Here's a question that matters.
Right? Because we're beginning to get all the tools together to evolve ourselves.
And we can evolve bacteria and we can evolve plants and we can evolve animals,
and we're now reaching a point where we really have to ask, is it really ethical and do we want to evolve human beings?
And as you're thinking about that, let me talk about that in the context of prosthetics, prosthetics past, present, future.
So this is the iron hand that belonged to one of the German counts.
He loved to fight, lost his arm in one of these battles.
No problem, he just made a suit of armor, put it on, perfect prosthetic.
That's where the concept of "ruling with an iron fist" comes from.
And of course these prosthetics have been getting more and more useful, more and more modern. You can hold soft-boiled eggs.
You can have all types of controls, and as you're thinking about that,
there are wonderful people like Hugh Herr who have been building absolutely extraordinary prosthetics.
So the wonderful Aimee Mullins will go out and say, how tall do I want to be tonight?
Or he will say what type of cliff do I want to climb?
Or does somebody want to run a marathon, or does somebody want to ballroom dance?
And as you adapt these things, the interesting thing about prosthetics is they've been coming inside the body.
So these external prosthetics have now become artificial knees. They've become artificial hips.
And then they've evolved further to become not just nice to have but essential to have.
So when you're talking about a heart pacemaker as a prosthetic,
you're talking about something that isn't just, " I'm missing my leg," it's, "if I don't have this, I can die."
And at that point, a prosthetic becomes a symbiotic relationship with the human body.
