I might embed a glowing hubwheel in my hand....
Yeah, don't. I used to think implants and shit were cool until I worked with impants and shit professionally. The reality of the situation is this: 1) There are no implants of any kind currently extant that are not pale, shitty imitations of the things your body does already. 2) There are no implants of any kind, nor will there ever be, that will leave you better off than if you didn't have them because your body doesn't like having non-body stuff in it. 3) The reason people revile freaky shit like LEDs in your hand is they're designed for revilement. The dude? With the camera implanted on the back of his head? That sings colors to him? That was implanted why, exactly? it needs to go in his skin because... then he gets to call himself a transhumanist? It's like the chucklefucks with the RFIDs in their hands. In case you forget your own name or something. 'cuz the deadbolts that work on RFID work on RFID cards and if you've ever had an RFID keycard, you know how shitty they are and how often they crash. Oh, but you don't want your keys stolen. Fuckin' sew it into your wallet or something. Stick it up your nose. I dunno... There, look. You're cyber as fuck and you don't need some jackass that isn't even a licensed tattoo artist giving you blood poisoning by sticking a fuckin' circuitboard under your skin. ___________________________________ Punk is punk, and that's fine, and that's admirable, and yay safety pins through the nose. But the thing about the punks is they were honest about their shock attempts. They did the shit they did to get your attention and make you feel uncomfortable, the way your culture makes them uncomfortable. They didn't get all high'n'mighty about the ethics of transhumanism or claim people don't like glassholes because of a failure of philosophy or some bullshit. Ain't nobody gonna begrudge a blind man an electric eye. It's the people that say "look! I did something deliberately repellent to make you squeamish, now if you feel squeamish it's because you're prejudicial!" that cause all the turmoil.
It's this implant shit that gets me too. I'd love to call myself a transhumanist, but I have no hope or desire for immortality, no urge to put stuff in my body, or a sense of myself as beyond human. But I do want to experience more than my current body can. I mean, why turn down a chance to see in infrared or to feel magnetic fields or to hear colors? But not if it means putting shit that doesn't belong there in my body. I wish transhumanists would take a key from contacts. Contacts are pretty freaking amazing. But you take them out at the end of the day. I actually made a ring a while back with a magnet in it, and if I wear it right, I can feel magnetic fields too, without the need for an implant. I like that kind of augmentation. For that matter, just being fit is a vital 'augmentation.' When I see transhumanists who don't take good care of their bodies, I'm immediately skeptical. Can't live forever if you did cause your body is a sack of shit. So, I think you're right about the attention. It's just too obvious and too extreme of methods to not be about attention in the end.
I mean, yeah, current implants are shit. They might be shit for the next 100 years. Medicine was shit for a good time, too. So while right now the best implants provide is the novelty factor, I think we'll eventually see them as just another normal thing. See this article, for example, where they might have created a sensor that is actually harmless and dissolves. You just need the right materials. Your reddit post's example with obsolescence is a good one, but we can also overcome that (theoretically), via stuff like nanobots that can dismantle/upgrade implants in a less invasive way, for example. And we might not even need that open wound for a 'jack in the future - Just look at how wireless technology has improved over the last decade. Oh, also that guy with the camera is colourblind. Which is why he has that camera.
There's only one version of Moore's law that is true in biology. Sequencing: Past that, most of medicine follows linear progress or sudden breakthrough. You'd have better luck listening to Drew Endy expound on reprogramming cells through synthetic biology than OP's guys talk about sticking home-made electronics under their skin. And even there... Plateaus, not skyrockets.
I was talking about wireless transmission making wires unnecessary, which means we don't need to break the skin. Today's bandwidth isn't good enough, but that in five years might be enough for, I dunno, real-time single-cell recordings or somesuch.
You're still talking about putting done device under the skin. Wires out or no. Pretty much every organ of your body has immune cells that will be on the lookout for a metal / coated coated object. For example, single cell neuronal recordings are done with electrodes that pick up on the induced electrical field of those cells firing. No breaking of cell membranes involved. But they are still notorious for losing signal after a month (in mice) as the glial cells in the brain form a scar around the device.
