Let’s call this a thought experiment, nothing more.
The question, just how far could we upgrade a person, literally how much can we augment a single willing specimen.
da Rules.
An upgrade need not be an improvement, but must be somewhat functional and serve a purpose.
Future Tech need not apply. If it we couldn’t realistically build it in the next 30 years, for the purpose of this discussion it does not exist.
Anything off the shelf, or a bespoke model thereof, is fair game, but anything that has to be invented from scratch, let’s assume a 25 million dollar (US) limit. So titanium legs = o.k., personal thorium reactor, you’ve got 25 mill to play with (in total).
We’re upgrading a single person, not the species. As long as our willing volunteer survives for a reasonable time afterwords, o.k. But if he/she ends up sterile and unable to reproduce, that’s not our problem.
Screw ethics, the subject is a willing participant. I’m not callous, but this is just a hardware discussion, and I don’t want it bogging down just cause we vivisected our theoretical recruit.
The goal should always be to stretch as far towards complete mechanical replacement as we can.
Love your neighbor, play nice.
Kinda looking forward to some creative, and possibly horrifying, thinking.
This is so hard man… 30 years… remember it took just 66 years to go from the first powered flight at Kittyhawk (1903) to landing on the moon (1969)… less than an average human lifespan. Now that we have AI in the picture, 30 years is going to seem like an astronomically long time. Hell 1995 was 30 years ago… can you imagine telling someone about the shit we got now back then? I mean one might suppose that those crazy huge cell phones might shrink down… but mobile phones with internet that you never make calls on anymore… robots… self-driving cars… actual AI anyone can use… and yet, no practical flying cars. I can’t guarantee anything in a 30 year timespan except one thing - whatever you guess, it’ll be wrong.
All the rules aside from this one I think are great guardrails. I’d say toss out this constraint and instead institute a “clear path” of logical provable steps (citations on current works) from today tech to tomorrow augmentation. If “magic beans” has to be called upon at any point, disqualified.
I wouldn’t say I meant it as a hard limit. More to prevent the injection of star trek level technology. I’d say ignore the number and embrace the concept, mostly cause I can’t define the boundary without being simultaneously overgenerous and over restrictive. A.K.A Keep it real.
I’m going to assume we have a 50 person strong team of the best surgeons, physical therapists, and other medical personnel at our disposal, who don’t need pay or are not included in the budget. Just to make sure we can actually install said leg.
Speaking of legs, I’m sure we could replace a person from the pelvis-down if wanted. Sure, the blinky-winky may not survive, but there are lots of… Options available to replace that… (Adult toy “modules”).
As for control of this, both synchron and neuralink have shown to be able to make tech that can enable the user to have digital outputs from their mind. I’d say 30 years and a touch of influence could reasonably push development to the point of being able to articulate 4 fully featured limbs.
On that note, we could probably also replace their arms with pretty much whatever we wanted to all the way up to the shoulder. (As for inclusion v. exclusion of the shoulders and pelvis, we could probably replace ‘most’ of both. How much of those we would need to keep in order to remain attached, I am unsure.
Eyes
Well, eye? Following rule 1, we could probably swap the non-dominant eye of the subject with a modified form of an off the shelf ArgusII or IrisII eye. Integrating either a thermal camera or expanding the range of perceptible colors would be neat. I’d argue that we’d want one organic eye remaining though.
There’s no reason to conform to the natural human shape or body plan when you’re creating an artificial form. If we can send and receive electrical signals through synthetic limbs then with a significant adjustment period you can have hands for feet, extra long arms, 4 legs, flexible and prehensile appendages, wheels, treads, thrusters. The biggest limitation is power, but efficiency advancements in energy harvesting MPPT recently are very impressive, and given we can use as much internal surface area as possible in your thought experiment glucose fuel cells become a realistic option. Even nuclear generators. Worst case we just incorporate batteries or supercaps into the augments and charge them, including trickle charging all the time from coils we place in our built environment.
There’s an overwhelming amount of cosmetic modifications we would be able to do too. I don’t know if you’ve seen facial reconstruction or feminization surgeries but “plastic surgery” has come a long way, and if ethics and money are not a factor we could see people with animal features or Eldritch horrors or anime characters. Some will also forego the mechanical and get extra fingers and reversed joints and color changing chromophore skin and fur.
People with disabilities and people not satisfied in the body they have like therians will likely be the first to explore these freedom of form options. You shouldn’t put humans in a box, we’ll transcend any limitations given enough time and resources.
There is one reason, even if it is mundane. The entire world of human interface design is built around the concept of natural human shape and body plan. If you go against it too hard, life is going to get more difficult for you. Want to be 22 ft tall? Great. No more buildings or cars or doing anything it has to do with human architecture or transport. That’s just a simple example, but you get what I mean. If you deviate too far from the “normal” body plan, you’re gonna to have a bad time.
In this case, it might be interesting to explorer concepts in a more temporary or wearable context. Being able to put on a harness that gives you six extra limbs would be pretty awesome, until you needed to take the bus home. Then you could take it off and it would fold itself into a backpack. Having neural interfaces to control and received sensory input from those wearable things, either through transdermal ports or wireless connectivity would be a pretty fundamental achievement.
Additionally, we need to consider meaningful integration. If I climb up on top of my car with a power stapler, and staple my feet to the car, it’s not really a part of my body. In the spirit of the exercise, I’d say we need to maintain certain concepts of what a body is. And defining that is… complicated. I think this too is an area of the exercise where we need to maintain some common sense boundaries.
Thought #2
Perhaps it would help to define the minimum human, then build back up from there? So just how little can a living human be?
My thoughts;
Arms and legs, can be removed at the hips and shoulders.
Sex Organs, actually very easily removed surgically.
Sensory organs, Eyes and ears could be removed.
I seem to recall an extreme surgery that removes the pelvis and most lower intestines??? A colostomy bag would be needed.
The heart believe it or not. Mechanical hearts, while crude by comparison, do exist in today tech.
Tounge. Not strictly necessary.
Minor organs, Gall bladder, Appendix.
So you’d be left with a brain, partial head, upper torso including lungs, liver, and most major organs / glands. Such a condition would have a low survival rate, and probably a high degree of madness, but is theoretically possible.
Now assuming we don’t just put the remaining body in a jar and bolt stuff to the jar (kinda violates the spirit of the exercise), how do we build back? What do we build back? Would we be better to keep some biological bits, like leaving the torso intact, as we assumably can’t build back better?
I’m thinking the first step would be a neurological link of some kind. The brain needs to connect to whatever we add back, so getting a meaningful amount of data in and/or out would be the first and highest priority.
