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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

> Another panelist shut them down immediately: doctors and scientists aren’t even close to solving the phantom pain and limited mobility that most amputees face, let alone building something uniformly better than a human limb.

To repost a slightly tounge-incheek description of features your "standard model" has:

1. Supports a very large number of individual movements and articulations

2. Meets certain weight-restrictions (overall system must be near-buoyant in water)

3 Supports a wide variety of automatic self-repair techniques, many of which can occur without ceasing operation

4. Is entirely produced and usually maintained by unskilled (unconscious?) labor from common raw materials

5. Contains a comprehensive suite of sensors

6. Not too brittle, flexes to store and release mechanical energy from certain impacts

7. Selectively reinforces itself when strain is detected

8. Has areas for the storage of long-term energy reserves, which double as an impact cushion

9. Houses small fabricators to replenish some of its own operating fluids

10. Subsystems for thermal management (evaporative cooling, automatic micro-activation)

View on HN

Many of the things the human body was optimized for aren't really that important in the modern world. E.g. I'd take a body (or brain...) that was 10 times stronger but required ten times more energy. Energy is abundant now.

Another serious downside is fragility. Sure it can self repair. But it's very slow and only works for minor damage. Id prefer to just swap out the broken part and fix it quickly.

And the whole fluid system is connected, so if a single part breaks it can drain the whole system. Not to mention the whole pain thing. It can't even extreme temperatures or environments at all.

> fluid system

Reminds me of the P-51 radiator. One tiny leak, the slightest battle damage, and the engine was toast. I have to admire the badass mofo's that flew them over long stretches of the Pacific. The P-48 (air cooled) would keep running with a lot of engine damage.

My truck sprung a leak in the heater hose last week (the fan belt ground a hole in it), and I was able to limp it the mile home before all the coolant was gone and the engine melted, but it wouldn't have gone any further.

Noted and begs the question of why "human augmentation" tends to popularly mean "partial replacement." (I'll assume because artificial limbs read better in visual media)

In reality, there are plenty of opportunities for true augmentation. F.ex. a friend was discussing the pacemaker his mother recently had implanted after an episode of tachycardia. Fairly small, continuously monitors vitals & syncs to communicate with base station (which can contact physician if needed), internal battery. And works in conjunction with the existing biological heart!

Why not focus on actually augmenting our already-amazing bodies?

Anyone remember the "6 Million Dollar Man"? Steve Austin had an arm and both legs replaced with bionic ones with super powers. He'd do thinks like break handcuffs by spreading his arms.

But only one of his arms was bionic. It would have just ripped the other hand off. Similarly, his running at superspeed would have just shattered his spine.

I.e. you can't increase the power of the engine without increasing the strength of the drive train.

  >> would have just ripped the other hand off.

I was amused that he could hit a tennis ball through the tennis net, rather than having the strings on his tennis racket shatter.

Yeah, with most technologies all the most useful applications are, well, more boring by the time you get them than what people imagine beforehand.

I imagine some of the best augmentation tech is going to be about diagnostic data and about coaxing/training our bodies away from maladaptive states. Consider already-existing stuff like insulin pumps or anti-seizure implants. Extend that to dealing with obesity, panic attacks, allergies...

Absolutely agreed. What's the effectiveness difference between doing something your body already does well... better? Vs doing something biology is terrible at... well?

It's engineering. Get the low hanging fruit first.

The wide separation between whats done and whats talked about makes the topic interesting. The technology isn't here yet and may never arrive, most of it's thinly veiled magickal fanfic. So they play with magnets instead.

In the example of the pacemaker, it would be like techies 50 years ago talking about how cool a computer controlled pacemaker would be, while they implant a 12AT7 dual triode vacuum tube in their belly doing roughly nothing.

True, but I think it's also somewhat disheartening (tone in article) to compare the present to only the "sci-fi exemplars" of the tech.

Yes, it's depressing we don't have artificial limbs that are superior to biological ones.

But, it's amazing and inspiration that we do have micro pacemakers and blood monitors and portable defibrillators today!

IOW, don't blind oneself to the future forest because the actual trees aren't the species you were expecting.

Makes me think of the story of survivorship bias in WWII bomber design:

https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...

Nice link. I ordered the book :-)

> Energy is abundant now.

