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A man with metal horns protruding from his forehead and a split tongue poking out between his teeth advanced toward me with a scalpel. "I've never done this before," he joked, inching closer.
A full-sleeve tattoo snaked out from beneath his black T-shirt, extending from a demon on his bicep to a skull on his fist. My eyes darted between skull and scalpel, then instinctively shut as I cringed, bracing for contact. Zack Watson, the inked-up body modification artist I'd hired — and drove seven hours from New York City to see — was about to sew a magnet under my skin.
...
Biohacking enthusiasts have tinkered with electronic tattoos and subdermal — underneath-the-skin — implants for two decades, sharing their efforts in videos on YouTube and internet forums to spread and encourage innovation. Proponents believe smart implants represent the future of wearable technology, potentially making humans healthier and more efficient while providing new opportunity to consumer-technology companies such as Apple Inc. AAPL, -0.34% and Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, -0.71% GOOG, -0.57% that are investing heavily in technology that could revolutionize health care.All of these predictions [quoted in the article] come as global adoption of wearables is forecast to boom. Juniper Research, which tracks consumer technology trends, expects world-wide wearable shipments to reach 420 million by 2020, more than four times the 80 million shipped in 2015. A similar surge is predicted for medical devices, with shipments projected to triple to 70 million over the next four years.
Trans-humanism has been around for a while, but the article focuses on the investment capital that is now flowing into the area.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 17 2016, @09:04AM
If I implant a smart device into a dumb turkey, will that make the turkey any smarter?
Seriously - those efforts to enable the handicapped to control their prosthetics mentally are of far more value than implanting smart devices. Those devices can't be accessed by the human nervous system, making them almost valueless.
When they can plug the devices into the nervous system, THEN something of potential value will have been created!
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @09:13AM
If you implant Siri into a turkey, will that make you want to fuck her harder?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @09:19AM
Technically, the dumb (not smart) magnetic impants are connected to the nervous system. They translate senses humans normally wouldn't feel (EM and ferromagnetism) into something it can feel: touch/vibration. The plasticity of the brain helps adapt the sensations into something that makes intuitive sense as you get used to it.
The smart prosthetics aren't so different... see phantom limbs.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday November 17 2016, @11:30PM
Yes, fake horns and implanting chips in your skin doesn't make you a cyborg. The implanted hardware has to affect the organism. Examples are artificial knees and hips, CrystaLens eye implants, ocular implants, etc.
I'm a cyborg, living here in the future with better than 20/20 vision in my left eye after being 20/400 all my life.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @11:53PM
Sure some of these ideas are lame, but technically they are correct. Melding a human with machine. Beta cyborgs if you will.