The near future
Five years ago, 3D printed kidneys were demonstrated live on stage. Teams like that are working on all the other organs in the human body right now, except for the brain. Brain–computer interface have been around for much longer. Not that you need them if there isn't a brain in the body, and plenty of research is going on to create silicon brains for robotic bodies — brains that learn from experience how to walk, or see. Naturally, if a robot knows how to walk, it can be given a higher-level order like "walk forward", or even "walk to the shops" if you add Google Maps.Put 3D bio-printing and BCI together, and it looks like remote-controlled organic avatars are in our near future.
My first thought was of bodyguards being more willing to (literally!) take a bullet for their employers, because the bodyguards would be using artificial bodies… but then I realised bodyguards would mostly be redundant because many of the people who currently use bodyguards would be able to use remote controlled bodies themselves, and never be in any real danger in the first place.
Then I thought of soldiers… but why go to the trouble of 3D printing a soft, fragile, organic body for soldiers to control when you could, with far less exciting new developments in bio-printing, manufacture a metal and plastic avatar for your soldiers? Or make them in a non-human shape that better suits military needs?
The next most obvious career it could make redundant is prostitution, depending on what it cost. I know essentially nothing about what life is like for prostitutes, only the scare stories that made it into national media — and yet, all of those threats to life and safety would cease to exist if prostitutes didn't have to really touch their customers, if they could interact via a remote controlled biological robot.
The flip side (or the same side, depending on your views of prostitution), is that it would make crime easier to commit and harder to prove guilt. You couldn't tell from the outside if you were looking at a real human, or a printed copy that was remotely controlled. It would mean an end to eye-witnessing/DNA testing/fingerprinting criminals, because such avatars could be of anyone, real or imagined. A simple MRI scan or X-ray wouldn't be enough, because printing a lump of disconnected brain cells in the shape of a brain would fool such a scan, yet be no more of a person than you would get from sculpting a dozen cattle brains into the same shape.
Original post: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/the-near-future/
Original post timestamp: Fri, 08 Apr 2016 12:40:20 +0000
Tags: 3D Printing, Bioprinting, meat puppet
Categories: Futurology