Good luck paying for energy equivalent to ten times your food budget, and the time taken to charge.

It would be more expensive yes, but a lot of the cost is currently in getting unique flavors and in the preparation which is a bit of a fixed cost. People also throw out large amounts of food. If you just wanted large amounts of calories you could just eat pounds of grains or potatoes

Well, a Jack in the Box large Oreo milk shake vines in at 1,150 calories. Finally one can have a bunch of those without feeling bad.

a 2000 food calorie diet is ~2.4 kilowatt * hours, if units(1) hasn't failed me. 10x, 24 kilowatt * hours, is still little more than a few dollars at today's energy prices.

getting 24kWh out of a wall and into a portable something in less time than a person spends eating in a day, though, would require some serious cabling.

An interesting analogy is the war on transformer based battery charger wall warts, because as much as 24 watt hours of "Energy vampires" will destroy the earth when multiplied by a billion or so people and their cellphones. 24 billion watt hours per day is a moderately impressive electric power plant, so there is some truth in that. Of course the fancier construction and shorter life of the elaborate chargers almost certainly causes more environmental damage in total (classic greenwashing). Hence the short lived hot running expensive switching power supply wall wart we've all come to know and tolerate. You're talking about all or most of humanity using over a thousand times as much energy, yeah that's not going to go over well.

Another example is it costs about $1 per watt-year where I live, and people completely freak out about using old desktop computers that draw 100 watts (aka $100/yr) and suggest the usual greenwashing solutions of spending hundreds of dollars on exotic new hardware that will pay for itself in only 50-100 years (of course its realistic lifespan is more like 5 years tops ...). 2400 watts continuous draw means $2400 per year to the electric company, roughly, aside from demand for air conditioning from all those sweaty heads. Most people are very poor in our current pyramid so this would likely be an issue only for 1%er types.

I would find it more interesting in terms of reducing total death rate to be able to drop burn rate to 10 watts or so and genetically engineer some photosynthesis in to skin. So in a famine you seem to exist by doing little more than sleep while sunbathing, not entirely unlike an elderly housecat. Or in the winter even without photosynthesis, turn the dial down to hibernate levels.

Odd that solitary animals like bears seem to hibernate pretty well but supposedly (note, supposedly...) hyper social hyper extroverted humans don't hibernate although a tribe structure would seem to enormously benefit... Probably some pre-conception is wrong or there's something about higher human consciousness that doesn't tolerate dreamworld for 23 hours per week.

> genetically engineer some photosynthesis in to skin

The "infrastructure costs" for making that possible will probably outweigh any benefit, unless you also genetically engineer people to be immobile brains connected to bat-wing-like collection surfaces.

Even with energy-conversion inefficiencies, it makes much more sense to construct/build something big and immobile that indirectly collects that energy which we can then tap.

Currently in our civilization, blind calories aren't that expensive. I think the bigger issue is how you carry that energy while moving, since I don't think anyone wants to operate tethered to an outlet.

In terms of stored energy per kilogram, regular old fat kicks the ass of any consumer battery tech.

Suppose that your augmentations rely on battery-fed electricity, and you eat 2,000 kcal per day for your bio-bits, and charge 18,000 kcal each night for your mech-bits...

In that scenario, you'd need to carry around an extra 120 kilograms of lithium-ion batteries to cover your daily activity, which probably won't involve much jumping.

Affordability of food is because food prices exclude most externalities (and subsidies). Food is one of the biggest global warming drivers. So we cannot afford more food consumption unless our diet composition changes.

> Food is one of the biggest global warming drivers.

I'd say meat is one of the biggest global-warming drivers. That's why I referred to "blind calories", as in, calories and you don't care where they came from.

But you can't not care of course.

> Sure it can self repair. But it's very slow and only works for minor damage. Id prefer to just swap out the broken part and fix it quickly.

That presupposes one lives in a certain part of the world. There are substantial reaches of the planet where even with commercial shipping access, letting your body heal itself would be faster.

Agriculture accounts for a third of worldwide carbon emissions. So energy still isn't abundant enough to fuel 10x humans, unless you change the fuel source from food to something more efficient.

Well a robotic hand probably wouldn't eat food.

I don't understand how you came to that number for agriculture though. Growing crops like corn consumes very little energy relative to the amount of food produced. Transportation and processing requires a bit more, but I can't see how it adds up to anywhere near that much.

