5 ms·

Many of the things the human body was optimized for aren't really that important in the modern world. E.g. I'd take a body (or brain...) that was 10 times stron

• WalterBright 9y ago
  > fluid system Reminds me of the P-51 radiator. One tiny leak, the slightest battle damage, and the engine was toast. I have to admire the badass mofo's that flew them over long stretches of the Pacific. The P-48 (air cooled) would keep running with a lot of engine damage. My truck sprung a leak in the heater hose last week (the fan belt ground a hole in it), and I was able to limp it the mile home before all the coolant was gone and the engine melted, but it wouldn't have gone any further.
  • ethbro 9y ago
    Noted and begs the question of why "human augmentation" tends to popularly mean "partial replacement." (I'll assume because artificial limbs read better in visual media) In reality, there are plenty of opportunities for true augmentation. F.ex. a friend was discussing the pacemaker his mother recently had implanted after an episode of tachycardia. Fairly small, continuously monitors vitals & syncs to communicate with base station (which can contact physician if needed), internal battery. And works in conjunction with the existing biological heart! Why not focus on actually augmenting our already-amazing bodies?
    • WalterBright 9y ago
      Anyone remember the "6 Million Dollar Man"? Steve Austin had an arm and both legs replaced with bionic ones with super powers. He'd do thinks like break handcuffs by spreading his arms. But only one of his arms was bionic. It would have just ripped the other hand off. Similarly, his running at superspeed would have just shattered his spine. I.e. you can't increase the power of the engine without increasing the strength of the drive train.
      • blacksmythe 9y ago
        >> would have just ripped the other hand off. I was amused that he could hit a tennis ball through the tennis net, rather than having the strings on his tennis racket shatter.
    • Terr_ 9y ago
      Yeah, with most technologies all the most useful applications are, well, more boring by the time you get them than what people imagine beforehand. I imagine some of the best augmentation tech is going to be about diagnostic data and about coaxing/training our bodies away from maladaptive states. Consider already-existing stuff like insulin pumps or anti-seizure implants. Extend that to dealing with obesity, panic attacks, allergies...
      • ethbro 9y ago
        Absolutely agreed. What's the effectiveness difference between doing something your body already does well... better? Vs doing something biology is terrible at... well? It's engineering. Get the low hanging fruit first.
    • VLM 9y ago
      The wide separation between whats done and whats talked about makes the topic interesting. The technology isn't here yet and may never arrive, most of it's thinly veiled magickal fanfic. So they play with magnets instead. In the example of the pacemaker, it would be like techies 50 years ago talking about how cool a computer controlled pacemaker would be, while they implant a 12AT7 dual triode vacuum tube in their belly doing roughly nothing.
      • ethbro 9y ago
        True, but I think it's also somewhat disheartening (tone in article) to compare the present to only the "sci-fi exemplars" of the tech. Yes, it's depressing we don't have artificial limbs that are superior to biological ones. But, it's amazing and inspiration that we do have micro pacemakers and blood monitors and portable defibrillators today! IOW, don't blind oneself to the future forest because the actual trees aren't the species you were expecting.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
  • Terr_ 9y ago
    Makes me think of the story of survivorship bias in WWII bomber design: https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...
    • WalterBright 9y ago
      Nice link. I ordered the book :-)
• rodgerd 9y ago
  > Energy is abundant now. Good luck paying for energy equivalent to ten times your food budget, and the time taken to charge.
  • lovich 9y ago
    It would be more expensive yes, but a lot of the cost is currently in getting unique flavors and in the preparation which is a bit of a fixed cost. People also throw out large amounts of food. If you just wanted large amounts of calories you could just eat pounds of grains or potatoes
    • ajmurmann 9y ago
      Well, a Jack in the Box large Oreo milk shake vines in at 1,150 calories. Finally one can have a bunch of those without feeling bad.
  • sigstoat 9y ago
    a 2000 food calorie diet is ~2.4 kilowatt * hours, if units(1) hasn't failed me. 10x, 24 kilowatt * hours, is still little more than a few dollars at today's energy prices. getting 24kWh out of a wall and into a portable something in less time than a person spends eating in a day, though, would require some serious cabling.
    • VLM 9y ago
      An interesting analogy is the war on transformer based battery charger wall warts, because as much as 24 watt hours of "Energy vampires" will destroy the earth when multiplied by a billion or so people and their cellphones. 24 billion watt hours per day is a moderately impressive electric power plant, so there is some truth in that. Of course the fancier construction and shorter life of the elaborate chargers almost certainly causes more environmental damage in total (classic greenwashing). Hence the short lived hot running expensive switching power supply wall wart we've all come to know and tolerate. You're talking about all or most of humanity using over a thousand times as much energy, yeah that's not going to go over well. Another example is it costs about $1 per watt-year where I live, and people completely freak out about using old desktop computers that draw 100 watts (aka $100/yr) and suggest the usual greenwashing solutions of spending hundreds of dollars on exotic new hardware that will pay for itself in only 50-100 years (of course its realistic lifespan is more like 5 years tops ...). 2400 watts continuous draw means $2400 per year to the electric company, roughly, aside from demand for air conditioning from all those sweaty heads. Most people are very poor in our current pyramid so this would likely be an issue only for 1%er types. I would find it more interesting in terms of reducing total death rate to be able to drop burn rate to 10 watts or so and genetically engineer some photosynthesis in to skin. So in a famine you seem to exist by doing little more than sleep while sunbathing, not entirely unlike an elderly housecat. Or in the winter even without photosynthesis, turn the dial down to hibernate levels. Odd that solitary animals like bears seem to hibernate pretty well but supposedly (note, supposedly...) hyper social hyper extroverted humans don't hibernate although a tribe structure would seem to enormously benefit... Probably some pre-conception is wrong or there's something about higher human consciousness that doesn't tolerate dreamworld for 23 hours per week.
