6. Franken-You: A Better Life Through Cyborg Technology

You are a cyborg. Yes, you sitting in that chair holding this book. Now if you get in front of a mirror, you might not look like one, especially with that little glob of guacamole on your upper lip, but trust us you are. You’re just not the cyborg that Hollywood generally defines. Then again, when was the last time Hollywood was right about anything?

Here are two ways we know you are a cyborg:

• For one, no one looks like Michelangelo’s Vitruvian Man any more (see Figure 6.1). We’re all wired up with an iPhone and other gadgets and as you’ll see in this chapter, our contemporary brethren are doing miraculous things to their own bodies to evolve past Michelangelo’s original vision of man. Still the elemental intention is still there. With Vitruvian Man, Michelangelo was demonstrating the blend of art and science during the Renaissance. The pen-and-ink drawing was a study in proportions and an effort to connect man to nature. Today, human beings are undergoing a new renaissance a new blend of art and science, especially when it comes to enhancing the body.

• The second reason we know you are a cyborg is because cyborg anthropologist Amber Case says you are. And she has the coolest job title around, so she’s gotta be right.

The Portland-based thinker explains what she does this way to National Geographic: “What will the next life-shaping breakthrough in technology be? How do parents respond to children who spend hours online? Which new products will fail or succeed? Is technology changing our values and cultures? ‘These are the kinds of questions my work tries to help answer,’ said Case.”

When we contacted her about cyborgs for this chapter it resulted in a very insightful chat.

Case told us the cyborg experience for humans started right at the beginning of our time on this planet.

“Cave people had fire. The minute we started to first cook food that was taking the digestion process that we would have had as animals outside of ourselves,” Case observed. “We started taking all these pieces we would have had eternally and started externalizing them. We became dependent on fire. We became dependent on a knife instead of our teeth to cut through the meat. We became dependent on houses, nails and hammers and then we had to create a society around that.”

That process continues through today, and will continue even as these external aids become more and more technically advanced. Plus, she noted, as we progress we don’t even necessarily notice that it’s happening.

“Once a thing becomes part of your life, like a laundry machine, it dissolves. You don’t notice a laundry machine. It just becomes part of your everyday life. If it breaks down, you notice it. It’s the same with technology,” says Case. “While everyone is waiting for the bus, or starts smoking a cigarette, they pull out their phone. In all the little moments of life where you are looking ahead or talking to your neighbor you pull out your phone. You go to bed with your iPhone, you wake up with it and read the news.”

In other words, don’t spend too much time worrying about whether you’re going to become a cyborg in the future ... you already are one. And if you are an Amish farmer, your barn and gas-powered lantern make you a cyborg. That said, you are not a fancy one like Arnold Schwarzenegger was in The Terminator, Jebediah.

“... don’t spend too much time worrying about whether you’re going to become a cyborg in the future ... you already are one.”

That definition has morphed over the years, however. For our self-serving purposes, a cyborg is any organism that has enhanced capabilities thanks to integration with technology, which is not quite the same thing as using prosthetics simply to regain lost functionality.

For example, an amputee using an artificial leg simply to regain mobility would not qualify as a cyborg by this definition. They are merely bionic. On the other hand, if the replacement leg was designed to increase running speed, or to include special sensors that are able to sense magnetism, radiation, or a dog peeing on it, then it’s: hello cyborg!

Unfortunately, the terms “bionic” and “cyborg” are usually used interchangeably or used as synonyms by Hollywood and literature, its tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking cousin. On the 1970s drama The Six Million Dollar Man and its spinoff program The Bionic Woman, both Steve Austin and Jamie Summers benefitted from speed and strength enhancements and each had one sense amplified, yet both were routinely referred to as “bionic.” (We know because some of us authors begged to stay up and watch it at 9 p.m. on a school night.)

But let’s get real. Our editor, Rick Kughen, has a chronic back issue that required several surgeries. In one operation the surgeon installed an electro-prongy thingy (that smart people call a neurostimulator). It doesn’t give Rick a super back. But it was suppose to help his wonky defective back work better than it would otherwise naturally and still let him go fishing. That makes Rick pretty much bionic. (It was a bust, but you get the idea.) When he sends us stressed emails from his iPhone, however, asking about missed deadlines, that is better than walking across the country to our house to grumble at us. That enhancement makes him a cyborg. Get it?

In early experiments, the duo and their team measured electrical charges inside muscles during contraction. They also developed a device that would convert visual information on a page into tones, in an attempt to allow the blind to “read” by ear, which we think is kinda cool.

Wiener noted the similarities between electronics and the human nervous system: “It is a noteworthy fact that the human and animal nervous systems, which are known to be capable of the work of a computations system ...” He goes on ad nauseum, but we deleted that part because frankly you get it. Cyborgs are humans with replacement parts that make them as good or better than their birthday equipment.

