HEADNOTE: This is one in a series of posts on how AI and other innovations could turn us into superhumans, or posthumans, depending on the choices we make. This post focuses on changes to our bodies. Companion posts focus on changes to our senses, thinking, relationships, sexuality, and the possibility these changes could create a global mind.
My body proves our merger with machines has begun. A one-inch metal stent props open my artery that doctors call the widow maker. This device likely saved my life and now helps guard me from a heart attack. Multifocal lenses gave me back clear sight after cataracts clouded it. I'm considering getting dental implants to fill four empty spaces in my gums.
I am far from alone; the line between human and nonhuman parts has blurred for hundreds of millions. A close friend with Parkinson's quiets her tremor with a brain stimulator wired straight into her nervous system. Another regained sight through an artificial retina. My mother-in-law walks on titanium hips and hears the world through cochlear implants. Others I know have pacemakers or carbon valves. These many devices already feel routine, yet only hint at what's ahead.
In addition to life-saving devices, we now have an increasing array of life monitors, AI-assisted trackers that collect data on every aspect of our bodies. And these trackers are forging a path to much more ambitious devices, innovations that will redesign our bodies. Advocates for these tools believe we should augment and optimize ourselves until we become cyborgs or even transhumans, creatures no longer bound to living matter.
What began with stents and other devices to repair our bodies has quickly advanced to include detailed health monitoring. The next step may be wholesale body transformations.
From Monitoring to Optimizing
In my own circle, the old-fashioned wristwatch has been replaced by wristbands, badges, rings, and other devices that count every heartbeat, footfall, and REM cycle. The Apple Watch alone tallies steps, flags falls, and reads temperature, heart rate, oxygen, even the ebb and flow of a menstrual cycle. Half a billion such wearables shipped in 2024, and the next wave will not just report on our health. It will advise us how to optimize our bodies beyond what evolution left them able to do.
Picture waking to a soft buzz on your wrist: "Your cortisol spiked at three, and REM was thin. Swap the run for yoga." It's less a watch than a health coach, one that tracks hormones, stress, and the faintest biochemical whispers all day, then nudges you toward better choices.
This constant surveillance creates both a new intimacy and a new unease, as machines know our bodies better than we do. Just as we use a thermometer to learn we have a fever, many now ask their device, "How am I feeling?" and trust the answer.
The health benefits of these advanced monitoring devices will probably be spectacular. Many AI programs already surpass the diagnostic skills of the world's best physicians. University of Edinburgh researchers, for example, found AI can inspect blood-protein patterns to predict Alzheimer's, heart disease, and diabetes up to ten years before any symptoms appear.
Every device wearer anywhere in the world could have access to medical consultations like those that now only the wealthy receive. The service would be available twenty-four hours a day and, if current trends continue, could be cheaper than what most people pay for a doctor visit today.
Our Data Is Us
Insurers are promoting these new monitoring devices as cost-cutters; healthier customers mean fewer claims. Companies welcome the discounts that insurers offer for lowering risk, so they, too, encourage increased monitoring. Physicians like the devices because they replace unreliable self-reports with precise data about what patients actually do between visits. Refusing to wear health-advising devices may soon seem as unusual as refusing to carry a phone, but the consequences could be much steeper.
It is not yet clear who owns or should be able to access our ever-larger troves of intimate data. Employers want the right to analyze it to verify our health claims and, sometimes, to judge what kind of worker we are. When you change jobs, copies of your data may stay with your old employer, to be sold or reused as it pleases. Your new employer could insist you provide them with a copy of the old data, maybe even before you can begin your job. Governments may claim they have a right to your data when it serves the public good, with them deciding what is "good" on our behalf.
The more our monitoring systems tell us about ourselves, the more we will likely trust them over our own intuitions. Their reading of our physical and emotional state carries the authority of science, after all; our raw sensations could feel second-rate by comparison. The devices could make us ever more detached observers of our own lives, turning us into another platform for electronic upgrades, software needing patches and updates as well as care for our biological base. It's easy to envision a future where we outsource our decisions to algorithms: what to eat, how to exercise, even who to date.
These dangers from excessive health monitoring are already present but are likely to prove mere stepping-stones to the even larger dangers associated with the optimizing devices soon to come.
