This month (4th Oct 2019 to be precise) saw a new breakthrough and another big step, pun intended, in our quest towards becoming post human. A paralysed man has been able to move his four limbs by using a mind-controlled exoskeleton suit in France. Thibault was an optician before he fell 15m in an incident at a night club four years ago. He had surgery to place two implants on the surface of his brain, covering the parts that control movement.
While it is not the first exoskeleton, it is one of the most advanced and available to the everyday man. It does make one wonder what level the military are at these days.
This is a big concern for much of the second half of the cycle; the half focused on the future. While much of the forecast technology listed next should have huge, life and world changing positive impacts on humanity, making us more and more sustainable, more and more posthuman (or ‘transhuman’), much of it could easily be life and world ending, should it fall into the wrong hands.
It is true war and conflicts have been driving forces for humans over the years, pushing us through competitive necessity against each other to new and new heights of technology, as well as depths of humanity. A key example of this is Alan Turing, with the first computers – a brilliant mind creating brilliant things, driven by the fear and the need to progress by a country in the midst of a world war.
It doesn’t make one a conspiracist to suspect it much easier to find out much more about the technologies listed in this wheel (talked about excitedly in the public domain), than one could researching deeply into what the military are up to. It’s almost worth advising against it, unless you want them researching deeply into you, which these technologies already allow them to. So much comes down to the amount of control we have over our technology.
In terms of war, at best perhaps we could just muse that destruction breeds creation?