If you read Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, you’re not going to read about a bunch of cool robot arms—this pioneering research occurred well before much of the miniaturization that make electronic implants and robot limbs feasible. In fact, much of the text is pure theory, with long passages of mathematics. But it is an important, if occasionally baffling, starting place for much of what we now consider cutting edge in this field.

That definition would apply more to the early-twentieth century French superhero The Nyctalope, who had enhanced night vision and an artificial heart in his arsenal of crime-fighting tools. It would certainly apply to Steve Austin, hero of Martin Caidin’s novel Cyborg (later made into the television series The Six Million Dollar Man). Following an accident, Austin’s legs (and one arm) were replaced with faster, stronger mechanical versions. His eye was also replaced with a camera that had telephoto capabilities.

On the darker side of the equation, both Darth Vader and Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons incorporate some technology that could allow them to be considered cyborgs. As mentioned earlier, the original Terminator was also a cyborg.

And do you remember this line: “We are the Borg. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own.”

For a whole generation, this catchphrase from Star Trek: The Next Generation came to exemplify the idea of the intersection of the biological and the technological. They—or the collective “it”—was a cyborg. The name “Borg” kind of gives it away, really. Archvillains are fun to watch when they are cyborgs. Of course not all cyborgs are evil, killing machines. But Hollywood certainly has given them a bad rap.

Back in the early days, everyone walked around naked all the time, until someone’s gray matter concocted the plan to bonk a buffalo in the noggin with a rock, peel off its shaggy coat, and wear it to stay warm and survive. And have sex and have babies. And that was just the first step toward our cyborg destiny.

“... the slippery gray matter between our ears has long been our greatest asset.”

Those early pelt wraps gave way to tailored furs, with sinews being used to stitch together multiple panels of animal hide, creating clothing that fit the body in a more natural way. Eventually, heavy pelts gave way to fabrics woven from a variety of natural materials, such as linen and cotton, which were lighter, cooler, and could be woven into predetermined shapes. Those, in turn, were bolstered or replaced by synthetic and ultralight materials such as polyester, rayon, and nylon, which had properties that would have seemed magical to our buffalo-skinning forebears. They had heat retention and water-repellency and the apparent ability to stretch when worn by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Geez, that guy could wear polyester!

Footwear made of wrapped animal hides turned into leather and rubber composite footwear stitched together for protection and durability. Through the years, advances in technology meant that footwear eventually transitioned away from animal-based material like leather to things like canvas and synthetic materials. Shoe soles, which originally were intended to prevent rocks and twigs from poking your feet, were computer-engineered to include features like shock resistance and springiness enabling you to run a reflective marathon or two painlessly on misty mornings (if you believe the “Just Do It” ads).

Of course, clothing wasn’t simply for protection against the elements; sometimes it was a matter of protection against each other. People had this bad habit of pissing off their neighbor, which occasionally led to them getting impaled by sharp, stabby bits of metal.

Thousands of years ago, people hammered plates of metal into shapes that would protect various body parts: helmets protected the head, breastplates and later, around 4 b.c.e., chain mail was invented to deflect bladed weapons. More recently, protective synthetic materials, such as Kevlar, are lightweight enough to be woven into gloves and jackets, and with a strength five times that of steel. They offer protection against projectile weapons such as bullets, or even (to some extent, anyhow) the blast of a grenade.

You get the picture through this timeline, right? Heck, your clothing makes you cyborg because your bare hairless flesh won’t keep you from freezing to death.

Until the thirteenth century, for people with eyesight that had lost its acuity over the years, the only option was to stumble around in a blurry world. Then someone realized that polished glass could correct vision to near-normal levels. Eyeglasses could cure near-sightedness, far-sightedness, or provide magnification for close-up work like reading or detailed work. Eyeglasses could also correct for eyes that didn’t track properly with each other, and could limit the amount of light that entered the eye, whether to protect against brightness or harmful ultraviolet rays or to look super-cool like Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

Eventually, corrective lenses were shrunk down into small transparent discs that could be placed on the eyeball, obviating both the need to perch spectacles on the end of your nose, or getting beaten up at recess for being a stinky four-eyes.

So far, each of these things has corrected deficiencies in the human condition: bad eyesight, the inability to survive when the temperature dropped, or resistance to deadly weapons wielded by fellow humans. But at a certain point, the desire to self-enhance went beyond simply curing these deficiencies to actually improving human capabilities.

One of those capabilities was knowing what time it was. The sundial was introduced around 3,500 b.c.e., making it easy for people to figure out the time of day so long as you were within a short distance of the sundial itself. This helped with avoiding darkness, which was generally hazardous to be out in. Being aware of time allowed for keeping safe, planned resource gathering, and other life optimizations.

The introduction of spring-driven clocks in the fifteenth century allowed people to tell time in their very own homes and without having to rely on the sun, which inconveniently disappeared every night for hours at a time.

In the sixteenth century, the technology was miniaturized into a wearable format that we know today: the wristwatch. Initially, it was favored by women, while men tended to rely on the pocket watch. (The neck-mounted watch was limited to Flavor Flav of the hip-hop group Public Enemy, yo.) Whatever version you preferred, the watch had the distinction of being the first wearable device.

