The future of prosthetics – Hugh Herr on the dream of eliminating physical disability

00:00:00: I think it'll become dull and boring what normal bodies can do in the context of Bionics.

00:00:06: And in the future, a sporting event like the Paralympics will be far more popular than the Olympics.

00:00:12: It'll be like, oh, it's so boring what normal old bodies can do.

00:00:24: Welcome to a taste of Bionics, a podcast brought to you by Otto Bock.

00:00:30: My name is Ranga Yogeshwar.

00:00:33: And in this podcast, we explore how technology is reshaping, well, our body, our identity, our sense of self.

00:00:45: And today's guest has literally in a way rebuilt himself.

00:00:52: And I'm very happy because I met him in twenty nineteen.

00:00:56: To be honest, he is the reason why I do this podcast.

00:01:00: So I've been Looking forward to this discussion, welcome Hugh Hehr.

00:01:07: He is a professor at MIT leading the biomechatronics group and co-directing the Lisa Young Center for Bionics.

00:01:15: And he and his team merged synthetic computing with the human nervous system.

00:01:24: Welcome back, Hugh.

00:01:26: How are you?

00:01:27: Very well.

00:01:27: I'm delighted to be here today.

00:01:29: Hugh.

00:01:30: First of all, as many people don't know you, sorry for asking, but this is a story you have retold many times.

00:01:39: If we see you right now, well, we don't see what I saw, which is you have two artificial legs and it all started back when you were young in nineteen eighty two.

00:01:55: Perhaps you can just tell us the story.

00:01:59: your story.

00:02:00: I was deeply passionate as a boy and a young man in extreme sports and mountain climbing.

00:02:10: So I lived and breathed mountain climbing from the age of eight.

00:02:16: And by my teenage years, I was considered a child prodigy.

00:02:21: And by the age of sixteen, seventeen, I was considered to be one of the the top five climbers in the United States.

00:02:29: Then at age seventeen, I was in a mountain climbing accident, was out with one partner.

00:02:37: We intended to be one day, turned into nearly four days.

00:02:41: I suffered severe frostbite to my lower legs, and after months of effort, my medical team gave up the fight to save my biological legs from the knee down, and they were amputated to be replaced with prosthetics.

00:02:53: First of all, this is a very traumatic experience.

00:02:57: And within this, I mean, I can imagine, first of all, you know, being an avid mountain climber and suddenly realizing, OK, this dream is perhaps gone forever.

00:03:10: Somehow you had the energy of well, countering and saying, yes, I can.

00:03:17: Yes, I will.

00:03:18: What was that?

00:03:19: for a moment?

00:03:20: Yes, I stated.

00:03:22: Climbing was a very deep passion for me, so I wanted to get on the horse again.

00:03:28: There was also a rescuer that died in my mountain climbing accident.

00:03:37: Albert Dao, he was struck by an avalanche and perished while searching for myself and my partner.

00:03:44: So because of Albert's extraordinary capacity of giving to the world, his generosity in going out and searching for two young boys in the wilderness, and really extreme mountaineering conditions, because of his ultimate sacrifice, I could not and would not give up on life and decided to do everything I could possibly do.

00:04:13: to make a contribution to society.

00:04:17: So the idea of giving up and remaining in a wheelchair was completely unacceptable, and I viewed it as a degradation to the memory of Albert Dow.

00:04:27: Because of Albert's memory, and I deeply strive to return to life to try as hard as I could.

00:04:36: So that meant really driving forward in my rehabilitation.

00:04:44: It meant once I was fitted with prostheses in a very early stage, returning to the vertical world of recognizing place climbing.

00:04:54: In the nineteen eighties, prostheses were largely passive.

00:04:59: So this was not the high-tech age, we will speak soon.

00:05:04: But this was very basic.

00:05:06: So somehow the young mountain climber who I read at least who wasn't that great in school sort of take a turning point and said, okay, I'm going to start studying and doing something else.