> but I can't see how it adds up to anywhere near that much.

Well, it does. Even EPA says it's about one quarter of the CO2 emissions.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

9%?

That's US only. Global EPA number: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

More like 12-13% then since half of the total 24% is from Land Use Change and Forestry (according to the 2014 numbers)

Nitrogen fixated feltilisers, our agriculture industry at its current scale is only possible due to fertilisers produced at mass from natural gas. There are other side issues that contribute too.

> our agriculture industry at its current scale is only possible due to fertilisers produced at mass from natural gas.

It's a bit more complicated than that.

Growing organic food on a healthy soil, will give you a certain amount of yield. Using fertilisers and modern techniques on that soil will give you a tremendous temporary boost. But most such techniques kill the soil in the process, and you eventually run out of natural fertilisers.

Using fertilisers and modern techniques on dead soil will have yields similar to organic food on a healthy soil. The only real advantage at this point is the reduced human labour required (organic food is more labour intensive overall).

Of course, organic food on dead soil will be crap.

We can stop relying on fertilisers, if we have a healthy soil. Fortunately, there are techniques to resurrect dead soils (basically have some wood rot on that soil), and some other things. It takes about 2-3 years, though, and generalising those technique will definitely require more farmers.

Those organic farmers are probably more easily replaced with robotics than ones arms or brains.

> Many of the things the human body was optimized for aren't really that important in the modern world. E.g. I'd take a body (or brain...) that was 10 times stronger but required ten times more energy. Energy is abundant now.

Energy is abundant only in certain areas of the world. As a species, many of us still face malnutrition.

Also, the situation of abundant food in certain parts of the world, has only been present very recently in evolutionary history - maybe 60 years / 200'000 years of homo sapiens. With the efficiency of food production threatened by climate change, this isn't something our genes will bet on.

Would you take a body/brain that was 10 times stronger but consumed 100 times more energy?

If everyone did that, we might run out of energy....

100 times more energy would result in heat dissipation problems. The stock human body runs at roughly 100W, the brain runs at around 20W or 25W. So it'd probably be worth it to upgrade a brain at your ratio, but I'd need confidence that the engineering problems are solvable. (2kW of power for the 100x brain cost, times 24 hours, would cost me about $5 a day if I bought it as electricity... $2000/year... pretty affordable).

I'd glaaaadly take a 10% brainpower upgrade that required 100% extra energy, though. I can afford the extra 500 kCal per day of food intake. My understanding is that most first-worlders like their food enough that they'd take a 0% improvement in trade for being able to eat another 500kCal per day of food without weight gain.

I mean, all that assumes that a "10x stronger brain" actually results in a useful performance upgrade. That part is pure fantasy speculation.

If we move away from optimal, then energy needs are likely not gone g to SoCal linearly. And ya, some of that extra energy wil,be used for cooling and such.

I would take the 10% upgrade also, but if everyone did...well...it could become a problem. As food isn't transformed into energy uniformly, obesity could still be a problem.

As all futurists, you seem to solve unexisting problem here. Only limbs are required to be local. If you can make artifical brain or parts without erasing your original, then you can easily offload new parts to datacenter, leaving only TCP/UDP interface inside your skull.

BrainHub. Additional brain processing and storage for $25/mo for your team of 5. Free for public memories.

I suspect latency issues may preclude this.

Otoh, I already have various memory latency and processing issues, having just 1x conventional brainpower.

If not complete military-grade win, it would be nice tradeoff anyway. Alternatives are: placing new heavy brain in abdomen (because stock digestion can't produce so much power by design), or replacing back, coxal and leg bones with carbon variants with embedded batteries, which should be far more expensive than subscription to low-latency BH channel for additional $1000/mo SLA per team. Also consider servicing and failure costs for businesses depending on 5*10x brainpower teams, and reduced labour market.

For 10% increase one would guess you could just overclock the brain, if we knew enough about the brain to connect hardware to it.

I think you'd be more likely to get an arithmetic co-processor to start, wire neurons in such a way up to a small circuit that you get precise mathematical intuitions based on it. Being incredible at math from birth would likely change your life indescribably.

