Despite my best efforts at re-direction, Joel Garreau decided to write a story for the Washington Post on the alleged diminution of feeling in people, like the IEET’s Peter Houghton, with heart assist devices. I think the idea is nonsense, and a side effect of being sick, disabled and depressed.
Link
Houghton is working on a book called “Cyborg Life.” It is based on his professional interviews with more than two dozen people who have faced death and now live with dramatic technological interventions—from heart machines to chemotherapy.
Houghton’s co-author is James J. Hughes, who teaches health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. He is also the author of “Citizen Cyborg” and is executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
“He’s a trooper,” Hughes says of Houghton. “Inspiring guy. My kids really dug him.”
Houghton’s collected narratives, Hughes says, show “the difference between the happy picture—‘glad to be alive’—and the long-term sequela of having foreign objects in your body—those can be a big contrast. A lot of people don’t have financial resources. It sucks to be sick and hurting. I don’t think we should be sugarcoating the enormous sacrifices these people have been making and will be making into the future. They get benefits out of it, but some find they regret those choices.”
The direction of research “takes us from these crude and not entirely satisfactory devices to nanotechnology,” Hughes says. Nanotechnology is the creation of man-made objects that are exceedingly small—down to the level of individual atoms and molecules. Its advocates hope to see millions of robots smaller than a blood cell coursing through our veins in the foreseeable future. These “nanobots” would, among other things, serve as watchdogs, pouncing on things that go wrong—like the formation of cancer cells.
“Insofar as having a foreign object inside your body changes your sense of identity, Peter is more of the mind that it does,” says Hughes. He, however, is an optimist.
“We have adapted to glasses, or pins in your legs if they get broken. Things get normalized. You no longer see yourself as odd or outside the norm. This will happen to all of these interventions.”
Whatever the future brings, Houghton says that being snatched from the brink of death and transformed into a poster child for cyborg life while experiencing serious psychological transformations “has been quite an experience.”
“A roller coaster.
“Better than being dead, I think.
IEET Blog