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[WascallyWabbit]

Found an old post on DIY transhumanism but nothing about this recent stuff, lock if duplicate

Read this article and short documentary on The Verge and was interested in what GAF thought about Biohacking / becoming a Cyborg

Cyborg America: inside the strange new world of basement body hackers

Some highlights:

With the advent of the smartphone, many Americans have grown used to the idea of having a computer on their person at all times. Wearable technologies like Google’s Project Glass are narrowing the boundary between us and our devices even further by attaching a computer to a person’s face and integrating the software directly into a user’s field of vision. The paradigm shift is reflected in the names of our dominant operating systems. Gone are Microsoft’s Windows into the digital world, replaced by a union of man and machine: the iPhone or Android.

For a small, growing community of technologists, none of this goes far enough. I first met Sarver at the home of his best friend, Tim Cannon, in Oakdale, a Pennsylvania suburb about 30 minutes from Pittsburgh where Cannon, a software developer, lives with his longtime girlfriend and their three dogs. The two-story house sits next to a beer dispensary and an abandoned motel, a reminder the city’s best days are far behind it. In the last two decades, Pittsburgh has been gutted of its population, which plummeted from a high of more than 700,000 in the 1980s to less than 350,000 today. For its future, the city has pinned much of its hopes on the biomedical and robotics research being done at local universities like Carnegie Mellon. "The city was dying and so you have this element of anti-authority freaks are welcome," said Cannon. "When you have technology and biomedical research and a pissed-off angry population that loves tattoos, this is bound to happen. Why Pittsburgh? It’s got the right amount of fuck you."

Cannon led me down into the basement, which he and Sarver have converted into a laboratory. A long work space was covered with Arduino motherboards, soldering irons, and electrodes. Cannon had recently captured a garter snake, which eyed us from inside a plastic jar. "Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been telling people that I want to be a robot," said Cannon. "These days, that doesn't seem so impossible anymore." The pair call themselves grinders — homebrew biohackers obsessed with the idea of human enhancement — who are looking for new ways to put machines into their bodies. They are joined by hundreds of aspiring biohackers who populate the movement’s online forums and a growing number, now several dozen, who have gotten the magnetic implants in real life.

If Lepht Anonym is the cautionary tale, Prof. Kevin Warwick is the one bringing academic respectability to cybernetics. He was one of the first to experiment with implants, putting an RFID chip into his body back in 1998, and has also taken the techniques the farthest. In 2002, Prof. Warwick had cybernetic sensors implanted into the nerves of his arm. Unlike the grinders in Pittsburgh, he had the benefits of anesthesia and a full medical team, but he was still putting himself at great risk, as there was no research on the long-term effects of having these devices grafted onto his nervous system. "In a way that is what I like most about this," he told me. "From an academic standpoint, it’s wide-open territory."

I chatted with Warwick from his office at The University of Reading, stacked floor to ceiling with books and papers. He has light brown hair that falls over his forehead and an easy laugh. With his long sleeve shirt on, you would never know that his arm is full of complex machinery. The unit allows Warwick to manipulate a robot hand, a mirror of his own fingers and flesh. What’s more, the impulse could flow both ways. Warwick’s wife, Irena, had a simpler cybernetic implant done on herself. When someone grasped her hand, Prof. Warwick was able to experience the same sensation in his hand, from across the Atlantic. It was, Warwick writes, a sort of cybernetic telepathy, or empathy, in which his nerves were made to feel what she felt, via bits of data travelling over the internet.

The work was hailed by the mainstream media as a major step forward in helping amputees and victims of paralysis to regain a full range of abilities. But Prof. Warwick says that misses the point. "I quite like the fact that new medical therapies could potentially come out of this work, but what I am really interested in is not getting people back to normal; it’s enhancement of fully functioning humans to a higher level."

On a hot day in mid-July, I went for a walk around Manhattan with Dann Berg, who had a magnet implanted in his pinky three years earlier. I told him I was a little disappointed how rarely I noticed anything with my implant. "Actually, your experience is pretty common," he told me. "I didn’t feel much for the first 6 months, as the nerves were healing from surgery. It took a long time for me to gain this kind of ambient awareness."

Berg worked for a while in the piercing and tattoo studio, which brought him into contact with the body modification community who were experimenting with implants. At the same time, he was teaching himself to code and finding work as a front-end developer building web sites. "To me, these two things, the implant and the programming, they are both about finding new ways to see and experience the world."

Berg took me to an intersection at Broadway and Bleecker. In the middle of the crosswalk, he stopped, and began moving his hand over a metal grate. "You feel that?" he asked. "It’s a dome, right here, about a foot off the ground, that just sets my finger off. Somewhere down there, part of the subway system or the power grid is working. We’re touching something other people can’t see; they don’t know it exists. That’s amazing to me." People passing by gave us odd stares as Berg and I stood next to each other in the street, waving our hands around inside an invisible field, like mystics groping blindly for a ghost.

I personally find the whole idea of "biohacking" fascinating. From a technological level as well as the impact and backlash it could generate on society.

So what say you, GAF? Anyone here a "Cyborg" or had personal experiences?

 

[Davedough]

I've been biohacked. It restored my hearing.

 

[Xero]

We didn't ask for this.

 

[Partial Gamification]

 

[Gregorn]

I really want to be the boss of the company that sells augmentations. Anyone want to help start it up with me before the rest of the world realises how much money could be made from it?

 

[jerry1594]

I really want to be the boss of the company that sells augmentations. Anyone want to help start it up with me before the rest of the world realises how much money could be made from it?

I want to live long without this machinery crap.

 

[Imbarkus]

Resistance is futile. Your technological and biological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.

Why do you resist? We only seek to improve quality of life, for all species...

 

[MormaPope]

Man, thank you for posting this thread. This is really awesome stuff.

 

[CHEEZMO™]

Nice to see Lepht Anonym namedropped. What's zhe up to these days anyway?