00:05:22: While in the rehabilitation center, I was fitted with my first leg prostheses and I was shocked by their lack of technological sophistication.

00:05:32: The prostheses that were provided me were made of wood and foam and metals.

00:05:37: They were without computational intelligence, without sensing, without... muscle tendon-like actuation.

00:05:44: And I really said to myself at the time, this is it, really?

00:05:48: How could this possibly be it?

00:05:50: In the age of air travel and smartphones and the internet, it was just staggeringly odd to me that this was kind of state-of-the-art.

00:06:02: And it was really, those were the early seeds of this idea that I would dedicate my life to advancing technology too.

00:06:12: both mitigate unwanted disability and also broadly to augment human physicality, even beyond innate physiological levels.

00:06:22: So my first mission was to return to mountain climbing and I designed my own artificial limbs.

00:06:29: So I got in the machine shop and architect with wood and metals and whatnot and designed my own climbing legs.

00:06:38: To my own surprise, I was able to climb at a more advanced level after the accident than I was ever able to achieve before the accident, which is saying something because as I stated, I was a top climber in the United States before the accident.

00:06:52: So that was surprising, very surprising to me.

00:06:55: And it really taught me at a very early age that technology has the power to heal, to rehabilitate, and in my own case, extend human physiology beyond innate.

00:07:07: physiological levels.

00:07:08: So you studied and well went into this field.

00:07:13: So this basically besides naturally mountain climbing was your new focus now in the nineteen eighties.

00:07:23: I mean I remember microprocessors were just about to come out.

00:07:27: the internet on a broad sense was not yet available.

00:07:32: You were, well, very in advance of your time in those days, at least when you started.

00:07:38: Yeah,

00:07:39: there's early stages of the internet, but it wasn't broadly available.

00:07:44: Yeah, so as you mentioned earlier, I was a terrible student because in that time in my life, my deep passion was extreme athletics, was mountain climbing.

00:07:57: So I did everything to get out of the classroom.

00:08:02: But after the accident, again, I cultivated this interest in human augmentation via technology.

00:08:10: And I actually began to develop an interest in academics and went back to school.

00:08:16: So I graduated from high school not knowing, for example, what a percent was.

00:08:21: So if you asked me what's ten percent of a hundred, I wouldn't be able to tell you because no one ever told me or I guess I wasn't listening what a percent was.

00:08:30: So after the accident I I began delving into mathematics and physics and computer science and in about a two-year frame I went from not knowing what a percent was the most basic of mathematics to stunning quantum mechanics.

00:08:46: So there was this incredible exercise of learning and becoming a scholar during that period.

00:08:54: So it was new mountain climbing in the intellectual sense.

00:08:58: That's right.

00:08:59: That's right.

00:09:00: Yeah, I actually believe that my climbing trained my mind to some degree for mathematics.

00:09:07: Because climbing is, you have to memorize a series of very advanced sequences.

00:09:17: They're body movements, they're not numbers, but I really believe my brain was trained in climbing to have an aptitude for mathematics.

00:09:28: Then you sort of, well, entered the academic world and you ended up, well, building your own more advanced prosthesis.

00:09:41: When did that start?

00:09:43: Yes, so broadly.

00:09:44: I was interested in human augmentation.

00:09:46: My first set of inventions were devices that I couldn't personally benefit from.

00:09:56: I invented a running shoe that augments or reduces the metabolic cost of running, not for persons with amputation, but for anyone.

00:10:06: I developed crutches that I really didn't need.

00:10:10: I developed a bionic knee, but eventually I started thinking about my own body in terms of bionics and developed a, with a broad team, developed a powered ankle foot prosthesis that today is manufactured and distributed by Autobock, a device that's called the Empower.

00:10:30: I

00:10:31: remember when I visited you at your institute in MIT, you could see a sort of a collection, almost an evolution of things going on.