Okay fine, but as superpowers go, knowing the correct time is pretty unimpressive. But let’s get adventurous. How about breathing underwater?

Until the late nineteenth century, the only place that human beings could comfortably breathe was while walking on land (save for areas plagued by pollution caused by heaving coal burning).

In 1878, Henry Fleuss created the self-contained breathing apparatus, which was strapped on and allowed divers to breathe underwater. These days it seems routine to don an air tank and go for a stressless underwater swim on holiday.

“Want a pina colada, darling?”

“No, no. Going shark diving. Will be back at 2.”

That said, it was the first step toward allowing people to venture into environments previously considered wholly hostile to human life. Further, it was only a few small steps for man to the spacesuit, which allowed humans to breathe off the planet.

While breathing underwater and in the void of of space come closest to Clynes and Kline’s original definition of cyborg, it’s probably a fair guess that scuba divers or wristwatch-wearers aren’t what immediately springs to mind when you think of part man, part machine.

The prosthetics company, Össur, has a line of bionics designed to replace missing legs, complete with processors onboard for more natural motion that mimics the movement and reactivity of the original meat limbs. In his book Tomorrowland, Steven Kotler tells the story of David Rozelle, a combat veteran who lost the lower portion of his leg but who was able to return to active duty with a bionic Össur-built replacement.

While it’s true that some of these limbs can be exceptionally expensive—and thus hard to justify the cost, at least for the uninsured—some people are building their own replacements at a fraction of the cost using 3D printing.

In 2013, 12-year-old Leon McCarthy had been missing fingers on his left hand since birth due to lack of blood flow during his development in the womb. Traditional prosthetic units, to help people like Leon, run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Leon’s dad connected with inventor Ivan Owen on YouTube, and in turn, Owen and Richard Von As from Johannesberg, South Africa. They collaborated on a high-quality, low-cost 3D printed prosthetic. The inventors do not hold a patent for the invention or charge to download the plans for the hand, so the cost of materials is all that is required. That’s $10. Pretty much the cost of two Venti specialty coffees from Starbucks.

Fortunately, Leon’s school owned a 3D printer and handily made it available. A $10 replacement was printed for Leon, and he now has a “cyborg” hand with fingers able to close, which he sees as “special, not different.” The fingers are controlled by flexing the wrist. This pulls on cable “tendons” to close around a targeted object. Leon can hold his backpack, give a snack to a buddy, and hold the handlebars of his bike just like other kids. (Check out Leon’s 3D printer hand at http://superyou.link/leonshand)

This points to a future where you can upgrade your hand simply by popping down to the local library and booking some time on one of their 3D printers. It’s not hard to imagine a future where we are able to inexpensively print limb replacements that not only replace but also improve upon what nature gave us.

“Honey, you can run really fast today. What did you do?”

“I upgraded my ventricles on the weekend, Mom.”

Seems nuts, but so did cellphone video conferencing in 2001.

Artificial hearts have been around since the early 1980s, but until recently the problem is they are tethered to external machinery which makes it hard to go on a hot date. Most recipients were unable to live for extended periods with the replacement technology. For some, the devices acted strictly as bridge technology until the patients could receive a donor transplant.

In the early twenty-first century, Peter Houghton was able to live seven years with a Jarvik 2000 ventricular-assist device which didn’t replace the heart outright but augmented the weakened ability of his original ticker. Heart-assist devices today are common tools that surgeons can implant to assist a weak heart pump better, which allows their recipients to live a normal life. (Learn more about the Jarvik 2000 device at http://superyou.link/jarviksheart.)

Surgically implanted devices also allow people to regain their hearing. In 2011, a 1.5-minute video of a deaf woman named Sarah Churman went viral, showing her breaking into tears when her audio implant (from a company called Esteem) was switched on (http://superyou.link/sarahhears). Since then, a number of other videos have shown other men, women, children, and babies having their implants activated (and now this kind of video is so de rigeur, it’s almost as common as those dog-on-a-skateboard videos). It’s worth noting that such cochlear implants have been around since 1976, but earlier models were bulky and often required external components. New models can be implanted completely internally. The downside is that, unlike traditional external hearing aids, you have to go to see a technician to replace the implant’s batteries. Under normal usage, that’s likely to only be necessary every five to eight years.

Many of these early visual therapies required a lot of external hardware to properly function, but with ongoing research, the outboard hardware has been shrinking. Today (as we write this in 2016) it is close to the size of a deck of cards. It could be a matchbook by the time you get to this section of the book after it sits on your night table until 2017.

For those who still retain some of their original vision, we’re also now starting to see lenses that can not only correct eyesight back to 20/20 vision, but can also enhance vision into the world of cyborg, so people can see things at greater distance than with the original parent-provided wetware. It’s getting to be very “Steve Austinish” out here today.