I mean, yeah, implants will always be shit. This is a discussion I have whenever implants come up, because people such as yourself think that Moore's Law applies to immunology. It doesn't. Until we genetically engineer humans to specifically not reject a specific selection of foreign materials, humans will continue to reject all foreign bodies. The way around it, which I worked on back when I thought I wanted to do this shit for a living, is to engineer nanostructures small enough that the body doesn't attack them... but since the body attacks, you know, viruses, you start working with structures about the size of asbestos fibers which, by the way, are carcinogenic. Or, you know, you CRISPR up your babies so that they think titanium is a part of their bodies and then within ten years you've got viruses and bacteria that imitate titanium. That's the other part of the problem: because any implant site is a wound, any implant site is subject to opportunistic infection and everything else has a much faster evolutionary cycle. I can't remember the exact numbers, but the number of generations humans have experienced since Australopithecus is the same as drosophila have experienced since the 1930s, and e.coli have experienced since two weeks ago. Being long-lived means you have a lot of genetic inertia, for better and worse. The "right" materials, as you outline them, are materials that go away. Did you miss that? They're dealing with the very problem I describe: leave the implant in and it will kill or maim the patient. Your answer? Grey goo. Theoretically, nanomachines can turn my stale coffee into diamonds. Practically, a nanomachine is a tiny, rudimentary thing that requires preposterous amounts of support infrastructure to do something really simple in miniature. A future in which that sort of omnipotent nanotechnology exists is one that belies implants entirely: why should I worry about an interface jack that doesn't rot when I can just have the magic grey goo restructure my brain while I wait? I get that the guy is colourblind. My point is that there's no aspect of a singing camera that needs to be surgically attached to your body. That's an iPhone app, yo. No part of that needs to be surgically stitched to you. My suspicion is that he decided to be hipsterish about it and spike a transducer into his skill so he got it via bone conduction but fuckadoodle doo. My library sells earbuds for a buck a piece. The reasons for not stitching that shit into your skull are legion. Also lesion. I'll show myself out.Here, we report materials, device architectures, integration strategies, and in vivo demonstrations in rats of implantable, multifunctional silicon sensors for the brain, for which all of the constituent materials naturally resorb via hydrolysis and/or metabolic action, eliminating the need for extraction.
Obiously if you had nanotech you wouldn't go for a fucking chrome arm. It does deal with the problem of surgeries and the open wound thing, and how old implants may become out-of-date pretty fast. It replaces a surgical procedure with something more akin to upgrading your smartphone. The interesting point about the brain sensor article wasn't the melting away - it was that there was no immunoresponse. It'd probably happen if you waited a bit longer, but we do have materials that don't inflame immediately. Which shows that there's still progress to be made. I'm also surprised that you claim "any implant site is subject to opportunistic infection and everything else has a much faster evolutionary cycle.". What about hip implants? That's a fairly huge metal thing in your thigh. What about cochlear implants? (Or breast implants) They stay in your body, sometimes for your whole life. Saying that we do not have useful implants is just plain wrong, we do, and they are routinely used. And they improve people's lives. They might not make people better at something they did before (except maybe breast implants?), but I doubt it's gonna stay that way for long. In fact, runners with prosthetic legs can already be faster than normal runners (which is just a narrow employ of legs, though, so in my opinion that doesn't count). We can avoid the immune response on two ways: Suppressing the immune system, which is probably a bad idea. The other idea is, of course, to avoid drawing the immune system's response altogether. And we can already do that, by coating it with biocompatible materials like collagen or PEG. The problem is to keep the body from reacting with the implant itself.
