As humans, a lot of our work now leverages brain power. The 19th century consolidated the way of life ushered in from the industrial revolution, and it has been a resounding success in terms of getting work out of our hands and into our heads. So much so that 80.7% of US jobs were in the non-physical services sector as of 2018. Of all the revolutions in human history, it could be argued that the industrial one was one of, if not, THE most influential.
But it looks like we’re due another one.
While the disruption potential of AI is formidable and will no doubt be a new era in human history, there is another wave of equally game-changing technology that is slowly brewing in its shadow. Humanity is close to giving birth to a new form of life — one which runs on silicon neurons and has actuators for muscles — and the water just broke.
Changes in the physical world are a lot slower than those in the rather ephemeral one of software. It took just 26 years between the first programmable electronic computer and the internet, whereas it took 139 years between the invention of the first effective car and the first paved road made solely for them. This trend stands today.
The technologies of tomorrow are usually touted as software running on hardware we already possess such as Virtual Reality, Machine Learning, Blockchain etc. But there are very few ‘hard tech’ innovations with the same apparent speed of adoption or innovation such as electric electric vehicles, wearable technology, CRISPR gene editing and so forth. But this is to be expected, after all — it requires much fewer resources to mould bytes than atoms to do your bidding both in terms of energy and time. As a result, we might sometimes feel that certain innovations tend to have snuck up on us while we were blinded by the ‘next big thing’ at the time.
Cybernetics may be the biggest thing we didn’t see coming.
The Cyborgs of Today
If you ask most people what a line worker at one of the Ford Motor Company’s factories looks like, you’re basically guaranteed to hear a bunch of words that describe this guy…
…a human holding a tool at one of the stations in an assembly line, waiting for the next car body to come along for him to weld, rivet, screw or all three and some more tasks on top. This is how manufacturing has essentially been since the dawn of time, humans using tools to make something, where said tool is only concerned with performing a function that changes the ‘something’, thus adding value.
But in reality, it’s starting to look a lot more like this guy:
And no, he isn’t disabled. That is the EksoVest, a commercially available upper-body exoskeleton that can provide the user up to 6.8 kg (15 lb) of additional force when lifting. Ford started using these vests in 2017, and there are other models available. There are lower-body exoskeletons with medical applications too, these are used for rehabilitating patients who have lost motor function in their legs.
This is a paradigm shift. For the first time, the manufacturing sector is about to start using meta-tools for physical labour, which are tools that help the user perform their role instead of being part of it.
Of course, the military is interested too. Lockheed Martin has been testing its own version of the technology and it has been shown to reduce fatigue and increase the effectiveness of troops in the field. Considering the fact that the average US infantryman is expected to carry around 68 kg (152 lb) for at least 9 miles, it’s a no-brainer!
This is only the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg is very, very big. Once this technology has been adopted at scale in the basic form of a suit that enhances user strength/mobility, it will start mutating into more specialised configurations.
It’s easy to see exoskeletons having four arms, or incorporating haptic feedback, why not add multi-tools to each appendage? These answers will be answered in the form of hyper-specialised suits that cater to niche industries such as construction, search and rescue, medicine and so on.
However, as amazing as this may sound, performance enhancing exoskeletons are like hybrid cars. They are a temporary solution that exists only because the ‘next step’ isn’t mature enough to be taken. Hybrids are probably past their heyday as electric cars are now being widely adopted, and the same will happen to exo-suits, they just haven’t peaked yet.
The endgame for this technology is for as many labour-intensive tasks to be taken over by robots, or cyborgs. According to the Oxford English Dictionary a cyborg is defined as:
A fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body.
Hypothetical? We already have cyborgs among us, except their physical abilities aren’t exactly enhanced. There are thousands of humans with pacemakers, prosthetics, motorised limbs etc. Heck, theres even a colourblind guy with a camera attached to his head, that’s connected to an antenna in his brain, which sends vibrations through his skull so he can ‘hear colour’!
This is the rest of that iceberg I mentioned earlier.
We also hear of humans of the future (if they can even be called that) having implants in their brains that will afford the user the ability to interface with a computer, the internet, AI and so on. One of the main reasons this will happen, proponents say, is that these implants will be necessary for us to keep up with AI and prevent us being made redundant. They mostly never actually go into what ‘redundant’ means though, and when they do its something to do with being relevant in the labour market.
But this irks me as a bit inhumane, humans are being reduced to only their economic output as workers. Rather than using an economic argument that needs some dark mental gymnastics for why we may want to ‘plug in’, there’s a more exciting and realistic approach.
In the movie ‘The Matrix’, Neo can download knowledge straight into his head. I want to be like Neo. While the movie embellishes the plot by showing humans being able to learn advanced skills in a second by downloading a patch that allows for theatrics such as Kung-Fu and the ability to clear a room like a Navy SEAL, it may not be that unrealistic in the future.
Humans will be true cyborgs, in my opinion, when we can connect to a central network and have information streamed directly into our squishy brains. This will allow for the ‘bandwidth’ of our consciousness to be vastly increased and thus we can expose ourselves to a firehose of information without forgetting most of it after one pass. This, I believe, is the greatest positive of human-cyborg transition. We will be able to be much more informed about the nature of reality and this in turn will allow us to vastly increase our collective problem-solving ability since it wont be necessary for us to go through a four year degree to tackle a specialised field. Rather, just download an update, configure it to suit your preferred language and learning style and you’re all set.
Additionally, our empathy, common sense, and mutual respect may increase too. Imagine if you could learn new ideas without having to read about them or have to go through a tough experience to learn them the ‘hard way’. If a potential flat-Earther had access to how a scientist thinks and the collective common-sense of the brightest minds our species has to offer, he wont have to keep himself in denial and will change his beliefs without having his family, friends and everyone else take the piss. A lot of human suffering is pointlessly caused by not having the chance to see things the way the people on the other side perceive them to be, solve that issue and a lot arguing, swearing, punching and killing will disappear.
It’s inevitable, it’s exciting, it’s potentially hell.