If you haven’t had to replace (or correct) one of your body parts, you might think there’s very little overlap between your world and the world of cyborgs. And you’d almost certainly be wrong.

The mobile phone started as an unwieldy assembly that had to be anchored to your automobile to connect to the phone company’s radio transmission network. Motorola’s DynaTac phone was introduced in 1983, finally allowing people to talk on the phone while walking down the street ... but with a weight of 28 ounces (794 grams) and a form factor that was more than vaguely reminiscent of a brick, it wasn’t widely embraced. But it was cool.

Eventually, the miracle of miniaturization allowed mobile phones to fit comfortably in your jacket or jeans pocket, making them practical for nearly everyone.

Around the same time that mobile phones were shrinking, the personal digital assistant (or PDA) was starting to come into its own. As electronics became cheaper, companies started making electronic organizers that would store addresses and phone numbers, essentially replacing the paper equivalent.

Take European electronics marker, Psion. Its gadgets included extra functions such as a calculator, a world time clock, and basic word processing/spreadsheet functionality. (Whoa!) Eventually they included a full QWERTY-style keyboard for faster text input. In 1992, Apple’s stylus-controlled Newton MessagePad was released into a world that wasn’t quite ready for tablet computing; despite its advanced capabilities, it ultimately ended up as a punchline on The Simpsons TV show.

The 1996 launch of the Palm Pilot was much more successful thanks to its more reliable stylus input, leading to a long line of successors and imitators.

On their own, either the mobile phone or PDA could have laid ample claim to turning humans into cyborgs. Mobile phones enhanced our capability to stay in touch with other people without having to tether to a landline, and PDAs were a handy way to store information in offline memory for quick and easy recovery. But it was when the two finally came together that we found ourselves in a whole new snack bracket.

While pagers had been around in one form or another since the 1950s, Canada’s Research in Motion (RIM, later Blackberry) introduced the first two-way pager in 1996, allowing people to respond directly from their hip-slung device. Eventually that led to the BlackBerry device, a full-sized PDA that was always connected to the outside world, enabling mobile email.

Palm responded by adding wireless capabilities to the Palm VII. Shortly afterward, Kyocera release the pdQ, which bundled phone capabilities with the Palm operating system, and though it wasn’t a success, it signaled the future of the direction of the phone.

Both Research in Motion and Palm came out with their own phone/PDA hybrids, and the smartphone was born, laying a path leading directly to today’s iPhone and Android handsets. With their capability to download apps and connect via Bluetooth to a wide variety of accessories, smartphones are essentially a bridge technology that turns every single one of us into an (improved) cyborg.

Another accessory that’s been speeding along the cyborg timeline is health trackers such as the Fitbit, a device that can track the steps you take throughout the day. They use motion sensors embedded inside the device to calculate your progress. By correlating the data gleaned from those sensors with information about your height and weight, the Fitbit app can then calculate your distance walked and the amount of calories you’ve burned. Newer Fitbit devices contain heart rate sensors, so the device’s app can keep a reasonably good record of your health stats throughout each day. It can also sense trends and even compare you against your friends to bolster your motivation to do better. “Hey lazy, Steve is kicking your butt today.” Ok maybe not.

But there’s an additional incentive, potentially. Your insurance company might give you more favorable rates if they can tap into your Fitbit data to make sure you’re taking care of yourself. In 2015, John Hancock became the first insurer to offer policyholders a discount when they use Fitbit wristbands that enable exercise tracking. Imagine your insurance agent calling you to warn you that your rates will be going up if you don’t do more sit-ups today.

The Apple Watch also adds health-tracking capabilities when paired up with Apple’s HealthKit app. But it’s not simply a health-tracking device: The Apple Watch also sends notifications from your phone straight to your wrist, and by using Near Field Communication technology (which enables short distance wireless data transmission), you can pay for items simply by putting your wrist up to a sensor at retail establishments. It can even send messages wirelessly to other Apple Watch wearers.

It’s probably fair to say that Google Glass is a device that more closely aligns with the general preconception of what a contemporary cyborg actually is: Worn on the face like a pair of eyeglasses, the voice-controlled device features an eyepiece that can privately impart information to the wearer, and can record a video of whatever the wearer happens to be looking at.

It’s probably also fair to say that the public at large isn’t quite ready for this kind of cybernetic technology; the device was banned in cinemas, locker rooms in health clubs and bars, and pretty much everywhere else. Why? Google Glass’s recording capabilities were considered to be an invasion of privacy and/or a way to subvert copyright laws. Add that to the fact that Google Glass wearers looked like utter dorks, and it was a recipe for failure. And fail it did: Google shelved the Glass project at the beginning of 2015 (see the story of Google Glass at http://superyou.link/brokenglass). That’s not to say it’s completely dead. In 2015, Google applied for patents on the next generation of its wearable technology, but it might be awhile until it’s fully accepted by the public ... if it’s even made available to them. Right now, the next generation version of Glass looks like it may simply be aimed at increasing productivity in the workplace.

