Thinking outside the box

New technologies. Transhumanism and biohacking. Augmented body. Researchers claim to provide superhuman abilities by subdermal implantation of microchips, while disabled amputated below the knee defy bodied athletes at world championships.

We’ve been using technology and medicine to enhance human qualities for quite some time, from surgery to inoculations and we now have many habits concerning new technologies and new medias, products we now can’t get them out of our lives.

A revolution is in progress in the design of the human body and, by extension, society. The “post-human condition” is not a pun of science fiction anymore. It is time to think seriously about its impact and its effects in our daily lives and moral.

Transhumanist thinkers study the possibilities and consequences of developing and using human enhancement techniques and other emerging technologies for these purposes. Possible dangers, as well as benefits, of powerful new technologies that might radically change the conditions of human life are also of concern to the transhumanist movement.

The transhumanist vision of a profoundly transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters as well as critics from a wide range of perspectives. We are now able to improve many things in our daily lives thanks to the technology,
For the first time we can choose, we have the the ultimate choice we can decide to modify ourselves, to ameliorate our mortal body, for the best or for the worst. Technology is considered by some as natural as organic bodies, not considering anymore the human being as the final step into the evolution cycle.

The legit question would be to know if the new technologies evolved that much that we need to rethink pre established concepts like social interactions, ethic, and even the perception of a body and the human being as known today? And in this era of technology and constant progress how can we reapropriate what’s been belonging to us all the time?

First steps into a revolution

Throughout history and at the mercy of cultures, body modification has often been made , whether for religious reasons, social or aesthetic. These practices would have appeared from the fourth millennium BC. where tattoos and piercings were the first body modifications.

Concerning the prosthesis field,These questions about using technology to help humans in their lives started many times before all this , as we can see with Egyptian prosthetic toe dating back to 2600 years, made of wood and leather and showing signs of usury.

We are already in a wide sense, human beings with abilities increased: we wear clothes that protect us from the cold, we use transportation that allow us to move further and faster, we create computers that increase our processing capabilities and storage more information, etc.

But the real step into the revolution has been when the pacemaker appeared, it’s really one of the precursor of this technological evolution. The Italian physician Luigi Galvani was the first, in 1780, to demonstrate that electrical stimulation of a nerve causes contraction of the muscle that is connected

Nowadays, cardiac pacemakers are the most developed and widely spread artificial organs. Some 30,000 pacemakers are implanted each year in France. We are now talking about a revolution, in the conception of the human body but also because the whole society itself has to be rethinked.

When the technology meet the human mind

Today, there is a confrontation between the will to fill a weakness and the one, natural and contemporary to always try to improve something. This confrontation arrived with the development made in the field, with the technology progress came the envy for the human being to use this advancement at his own benefit, not just to replace something or improve his daily life but also his body and his life expectancy.

But the augmented body is not a repair, but the replacement of a function or a member by another natural or artificial and now we experience the fact that, with the constant progress of the sector, the will of men which was the desire to fill defects becomes necessary a quest to improve, update itself.

And when prostheses combine aesthetics and sport, we admire people like Oscar Pistorius or Aimee Mullins. The Para-athlete, both legs amputated at the age of one year, broke the world records in the 100m, 200m and long jump at the 1998 Paralympic Games with the latest developments artificial legs. in 1999, she parades wearing dentures ash wood hand-carved for Alexander McQueen.

We can indeed also fear a society in which certain “privileged” “augmented “ form a “higher” social group as well. But then again there is nothing new there . Access to drinking water , medicine , digital networks are some of the gaps that persist and already separate human society into groups more or less privileged. It will certainly so with technology increase human functions, which are often inherently costly.

Good points to show if these improvements will be really in the future for the human wealth or for corporate greed.

Improved Social interactions

It is public knowledge that historical studies of infants who were not physically interacted with from their birth displayed characteristics of withdrawal, failure to thrive, and social problems later in life. And Technology has played an important role throughout the last few decades in the decline of interpersonal relations.

Those with a mobile phone has a larger network of 12%, and those who use instant messaging tools have a wider network of 11% on average.

Also, with the digital era, a major upheaval to consider is the memory of our activities on the web and social issues. Indeed , the Web has become a vast database , many of which are personal data. All web activities leave traces, also known as traceability of the individual who has become a collection of traces.

Nicolas Auray, lecturer in Sociology thinks that today, new technologies offer more and more the possiblity to fly away from our actual socialisation, in order to, for a moment, disapear in imaginary realities. For him, and from the point of view of an user, “the identification the most virtual and the most ephemeral can seem heavier than its usual socialisation, than the “real life”, rooted in their usual burdens.

Interactions man/technology

The rise of these new technologies is changing our relationship to temporality and space. With the digital natives1, we have the impression we control the world with our thumb, with the applications we have the ability of finding any information, control any device.

The development of brain / machine interfaces also suggests easier and natural control of prostheses motorized (or exoskeletons4 by the patient). Finally, the quality of implants is also much improved, eg the cochlear implants that bypass damaged part of the cochlea to the auditory nerve directly transmit sound signals recorded by an external device.

By natural control, many people thinks that it is necessary for the device to work as well as the nervous system. Todd Kuiken, a biomechanical engineer at Northwestern University, and his team think this way and are looking at how different patterns of brain activity can be used to control artificial limbs.

