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.
Aww, why not? Well now I need to think of another answer.
…
If we have really, really long prosthetic legs, does the higher ratio of metal to flesh count as a higher percentage of mechanical replacement? Better yet, power tool style hot-swappable prosthetics on neural jack base mounts. Regular limbs for when you want to go out fitting in a regular outfit. Long limbs when you want to step over the neighbours houses to take a shortcut to the park. Plug your limb sockets into a sports car when you wanna go vroom vroom. Eventually you fill up a whole garage with all your mechanical mass. But most of the time you’d just switch channels to control the various actuators in your house, and sense them with various sorts of nerve stimulators. Who needs a smart house when you are a house? Put the house on wheels and take a road trip. In fact, if it’s remote, you can become a whole caravan of motorhomes to store all your manufactory organs. “My liver is in the fourth truck. My 3D printer is in the second truck where I’m currently giving birth to some cable organizers.” Eh, we don’t need to bring all of ourselves with us everywhere we go. Just sprawl the body internationally with the internet to carry the brain signals. (Okay, maybe I’m effectively devolving into a brain in the jar and apparently that’s cheating.)
As for the flesh, strip away unneeded organs and plate the bones with metal in anticipation for when you crash the sports car. The heart is an unneeded organ since we can replace it with one of those metal pump ones where your blood flows in a steady stream without a pulse. The remaining space… well batteries aren’t exactly safe but if we have this kind of budget… and it’s hard to be creative to think of anything other than batteries when my laptop is about to die.
I keep coming back to… Just how the hell do we attach anything? Say we delete the meat arms. Then we get a set of powered mechanical arms, and I’ll even stipulate that they’re jacked into the brain with a neurolink type device.
You can’t just clamp them on, cause that’s not really attached as part of the body.
Glue would detach quickly as the outer skin sloughs off naturally.
Magnets would cause pinching / necrosis.
All I can come up with is a titanium screw / bolt, buried into the shoulder joint, but I can’t figure out how to seal the skin to it?
If we consider the neurological connections are a given, then what you’re looking for is exactly what the prosthetics industry is looking for. As I understand it;
You must integrate into the existing skeletal system
It should be done in such a way as to evenly balance weight across the skeletal frame, or other physiological problems will likely result
A new transdermal interface is needed so the skin can properly integrate and “seal” with the material. This may actually require localized genetic modification because it isn’t viable to simply allow the “living” dermal tissue to grow and integrate while the “dead” epidermal tissue will continue to slough off and refuse to attach to any material. This will always leave room for infection to take hold. The area around the implant interface will need some sort of modification to behave more like a fingernail / toenail cuticle and growth matrix so the body properly handles “protrusions”. Teeth and gums require totally different cells and handle this interface totally differently, but the nail cuticle interface is a skin solution that may hold the secret.
Unless you want to be bound to an extension cord, significant improvements to power storage and / or power generation (micro-fusion cells anyone?) must be made in order to power a mechanical arm that has any hope of being as strong as muscle could be, at least a full day’s work anyway.
My favourite part of the below video was at 21:33 when he said, “Um… You can see how it just passes through the skin permanently. That’s an interesting part but we won’t talk about that.”
That’s a very interesting part. I wish he would talk about that.
Yeah, the best I’d thought of for implants that physically interface to outside the body would be something like a PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter), but that comes with all kinds of infection risks. I’d thought about maybe having some sort of pre-manufactured easily swappable sanitary bandages. Think of it like changing the filter on a mask, but the bandages are coated in some sort of sterilization solution in a manner like a box of wet wipes.
That makes it more convenient but still the flesh is quite the chore to deal with. My thinking had only gotten so far as maybe having some sort of drip of sanitizing fluid, so you’d slot something like an ink cartridge and leak something like snot.
But now that! I like that idea! That would be wonderful if we could get something like that working. Now, ingrown toenails and other such physiological errors are quite the chore in themselves, but perfecting a design like that means we just eat more jell-o and occasionally trim away excess and we’re good to go.
Years ago we already managed to grow human ears on the backs of rats, so growing nails on our stumps sounds viable.
I suppose we transhumans are in a position to begin experimenting with implants under the nails we already have. Like the blades under Molly’s fingernails. Maybe a small cable protruding from under a toenail. Molly wore fake nails over hers. I sense potential to exploit such a casing, maybe a hatch that glues to the nail.
It’s bad if it makes the nail grow the wrong way or gets fungus under it, but if we can get it working, it proves the concept. An interface on our fingertips or toes is a bit in the way, prone to stubbing and other undesirable forces, so we would remain motivated to test the nail cuticle growth further from the extremities, maybe on the torso or the limbs close to the torso. Step by step, I could see us arriving at the use of such an interface for prosthetic limbs.
It’s not actually the nail I’m interested in but all the components that support the nail interface… the nail itself would not be part of the solution, only the supporting structure that allows anchoring to and growth from the skin to the nail bed. Imagine instead a vertical cuticle that grows to occupy the space between the implant and epidermis. We might also integrate some shark skin antimicrobial channels if we’re modify our genes.
I’ve been noodling this a bit and I think there might be a similar pathway exploring the scabbing process. Just putting this as a placeholder note for now.
I would like a built in wingpack, but it could be bulky when just walking around. And there are a bunch of other problems but still, I want to have that option.
This is a very important part. getting the electrodes to stay in place and be reliable for an entire lifetime could be a challenge tho.
It’s probably better to start with simpler things like the legs, then the arms once the legs are figured out, etc… Although I’d totally sign up to go full 40k Dreadnought…
Most of those leak exudate permanently… This is one of the challenges that still need to be solved. And I’m getting a spiky metal mohawk when that gets solved, until I go for even more metal…
Getting the skin and neurons to integrate into stuff is required. And those are some really interesting ideas.
As you guys can probably tell, I’ve been extremely busy with life… This is the sort of thread that gets me exited and willing to develop new stuff.