It’s not just socially oblivious nerds that want to strap on cameras. GoPro has become ubiquitous in the extreme sports category, with people strapping on a high-def third eye before throwing themselves into death-defying situations, like working as a bike courier. While GoPro has been of special interest to skiers, stunt cyclists, and skydivers, the company has more recently branched out into drone technology—after acquiring Swiss drone company Skybotix—giving people the ability to see at a distance ... from hundreds of feet in the air.

Then there’s virtual-reality eyewear. It allows users to go places that don’t exist. While virtual reality goggles have been available for quite some time now, earlier models tended to have relatively low-resolution displays and slower refresh rates, which could leave those trying to enter into virtual environments headachy or barfy. Now, the Oculus Rift features tech specs that make these virtual environments more tolerable and lifelike.

Combined with a camera, these new virtual reality glasses could functionally put an overlay onto real life, helping wearers to identify what’s in front of them and to navigate unfamiliar or dangerous environments. It’s worth noting that smartphone apps, such as Layar, have been offering some of this augmented-reality functionality for years, though the smartphone experience is obviously less immersive than a full virtual reality headset.

Can you see the trend? Miniaturized headsets (or soon embedded wetware, maybe?) that is enabled with smart software that overlays helpful guidance through the underwear aisle at Macy’s to the discount boxers, and you have the makings of something kind of handy.

While the Apple Watch and Fitbit can alert you that you have a phone call coming in by flashing an alert on your wrist, there are more discreet ways to receive alerts. Kovert’s ALTRUIS jewelry line-up includes rings, bracelets, and pendants that will subtly vibrate on predefined events such as an incoming call or a message from a specific person.

The problem with fashion is it’s so temporary, so you might want to wait a little bit until you can get a more permanent alert system tattooed to the body part of your choice.

Yep. We went there. Actually it’s old hat. In 2012, Nokia applied for a patent for precisely that reason, suggesting that magnetic ink could be compelled to subcutaneously vibrate on incoming calls or messages, when connected to a Bluetooth-enabled phone (we talked a bit about this in Chapter 3 “Beauty Hacks: Becoming Barbie, a Lizard, or Whatever You Want to Be” in the section called Gadget Activated Tattoos). Different vibration patterns could allow you to differentiate between callers just by the different sensations emanating from your tattoo.

While each of these things is high-tech in its own way, you might still be feeling like they’re cyborg-lite. Let’s take a look at a few people who have really jumped feet-first into the world of the cyborg and are leading the way on how it really could be for everyone in the future.

Like Google Glass, Mann hasn’t had the smoothest ride, and for some of the same reasons: People tend to be wary when you’re wearing a bunch of technology on your head. By 2012, Mann’s headgear had shrunk substantially from the helmet-sized assembly he was wearing in the late 70s and early 80s. Even so, his streamlined setup still came with a camera attachment (known as the EyeTap) located directly in front of his eye, and consequently Mann could still be quite conspicuous. Although the technology was surgically connected directly to his skull, employees in a Parisian McDonald’s restaurant attempted to forcibly remove it from his face and skull.

Despite Mann’s attempts to show them documentation from his doctor explaining the technology, they ultimately ended up ripping up the doctor’s note and ejecting Mann from the restaurant. This wasn’t even the first time Mann had been assaulted for wearing this technology in public; Mann had also been accosted by a subway security officer a little earlier on his personal cyborg timeline.

Mann continues to move forward with his wearable computing project, and serves as the director of the EyeTap Personal Imaging Lab, which works on ways to provide augmented reality devices in smaller and more user-friendly form factors.

While the original goal of Mann’s wearable computing devices was as a “seeing aid” for people with visual deficits, it now acts as augmented reality for anyone who wants it. “Thirty-five years ago I was trying to justify or explain this glass. I think, now, digital eyeglass doesn’t require convincing. I think people realize its benefits,” he said in an interview posted on YouTube (http://superyou.link/stevetalksatTedx).

This ability to translate colors into tones has had a few different practical synaesthetic effects for Harbisson. Now, when looking at paintings, he can perceive them on a sonic level, leading him to regard certain paintings with many different subtle shades as sounding more like a horror movie.

But he’s also been able to start working in the other direction, rendering the tonal qualities of certain songs or speeches into colors—in fact, he’s turned this ability into an art career—and being able to pinpoint the “color” of a phone ringing. He’s even joked that he’s starting to dress less on how it looks than how it sounds.

While the implant has provided its share of troubles—including a run-in at the passport office where an official didn’t want to allow Harbisson to wear the camera for his official photo—it’s also had its benefits, including the ability to “see” outside the normal human spectrum. His ability to hear infrared means he immediately knows if there are motion detectors in a room, and his ability to hear ultraviolet means he can tell how safe it is to be outside without having to consult the UV listings from the weather service. The TV weatherman might soon be out of a job.