Point by point: Right. Like catgut or nylon sutures. There's no immunoresponse there because the irritant goes away. So yeah - if you want to put in an implant that is only going to last a couple weeks, hip hip hooray. They have a design life of about 20 years. My grandfather went through two. Atrial cardioverters? 10 years. Ventricular cardioverters? 6-8 years. That's the calculus: "Will you be dead by the time this thing fails?" Cochlear implants? Dunno, not my bag... but not as long as you. Breast implants? I've known women who had to get them redone under warranty (typically 10 years); apparently every year, between 1% and 3% of all boob jobs are getting redone. And these are simple, mechanical things. A saline sack or a titanium jack are doing a lot less than, say, bluetooth. Good thing I didn't say that. What I said was "There are no implants of any kind, nor will there ever be, that will leave you better off than if you didn't have them because your body doesn't like having non-body stuff in it." To be even clearer, I said "Ain't nobody gonna begrudge a blind man an electric eye." And so that we're absolutely lucid, that blind man would much rather have your eyes than a 256-pixel light-dark grid, but he'd rather have the grid than nothing. That is because you are uneducated in this subject, and are confusing "wish" with "understand." Sure - but if I attach Pistorius' springboard to my shoes, I can run faster than Pistorius. Besides which, that's a prosthetic, not an implant. Reductio ad absurdum on that is that a forklift is a prosthetic lifter. Wishing doesn't make it so.The interesting point about the brain sensor article wasn't the melting away - it was that there was no immunoresponse.
I'm also surprised that you claim "any implant site is subject to opportunistic infection and everything else has a much faster evolutionary cycle.". What about hip implants?
Saying that we do not have useful implants is just plain wrong, we do, and they are routinely used.
They might not make people better at something they did before (except maybe breast implants?), but I doubt it's gonna stay that way for long.
In fact, runners with prosthetic legs can already be faster than normal runners (which is just a narrow employ of legs, though, so in my opinion that doesn't count).
The other idea is, of course, to avoid drawing the immune system's response altogether. And we can already do that, by coating it with biocompatible materials like collagen or PEG.
Eh, if we're talking implanting stupid shit into yourself, most people might be satisfied with it lasting only a few weeks. Hip replacements don't fail because the immune system kills them, though. They're worse at wear and tear than original bones. Pacemakers have to be swapped because battery. Nothing to do with their compatibility. For pacemakers, the original leads might stay in forever. Bluetooth is a bad example because that's just as non-interactive as the others. A memory brain implant that connects to actual nerves, maybe. Bluetooth would just be another box. Yeah, but I'm saying that progress is inevitable, and if we can have a 256-pixel grid, we can get up to and beyond original eyesight. Nothing to do with wishing, it already works. Example. So yeah - if you want to put in an implant that is only going to last a couple weeks, hip hip hooray.
They have a design life of about 20 years. My grandfather went through two. Atrial cardioverters? 10 years. Ventricular cardioverters? 6-8 years. That's the calculus: "Will you be dead by the time this thing fails?"
And these are simple, mechanical things. A saline sack or a titanium jack are doing a lot less than, say, bluetooth.
And so that we're absolutely lucid, that blind man would much rather have your eyes than a 256-pixel light-dark grid, but he'd rather have the grid than nothing.
Wishing doesn't make it so.
This is simply not true. My grandfather's implant, for example, was in splendid shape... but the bone around it had impacted and eroded so fiercely that one leg was 3/4" shorter than the other. This is also simply not true - you're speaking to someone who spent a year designing and testing implantable shock/pace leads for atrial defibrillators. The implantation helices lose conductivity due to plaque build-up and the conduction coils wear mechanically. Again, our design life was ten years. I built the testers to simulate ten years of normal wear on implantable shock/pace leads. And I broke them. Yeah, but I'm saying you're wrong. The progress you're looking for is on the body side, not on the gadget side, and in case you hadn't noticed, that side is not progressive.Hip replacements don't fail because the immune system kills them, though. They're worse at wear and tear than original bones.
Pacemakers have to be swapped because battery. Nothing to do with their compatibility. For pacemakers, the original leads might stay in forever.
Yeah, but I'm saying that progress is inevitable, and if we can have a 256-pixel grid, we can get up to and beyond original eyesight.
Nothing to do with wishing, it already works. Example.
