Our Cyborg Future

Imagine a futuristic world in which people augment themselves with surgery, gene therapy, and mechanical enhancements. They undergo these procedures not for cosmetic purposes, but to perform certain tasks especially well. Wouldn't swimming be a lot easier with webbed toes and fingers? And what if my arms were just a little bit longer than everyone else's? If my legs were longer, could I jump farther? Could I live on Mars with bigger, more efficient lungs? Am I talking about 2050? 2040? What about 2010? Only 5 years away. Such a world may be closer than we think. A family of similarly-gened aquapeople could change Olympic history forever. Machine-human interface is already here, with tiny cellphones and computers that people wear like jewelry. Responding to spoken commands, these glittering bits of technology make our lives... better? We'll leave that question to the philosophers. Meanwhile, how far away could it be to go the next step, where the commands are sub-verbal, controlled by muscle twitches, when just thinking it we can make it so? It's 2015. You close your eyes and you're automatically logged into the Internet. Open your eyes and now with a couple of subverbal grunts into the mole-sized microphone in your mouth, you call up computer-generated images and project them over the real world. Extra data, better vision, enhanced communication. You could, for instance, see radiation, or see the air quality change. You could see people's body temperature change in real time. What else could you see? Currently, one of the ultimate man/machine interfaces is the automobile. Today's cars fit like gloves and practically drive themselves. Talk about lots of blinking lights! What if in the futurre you could interface with your car and control it with your mind? Our minds are hundreds if not thousands of times faster than our muscles. Reflexes are suddnely not an issue. We could probably do it without even thinking, the way we walk without thinking. And what if everything we thought could just pour out onto the screen, instead of slowly typing our thoughts in, letter by letter. Whole words could appear at once, whole phrases, sentences, paragrahs. Where is the limit? How fast can you think a sentence? With pattern recognition software you could easily bring up document templates, schematics, software code, truly interactive games. You could run an entire on-line business in your mind! And what about dreams. One day you will wake up and read a transcript of your dream.