Body-Enhancing Devices
Why settle for merely being healthy if it is possible to be better than healthy? This logic is driving the development of dozens of innovations aimed at enhancing people beyond what nature provides.
It's useful to consider these innovations in two categories: those likely to become available in the near term, in the next ten years or so, and those now more theoretical and not likely to become commercially available until after 2035.
The near-term optimizations include paper-thin epidermal patches with micro-sensors to read glucose, lactate, hydration, cortisol, and inflammatory proteins minute after minute. We may also have single-shot CRISPR edits that can de-age our bodies by switching off maturing pathways and boosting muscle metabolism. Other expected near-term innovations include micro-dose smart pills that sharpen memory and flatten anxiety, sleep implants that fine-tune circadian rhythms through gentle nerve pulses, and non-invasive headsets that convert subvocal thoughts to text or to controlling an external electronic cursor. Exoskeleton sleeves that add strength for lifting and endurance for running are already on the market, although at present for an exorbitant price. We likely will also soon have 3-D-printed tissues created from your own cells that allow upgrades to our bodies before we begin to feel run-down.
These and many other body enhancements are expected to be available in the next ten years. Their collective impact will change our experiences of being human in fundamental ways. Then, the subsequent optimizations expected to be widely available by midcentury will be even more revolutionary. By then we may be wearing neural lace interfaces that upload skills or languages to our minds in minutes. We might enhance our bodies with modular self-repairing heart-lung "power cubes" that outperform biology, and also rely on bionic limbs with super strength and flexibility. We could replace our dermis and epidermis with full-body synthetic skin that repairs itself and gives us sensations beyond our current limits. Nanorobots may form a capillary mesh linking our neurons to the Internet, enabling knowledge downloads and shared memory streams.
These are just a sample of the many innovations currently in the design stage. No doubt some will fail to match their developers' dreams. But some will not, and other optimizations not yet imagined will prove great successes. Some body optimizations may be so effective that insurers will lower their rates dramatically for people willing to use them to augment their bodies. Some employers may insist that their workers optimize their bodies in job-related areas. For example, physical laborers in the short term may be required to wear strengthening exosleeves; by midcentury they might be required to have bionic limbs. Knowledge workers in the next decade may be expected to ingest micro-dose smart pills. By 2050, they may be wearing company-approved neural lace interfaces.
There will likely be massive advertising campaigns for enhancements, at least in the United States, which already allows ads for powerful and addictive prescription drugs. Media and self-help influencers will likely push people to optimize, as they now encourage many health and aesthetic enhancements. Even our family and friends may advise us to take advantage of optimizations that they have had or believe would be particularly improving for us.
And, really, even without these pressures, once so many enhancements are proven safe and become the cultural norm, who won't want an upgraded body, healthier, smarter, and stronger than any earlier humans ever had?
By midcentury, at least for the affluent, the line between human and machine, human and superhuman, could disappear.
The Optimization Trap
Digital monitoring and data collection has already shifted how we experience our bodies a little, but advanced body augmentations will alter our experiences much more. Unfortunately, in our quest to optimize, we could easily lose touch with the primal intuitions that have guided our species for millennia.
Experts disagree about how we'll end up. Some say we'll become hybrids or cyborgs, a combination of biological and non-biological components, as those of us with artificial hearts and hips, brain stimulators, pacemakers, and stents in a sense already are. Others say our destination is to go beyond being hybrids to become transhumans, enhanced organisms living with few biological limitations. This, many futurists say, will be just an intermediary stage on the way to us becoming even more revolutionary beings, posthumans, creatures no longer recognizable as human at all.
There is much disagreement about these terms and our likely future, but most analysts agree that we are on the way to becoming superhuman, people with enhanced capabilities far exceeding those found in the human bodies evolution bequeathed us. We may still look like people, as do most comic book superheroes, but, like them, we will possess abilities far surpassing what you and I are capable of today.
So, it seems to me, we are left to decide not whether we should become superhuman, but which new powers we should choose, and which reject. In an ideal future we'll have the freedom to select our new abilities with much thought and care. But many powerful others may try to tell us who we should become. We will have to fight for the freedom to choose for ourselves.
Wow! This took me way beyond my usual mindset. Thanks for laying out the range of possibilities you see and considering the boons and threats.
I have to tell my grandkids to buckle up for a wild ride.