• ethbro 9y ago
  > Sure it can self repair. But it's very slow and only works for minor damage. Id prefer to just swap out the broken part and fix it quickly. That presupposes one lives in a certain part of the world. There are substantial reaches of the planet where even with commercial shipping access, letting your body heal itself would be faster.
• quicklime 9y ago
  Agriculture accounts for a third of worldwide carbon emissions. So energy still isn't abundant enough to fuel 10x humans, unless you change the fuel source from food to something more efficient.
  • Houshalter 9y ago
    Well a robotic hand probably wouldn't eat food. I don't understand how you came to that number for agriculture though. Growing crops like corn consumes very little energy relative to the amount of food produced. Transportation and processing requires a bit more, but I can't see how it adds up to anywhere near that much.
    • dom0 9y ago
      > but I can't see how it adds up to anywhere near that much. Well, it does. Even EPA says it's about one quarter of the CO2 emissions.
      • jack9 9y ago
        https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... 9%?
        • dom0 9y ago
          That's US only. Global EPA number: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data#two https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
          • jack9 9y ago
            More like 12-13% then since half of the total 24% is from Land Use Change and Forestry (according to the 2014 numbers)
    • cannonpr 9y ago
• ultimoo 9y ago
  > Many of the things the human body was optimized for aren't really that important in the modern world. E.g. I'd take a body (or brain...) that was 10 times stronger but required ten times more energy. Energy is abundant now. Energy is abundant only in certain areas of the world. As a species, many of us still face malnutrition.
  • dm319 9y ago
    Also, the situation of abundant food in certain parts of the world, has only been present very recently in evolutionary history - maybe 60 years / 200'000 years of homo sapiens. With the efficiency of food production threatened by climate change, this isn't something our genes will bet on.
• seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Would you take a body/brain that was 10 times stronger but consumed 100 times more energy? If everyone did that, we might run out of energy....
  • jholman 9y ago
    100 times more energy would result in heat dissipation problems. The stock human body runs at roughly 100W, the brain runs at around 20W or 25W. So it'd probably be worth it to upgrade a brain at your ratio, but I'd need confidence that the engineering problems are solvable. (2kW of power for the 100x brain cost, times 24 hours, would cost me about $5 a day if I bought it as electricity... $2000/year... pretty affordable). I'd glaaaadly take a 10% brainpower upgrade that required 100% extra energy, though. I can afford the extra 500 kCal per day of food intake. My understanding is that most first-worlders like their food enough that they'd take a 0% improvement in trade for being able to eat another 500kCal per day of food without weight gain. I mean, all that assumes that a "10x stronger brain" actually results in a useful performance upgrade. That part is pure fantasy speculation.
    • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      If we move away from optimal, then energy needs are likely not gone g to SoCal linearly. And ya, some of that extra energy wil,be used for cooling and such. I would take the 10% upgrade also, but if everyone did...well...it could become a problem. As food isn't transformed into energy uniformly, obesity could still be a problem.
    • wruza 9y ago
      As all futurists, you seem to solve unexisting problem here. Only limbs are required to be local. If you can make artifical brain or parts without erasing your original, then you can easily offload new parts to datacenter, leaving only TCP/UDP interface inside your skull. BrainHub. Additional brain processing and storage for $25/mo for your team of 5. Free for public memories.
      • tboughen 9y ago
• subroutine 9y ago
  So you want a body that can withstand extreme temperatures, something not an issue in the modern world. A less optimized brain that consumes more energy, something not strictly correlated to intelligence (finback whale metabolizes 5x more energy per hr), or even cognitive engagement/load. Body parts that must be purchased when damaged instead of self repairing. You want to disable your ability to sense noxious stimuli. And a compartmentalized fluid system that would require multiple pumps, and some novel method to transport energy from fluid, over tissue, back to fluid; from the gut compartment to the chest compartment, and finally to the head compartment, to fuel your inefficient as fuck brain?
  • Houshalter 9y ago
    >So you want a body that can withstand extreme temperatures, something not an issue in the modern world. Do you live someplace without weather, because I sure don't. >A less optimized brain Who said anything about less optimized? Energy conservation was the dominating constraint for evolution. The brain has to run on only 10 watts of power, which is tiny. Remove that constraint and its likely the brain could be much more powerful. Comparisons to completely different classes of animal with completely different types of brains is irrelevant. Within primates, species with more energy consuming brains are more intelligent, with humans at the top. Also the brain uses very slow and inefficient chemical reactions to send signals, compared to transistors. >Body parts that must be purchased when damaged instead of self repairing. Healthcare is by far one of the greatest expenses of the modern world. I'll take just purchasing a new robot arm, assuming cyborg insurance doesn't cover it. >You want to disable your ability to sense noxious stimuli. If you mean pain, hell yes. I'll take an alert "you've been damaged!" over excruciating pain any day. >And a compartmentalized fluid system That doesn't sound so bad at all. In fact a robot body probably doesn't require fluids at all if power is distributed electrically. Even simple emergency shutoff valves could fix the fluid system. A simple cut shouldn't be enough to kill you.