The case for merging human bodies with machines
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What are the implications of merging human bodies with machines?
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Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. In 2014, Katie Kwan was a professional dancer in New York City living her dream.
Taking the train to Lincoln Center and dancing at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and traveling all over the United States to be in various shows. I did The King and I at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. I did Cinderella at the Gateway Theater. I had my own dance company, actually, and we did something between like six to ten shows a year.
But then her father got sick.
Yeah, it was very scary for our family. He had a stroke. And my dad, you know, English is his third language. He was in his mid-60s at the time.
Katie found herself there with her dad in his hospital room, surrounded by medical equipment.
So he had a heart monitor, you know, the thing that blips and bloops on the screen. And he also had quite a few issues with his lungs, and so there was something that was helping to track his breathing. You know, seeing my dad so small and surrounded by all of these machines, I thought these things are meant to help assist him and empower him, but he feels very alienated and afraid of them. And that struck me as such the wrong relationship between humans and our technologies.
She wondered, was there a way these machines could keep someone alive without being so terrifying? Maybe they could even come across as nurturing.
And it started to open the door to so many questions about how we could live with our technologies in a way that we weren't living with them.
Katie's dad made a full recovery. But these questions continued to nag at her. She'd always been good at math and science, so she decided to go back to school to try and find some answers.
So even though there were lots of valid assertions that grad school was going to be very hard for me, I kind of did it anyway. And I did my master's, my PhD, and then my postdoc all at Stanford in mechanical engineering and computer science.
At Stanford, people were building technology to change the way we live with machines, well beyond hospitals. Designing robots to do everything from cleaning our homes to offering companionship. So just imagine.
What's it going to be like when not only you have autonomous vehicles on the road, but then you have robots? autonomous robots who are showing up to deliver your burrito, and you have an autonomous robot that might fly in to drop off a package, and then you go to your doctor's office and there's an autonomous robot that takes your temperature. Like, this is a completely different way of living and working. I think we're about to undergo one of the most consequential shifts to our built environment in a long time. So the question for me is how can we then build robots that make people feel empowered, inspired, legible and clear that they feel safe around and know how to control? Because it's not a question for me of whether or not the robots are coming.
It's simply a question of how quickly and what are those robots going to look like when they do show up?
Forget sitting down at a laptop or tapping on a screen. Technology is being woven into our physical world in all kinds of new ways, from robot helpers to smart body parts that turn us into cyborgs.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What are the implications of merging human bodies with machines?
0:00–5:29
2
How did Catie Cuan's father's health crisis influence her perspective on technology?
5:29–19:05
3
What innovations are being made in robotics and human interaction?
19:05–26:09
4
How can technology enhance human capabilities without compromising humanity?
26:09–51:24
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from TED Radio Hour
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