In 2002, Naumann (dubbed “Patient Alpha”) was the first of 16 patients to undergo a procedure in which holes were drilled into his skull, wires were connected directly to the brain via implants, and he started to receive a feed from a special camera attachment in front of the right eye. Once he was wired up, he could perceive input via the electrodes in a grid of limited resolution. It was nowhere near the resolution of his original vision, but a damn sight better than the darkness he’d lived in for years. Despite a rocky start—including seizures induced by the electrodes—Naumann was soon able to make out what was going on around him, to the point where he was even able to drive a car around the clinic’s parking lot.

Unfortunately, the implant only worked for about eight weeks before deteriorating, and its inventor, William Dobelle, died before being able to fix it or properly document it. Naumann had the jacks in his skull removed in 2010. He readjusted to life without vision, documenting his experiences in Search for Paradise: A Patient’s Account of the Artificial Vision Experiment. (Read more about Jens at http://superyou.link/meetjens).

Even though the Dobelle vision replacement system ultimately failed, it provided proof that it was possible for people without vision to see again, and many have since benefited from subsequent technologies. In fact, new vision technologies, such as Second Sight’s Argus II, are now capable of generating a picture for people who were previously legally blind. Again, the image is crude, but it’s a start.

However, he had cochlear implants placed directly in his skull, allowing him to hear again. A pair of headpieces were placed on the side of his head, magnetically locking to the implant inside his skull. After creating a radio link to the implant, the headphones sent audio information to the implant allowing Chorost to hear, but not the way people regularly understand hearing.

Because the electrode stimulates portions of the brain rather than moving the bones of the inner ear, Chorost initially found the audio input “incomprehensible.” However, he retrained himself to hear all over again with audiotapes of Winnie the Pooh. By reading along with the audio version of the book, he was able to teach himself what each of the sounds he was previously familiar with “sounded” like using this direct method of electrode-induced stimulation.

Chorost understood that much of his new experience was made possible by the software, along the way, the software he was using was updated, giving him more access to auditory information.

The entire process led Chorost to switch careers, becoming a technology theorist and science writer. His award-winning book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, came out of his experience with his implants, and more recently he’s written World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines and the Internet. It’s safe to say that Chorost has embraced his status as a cyborg. And he has brought Winnie the Pooh into the twenty-first century.

The first prototype, also known as the—wait for it—Eyeborg was built right on Rob’s kitchen table, but he soon got the company RF-Links involved in custom-building a wireless camera to fit into the prosthetic. While the camera could transmit wirelessly to an external receiver, it was not connected directly to his brain, leaving it as mostly a way to provide a point-of-view shot from the same perspective as regular human eyesight, not to function as an actual replacement organ.

As you’d imagine, these initial prototypes didn’t quite match up to the kind of bionic eyes you see in futuristic television shows and videogames. In fact, they looked quite unnatural. In one of Spence’s videos, you can see a definite red glow from the eye in lower light, which is certainly attention-getting, but not the sort of thing that would put a Tinder date at ease while sharing a nice Chablis. Ultimately, the goal for Spence’s Eyeborg project was to create a model that looks more like a standard eyeball, and to provide the replacement camera with the type of augmented reality functionality typically featured in cyborg-oriented movies and video games. You can watch Rob Spence’s documentary on living with a camera in his eye socket at http://superyou.link/robtheeyeborg.

While the Eyeborg isn’t connected directly to the brain, it serves as a totem to future models that might be. Researchers have already started work on a 3D-printed eye that comes with built-in wireless, plus zoom and recording capabilities, in a modular format that will connect with the brain yet be quickly upgradable. (No word on whether the French arm of McDonald’s will sponsor it.)

As you might guess by pulling apart the word, an exoskeleton is a powered robotic framework a person can wear on the outside of his or her body and clothing, which gives the wearer support, strength, and speed. By distributing loaded weight onto the skeleton, it allows the wearer to carry more than they ordinarily would be able to handle without the need for a lifetime access to a personal chiropractor. It can also help the wearer maintain his or her balance, even while climbing hills or walking great distances.

The powered Human Universal Load Carrier (also known as HULC), developed by Ekso Bionics and licensed by military manufacturer Lockheed Martin, allows the wearer to carry a load of 200 pounds and achieve a sustained speed of 10 miles per hour, while continuing to help the wearer maintain his or her agility. In other words, it’s not like strapping on a tank, but rather helium balloons. The company also offers an unpowered model known as FORTIS, which simply provides support by transferring loads to the ground through the metal frame, rather than directly through the wearer’s body. We think this would be handy for carrying cat litter, when there’s a “buy one get one free” sale on.

While these capabilities obviously have great tactical benefit to soldiers in the field, exoskeleton technology can also return mobility to people who have lost the use of their limbs. In 1992, Amanda Boxtel sustained a spinal cord injury while downhill skiing resulting in paralysis in both her legs. Nearly two decades later, she began to learn to walk again using Berkeley Bionics’s eLEGS exoskeleton, and she now has some mobility again, albeit with the use of a pair of arm-crutches for additional support. In addition to regaining mobility, Boxtel notes in one of her TED Talks that by standing upright inside the exoskeleton, she also has improved circulation, has better bladder and bowel function, and less pain. (See Amanda Boxtel strap on her eLEGs: http://superyou.link/amandastepsup.)