Some people like Jean Michel Besniers already think that Nanotechnologic programs would be this next step into evolution and then into posthumanity

“Nanotechnology would likely allow for an enormous array of human enhancements and medical treatments. In the long run, nanotechnology would enable us to analyze and repair any physical ailment in the body. This would mean that nanotechnologies would be able to repair someone who is damaged or diseased back to full health; an aged body and brain could be restored to a youthful state. The ultimate result could be the end of pain, disease, and aging.”
Even if these problematics seem utopic for the moment, we know now that it is just a question of time before we reach these goals.

The boundaries of the research

The new technologies are both a new challenge and new opportunities. With the help of these technologies, humanity reaches new heights. At the same time, new opportunities are always a potential danger.

However, the biggest problem at the moment is that the technology is developing way more faster than the government’s reactions, and the law is not following the race, then the sector si almost exploitable in an unlimited way.

Also, one of the human’s dream has always been to get rid things such as disease, age, or even death. For some people now, the solution and the real challenge is to get rid of the body because without it, such things like desease or death wouldn’t even exist anymore, and for them, technology has a big role to play in this.

However, with this idea comes a paradox, the paradox of of using technology in order to stop being limited by flesh body, but by doing that we are the slaves of the technology.

For a long time, science fiction warned us against the dangers of creating powerful or intelligent robots, to supplement our body and mind. And it’s becoming reality; in the twenty first century, The man doesnt want to decide, to take positions or responsabilities anymore and want the technology to do it fot him.

Finally, The limit of the hybridation of the body to still talk about human entity appears, for me, to be the subjective perception of the human to consider the status of “person” and not as a synthetic information who has lost its individuality. Since the limit is subjective, it may seems that it is possible that there is no limit actually.

Technology as a step into evolution

There are some arguments, some people saying that the human, the organic and “natural” one is not going to disappear with this revolution, while other announce the end of the human kind, some of them wish this rupture, some others fear it but the sure thing for them is that nothing that we know today as “human” will remain in our future world.

Utopias are developped then, in which the acceleration of the progress and the autonomisation of machines would lead to a mutation of humanity into posthumanity: the body, the flesh would disapear for the profit of a technological body which would support updates and would not know an obsolescence.

New digital and biogenetic technologies – in the shape of media such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, genetic modification and technological prosthetics – signal a ‘posthuman’ future in which the boundaries between humanity, technology and nature have become ever more malleable.

Many people try this adventure of reaching a sixth sense their own ways, Lepth Anonym is one of them.“The medical consequences can be both severe and likely to elicit hostility from doctors. She’s put herself in the hospital several times. She nearly lost a fingertip the first time she tried to implant a neodymium disc herself. Various experiments with bioproofing have failed, with implants rusting under her skin, or her own self-surgeries turning septic.”

But if that list of horrors isn’t enough to scare someone off, she’s also eager to help others avoid some of the mistakes she’s made in learning.

Body reappropriation: surgical experiments and DIY

Transforming the human body using technology implanted into the body of artificial components, mixing organic and electronic, develop new meanings, increase human capacity... these are some of the aims of body hacking. Supported by scientific research for several decades, they seeks to take advantage of digital technology, electronics and robotics to cure or improve the lives of patients suffering from diseases and severe disabilities, but with the human propension of always going futher that we saw in the first part, today, it is individuals themselves who push the logic of individual freedom at its peak, undertaking their own body sometimes extreme physical changes.

An approach that raises new questions, scientific, social or moral - and forces us to rethink the future and even, perhaps, the definition of human.
Dave Asprey is considered a guru of the biohacking movement. Asprey has helped develop a prototype HEG neurofeedback device that helps train the brain, and he also uses a soliton laser which helps with healing.

We can raisonably think that in the future innovations in this area will not necessarily, or at least not only, come from research laboratories, hospitals or companies, but sometimes individuals themselves.

But as we said before, the greed from humans is limitless and when one domain seem to be applying to the subject itself, it seems that the other one, the safer and the most regulated and supervised one would be in total control by corporations, companies, etc...

Finally, regarding everything we experience until now, it comes to find a balance between benefits received and ethical concerns.
Stelarc observes that ‘we are not capable, nor should we even try to engineer a total transformation of the human species – but we can modify chosen individuals, calling them ‘bionauts’ that could be launched on multiple evolutionary trajectories’. But an absolute control is either impossible and really dangerous, then in that case, this option of “do it yourself ” would be the best answer to really reapropriate our body whilst enhancing our capacities.

Trying to conclude this constantly evoluting topic...

With the development of mobile technologies, we are witnessing a real transformation of morals in terms of use of information and communication technologies. Our real world is taking root in our virtual landscape and vice versa. For now, Augmented deploy to carry out marketing activities reality is the logical progression of the social and societal transformation. However, this complementarity which can be seen sometimes as an intrusion can also be an incredible (as well as dangerous) new way for advertisers to build a relationship with their customers.

Today, governments are struggling to adapt their laws to something as ordinary as the internet . We can therefore easily imagine the difficulties that legislators would meet to anticipate future technologies dilemmas that have not yet emerged.Nevertheless, it is important to be aware of the lack of existing regulations to deal with this situation, because it is not said that the advent of the bionic man and truly intelligent robots is not for tomorrow.
Therefore, no one argue when it’s said that it is a powerful field that will become indispensable in the coming years. And the only way for people to reconnect with what they have and what they want is probably to reapropriate their body and themselves by this tehcnic of DIY.

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