Which, again, nothing to do with the implant being rejected. The bones being eroded by the metal why we have metal-on-metal hip replacements now. Cool, how do you test that? The link to the paper works for me. It's basically about how a coat makes a titanium rod bond better with bone (helping it heal fast). So, very much a thing: Even after 28 days, no reaction. Bacteria becoming resistent to antibiotics faster than we create them has nothing to do with developing materials that don't trigger the immune system. You seem to think that we will never be able to develop something that makes our bodies accept implants. Apparently, the immune system is so great at sniffing out foreign substances that we will never be able to trick it. Never is a very bold claim to make. One that isn't supported by the evidence.but the bone around it had impacted and eroded so fiercely that one leg was 3/4" shorter than the other.
I built the testers to simulate ten years of normal wear on implantable shock/pace leads. And I broke them.
"All implants healed uneventfully without wound infection, implant loosening or chronic adverse reaction during the whole course of the experiment. In particular, no abundant lymphocyte or granuloclyte infiltration and no appearance of multinucleated giant cells (apart from osteoclasts) has been observed at any time."
that side is not progressive.
Moving the goalposts again, and also being factually wrong. Do you remember why my grandfather's hip came into the discussion? They're not. They're titanium. they're strong as fuck. But let's roll right into the riposte: WE'RE NOT METAL. At some point, the implant has to touch gooey meaty bits. Or crunchy chalky boney bits. Generally both, if you're talking a hip replacement as that shit goes into marrow. So let's review: - Leg without titanium: shortened normally - Leg with titanium: accelerated decrepitude - difference: Titanium It's pretty simple math but you keep dancing around it by pretending you don't understand. Like the paper you linked to that I can't get to that says "holy shit, no reaction in four weeks." Dude, I got milk that lasts longer than that. If your implant expires faster than dairy products it isn't applicable to the subject of transhumanism. Nobody says "I want awesome cyber shit in my body for the next couple weeks" they say "I wanna be awesomely cyber." You're essentially arguing the temporary tattoos of implantation and extrapolating out to permanence. And I'm not willing to assume you're doing it by accident. Like your canard about bacterial resistance. Once more, with feeling: an implant site is a wound, its success is directly correlated with immune response, and subverted immune response is a pathway to infection. Full stop. Our bodies will never accept implants. I've done the vivisection. I've reviewed the studies. I've been involved in the primary research. You're still going for this "fundamental advancement of medical technology" thing and ignoring the fact that human immune systems are unchanged from the time of Solomon. And the worst part is you pretend you don't even understand the evidence. Here, watch: _________________________________________________________________________ The primary failure modes for implanted shock/pace leads are related to body motion. Because the most likely site for a cardioverter is underneath the pectoralis via Superior Vena Cave (SVC) cutdown with cardiac access through the svc, leads generally travel up underneath the clavicle and back down. Rotator action (swinging the arm, either while walking or with a tennis racket, for example) provides compression upon the lead. Generalized motion causes the attitude between cardioverter and fixation site to change by a small but non-negligible amount. The FDA will sign off on any test they feel adequately reflects the failure mode of your product. In our case, our leads were made of helical small-gage MP35N, a cobalt-nickel alloy with high corrosion resistance and excellent conductivity. The coil was sheathed in implantation-grade medical tubing the composition and coatings of which were not my job; existing tests proved that their eventual breakdown by the body did not have substantially adverse effect on the charge delivered to the heart. Therefore, our primary concern was physical breakage of the coil. The first test, flexion, consisted of counter-rotating chucks each containing the end of a sample of our coil. I designed, built, tested and deployed a 3/4 HP test rig that spun 24 of these 4" samples at 10,000 RPM, like an Epilady from hell: Each rotation of the sample passed it through a complete 180 degree bend and back, without the cooling or hysteresis period that the actual lead would experience within the body. Also, atrial fibrillation patients aren't really in the habit of doing anything at 10,000 RPM so the conditions experienced by the leads were worst case, to say the least. As it is, our leads could survive approximately 18 hours of destructive testing at 10,000 RPM. Assume your patient will live 20 years. If the leads in his body somehow go through a complete 180 degree bend and back again 1500 times a day, he might need a replacement. Otherwise, he's probably good. The other test involved compression in a medium that modeled tissue. I developed a roller system and poured samples of a medical moulding compound that rolled the leads over and over again until they broke down. The tricky part was finding a molding compound that would survive long enough to cause the coils to deform. As it turns out, cobalt-nickel alloy is pretty tough. BUT NONE OF THAT SHIT MATTERED because the scar tissue that built up at the helix site rendered the leads moot after about ten years. Less, if the patient was particularly unhealthy (none of our patients were particularly healthy, much like every other implant candidate in the history of medicine). And the body could break down the sheathing and plaque up the inside of the helix and it didn't matter because it was bioinert... but the simple presence of the lead caused a substantial portion of the body's immune defenses to be redirected towards plaqueing the lead over. After five years in a sheep, what was a 1/6" diameter pace lead ended up looking like linguini. ________________________________________________________________________________________ The shit you build? Solid as fuck. That flexion tester sounded like a goddamn lear jet (I kinda fucked up the gear lash - what can I say, I was an undergrad). The body you put it in? Frail, and made out of meat. You can't fix the meat. You only think it's a bold claim because you still don't understand the problem.Hip replacements don't fail because the immune system kills them, though. They're worse at wear and tear than original bones.
