Pleasures are the result of brain chemistry and pleasure circuits being triggered by experiences. An artificial human would need some way to sense these.
Not unless that also made me look better!
This is fantastic! I was just discussing this earlier today:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121108-will-men-and-machines-merge
If we do merge, I’d like a pair of these hands once they are perfected:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk
And perhaps some new legs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chPanW0QWhA
@Jackson – You use all of your brain. The whole “15%” thing, or whatever number it is, is not based on proper understand on neuroscience. It’s just that not all of it is actively used in reasoning and thought; some of it is memory and unconcious functions.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution deals with these issues. Good game.
Yes, definitely. I don’t see this being safe for a while, but I’ll in line when it is.