IEEE Future Directions
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We are likely the only species that have the capability of extending our phenotype (at least in such a significant way). We learn, and what we learn change who we are. We learn from books, from experience and from being immersed in a specific culture.
More recently we have created prosthetics, first to compensate for acquired deficit (like losing a limb) and then to augment our capabilities (like a microscope…). For a long time these were physical prosthetics and the cognitive improvement they made possible was totally mediated by our senses. More recently we are starting to have the possibility to increase our cognitive capabilities (e.g. using drugs).
What lays ahead is an ever-increasing sophistication of prosthetics both in the physical and in the cognitive space (mediated and in the long term direct).
Think about the increasing use of the smartphone to connect to knowledge in the cyberspace, the seamless use (coming in the next decade) of augmented reality, the ever-increasing reliance on distributed knowledge, mediated by seamless connectivity.
Think about the emergence of personal digital twins that will augment our capability to improve health care and cognitive space.
Notice that it is not just about “us”: the overall ambient we live in is improving and this changes the relations we have with it, and along with it, it changes our extended phenotype. All discussion on the have and have-not is, actually, a discussion on the (widening) gap among the extended phenotype of people living in different ambient, resulting in the acquisition of different capabilities.
It is interesting to notice that the extended phenotype applies to the individual as well as to a community. There are plenty of companies “relocating” or opening a branch in an area having a rich distributed knowledge fabric, relevant to that company business. Likewise, at a micro level, companies try to create a distributed knowledge environment, both by keeping a crucial number of experts in contact with one another (in a physical space) or using tools to break distance barriers recreating contiguousness in the cyberspace (with the present tools this is less effective than having people operating in the same physical space).
As mentioned, the availability of prosthetics is extending our phenotype. We can see an evolution in this area in 5 steps:
- Replacement of missing or malfunctioning parts
- Pro-active replacement to prevent failures
- Replacement to sustain adverse conditions
- Replacement to provide enhancement to specific features
- System-wide enhancement, including life extension
Steps 1 and 2 are obvious and are already in the clinical practice today although the types of prosthetics are increasing and their capabilities are improving (sometimes becoming better than the part they are replacing).
Step 3 is already reality for plants, where at the genomic level changes are made to have them producing crops in certain types of soil, with low water availability and so on. However, this is a change at the genome level whilst here we are focussing on the extended phenotype. In the coming decades humans (some of them) will have to inhabit areas that are not suited for living, like the outer space, and research is going on to find ways to create “augmented version of humans” that can endure those situations. More simply, think about using prosthetics to allow firefighters to see the “heat” by using smart contact lenses, or workers in dangerous environment needing heightened sensory capability to anticipate problems. These prosthetics may be a mixture of hardware implants and signals generated by software, possibly by their digital twin.
These examples lead into the step 4, enhancing specific features (like heightened senses…).
Another example of a type 4 prosthetics may be the addition of an artificial sensor, like a radio antenna able to capture specific radio frequencies connected to a transducer that can process the radio signals converting them into electrical signal that can be conveyed to the brain (either to the cortex or more likely to some nerve, like the aural nerve, and let the plasticity of the brain take care of learning how to process these new signals. After a while that person might be able to recognise radio frequencies associating meaning, in other word to capture a different representation of the world.
Type 5 would lead to a complete human body/person enhancement, affecting the whole set of capabilities.
Notice that some persons are already using (in many cases illegally) chemical compounds that enhance their overall performance, including resistance to stress, improved alertness, removal of fatigue, higher muscular efficiency and so on. The more we learn about the working and physiology of our body, the more likely we are to devise ways of improving on it (of course the risk of side effects remain high).