Which, again, nothing to do with the implant being rejected. The bones being eroded by the metal why we have metal-on-metal hip replacements now.
Cool, how do you test that?
I once had an acquaintance who was into this. He was planning on embedding small magnets into his fingertips, so he could feel magnetic fields. So far as I am aware, he changed his mind, because it would make working with electronics basically impossible. Also, here is a beautiful webcomic that deals with transhumanism.
I remember reading an article about having magnets in your fingertips to feel magnetic fields, that's what I thought this article was going to be about. That is FAR more interesting to me that having a glowing LED ring on your hand. Implants that broaden our senses to experience the universe in new ways would be very interesting, I would like to read more about that. I find cochlear implants and brain-computer interfaces fascinating too. Being able to help deaf or paralyzed people would be a truly great advancement.
The Dark Science storyline probably has the most right now, but the Hob storyline is also significant.
Oh yeah, no, it's about a lot more than that. But I do think it's fair to say that it does a little bit more than touch on transhumanism when (spoiler) ɐu ᴉɯdoɹʇɐuʇ dloʇ doᴉuʇ ᴉs ʇɥɐʇ ʇɥǝ dɹoʇɐƃouᴉsʇ nupǝɹƃoǝs ɔouʌǝɹsᴉou ʇo ɐ ɟnllʎ ɯǝɔɥɐuᴉzǝp qopʎ˙
Well, I've already got the pacemaker, and joked (only partially) about adding a third lead to my vagus nerve for mood control. I can't see where I'd draw the line on implants truthfully. I'm already a cyborg, so is anybody who wears glasses, definitionally. Grinders, such as there are, are just one piece of the transhuman puzzle. One day though, one of them will invent something that John Q. Public might actually want, and the world will change overnight.
I find this all "ew." Not to mention the worrisome tie between already-extant cosmetic surgeries and people with body dysmorphia or related issues (i.e., people who try to match their mental ideal with repeated surgeries and always want another one, because their mental ideal is, to start with, not healthy or a reasonable aspiration) - this just opens up a whole new playground for people who don't want to look normal/human/healthy/whatever to dabble in. I feel like people who do not believe they are human or actively try to change the way they look in order to seem less human are probably inherently unhappy with themselves and who they are. And I feel like the first step is to try and become happy as a human, and feel like you belong and are one, than to change the exterior to match the interior.
Not going to happen. There aren't many problems that are best solved by sticking electronics in your body, and most of them are of the form "you are going to die or have very poor quality of life if we don't stick this thing in you." This stuff is more like body mods for nerds, LEDs instead of skull spikes. Which isn't a bad thing, but is just retreading the whole modern primitive thing with a science fiction flavor. And either they're acknowledging that by calling themselves Grinders after the subculture in Doktor Sleepless, or they hilariously missed the point. kleinbl00 knows things about implantable devices.
It won't happen in the ways that we've seen so far. That doesn't preclude some innovation that we are currently incapable of predicting. One day somebody will work out a good brain-computer interface that doesn't, and I believe I'm quoting here, leave all your food tasting like pennies. Believe me, I'm not going to sign up to be the first to jam electrodes into my brain. But I'm not afraid of such a thing on principle.
