TRANSHUMANISM
People who are physically disabled, be it from birth or tragedy, can be empowered by technology to function as any other human would. This would increase the labour force as such individuals can return and contribute to society, providing themselves with the means to support themselves. Captain Dan Luckett lost one of his legs and a foot when a bomb exploded under his humvee in Iraq in 2008, but was able to return to active combat duty in Afghanistan due to the help of prosthetics (Gearan, 2010). Captain Luckett is just one of many US soldiers who have benefitted immensely from prosthetics. Should such technologies become more advanced and widely adopted in the future, it would not only mean a new lease of life for these people, but that society can benefit from their contributions to the economy.
Economical
Developments in prosthetics would also impact how society operates, should such technology be adopted en masse. Take the Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC), although its applications are largely limited to the military, allowing it to become commercially available would allow people to carry heavier loads for longer periods of time (Logan, 2010).
Having prosthetics would be able to enhance an individual’s strength, possibly even endurance, allowing workers to be more productive than others without such prosthetics. An issue that could surface is the concept of an unfair advantage, people with prosthetics would likely be preferred for employment due to their higher productivity especially in labour intensive industries.
As societies progress, they tend to transition into knowledge based industries, hence the perceived detrimental effect may not be as significant as the benefits conferred by such advance prosthetics. However, developments in prosthetics are not entirely confined to external ones. In the case of brain implants, researchers from Intel have projected that by 2020, people will be able to surf the net without touching their devices but rather through brain waves detected by a brain implant (Gaudin, 2009).
Other researches have even gone a step further, researching on ways to download information directly from computers to brains directly (Bilton, 2013). As the various economies transition into a knowledge based economies, such technologies would allow individuals with such brain implants to have a significant advantage over others, allowing them to access information with a thought, further empowering them in an age where knowledge is power.
Developments in prosthetic organics would increase the average lifespan of a person in the future, allowing them to fulfil their potential through a longer life, enabling them to accumulate more capital and resources, increasing their standards of living. This does indeed seem like a huge benefit to mankind, allowing them to improve on their standards of living but we have to bear in mind that such a privileged lifestyle is only for those who can actually afford such prosthetics.
Through the use of such prosthetics, populations will further increase due to the increase in longevity, increasing the strain on the finite resources our Earth possesses. With a limited supply, prices of goods will likely increase such that the distribution of goods will lie largely with those who have the means to afford them. These cumulative effects will further exacerbate the wealth disparity between those who can afford such prosthetics and those who are unable to.
Reproduced from Gearan (2010)
Reproduced from Logan (2010)
Reproduced from Leach (2009)
Reproduced from Orca (2009)
Reproduced from Immortalhumans.com (n.d.)