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Welcome back to the reading club!
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After taking a look at the most internal part of the Human Machine last week, in Corin Faife’s episode on gene editing, this next part of our reading club is focused on the external. Let’s talk about body augmentation.
We’ve already touched on this to some extent, with our second episode, on hacking sensory experience. This week we’ll be reading about augmentations that improve physical strength and mobility.
Humans have probably been building prosthetics for thousands of years. The oldest one we know of is a fake toe from Egypt, made sometime around 600 BCE. Today researchers are still playing with the design of artificial toes, changing their size and weight in prosthetic limbs to try and make an athlete’s stride just that bit more efficient.
Beyond prosthetics, though, are the possibilities opening up in our time thanks to developments in robotics. The most recent advances in prosthetics research are starting to produce artificial limbs which are almost as good as—or even better than—the parts they replace. Similarly, researchers are now focused on actively enhancing and supplementing existing human strength, speed, or function with a new wave of exoskeletons. Like the “chairless chair,” a set of robot legs that can snap into action and give people who stand up to work an easy way to rest: |
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It’s these kinds of exoskeletons that are where the next stage of body augmentation is so interesting, I think—as opposed to, say, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos dancing around in a huge mech-suit, scaring the local children and eating his peasants’ livestock. (And for all that the flashy big suits like Hankook Mirae Method-2 look cool, many people have pointed out that they’re still basically just very expensive puppets.)
This week in the Human Machine Reading Group, we have some stories about the places where exoskeletons and next-generation prosthetics—two categories which are increasingly blurring together—are most immediately going to make an impact. Instead of fighting aliens, like in the hit movie Aliens, these are being developed to make human soldiers fight harder and longer, or warehouse workers carry heavier loads, or allow athletes to break otherwise unbreakable track records.
In turn, they raise serious questions: Are these innovations actually benefiting us? Or do they benefit the people who want us to use them? There is a huge difference between a medical advancement which genuinely improves the lives of people, and something which is primarily forced upon workers as a way of improving productivity at the cost of rest and stress.
Here’s what’s happening right now in the world of exoskeletons and prosthetics:
- READ: Emiko Jozuka at Motherboard reports on “Robot Exoskeletons Coming to Japan’s Airports”—but the most important thing here is that these exoskeletons are designed so old age is no excuse for avoiding manual labor:
“Cyberdyne’s website states that the suits, which can be rented out for €1,000 ($1,109) per month, are also designed to help women and elderly folk lift heavier objects. ‘As the devices are designed so light that female or elderly workers can wear, they will encourage participation of those various people into a society with a low birthrate and aging population,’ it reads.
Uga told me that the company was already working with construction, transportation, and manufacturing companies as well as nursing homes. These suits were also trialled in Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corps in May 2015 to help a group of workers aged over 65 carry heavy packages of cash.”
- READ: This profile at Fast Company of Ekso Bionics, and the difficulties its founder has had convincing people that its exoskeletons are legitimately useful for people with physical injuries:
“‘We’re starting with soldiers and paralyzed people because their needs are great and the opportunity for funding is better,” [founder] Eythor Bender says. “But you can imagine exoskeletons for workers using tools too heavy to hold for more than a few minutes. And a consumer version for people who want to run a marathon or climb Mount Kilimanjaro.” Exoskeletons, he dreams, will be “the jeans of the future”–practical, fashionable, and streamlined enough to wear in economy class.
First, though, he must get past obstacles that have derailed many a medical-device company. He must convince rehabilitation therapists and wheelchair users that the Ekso is more than a pricey gewgaw. He will need to outdistance competitors, some of whom already have products on the market. Finally, he must persuade the FDA and the insurance industry that paralyzed people need to walk, a proposition that’s controversial even among paraplegics.”
- READ: As this feature in the Chicago Tribune explains, part of the reason there’s resistance to exoskeletons for the disabled is that they are extremely expensive:
“The ReWalk Personal 6.0 System costs, on average, $81,000. Ottobock’s C-Brace is priced at $75,000. For the Indego Personal, which received FDA approval last year, it is $98,000.
About 28 percent of the more than 5.2 million Americans living with paralysis survive on an annual household income of less than $15,000, according to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. The basic expenses of living with paraplegia are, on average, $519,520 in the first year and $68,821 each subsequent year, according to the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center. Furthermore, only 34.3 percent of people are employed 20 years after a paralysis-causing injury.”
- READ: Lots of research into exoskeletons is being done by militaries around the world, and, like a lot of military research, it has more than just “killing people” utility:
“Early tests show that the exoskeleton has increased productivity anywhere from two to 27 times, depending on the task. The team measured the amount of time a worker could hold a 16-pound grinder overhead without having to rest his arms. ‘The longest operators could work continuously without a break was three minutes sustained without augmentation,’ says Miller. ‘Using the FORTIS, operators could work 30 minutes or longer without requiring rest breaks.’”
- READ: ...but of course, the main reason armies want to build exoskeletons is to create soldiers that are essentially superheroes, as this long-read in Science explains:
“A lone soldier stands in a dark alley, eyeing a door. Even though he’s covered in bulky armor, he charges forward and bursts through, and is engulfed in a barrage of gunfire. Rather than retreat, the soldier stands tall as bullets ping off him harmlessly.
This isn’t a trailer for the latest superhero movie. It’s an animation produced by the U.S. military, designed to show off its vision for a brawny robotic exoskeleton that it hopes to deploy with elite commandos.”
- READ: Our very own Duncan Geere reports for Techradar on the “Cybathlon” in Zurich, Switzerland, in October 2016, a kind of Paralympics for prosthetics designed to demonstrate the cutting edge—and future—of assistive bionic augmentations:
“The Cybathlon differs from competitions like the Paralympics in two main ways. Firstly, the athlete use powered prostheses, which are expressly forbidden at the Paralympics. Secondly, the Cybathlon’s challenges are modelled after those experienced by people with disabilities on a daily basis—doors, stairs and ramps, for example.”
We’re going to be hanging out in the Human Machine group on Facebook to talk through this stuff, so come and join us!
Until next time,
Ian
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