7
Not to spoil anything for your readers, but Petrovitch undergoes a few . . . enhancements as the series to progresses. Do you foresee anything similar happening in the real world? We’re already doing it. Every so often, I bump into someone with a cochlear implant, and these days they can even fit them in babies. There are nerve and muscle-activated bionic limbs, now with force feedback. Pacemakers with inductive recharging. Artificial hearts. Insulin pumps. Put them all together, and that’s quite a lot of a human you can effectively replace. Some bits of us will take a little longer. Lungs, eyes. Some of those squishy bits in the torso. But when you think about how many people wear glasses, let alone are blind, the market for a cybernetic eye is simply huge: better than 20/20 vision, specialist lenses for close-work or distance, infra-red, UV capability? Oh yeah.
6
Any conjecture on transhumanism as a whole and how it might affect day to day life for better or worse? It’s always a tricky thing, taking a nascent technology and going all the way to its logical extremes. In the short term, it’s not difficult to imagine a user ‘occupying’ a robotic telepresence for use in a hazardous environment, using the same tech in bionics to see, hear and feel remotely. Neither is it difficult to imagine a soldier doing the same thing on a battlefield, being a weapon without ever risking the ‘meat’. In the medium term, another effect would be the ability to stream video straight from your eye to the internet. Potentially the end of privacy, for ever. And information from the net back to your eye. How would you test someone’s knowledge if they could access answers instantaneously from storage? And in the far future? Body modding. The end of bilateral symmetry, bipedal locomotion, two arms, two hands, even. We’d be brains in jars, and our bodies would