Ultimately, while the technology was developed for military applications—such as Ripley beating the celestial poop out of the mother of all aliens in Aliens—it’s clear that civilians will eventually be huge beneficiaries, too. Most of the good stuff—such as GPS and duct tape comes from the military, really. The big hurdle in the short-term is the price. Exoskeleton models cost between $30,000 and $100,000.

They’re not something you can just pick up at Target. At least not yet. As the technology develops, however, you know the price will come down. And then wheelchairs will become as antique as the Betamax, 56Flex, and HD-DVD. People with spinal injuries will be able to function just as well as able-bodied people, of course until we figure out how to repair spines with stems cells and then ... well you get it.

Jalava popped a 2GB flash memory component into the fingertip replacement, and preloaded it with a bootable operating system and several apps. When the USB component was needed for booting or for saving data, he would leave his fingertip behind, connected to the computer. The only problem: 2GB wouldn’t always be enough space, and so Jalava immediately started thinking about upgrading to a higher-capacity drive, a wireless component, or an MP3 player ... as always with technology, you want the upgrade—640k, after all, is never enough. (Check out Jalava’s USB finger at http://superyou.link/jerryjalava.)

Realizing that identification chips use the same general radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology found inside RFID passcards, Graafstra found a biosafe glass-encased RFID tag and in 2005 had his doctor implant it into his hand with a giant syringe. Then, after rigging up his office door with an RFID reader, he was able to automatically unlock his office door with the swipe of a hand, which was useful when he was toting an armload of server equipment. (Anyone who’s had to fumble for their keys with an armload of groceries can probably relate.)

After gaining some attention for his innovation, Graafstra sat back while the rest of the world caught up. When he realized there were some grisly do-it-yourself (DIY) body-hacking attempts occurring, he formed the company Dangerous Things, which is dedicated to providing safe products for people to self-modify (and encouraging people to involve body modification professionals when their conservative MDs are too reluctant to participate).

Unlike people who consider the body a temple (see the next chapter for some of the religious objections to body mods), Graafstra is more inclined to think of the body as a “sport utility vehicle for the brain.” Graafstra notes that biohackers are interested in adding other senses such as small fingertip implants that can help the recipient detect magnetism, or implementing carrier pigeon DNA into ourselves to be able to sense directions without having to whip out the iPhone compass app.

Currently, Graafstra is able to use implanted RFID and near field communication (NFC) components to unlock his door, log into his computer, and cue his smartphone to automatically open up contact information, among other things. Given the right gear, the list of things he’ll be able to do in the future is pretty unlimited, like to detect and avoid angry French McDonald’s employees. Graafstra believes bio-hacking is the future of human evolution—watch his TEDx talk at http://superyou.link/amalgraafstra.

Following the procedure, when he closed his fist, a mechanical hand on the desk beside him would also close; when he opened his fist, the fingers of the mechanical hand would retract. While the procedure was controversial at the time, the goal was to analyze the data to determine the specific makeup of each of the signals passing through the BrainGate to better design bionic limbs down the road.

“I was the first human to have that implanted in my nervous system. Which, since then, has been used in about three different people. You know, tetraplegics to control a robot arm, that sort of thing,” he said. But Warwick has even bigger end goals. “For me, the next system is clearly brain-to-brain feedback ... sending signals from one human brain to another.”

It’s not surprising, as Warwick has already done some of the work, and turned himself into a guinea pig: He and his wife got wirelessly hooked to each other and could communicate in a rudimentary fashion via their implants over the local network.

You can watch Warwick undergo a risky surgery to have the BrainGate inserted into the media nerve in his left hand; then, see it in action at http://superyou.link/kevinwarwick.

(This project was explored in Chapter 5, “The Human Computer: How to Rewire and Turbo-Boost Your Ape Brain.”)

If you are thinking Tom Cruise in Minority Report, then yes, you got it.

This eventually evolved into SixthSense, which uses a camera to track hand movements and projection to display information. Color-coded fingertip markers are tracked, and gestures with the fingers are converted into clicks, zoom, pinch, and other types of input familiar to people working with physical interfaces, all without the need to lay hands on a mouse, screen, or trackpad.

If you’re outside, holding your hands up in the gesture of taking a picture will cause your chest-mounted tracking camera to take a photograph. Perhaps, you can use your hands to dial a phone number instead of having to haul out the smartphone and unlock it. Or, by clipping a contact microphone to a standard sheet of paper you could use the vibrations on that paper to track your finger across the surface, effectively turning it into a tablet. And then, when you return to the office, you can pinch the info you have been working with on a sheet of paper and transfer it to your full desktop with a simple gesture. (Or, we wonder, maybe you could raise your middle forefinger to order Le Big Mac on the Champs Elysees.)

