Body of the Future

Yesterday I was reading an article about Aimee Mullins who discusses the notion that her prosthetic limbs are not an impairment, they’re an improvement (check out the TED video where she talks about it).  Her limbs can give her ‘superhuman’ abilities.  It was linked from an article about the singularity.  Today comes an article about a robot arm controlled by a person’s mind.  Now, we’re still a way off perfection, but how long before we start to see people swapping out body parts not because they need to, but because they want to?

It’s something you don’t see in films very much, although it’s a feature of quite a lot of Sci-Fi.  Why would we try and fight the machine bare-handed as in Terminator and The Matrix (less so at least)?  We’d just encase ourselves in bio armour, or decant our minds into artificial bodies, or control remote drones through some sort of mind link.  Our bodies are too weak to go up against machines as they are, but we’ll just enhance them to go head-to-head and win.

Outside of global war, will we accept being able to just swap body parts or entire bodies at will?