00:10:42: I don't know if this collection is still there, but when I came to your institute, one could see a development.

00:10:50: Now you are focusing more and more not only on, well, the mechanical part, but on the neurological embodiment.

00:10:59: So how shall I say, fusing the artificial with the human body, if I express it correctly?

00:11:09: Tell us more on that.

00:11:10: First of all, let me describe the empower prosthesis.

00:11:16: So the prosthesis that I'm wearing now have.

00:11:19: Each prosthesis has three computers.

00:11:22: They're the size of your thumbnail and they cost a few euros.

00:11:26: Each one has about six sensors that measure movements, accelerations, forces, temperature, and so on.

00:11:37: And then each one has an artificial motor tendon-like structure that powers an ankle joint.

00:11:45: So when I move, there's a robotic algorithm that receives that sensory information and then runs through again a computation and commands that artificial muscle tendon system.

00:11:59: So with these devices which I call intrinsically controlled, they're not controlled by my brain, they're controlled by a robotic algorithm.

00:12:08: I'm able to walk at normal speeds and normal metabolic rates and normal levels of muscle skeletal stress.

00:12:15: But the devices, if you ask me what is my body, I wouldn't include the empowered devices.

00:12:23: They're very powerful technologies.

00:12:26: They're powerful robotic tools.

00:12:29: But they're not me.

00:12:30: They're not part of my body schema.

00:12:32: So what we're now pursuing is prosthetic interventions that are linked to the nervous system, the peripheral nervous system.

00:12:42: that will allow someone like myself to think and directly control the motors and the prosthesis with my brain, and also to feel the prosthesis as natural perception, both proprioception, the sense of position and movement and force, as well as the sense of touch.

00:13:05: Like I touch my arm, I can feel it because of the mechanoreceptors of my skin.

00:13:10: So proprio, just excuse me, just for our listeners, proprioception is I believe the body's internal sense of well-position.

00:13:23: For example, you know, you can close your eyes and you can touch things because we know where my arm or my hand is.

00:13:32: Yeah, the ability to do this.

00:13:35: So I just closed my eyes and I could find my fingertips as proprioception.

00:13:40: So that I can close my eyes and I know the position of my elbow.

00:13:45: I know the speed of the elbow.

00:13:47: And if you were to hand me a barbell, I would feel the increase load on my elbow.

00:13:53: So that's predominantly biological sensors in the muscle tendons that tell the brain what the length, speed and force on the muscle is, which from a joint level tells us the position, speed and load on the joint.

00:14:10: So what the goal of the lab then is to give persons with limb loss that are using these binoclims the sense of that proprioception as well as touch a skin-like aphor and signal.

00:14:25: You work on something which is called AMI, agonist, antagonist, myoneural.

00:14:34: interface and this is I think so part of it where you connect two antagonistic muscle pairs so that you can use it.

00:14:46: So broadly the surgical techniques used to amputate limbs largely hasn't changed for a very long time really since the US Civil War.

00:15:01: But right now in history, there's incredible innovation on how limbs are amputated.

00:15:09: So the AMI, or we call it the AMI, the technique is that when the limb is amputated or as a revision, we purposely, in a surgical sense, connect a natural agonist muscle to a natural antagonist muscle.

00:15:25: So for example, if a person is amputated above the elbow, we would connect the bicep to the tricep.

00:15:33: If the person's amputated below the knee, we would create an ankle amine, connect the tibiosine tear to the gastrocnemius.

00:15:42: So what happens is after the amputation, when a person moves their phantom limb, those physical muscles are moving dynamically and talking to each other dynamically.

00:15:54: Then the brain is being flooded with that length, speed and force.

00:15:58: So a person can actually feel the movement of their phantom, just like I can feel the movement of my elbow.

00:16:05: We then sense signals from those muscles.

00:16:09: So as the muscles moving and now they're being activated, we use those signals to control directly the prosthesis that's controlled by motors.

