Technology and Humans: Are We All Going to Become Some Mix of Man and Machine?

Humanity, it seems, is evolving at a rapid clip. Things that were just in movies and sci-fi books are now taking their places in our day to day life. Some technological advances are even taking their places right in our bodies. Heart defibrillators that run on batteries and record every heartbeat so that your doctor can help keep you healthy and prevent a second heart attack have replaced the ordinary pacemaker. There are replacements for your knees that have been around for years and are now made of new high tech stuff. They have even come up with pills that increase your bust size or replace necessary cartilage. So surgery is not even necessary in order to use these advancements. People are changing the bio-chemical composition of their bodies with changes to their diet, with drugs (both prescription and illicit), and our environment I am sure is still working it's magic on evolving the human creature also.

The question that must be asked is, with all of this genetic bioengineering of our foodstuffs, and pills that can in some cases replace or relieve the need for surgery, and the technological advances in medicine, such as the artificial heart, are we not stepping into the role of nature and changing the meaning of survival of the fittest? Now people may get the idea that all of these technological advances are good for us, and are advancing the longevity of human lives. Yes, we can see that people's longevity is increasing year after year. So is the number of new people being born. While we are making evolutionary changes to ourselves in a single human lifespan it used to take natural evolution 3 or more successive generations to begin to graft a new evolutionary variation onto the existing population and test the viability of the variation. Now that we have stepped into the evolutionary arena and the law is no longer necessarily "The survival of the fittest" how long do you think it will be before people decide that since the biological systems break down occasionally that some of the biological parts should be replaced before they have time to break down and make us sick? Diseases and genetic variation ravage and destroy the function of the body as a whole. Genetic research and implementing that research into something useful for humanity is expensive so with all of the medical replacements, enhancements, and advancements will that soon change to "Survival of the Richest"?

People are already walking around with mechanical parts, arms, legs, hearts, defibrillators, plates, screws, pins through this or that bone, etcetera. Most of these people will be quick to tell you how much of a positive change their bio-mechanics have made to their lives. Amputees can be up and on their feet again, and a paramedic is no longer strictly necessary if you have a defibrillator right in your chest to shock the heart back into functioning. If that school of thought were to couple with the school of thinking that is behind the need for body perfection in our society and that promotes plastic surgery on any and every "imperfection" and stops at nothing to recognize their vision of beauty in the flesh. Might these people not begin to think that surgical alteration and implantation of "better" parts for improved body function and design, is where we all should be headed? "Heart disease in your family history, you say? That's ok we'll just go ahead and replace that! A brand new state of the art Mudpumper 3000 or maybe you wanna upgrade to the 3500 athletes heart instead. It may cost a little more but it's worth it! Oh and long as we're in there since a use has never been found for your spleen why don't we remove that for you so we can upgrade your data storage space? A quick and easy rewire of the central ganglia in the brain and you'll have 2000 gigabytes more memory space, much more reliable than the old biological memory my boy that, those biological functions used to lose things."