In How To Build A Bionic Man (C4), they started from scratch. The aim of the assembled team of experts [1,2] was to construct a modern Frankenstein from the latest in artificial organs and prosthetic technology, a million quid's worth of top gear. The experiment was to be "a guided tour of our future" with Dr Bertolt Meyer as our guide, investigating the latest technologies and those who benefit from them.
Dr Meyer is himself partly bionic. He's got a robot hand on one arm. After a lifetime struggling with unsatisfactory fake limbs, he has finally found something he considers both aesthetically pleasing and part of himself. "If I don't wear it, I feel as if there is something missing," he said. You could see the extent to which he'd assimilated it – he clasped it with his other hand, and enumerated points on its plastic fingers. It wasn't just a grabber, it was a tool of expression.
his didn't stop him coveting the latest in bionic hands, which come with flexing wrists and teach themselves to respond to your commands. He tried one – working it with his own arm, but from across the room – and was amazed. Meyer does a very good freaked-out face. "I had a wrist there for a moment," he said. "And then you walk out of there and it's gone again." He wants to be able drive without the knob attached to his steering wheel. "It looks like something that's made for disabled people," he said. "I hate that." He's wrong, of course. Those knobs (suicide knobs, they called them) used to be cool, but I accept that was a long time ago.
Meyer then visited Hugh Herr, an expert from MIT, who was demonstrating the latest prosthetic ankle with the help of an amputee. Meyer was duly impressed. "If he was wearing long trousers," he said to Herr, "you wouldn't realise that he was wearing an artificial leg."
"Right," said Herr, pulling up his own trousers. "Just like you don't realise I'm wearing two right now." Meyer's freaked-out face was nothing to rival mine. In addition to being MIT's director of biomechatronics, Herr is also an avid climber who lost both his legs to frostbite at the age of 17. He now has three different sets of high-tech legs just for climbing, which he changes like shoes. "I think normal bodies are boring," he said. Meyer agreed that artificial limbs no longer carry a stigma – they are just too impressive.
"It's something cool, if you make it that," he said. If that's an attitude that might allow someone to embrace his steering wheel knob, it's also not far off the kind of thinking that might lead to someone cutting off his legs to have better ones installed. Herr said he wouldn't take his old legs back, but I think we're some way off elective bionic surgery, if only because of the cost. Herr's ankle joints are £45k apiece.
But back to the bionic man. By now he'd been fitted with robot arms, a state-of-the-art retina chip, a skull, an artificial heart pumping synthetic blood, and a voice synthesiser attached to a chatbot programme that made him seem at least as intelligent as the average Deal or No Deal contestant. All he needed was a face. His designers decided to give him Meyer's. Not his actual one – they made a mould.
Seeing his own head perched atop a collection of fake limbs and chugging tubes produced a reaction in Meyer that went some way beyond freaked out. He was horrified. "It has this Frankenstein creepiness to it," he said, looking queasy. The designers sniggered. "I think I need a break," said Meyer. "And will you STOP laughing!" When the bionic man lurched round the corner, electronic innards hanging out, I understood how he felt. He'd seen a monster created in his own image.
While occasionally gut-churning – I don't need to watch another heart being cut out of someone for a while – this was a tremendously intriguing exercise, raising all sorts of tricky questions – about the nature of humanity, our future relationship with machines and its eventual cost (presently much of the prosthetic technology that could transform amputees into superhumans is funded by the US military), and the best way to spend quality time with one's mechanical doppelganger. Dr Meyer took his to Harrods to get him some shirts [3].
[1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/richard-walker-shadow-robotics.html
[2] http://cyberneticzoo.com/?tag=richard-walker
[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/feb/08/build-a-bionic-man-tv-review
No comments:
Post a Comment