00:16:19: By what I learned first of all, and will come to, well, the sensor or the interface to the technology, Phantom pain is also reduced by this amyloid?

00:16:33: Is that correct?

00:16:33: Correct.

00:16:34: So the old style of amputation, nerves are obviously when a limb is amputated, nerves are transected.

00:16:42: And in the old form of amputation, those nerves are left dangling in the wind, if you will.

00:16:48: And what happens is the nerve endings create a neuroma that can be very painful.

00:16:54: So in this modern framework of amputation, when a nerve is transected, it's always given what a nerve desires, which is muscle cells or skin cells.

00:17:05: And it turns out when you give the nerve endings the cells that they're designed to innervate, that the pain is mitigated and often eliminated.

00:17:18: Let me ask you very personally.

00:17:20: I mean, you said very clearly, well, we had amputation techniques which were almost the same as within the US Civil War.

00:17:30: So when you got your amputation, I presume this was still old style amputation.

00:17:37: Correct.

00:17:38: Correct.

00:17:38: Was that redone later?

00:17:41: No, I still have the Civil War era.

00:17:44: amputation.

00:17:46: So I can feel my feet as a phantom awareness, but it feels like my feet are stuck in rigid ski boots.

00:17:54: I can't move.

00:17:55: So my phantom awareness is not dynamic.

00:17:59: Not surprising because my muscles are not talking to each other.

00:18:04: They were stitched so that they can generate force, but they can't stretch their antagonist partner.

00:18:10: So my brain is not getting that proprioception.

00:18:14: It is achievable for me to go under the knife as a revision surgery and to connect my muscles via these pulleys so that they can dynamically move.

00:18:25: And I plan to do that in the future.

00:18:28: Okay.

00:18:28: But now let's get into.

00:18:30: so we understand AMI.

00:18:34: And now you come with a technique, magneto-micrometry, so you insert well small magnets, which are sensors, which you can read, so that the external technical world knows of, well, these muscles, these antagonists, getting

00:18:55: active.

00:18:56: Yes, so the technique is called magneto-micrometry.

00:18:59: We implant into the amy muscles.

00:19:03: tiny magnetic spheres.

00:19:05: They're about three millimeters in diameter.

00:19:08: They're coated with coatings that make the implantation safe.

00:19:13: And each muscle we put at least two of these magnetic beads.

00:19:21: And then outside the body, we have a large array of magnetometers.

00:19:27: Each chip on the array is measuring the magnetic field local to the chip.

00:19:32: Because we have many chips, a whole ray, we can perform the mathematics to figure out where the bead is in three-dimensional space, given the field that it produces.

00:19:44: So essentially what we can do is we can plant two beads in a muscle, and in real time, at really, really high bandwidth, compute the distance between the beads, which correlates to the length of the muscle.

00:19:58: So as the muscle is shortening and lengthening, We have a real time measure.

00:20:03: Yep.

00:20:04: And it's interesting.

00:20:05: It's admittedly invasive.

00:20:06: Putting these beads in is very simple from a surgical perspective.

00:20:10: There's no electronics in the body.

00:20:13: The magnetic fields go through tissues and synthetic materials as if they don't exist.

00:20:18: And then all the electronics are outside the body.

00:20:21: So we can implant a young person in principle and they can live to a hundred and ten years old.

00:20:27: And we never have to go in and redo the surgery because something broke or the electronics are outdated that were put in the body.

00:20:35: Yeah, one has to think of, you know, you can't replace a battery in a sensor in the body.

00:20:40: So you have to do it that way.

00:20:43: Now, this was the theory, but this is not only theory.

00:20:48: You also have patients who underwent this procedure.

00:20:54: Tell me more about that.

00:20:55: Yeah, so at the blow knee level, we've now have three patients that receive the Amy amputation.

00:21:02: So again, their muscles were connected at the blow knee level in the residual.

