Net Creator Says Bionic Will Boom

Following up on Dean Kamen's upper limb prosthetic below, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist and Internet co-creator Vint Cerf spoke my kind of language at the launch of the Hear and Say Centre in Brisbane, Australia.

"Where do we draw the line between repairing impairments and actually enhancing capabilities? I think the answer is we don't and should not draw that line," he told journalists during a press conference.

"There is nothing that should stop us from taking the same technologies that bring someone into the normal mainstream of hearing, for example, and actually allowing people to hear sound that other people could not hear."

Ocular implants, designed to repair blindness by allowing patients to see in the normal range, could be boosted to allow anyone to see in the infrared or ultra-violet spectrum, Dr Cerf says.

"The same thing could be true for neuro-motor implants, spinal cord implants that would allow you to signal to otherwise useless limbs, like arms and so on."

Ocular implants that allow you to see through clothes and aural implants that allow you to hear whispers from 100 feet away will raise some concerns, but the more mundane enhancements should be fine. As a quadriplegic, I wouldn't mind using bionics to get function back.

In the meantime, I'm still waiting on an 80 gig neural storage unit like the one from Johnny Mnemonic.

Net Creator Says Bionic Will Boom [The Age]