It won't. Simply. It can't. You can engineer the most skookum circuit on earth out of the most magically wonderful biomaterials but you can't engineer people that won't reject them. If you gave me a kidney I'd spend the rest of my life hopped up on all sorts of immunosuppressants so that I could keep it alive, functional and in my body. That's a 1:1 replacement, blood type and all biomarkers matching perfectly, and the body still knows it ain't natural. There's a reason we autotransfuse over blood transfusion: even though blood is simple compared to a kidney, and even though it only lasts about three months, our own stuff is our own stuff and other people's stuff is THE INVADER. You've got a pacemaker. There's stuff you can't do because of it, and there's regularly scheduled maintenance that is a fundamental part of your life. It's a lot less than it was even ten years ago, and your quality of life with that pacemaker kicks the shit out of your quality of life without, but it still isn't as good as my quality of life. That's not really the pacemaker's fault. It could be 100% certified alien technology and it'd still have to touch your heart to do its job, and your heart doesn't like to be touched. You're young. That won't be your last pacemaker. The next one is going to be even more awesome. But it's still going to have to touch your heart, and your heart is going to be a little less responsive because it will have built up plaques and biofilms and scar tissue against pacemakers. And it will still not be quite as awesome as a healthy heart with no pacemaker because an implant is a compromise between added functionality and added damage. The damage is never going away. It's not a problem of technology, it's a problem of anatomy and biology and even if we were to Man After Man our way into some T-1000 transhumanist future all we'd do is shift the playing field to T-1000-opportunistic microbes.
I'll point out that transplants / grafts between identical twins do work without rejection. And that was basically the only type of transplant surgery that occurred before the discovery of immunosuppressants. Isograft: Past that, I've seen papers testing all kinds of coatings and shapes on implanted devices. They delay, but never prevent the inevitable. Personally I suspect that it's not just what cells touch, but how their neighbors respond to that touch that dictates rejection. But that's largely speculation. Home-grown stem-cell-derived tissues might one day be a thing, but until then, we're stuck with sticking metals under our skin. Which I personally regard as dumb when medically unnecessary.That's a 1:1 replacement, blood type and all biomarkers matching perfectly, and the body still knows it ain't natural
An Isograft is a graft of tissue between two individuals who are genetically identical (i.e. monozygotic twins). Transplant rejection between two such individuals virtually never occurs.
but that's why we're working on manufacturing donor organs with the recipient's own genetic code, those should in theory not be rejected, because they actually share all biomarkers (which donated kidneys never do), and they don't come with their own immune cells to sensitivize your immune system.
There's your theory again. I'd like to point out that this started with a discussion of shoving electrodes into bodies because yay transhumanism, and you're now arguing that my position is invalid because, in theory, we'll one day be able to clone kidneys. Not the same. Transhumanists don't want perfect organ reproduction. They want bluetooth blood monitors. So are we going to genetically engineer bluetooth blood monitors? Shit, Dr. Frankenstein if we can do all that, we probably don't need to. This whole Tetsuo Body Hammer aesthetic comes from machine fetishism and will cling to any little gibbet of technohope in order to defend the dream. But it's not based on knowledge or empirical science. Bioengineering is a dreary fucking science where you know, as a fundamental, easily-proven maxim, that whatever you build the body will reject because the body has had billions of years of evolution to do just that. And that doesn't make it a futile exercise, and it doesn't make it a task to ignore, but it does temper the Robocop ambitions of anyone that's ever vivisected an implanted sheep. Not sure what "we" you're referring to but "I" decided to do other things with my life because "I" got to see reality rather than fantasy.
oh, I agree about body mods. Borderline suicidal, in my view. In my eyes, not really transhumanism, as that's about "freeing" people from natural constraints, not showing off you hot new 'ware. It's not a technology that's available yet. What those guys do is basically fancy piercings.
Anybody who finds this article interesting, I highly recommend the book Machine Man. It's about a scientist who is obsessed about improving his body by replacing it with one mechanical part after another and things quickly get out of hand. It's a very easy, fun read.