So you want a body that can withstand extreme temperatures, something not an issue in the modern world. A less optimized brain that consumes more energy, something not strictly correlated to intelligence (finback whale metabolizes 5x more energy per hr), or even cognitive engagement/load. Body parts that must be purchased when damaged instead of self repairing. You want to disable your ability to sense noxious stimuli. And a compartmentalized fluid system that would require multiple pumps, and some novel method to transport energy from fluid, over tissue, back to fluid; from the gut compartment to the chest compartment, and finally to the head compartment, to fuel your inefficient as fuck brain?

>So you want a body that can withstand extreme temperatures, something not an issue in the modern world.

Do you live someplace without weather, because I sure don't.

>A less optimized brain

Who said anything about less optimized? Energy conservation was the dominating constraint for evolution. The brain has to run on only 10 watts of power, which is tiny. Remove that constraint and its likely the brain could be much more powerful. Comparisons to completely different classes of animal with completely different types of brains is irrelevant. Within primates, species with more energy consuming brains are more intelligent, with humans at the top.

Also the brain uses very slow and inefficient chemical reactions to send signals, compared to transistors.

>Body parts that must be purchased when damaged instead of self repairing.

Healthcare is by far one of the greatest expenses of the modern world. I'll take just purchasing a new robot arm, assuming cyborg insurance doesn't cover it.

>You want to disable your ability to sense noxious stimuli.

If you mean pain, hell yes. I'll take an alert "you've been damaged!" over excruciating pain any day.

>And a compartmentalized fluid system

That doesn't sound so bad at all. In fact a robot body probably doesn't require fluids at all if power is distributed electrically. Even simple emergency shutoff valves could fix the fluid system. A simple cut shouldn't be enough to kill you.

11. Worldwide standardization, lots of repair shops available with the right tools available.

12. Comes in many different shades of skin color, individualized just right for your body.

13. Full compatibility with other body parts, e.g.immune system lung heart

It will probably be cheaper and easier to grow a new arm in a dish and surgically attach it rather than cybernetic alternatives - this has already been done with donor arms. I can't see the economics of fully synthetic prosthetic limbs ever being viable in the current era.

Yes, but a synthetic arm could offer a wider range of utility and pack an assortment of attachments from lockpicking to weaponry to a sensor array.

Although

You know what else also carries that? A backpack. All those things are bulky and you usually need a lot available.

Also, no one picks locks unless they don't want it known they were there or don't want to pay for another lock. So ... just use your weapon.

That's the use case I was imagining too. Something like in Mega Man, Metroid or Bionic Commando where the arm acts like a super fancy swiss army knife. Seems like something there could be military applications for, or something espionage agencies may want to have available.

Funny, I was watching a video of a guy with a prosthetic hand. He loved it. He said he went from almost committing suicide to being ok with life again. When he talked about his bionic hand, he said "I'm not left handed, I'm other-handed", as he turned his hand a full 360... It was pretty funny.

Sort of a meta analysis, but:

While I don't disagree with your level of skepticism necessarily, I'd like to take this moment to make a point --

this kind of negative sentiment seems so characteristic of HN lately toward anything new and difficult, in spite of the fact that this is a community generally aimed toward entrepreneurial, forward-looking, highly-technical types.

Instead of such a short stop "it would be expensive, so why bother, it won't happen for a long, long time" sort of sentiment, why does't the community make more pointed suggestions about flaws. Simply and vaguely saying "the economics look bad to me" generates only sentiment, and no real knowledge to be shared. I can be guilty of it, too, but usually because of emotional response and not a technical criticism. This sounds like a technical criticism with no reasoning.

On top of that, "era" is a really vague term. I mean, it might not be perfect, but try $300 on: https://www.engadget.com/2015/03/23/this-300-cybernetic-arm-...

I don't think it's as far and distant as you think.

HN is probably on a backswing. For a while a few years ago, it seemed like everyone would have expected to be able to create a better-than-flesh prosthetic in 18 months with a team of five coders and a little vc funding.

I guess some of us are just sick of the hype, and the frankly demented hubris that's so often on display along with it.

I'll be honest, all this biomod stuff looks like LARP to me. Just look at the article, this person literally got a magnet installed so they could play-act at being in a lesser Neil Stevenson novel, while, as noted in these comments, the actual science is nowhere near delivering the advancements that were promised. It turns out not all problems can be solved with a little Javascript.

