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.