The human augmentation sci-fi trend

[Tephnos]

Human augmentation strikes me as a 'never going to happen' sort of thing, especially for those who are intact and healthy, even if technology reached the point where it became possible.

Idealistic, but in reality, everyone would jump at the chance to augment their physical features, senses especially.

 

[Efour]

Eyes and ears sure why not next 50 years too....
Organs probably 50 years.
Limbs
Implants AUGs whatever, I'm sure a mobile company will be offering implants one day 2050 soon...
Google glass style contacts or whole new eyeballs ...

 

[Vexr]

Interesting read. I certainly wouldn't argue with them being used for medical reasons like worn out joints, but I'm struggling to see the advantages for those who wouldn't 'need' them. Two examples of the ultimate baseline of what humans can do naturally are martial arts and free running. These would seem to require precise control, balance, and feedback from your biological systems and would probably be jeopardised by augmentations.

I suppose they'd need to be hot-swappable for different situations. I.e. the aug-legs you'd need for running would have to be a completely different design to those that would allow you to jump off buildings. Any all-in-one design would surely be inferior to the real thing.

Ultimately I just don't see them as ever being practical or desirable, yet they're newly prolific in science fiction.

 

[GiraffePencils]

The biggest problem to any sort of complex artificial limb is the fact that they would not be able to self repair.
We cause small amounts of damage to ourselves aaaall the time but barely notice as it heals in a few days, these limbs would need regular MOT and costs associated.
Can't afford your car MOT, well can take a bus for a couple weeks till pay-day.
Cant afford your LEG MOT..........well now, can't put your old legs back on

 

[Avenged7Fold]

We have stuff like auditory brain-stem implants, surely that counts as augmentation. If you really wanted to, you could create one to pick up and process sounds outside normal ranges then process the sound to put it in your range. Maybe add blue-tooth link to your phone so you can directly play music to it without producing sounds or adjust your hearing settings.

 

[gord]

The biggest problem to any sort of complex artificial limb is the fact that they would not be able to self repair.
We cause small amounts of damage to ourselves aaaall the time but barely notice as it heals in a few days, these limbs would need regular MOT and costs associated.
Can't afford your car MOT, well can take a bus for a couple weeks till pay-day.
Cant afford your LEG MOT..........well now, can't put your old legs back on

What are you making the artificial limbs out of? Cardboard?!

And we have self-repairing materials now. C'mon, keep up!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-healing_material

 

[Angilion]

The biggest problem to any sort of complex artificial limb is the fact that they would not be able to self repair.
We cause small amounts of damage to ourselves aaaall the time but barely notice as it heals in a few days, these limbs would need regular MOT and costs associated.
Can't afford your car MOT, well can take a bus for a couple weeks till pay-day.
Cant afford your LEG MOT..........well now, can't put your old legs back on

While that's true, I think it wouldn't usually be as large a problem as you're arguing it would be for a number of reasons:

When they're first available, the cost would be high enough to make them available only to people who are rich and so the maintainence costs wouldn't be an issue for almost everyone who had them. There would be some cases of people who were borderline rich enough to afford them and they might find maintainence costs a problem, but that wouldn't be the case for most users. In time, they might become much cheaper and thus available to people who aren't rich. If that happens, maintainence and replacement costs would also decrease by approximately the same proportion so it still wouldn't usually be a problem.

These predicted artificial limbs should be much more robust than natural limbs. Natural limbs sustain small amounts of damage all the time, but most of the forces that cause damage to organic tissue wouldn't cause damage to advanced artificial materials. Complex metal alloys, carbon fibre, etc, are far more resistant to wear and tear than cartlidge, tendons, etc.

These predicted artificial limbs should probably have various models at various costs. You use cars as an analogy, so I will too. The insurance, maintainence and repair costs for a Ferrari LaFerrari are vastly higher than those for an entry model Ford Mondeo, but a Ford Mondeo still does the job well.

While you wouldn't be able to put your old legs back on, if the systems are designed well you would probably be able to put a cheaper pair of legs on until you could have your more expensive pair repaired. A loan pair from your insurance scheme, for example. Or an old used model you picked up cheap at some point. In that case, these wouldn't be like cars - you wouldn't need much space to store a backup pair and keeping an unused pair in working order should be very simple and cheap.

So I think that the problem you refer to would exist, but not on the scale you refer to. It would affect some users, but not most.