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The crux of the matter is this: we are just beginning to enter an era of prosthetic and neurological medicine wherein the bionic prosthetics are good enough that patients can opt (and have opted) for robotic solutions over conventional physiological ones.
I wonder where we will be 10,20, 50 years from now in the field of biotics. I am only 20 now and if I live to be 70 I would opt to have my arms and legs cut off and replaces since I would have more movement and freedoms than I currently would have at 70 years old. By then one might be able to extend there life time with biotic implants replacing the heart, kidneys, lungs, and other vital organs to the point where everything but the brain is left. Even the brain would be 60% biotic to link it to the rest of the body and keep it going even if 100, 200, 300, ext years go by.
I can understand someone who has accidentally lost a hand or has a deformed hand to replace it with a bionic prosthetic. But to opt having a perfectly normal hand removed in order to replace with an artificial hand seems pretty extreme. At the present time, such prosthetics are quite remarkable, but still a long way from being as functional as your own hand. Sounds more like a body modification or amputation fetish to me.
I wonder where we will be 10,20, 50 years from now in the field of biotics. I am only 20 now and if I live to be 70 I would opt to have my arms and legs cut off and replaces since I would have more movement and freedoms than I currently would have at 70 years old. By then one might be able to extend there life time with biotic implants replacing the heart, kidneys, lungs, and other vital organs to the point where everything but the brain is left. Even the brain would be 60% biotic to link it to the rest of the body and keep it going even if 100, 200, 300, ext years go by.
Yeah, that's what we need, more people living longer and vying for less and less resources. I really wonder how long it will be before we are facing a worldwide situtation of one child per family or forced sterilization.
On the other, it'd be cool to have bionic strength so I kick Bigfoot's butt. He's been getting cocky lately.
With the way technology is going then people will be able to live well past 100 soon without biotic upgrades. Also I don't plan on cutting off my limbs just for the fun of it, it would be when I'm old. Don't you think having biotic legs that would allow you to run 8mph straight for a month on a single charge compared to your old human legs that would require you to have a cane since they cant hold your weight anymore?
I brought out in another thread that soon we wont have a population issue even with people living 500+ years since everyone would rather have a virtual/robot wife/husband that feels and acts like the real thing but is under your control.
Heck soon it would be common place for everyone to have a jack plugged into their brain stem so that they could connect directly to computers like in the matrix. That would be cool and scary since on another forum someone brought out how something like that could be abused. Forgot the name of the movie but it was about how criminals would be hooked up to a computer for 1 hour to serve their sentence before being released. However 1 hour in the real world was 50 years in the computer so those hooked up spend 50 years of pain in a virtual prison designed to be like hell.
When we get to the point where the virtual world cant be distinguished from the real world, then that is when we know we went to far. Since when you wake up for work, who knows if you are in the real world or in a fake world made to get information out of you and after their done they just pull the plug and you still would not even release you where in a virtual world. Everything would become inverted where no one knows the difference.
With the way technology is going then people will be able to live well past 100 soon without biotic upgrades. Also I don't plan on cutting off my limbs just for the fun of it, it would be when I'm old. Don't you think having biotic legs that would allow you to run 8mph straight for a month on a single charge compared to your old human legs that would require you to have a cane since they cant hold your weight anymore?
In the case of the patient in the article, since his hand was already useless, refitting with a bionic hand would be appropriate and certainly better than having a useless hand or no hand at all. At the present time though, the technology is greatly improving but still has disadvantages over a healthy functioning hand. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that current bionic hands are not able to be fused to bone and tissue. The ones I've seen are essentially strapped on or slid over the forearm.. Some, that are designed to just replace fingers, are wrapped around the palm sort of like a glove. The disadvantage over a natural hand is that current bionic hands don't have the strength to lift or hold objects of significant weight. Too much weight and the bionic hand would fall off. That said, the technology will likely continue to improve to where the installation of a bionic hand or limb could be as good or better than a natural hand or limb. I'm with you though, I don't think I'd want to hack off a limb any time soon just for the fun of it.
Here's where things are today in the area of bionic hands. It looks similar to the one in the article. The first link is about replacing missing fingers. The other is hand replacement. They're pretty expensive. Touch Bionics Touch Bionics
When we get to the point where the virtual world cant be distinguished from the real world, then that is when we know we went to far. Since when you wake up for work, who knows if you are in the real world or in a fake world made to get information out of you and after their done they just pull the plug and you still would not even release you where in a virtual world. Everything would become inverted where no one knows the difference.
Of course, if we reach a point to where we'd be unable to distinguish the real world from a virtual world, we wouldn't know if we went too far or not because either one would seem perfectly normal... unless there was a glitch in the virtual world.
This is a little off topic, but here's an excellent fictional clip about creating a virtual world.
Love the world builder video Wonder if that type of technology would be available in the year 2071 when I'm 80yrs old. Heck I wonder how the world would look like in 2071, would it seem the same as today's world or would it have changed a lot by then? My grandparents are both alive and in their 90s and I can only imagine what they must think of the world today since their world that they grew up in was much different than today's world in the sense of technology. Regardless, it would seem technology advances faster than what consumers can adapt to.
Love the world builder video Wonder if that type of technology would be available in the year 2071 when I'm 80yrs old. Heck I wonder how the world would look like in 2071, would it seem the same as today's world or would it have changed a lot by then? My grandparents are both alive and in their 90s and I can only imagine what they must think of the world today since their world that they grew up in was much different than today's world in the sense of technology. Regardless, it would seem technology advances faster than what consumers can adapt to.
I wouldn't be surprised if the technology to create virtual worlds will be more advanced in 2071 than they are today. While your grandparents have certainly seen amazing changes in the course of their lives, changes often seem to develop over the course of time, usually in the form of improvements, so it's not often there's a stunning shock when such changes do emerge. It's still impressive though, especially when comparing things that were available in the past vs. things that are available now.
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Wonder if that type of technology would be available in the year 2071 when I'm 80yrs old. Heck I wonder how the world would look like in 2071, would it seem the same as today's world or would it have changed a lot by then? My grandparents are both alive and in their 90s and I can only imagine what they must think of the world today since their world that they grew up in was much different than today's world in the sense of technology. Regardless, it would seem technology advances faster than what consumers can adapt to.
