Active Thinking Topic 45 - Yourr Body Parts Replaced & Modified - Any Limits?



Monday 21 November 2022, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Any replies to the organizer - thormay@yahoo.com

Venue: Cafe Brunelli, 187 Rundle St, Adelaide CBD, South Australia


Focus Questions

 

1. Will humans win the fight to be independent of nature? The mythological Adam and Eve were naked in God's orchard. He cast them out. They should have perished but they became independent and thrived. The moment humans put on clothes they began to evolve away from animals entirely shaped by nature. The change may have been initially driven by climate but it soon developed a life of its own.

2. Consider what parts of you have already been replaced or modified (don't forget your brain). Think of your grandparents in this context. What's the trend?

3. So which part of your old body do you want to keep when all the other parts are replaced? Why?

4. Why do surgeons and medical specialists sometimes give bad advice? What can you do about it? Medically it is now possible to replace quite a large number of body parts. It has also emerged gradually that a significant number of these replacements are pointless, useless or in some cases do real damage.

5. "You Are Already A Cyborg" [Elon Musk] - Agree? Why/why not?

6. Well, what will we look like in 1000 years? (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BibBMBibTq0 )

7. All the cells in your body eventually die and are replaced. Is the new 'you' the same as the 'old you'? (Have a look at the Ship of Theseus paradox @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus ).

8. Humans have doubled or tripled average life expectancy in a few generations. In what ways (if any) are these longer lived humans (you) different from the previous type who only lived 30 or 40 years? [..is this true? See the BBC link https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity ]? Would humans be qualitatively different again by living, say, 200 years?

9. The R&D industries which support militaries worldwide are furiously researching battle soldiers - either humans with enhanced mental & physical support, or robot soldiers. This is creepy but impossible for you and I to stop. What consequences do you expect to grow from these man-machine killing creatures?

10. Natural population growth has peaked in developed economies, and world population growth will peak by 2080 (Africa last to level off). Given the ponzi structure of modern economies (growth, growth, growth) this means that aging populations will not be able to service their own wants and needs. How might cyborgs and robots step in to provide this support? Will it happen? How soon? Can it work?


Extra Reading

Wikipedia (2022) "History of Nudity" @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nudity 

Matthew Alexander (20 Jul 2016) "Did you know? These 10 human body parts can be replaced". Memeburn @ https://memeburn.com/2016/07/replaceable-human-body-parts/ 

Wikipedia (2016) "Artificial Organ". @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_organ 

Tyler Baum (March 27, 2022) "Humans could live up to 150 years, new study claims". New York Post @ https://nypost.com/2022/03/27/humans-could-live-up-to-150-years-according-to-new-study/ 

Caleb E. Finch (October 12, 2009) "Evolution of the human lifespan and diseases of aging: Roles of infection, inflammation, and nutrition". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences @ https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0909606106 

Tech Insider (7 May 2017) "What Humans Will Look Like In 1,000 Years" Youtube @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BibBMBibTq0  [25,295,913 views; 3 minutes] [Quote: "There will eventually be a day where prosthetics are no longer just for the disabled. However, it’s not just our outside appearance that will change – our genes will also evolve on microscopic levels to aid our survival".]

Sonia Sodha (6 November 2022) "The tunes you hum, books you read, rows you have: Twitter and co are shaping your world". The Guardian @ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/05/what-speaks-to-us-twitter-tiktok-code-algorithm 

John Naughton (6 November 2022) "Machine-learning systems are problematic. That’s why tech bosses call them ‘AI’". The Guardian @ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/05/machine-learning-systems-are-problematic-thats-why-tech-bosses-call-them-ai  [Quote: "Pretending that opaque, error-prone ML is part of the grand, romantic quest to find artificial intelligence is an attempt to distract us from the truth"]

Joe Rogan (2020) "Joe Rogan Experience #1169 - Elon Musk" Youtube @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycPr5-27vSI  [views: 62,517,098 Length: 2 hr 37 min] (Thor, comment: Why would you spend over 2 hours of your life watching Joe Rogan interview Elon Musk? Well, you can't answer that until you've done it, but if you have a working brain this video will give you lots of ideas going forward. You don't even have to like Musk (watching did change my view of the guy a bit...). ]

Paul Ingraham (Jun 8, 2021) "Knee Replacement Surgery Doubts - Is it legit? Knee replacement is extremely popular, but not yet based on good evidence of efficacy". Pain Science website @ https://www.painscience.com/articles/knee-replacement.php  [Quote: "Various types of knee replacement surgeries are a popular choice for people with intractable knee pain caused by osteoarthritis. Both partial and total knee replacement (PKR, TKR) are common... This is a huge industry, delivering hundreds of thousands of knee replacements annually in the US, and millions globally. That’s a lot of bionic knees. ... Does knee replacement work? No one really knows, period — there simply isn’t enough of the right kind of evidence. It is effectively an experimental treatment. ... Meanwhile, there is now substantial evidence that several similar orthopedic surgeries cannot help people more than a sham".]

Peter Eisler and Barbara Hansen (June 19 2013) "Doctors perform thousands of unnecessary surgeries". USA TODAY @ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/18/unnecessary-surgery-usa-today-investigation/2435009/ 

Adam Taylor (October 6, 2017) "Seven body organs you can live without." The Conversation @ https://theconversation.com/seven-body-organs-you-can-live-without-84984 

Simply Tech (18 September 2022) "Boston Dynamics' New Robot Makes Soldiers Obsolete, Here's Why". Youtube @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu1kpnCylKQ  [14 minutes]

Amanda Ruggeri (3rd October 2018) "Do we really live longer than our ancestors?". BBC @ https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity  [Quote: "“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans – opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct – hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.” ... ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 ... To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency... life expectancy in the English mid-Victorian period [1800s] was not markedly different from what it is today”. A five-year-old girl would live to 73; a boy, to 75".


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Yourr Body Parts Replaced & Modified - Any Limits? (c) Thor May 2022

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