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posted by martyb on Friday July 19 2019, @12:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the superhero-cyborgs-need-a-special-suit,-too dept.

Why I'm turning my son into a cyborg (archive) (alt)

Imagine if everyone spoke a language you don't understand. People have been speaking it around you since the day you were born, but while everyone else picks it up immediately, for you it means nothing. Others become frustrated with you. Friendships and jobs are difficult. Just being "normal" becomes a battle.

For many with autism, this is the language of emotion. For those on the spectrum, fluency in facial expressions doesn't come for free as it does for "neurotypicals." To them, reading facial expressions seems like a superpower.

So when my son was diagnosed, I reacted not just as a mom. I reacted as a mad scientist and built him a superpower.

This isn't the first time I've played mad scientist with my son's biology. When he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I hacked his insulin pump and built an AI that learned to match his insulin to his emotions and activities. I've also explored neurotechnologies to augment human sight, hearing, memory, creativity, and emotions. Tiger moms might obsess over the "right" prep schools and extracurriculars for their child, but I say why leave their intellect up to chance?

I've chosen to turn my son into a cyborg and change the definition of what it means to be human. But do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @09:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @09:53PM (#869178)

    > Give me the same set of tools and I would still be emotionally superior to her barely-functioning son

    Right, then you too would be superhuman, with glasses that revealed emotion like x-ray specs.

    Driving a car? Also reaches superhuman speed and momentum, etc.

    Like making art, just because you could do it too, doesn't diminish the original.

    And Temple G.'s hugbox, built to compensate for emotional challenges in a different way (internal feelings instead of external input processing), is probably not something you'd diss. Why diss this tech?