The_Invention_of_Surgery

As shown in this book, there are about twenty million implant
operations per year in America. Much of our health care dollar revolves
around medical devices, but hospitalizations for chronic illnesses
represent hundreds of billions of dollars per year. There seems little doubt
that with genomic purification, many chronic diseases (and cancer) will be
wiped out—leaving mankind focused on achieving the Olympic ideals of
Citius, Altius, and Fortius (“Faster, Higher, Stronger”).
What are the limitations of our cyborg future? If (when) we cure
chronic diseases, the impulse to maximize our physical and mental
function will no doubt lead to a destiny where man is machine. That is not
to say that every human will undergo open brain surgery for implantation
of BioMEMs (although that may well happen), but perhaps an unknown
process of mechanically embellishing the human mind by altering the
physical brain is in our future.
This is a chilling thought to almost all of us. Do we want to live in a
world where every human has a partly artificial self?
If you suffered an existential crisis over the relationship of Joaquin
Phoenix’s character in the motion picture Her, in which he falls in love
with an operating system representation of a human female “Samantha,”
(voiced by Scarlett Johansson), you were not alone. It is unsettling to
contemplate a reality of interfacing, and falling in love with, super-real
computers. Many viewers found it disconcerting (or unbelievable) that
someone could feel “love” toward a computer, given the fact that the
human subject knows it is a faux paramour, but it does highlight the fact
that relationships, although typically physical, are grounded in the life of
the mind.
Perhaps more unnerving than a computer relationship (which is
becoming technically feasible), is the human-robot liaison in Ex Machina,
where one of the wealthiest men in the world has retreated to an extremely
isolated home and research facility, inviting a young computer
programmer, Caleb, to his outpost to judge the humanness of his robot
creation Ava. Ava has a transparent torso and limbs that reveal her
electronic innards, but despite this, the young male protagonist begins to
sympathize, and even fall in love with, the convincingly real robot. As the
movie progresses, it’s tempting to root for the anthropomorphic Ava, even
if you are asking yourself, “Would I be fooled in real life?” “The real story
in this film is about a machine becoming a girl,” says Alex Garland, the