There’s an excellent set of articles from Gizmodo this week “exploring the enhanced human future,” including:
-an interview with Michael Specter, “Synthetic Biology: Why Not Pursuing Crazy Biotech is dangerous”
-an article about tissue engineering and skin grafts: “Meat Band-Aids and Mass Production of Living Tissue”
-human/machine interfaces to enhance our hearing and sexual experiences (NSFW, obviously), replace our bowels after horrific motorcycle accidents, and much, much more!
According to gizmodo, this cyborg life is “about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine.” I find this stance fascinating, and perhaps too complicated for me to really think about now as I’m still recovering from an all too human cold, so I’ll leave off with some questions to mull over. Are we really machines, or does the ability to interface with non-living technology make us so? Is the dichotomy between “sacred objects” and “machines” a false binary? Is there another option? Are we really the ultimate machine? Can there be a pinnacle, an end, a goal for evolution?
