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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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @08:10AM
Is this like that guy from Warwick, who put a USB port into his arm, connected, basicly, to nothing, and claimed to be a "cyborg"? I hear he wandered about campus, saying, "Exterminate! Exterminate!", until students and faculty realized he could not climb stairs, and so they all retreated to upper stories and were saved. Or am I mixing up Kevin [kevinwarwick.com] with an actual university? Or a particular Dr. Who episode? I could be mixing them up, AI tends to do that.