14 DAY TRIAL // Over recent years, considerable advancements in the field of robotics have brought forth a new wave of development in what some experts call “Humans 2.0.” Paraphrasing the type of Web content that is now a part of mainstream culture, they believe that, in a few years to a couple of decades, we could have the technology to build human “spare parts,” or, indeed, entire humans from nothing more than a few cells. Under these circumstances, the question 'what makes us human?' gets new meanings.
The field of bionics is growing more and more complex every single day. Advancements are being reported in scientific journals at an incredible rate, and bioengineering is not lagging far behind. Some aspects in these types of research are not entirely ethical – at least according to some – but the fact is that progress is coming, and there is little anyone can do to stop it. Scientists are slowly gaining the ability to grow hands, arms, legs, bones, skin, hearts, lungs and kidneys in bioreactors, to replace damaged ones in patients.
The weird thing about these efforts is the fact that it's not the lack of technology that is holding people back, especially in the case of prosthetic limbs, but a deficient understanding of how the brain works. In these devices, which rely on harnessing the power of brain impulses for controlling mechanical devices, it's the sensors detecting the signals that need to work. As soon as more efficient methods of detecting and using them are created that would work in real-time, we could very well see people giving up their natural limbs for artificial ones that would give them more strength.
Soon, the differences between people and machines will grow even thinner, as companies will release all sorts of portable “organs” on the market. Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation experts, for instance, want to create and start selling a portable pancreas to patients within the next few years, while scientists at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) are working on a similarly portable kidney, LiveScience reports. When these devices become common in our lives, the definition of an actual human will grow even more difficult to pinpoint.
But perhaps the most revolutionary – and, some may say, disturbing – effort in science today is to replicate a fully functional human brain. A group of Swiss researchers has already announced that such a construct will be finished within the next decade. So the question is, if we have artificial limbs, artificial organs, and artificial brains, are we not just humans by name? We may continue to look like we did until now, but, on the inside, there would be little resemblance to our ancestors. And if the brain, the center of our personality, desires, thoughts and fear, is artificial too, then who is to say that the people sporting it continue to be human?