00:21:07: So when they close their eyes and move their phantom foot ankle, they actually feel it moving dynamically because those muscles are moving dynamically.

00:21:15: We then, in each muscle, implanted these magnetic beads.

00:21:19: So with an external ray outside the body on the skin, We can, as the muscles are being moved by the brain, we get the full length, speed and force of all the muscles.

00:21:31: That's then, those signals are then used to control a robotic ankle foot device.

00:21:38: So this allows a person to think and to have direct agency over the mechatronic limb.

00:21:46: and they can actually feel the movements of the mechatronic limbs because of the proprioception happening in the Amy.

00:21:53: So these people, first of all, well, if you are helping them in that sense to regain a feeling of a body part, which is missing quote unquote, but how is the outlook?

00:22:13: So you have an interface, you have your well, artificial limb, and they feel it, so can they do things other people can't do?

00:22:24: Yes, actually.

00:22:27: There is some form of augmentation.

00:22:31: So we amputate the limb again.

00:22:33: We connect Agnes muscle to Intagnes muscle.

00:22:37: The muscles aren't connected to the robot.

00:22:40: They're just connected via a little pulley inside the body.

00:22:45: So there's not.

00:22:45: the forces on those muscles are very low.

00:22:48: It's not like the forces in the muscles that are moving your foot as you walk.

00:22:54: because the muscles aren't in this Amy case aren't actually connected to the robotic foot.

00:22:59: They're connected electronically, but not physically.

00:23:03: So because the forces are low, those muscles can move back and forth actually faster than the muscles in the intact limb.

00:23:12: And if the robot can track those really fast movements, then a person's actually augmented.

00:23:18: They can actually move faster than innate biology.

00:23:21: And I mean, you spoke to your first patients.

00:23:28: What is their feedback?

00:23:29: I mean...

00:23:31: Yeah, it's quite emotional.

00:23:33: So we bring in these patients that have received these... special soft tissue and hard tissue and implant surgical techniques.

00:23:45: So we bring them into the lab and within the lab, they try these bionic platforms that are linked bidirectionally to their nervous system.

00:23:54: So when we connect their nervous system to the mechatronics, either the patient begins giggling out of happiness or begins crying out of happiness.

00:24:04: It's a deeply profound experience.

00:24:07: to once again have agency and ownership over the body part that they thought was amputated and lost forever.

00:24:16: So they're in the lab and they're walking and they're controlling their mechatronic limbs.

00:24:21: When the experimental session ends and they have to go back to their regular prosthesis, that's not linked to their brain, they visibly often get depressed.

00:24:33: It's almost that they're reliving the amputation once again.

00:24:36: So this idea of linking the brain bidirectionally to mechatronics, where a person actually views the mechatronics as part of themselves, as part of their body schema they're embodied, is a really important clinical phenomenon that the field needs to continue to push and advance.

00:25:01: The field of prosthetics needs to be in the business of rebuilding bodies, not just building AI-driven robots that are powerful.

00:25:11: We need to be able to architect the human body and restore the body, that body that the user or the human seeks.

00:25:19: But you tell me that while your patients almost get depressive once they return back to the old age.

00:25:29: This is a lot of motivation to say, well, why can't they use it in everyday life?

00:25:37: Where are the obstacles?

00:25:38: I mean, is this more technology?

00:25:40: Is this more, I don't know, in Germany, we would say a lot of FDA controlling and so on.

00:25:49: Yeah,

00:25:49: that we're on that pathway to translation.

00:25:52: So the surgical techniques.

00:25:57: can now be performed in the Boston area as a standard of practice.

00:26:03: So if you view that as a product, we've already translated that product.

00:26:09: The tiny magnetic beads, we just got FDA approval to do an early feasibility study of that technology in humans.

00:26:22: We plan what's called a pivotal clinical trial, tens of people.

