What are your thoughts on human augmentation?

Conceptually? I'm all for it. Why wouldn't I be.

In practice, we live in a capitalist society and I don't want an arm that makes me watch an advertisement before I open a bag of chips.

Not against it on principle, but there's no way I'd get it knowing about the way the corporations that have the resources to make it happen operate.

There are a lot of different human faculties that can be augmented!

We augment our senses every day with tools like microphones, microscopes, radio, radar, telescopes, X-rays, cameras, etc.

And when our senses fail us, we augment them with eyeglasses, hearing aids, and so on.

We augment our legs with bicycles, skateboards, cars, airplanes, etc.

And when our legs fail us, we augment them with braces, crutches, wheelchairs, electric scooters, walkers, etc.

We augment our memory retrieval with writing, library science, search engines, and regular expressions.

We augment our ability to measure lengths with rulers, measuring-tapes, and surveying equipment.

We augment our immune systems with masks, rubber gloves, antiseptics, antibiotics, cancer therapies, water treatment, etc.

We augment our sexual functions with erotic stories and art, contraceptives, lubricants, sex toys, dating apps, etc.

We augment our metabolic function with cooking, fermentation, agriculture, selective breeding of crop species, etc.

We augment our musical abilities with horns, percussion, strings, synthesizers, and more.

It turns out that augmenting human ability is itself a core human ability.

I know too many devs to have my body require a firmware update.

Wearable > implantation

Just a security concern. Augmenting is great but we don't want the augmentations to become a liability. Obviously there are exceptions to every rule, if we invent a robotic arm replacement for someone who's lost one, the security concerns are generally lower than the quality of life improvement of having a functioning arm 99% of the time, and there's an argument for the potential ability for rapid detachment in case of emergency, but once we get into subdermal and brain implants, we're in a territory where these things can't be easily removed in case of emergency, and the risks get immense.

As a already augmented human, i fully support this.

Glasses, portable electronic tether, surgery...........

Whatever improves your quality of life I’m all for.

Permanently Deleted

Its a good thing? Prosthetics really help disabled people.

The flesh is weak. Only the machine is eternal.

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel; I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine.

Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day, that crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you.

But I am already saved.

For the machine is immortal.

I work as a surgical tech for a living, so obvious bias on modifying the body - making that shit happen is my job! The medical applications are pretty wild - we can replace worn down bones with titanium replacements, or stick a diode in you and makes your heart beat at a specific rate, or replace the chambers in your dick with a manually filled balloon if you can't get it up anymore (legit, it's a thing [SFW - seriously]).

Guessing OP is more directed at non-medical applications; we (society in general) already mostly accept that on an aesthetic front - piercings, tattoos, etc, but we've only scratched the surface functionally.

You might be interested in the concept of "transhumanism" which is kinda the more sci-fi flavor of augmentation, but the better our tech gets, the less 'fi' it is.

Lots of cool ideas, like eye lens prosthetics capable of slapping a HUD on your field of view, or being able to chemically or electrically stimulate a specific part of the brain to pump up your alertness or w/e... how often those ideas manifest as an actual product, eh, mixed results (looking at Musk's disastrous neurolink garbage).

There's also simpler stuff - I saw a documentary on this stuff years ago, and one of the cool examples was a guy that got tiny little rare-earth magnets - little 1mm balls or thereabouts. Dude cut the ends of his fingers all the way down to muscle, and implanted a magnet ball into each one, sewed back up, and let them heal. So, now he can pick up ferrous objections with a poke; and cooler than that, unexpected result was he how has a sense of magnetism! Any time he entered a magnetic field, he could feel feedback from the implants, so he could tell the strength and polarity just by moving his hand through it. And apparently some things generate a magnetic field that you wouldn't expect - like he noticed feedback when he was cooking on the stove from those those heat coils: when it was on / hot it would move the implants slightly, so he had an extra layer of warning for things like when a coil is hot enough to burn skin but not quite 'red hot' because the magnetic feedback was more noticeable than the actual heat it was putting off.

I'm all for the concept. Definitely wouldn't recommend a DIY surgery like some of those folks do, but I could definitely see something like non-medical body mod clinics popping up the same way we have tattoo parlors now.

Pretty fascinating stuff!

Permanently Deleted

I can't imagine a faster way to dystopia. You'd be literally incapable of disobedience.

I'm all for it, things like cochlear implants have already been improving lives for decades.

This sparks joy: Augmentation to help people become the selves that they would truly like to be.

This does not: Some kind of transhuman singularity dystopia where we have replaced ourselves not out of a soul-driven yearning for our true self, but in service of a cold, quantitative utilitarian calculus that says we must shed our skin because it is logically inferior.

I would say "i never asked for this", but actually i did.

I am in favour of transhumanism, but I would only want a neural implant if it's fully open source and not connected to the cloud. It also must not break the skin, because I don't want infections, especially near my brain.

I think it'll be cool in like, 50 years once the technology is there. Right now all it does is kill monkeys.

I'm currently wearing a continuous glucose monitor. Does that count? I'm all for anything voluntary especially if it improves quality of life without impeding on others.

I didn't ask for this. - Adam Jenson

Natural will always feel better, but I wouldn't complain either way

I prefer my humans segmented into highest $$$ parts thank you.

I read this and thought: if someone wants a boob job: okie.

I like big butts and I cannot lie

Your/my body, your/my choice. People need to stop judging/comparing themselves or try to stop bodily autonomy choices on other's behalf.

Or to be trite, to each their own. What he/she/it/they do with their bodies is this own violation.

Cool for people with disabilities or medical needs. But otherwise I'm not a fan of purely cosmetic/cyberpunk/silicon valley style augmentation.

I don't care what other people choose to do with/to their own bodies. It's none of my business, at all, ever.

For myself, I'm not sure. I don't have the means, so it's irrelevant, but if I did... I don't know. I don't have any issue with it really, but it doesn't particularly appeal to me either. I can of course see advantages to overcoming the limitations of a natural body, but for whatever reason, I've never been much for pursuing fulfillment by acquiring things (which is pretty much what augmentation boils down to). It just seems to be too much hassle for too little gain, and particularly since the acquisition of things never leads to real fulfillment anyway - it just fuels the desire to acquire even more things.

Most likely, given the choice, I'd choose to just continue to inhabit my natural, unaugmented shell. But I really don't know.

it's really sick