Despite the fact this technology ultimately turns the wearer into a cyborg, Mistry notes that its capability to make everyday objects interactive is actually a way to help people reengage with the physical world, rather than forcing them to constantly toil away in front of a machine. (Learn about Mistry’s revolutionary tech tools at http://superyou.link/pranavmistry.) A paradox, perhaps, but one that might help keep us human.

While the initial array of electrodes and connections was fairly unwieldy and unattractive, it certainly allowed Sullivan to conduct some of the tasks of which he was capable before the amputation, including eating, shaving, and vacuuming (see http://superyou.link/jessesullivan). More importantly, it allowed him to play with and hug his grandchildren again. For a man who had no arms at all, that’s a pretty big deal. And of course, as technology improves, newer robotic arms will become more natural looking, and the connections to the nerves will become more discrete.

With the Bebionic 3, connections to existing nerves aren’t necessary; instead, the prosthetic is able to sense muscle contractions at the end of the amputated arm and convert those to the appropriate movement using the servos inside the hand, to a total of 14 different hand positions.

As with Jesse Sullivan, the device allowed Ackland to resume some day-to-day tasks like two-fingered typing and driving a car. While Ackland has been known to rock the plain black robo-hand look, the prosthetic also comes with a skin-toned covering, for those who don’t want to call immediate attention to the fact that they’re cyborgs. You can hear Ackland’s story at http://superyou.link/nigelackland.

Don’t get any bright ideas, however: the effect of this chlorophyll analogue only lasted a short time, and required Licina to wear black contact lenses to prevent him from receiving too much light during the testing phase: it’s not something you want to play around with without precautions. On the other hand, it’s ample proof that humans can boost their abilities temporarily without drastic measures, opening up a lot of military and emergency-responder possibilities.

These do-it-yourself biohackers, known as grinders, are starting to implant themselves with actively powered components that can connect to other equipment with Bluetooth, and possibly (in the future) even interface directly with the brain ala William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Tim Cannon had a Bluetooth-enabled temperature-sensing module (known as the Circadia) implanted into his arm as a way to track his health. Despite the unit being much larger than the RFID tags Graafstra and Wake used, Cannon had the entire procedure performed (complete with sutures) without anesthetic by a fellow body-modder. The electronics embedded under Cannon’s skin also resulted in a pretty pronounced lump directly under his skin, so there’s little subtlety to some of these implants at this stage. But again, as technology advances, miniaturized versions of these electronic components will likely become available in form factors little bigger than the rice-sized RFID tags.

“The medical industry really, truly believes that it is unethical to attempt to supersede your limitations,” said Cannon in an interview with Motherboard’s Max Hoppenstedt. “I would like to improve a lot of those inefficiencies. I think that’s the best course of action for preserving conscious thought in this universe.”

The DIY community has to be careful about their modifications, though. Even when it comes to relatively simple procedures like having a neodymium magnetic implant placed into a fingertip (a procedure Cannon also had done previously), it has to be performed without anesthetic or surgical tools—were these things to be used, the person performing the procedure could be charged with performing medicine without a license. Consequently, much of this work has to be done in a gray area, which opens up ethical questions about the procedures, raising concerns that might not be immediately evident to the younger and more enthusiastic modders.

“I think there are a lot of younger people that have more piercings, it is something that is done more now,” says Kevin Warwick, speaking of his lab’s work with implants. “We’ve got another student, Matt, who’s got all the piercings. He has them all over his ears, his nose, his body. He wonders why we have to bother with all the ethical approval. It was relatively trivial in comparison to what he has already got.”

And, of course, there are many ethical concerns raised along the way. Having an eye or limb replaced when it’s lost in an accident is one thing, but what about replacing a perfectly functional body part simply because the replacement part is better? Are we ready for that? Right now, medical practitioners are even unwilling to install nondestructive implants that grinders are eager to use (such as the Circadia), opening up the possibility of back-alley cyborg chop-shops with the inherent risks that come with such nonlicensed activity.

But to a growing number of transhumanists, this is bound to change as the world becomes more familiar with technology. “The distance between the two is so small now. As that blends, where do we begin and where does technology end? It’s been getting closer and closer over time,” says Amber Case. “I think as people become more moderate in the ways of technology they will start to see it more as a tool to help with creativity.”

“When people have more time they will hopefully become more educated and that will have huge ramifications,” agrees Zoltan Istvan, who is running for United States President as the leader of the Transhumanist Party.

We’ll visit with Istvan again in Chapter 7 “In Hacks We Trust? The Political and Religious Backlash Against the Future” but in the meantime it’s worth underlining one point: The fact that a transhumanist is running for President shows there’s already been a big movement toward acceptance of these types of enhancements. Can a world where going to get a bionic arm is as easy and acceptable as going for Lasik eye surgery be on the horizon?

We think so.