Maybe that makes me a cynic, fair enough, but all this valley hype is exhausting.

I did enjoy the note about gatekeepers (insurance companies and the medical profession).

These scientifically conservative organizations are great for not letting terrible things happen to people, but not at all geared towards radical innovation. Viz the medical community just starting to realize that systemic outcome-tracking might be beneficial towards informing what procedures are more effective in the real world.

Do you realize the irony replying to a comment that's basically saying "I don't think we'll go full cyborg soon, since growing new body parts in a lab will be cheaper." with the implication that it's not forward-looking?

Both of these ideas are currently in the basic research stage and far from becoming mainstream, so they are just looking in a different direction that is still "forward".

I agree that the lack of reasons for the economic differences is disappointing, though.

Personally, I believe we will use whatever solution makes sense in a given context. If you need a cosmetic replacement for you lost ear, you get appropriately shaped connective tissue colonized with fresh cells, so that it looks like the real thing. If you need something to restore your lost hearing, you get a cochlear implant.

You got me there!

I actually agree with you -- and personally I'd prefer having natural tissue replacement as a more ready and viable solution, I guess I really approached a response the wrong way. Rather than saying they weren't forward looking, I think I meant the vision espoused was too limited?

I do think we're closer to cybernetic/bionic options, though (as referenced in my original comment as an example).

Fair enough comment, I didn't add much detail.

My thoughts are:

The market for a useful cybernetic limb is extremely small, despite the amount of media attention this kind of thing gets. It would be limited to injured soldiers, the very small number of civilians that lose limbs, and the even smaller number of biohackers that would consider voluntarily replacing a limb. Each prosthetic limb would need to be custom built to size constraints and other characteristics of the amputated limb. Think about how much effort it took to create a good consumer experience for a smartphone where the market size is essentially the entire population on the planet and there are massive economies of scale.

The other factor is that even the limb prosthetics we have today require a significant amount of ongoing support to resize and adjust to the user. You can appreciate therefore that a highly sophisticated and customised synthetic limb would require very thorough ongoing follow up and maintenance for the lifetime of the user, and this incurs a significant cost.

Another factor is competing technology - growing organs extra-corporeally benefits from a much broader scope and therefore larger market, and possibly even easier engineering hurdles. Also, it is likely that there will be robots which you can ask to pick up your coffee cup etc long before a useful prosthetic limb. This isn't as good as having your own arm, but the engineering hurdles are much easier and the market for robotics is obviously massive.

I would suggest therefore that in the next 30 years, a useful prosthetic limb, with acceptable latency, strength and durability is probably not possible for less than several hundred thousand dollars initial cost, and perhaps that much again for life long maintenance. I also doubt that the potential market is big enough for someone to invest enough to turn it into a really good consumer product, including setting up supply chain and maintenance systems.

Thanks for adding detail! I haven't delved as much as I'd like into the field, so I appreciate any info I can get. However, I'd love if you could throw some references for some of these points.

Personally, I'd love to have to have natural regrowth as a more viable option (though I also like the idea of cybernetic enhancement). For example, I have soft teeth and have had an issue maintaining their health without dental work my whole life. If anybody could ever make that such a non-issue as I might be able to have my dentin and enamel regrown, I'd be soooo happy.

Refreshing and similar in sentiment to what the article expressed. Thanks for posting, even if meta. (And keep on increasing the HN SNR with information-heavy posts!)

I'll take one. No, make it two.

Super nitpick: I would say "density restrictions" in #3. Weight, unfortunately, remains a largely unsolved problem.

Nice list.

BTW the current models often fail practically at #3 getting a repair would often be easier, instead of a long road to recovery ;)

Indeed. Flesh is some pretty impressive nanotech.

To recycle another comment:

> [C]onsider that you are an enormous colony of vicious nanomachines, shaped by millions of years of fighting and cooperating with other varieties for survival.

> Your mobile swarm contains thousands of tools for finding, neutralizing, disassembling and anything useful it comes in contact with... including techniques for identifying and destroying possible intruders. Now, those tools aren't perfect -- and everybody else has their own tricks -- but the fact that you're around means you're competitively equipped and you're at least somebody's else's nightmare. All the really bad players were eaten long ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6i881n/e...

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