00:26:27: that will be using the technology, show the safety and efficacy of the implant.

00:26:33: So once we're through that pivotal trial, we'll get FDA approval, and then there can be a commercial offering of the interface.

00:26:40: So we think that'll take three to five years from now.

00:26:44: So we're quite close to offering this extraordinary capability to the public.

00:26:51: Well, in the internet, I saw some videos of your patients who are walking up stairs, who even had, you know, like a small tape, which they just pushed away with their foot, so it was like going back to where they were.

00:27:09: Yeah, it's, again, it's quite profound when you link the nervous system to the mechatronic limb.

00:27:16: the person says strange things and does strange things.

00:27:21: So we've had our patients say, refer to the brain-integrated mechatronic limb as alive.

00:27:30: Saying, this one's alive.

00:27:33: The one I walked off the street on that's not linked to the brain is dead, is not alive.

00:27:40: They're describing something as a live.

00:27:42: that's made of titanium, silicone, carbon composite, a bunch of nuts and bolts.

00:27:48: So what we're learning is that if a human can move and have agency over a mechatronic limb and can feel it, it becomes them.

00:28:00: It doesn't matter what the physical materials are that comprise the limb.

00:28:05: It doesn't have to be flesh and bone.

00:28:07: If it's linked to the brain bi-directionally, it'll be part of self.

00:28:11: This is really remarkable.

00:28:14: Throughout human history, humans have demonstrated the extraordinary capacity to invent tools and to use tools.

00:28:21: But we're at that cusp in human history where we're going beyond mere tool use, where we confuse human physiology with synthetics so beautifully that we can actually sculpt the human body and do something more profound than use technologies as mere tools.

00:28:44: And here we're using technology to actually extend humanity in a very profound way.

00:28:50: Well, this is very philosophical.

00:28:52: And I remember as a young journalist, I visited the MIT Media Lab.

00:29:00: This is about thirty, thirty-five years back.

00:29:03: And there was a system with two cameras, sort of a robot system which could scan.

00:29:12: And I put on a helmet.

00:29:14: I could see what the cameras saw.

00:29:16: And I was standing on the other side of the room.

00:29:19: And it came to me.

00:29:21: The interesting thing was... Who am I?

00:29:24: And in a gedanken experiment, as you say in German, if somebody would have said, okay, you have to shoot everybody who was there, I would have killed myself because I was in this technology looking at something on the other side.

00:29:40: So I think this was a very deep experience to me to realize that, well, our sensation of who we are is much more complex.

00:29:52: It's not only body.

00:29:53: It's perhaps much deeper feeling, seeing, having this sort of feedback loop.

00:30:01: And in that well context, I mean, you very often speak about cyborgs, cybernetic organisms.

00:30:11: This old vision, I think it was born somewhere in the sixties, nineteen sixties of technology and biology fusing together.

00:30:24: And I think you are one of the very few people where in your field, this is becoming more and more reality.

00:30:31: That's right.

00:30:32: I define cyborg function as that bidirectionality between a synthetic design construct and the human nervous system.

00:30:41: think, have agency, have biological neural nets, impact synthetic computation and synthetic computation impact biological tissues.

00:30:51: So that bidirectionality, again, is critically important to embodiment.

00:30:56: I just want to make the point that you mentioned this experience you had at the media lab of what I would call telepresence.

00:31:03: So you jacked into a robot and it felt as though you were at a different location.

00:31:09: So that's That's called telepresence.

00:31:12: It's an old idea.

00:31:13: And the idea is, imagine that the prosthesis that my brain is linked to is an entire humanoid robot.

00:31:23: And imagine that that humanoid robot is in Paris.

00:31:27: I'm in Boston now.

00:31:28: It's in Paris.

00:31:29: And I can practically at the speed of light be in Paris.

00:31:34: So I embody a whole humanoid robot and I walk around the streets of Paris, I do work, I buy things, I use my robotic hands and I walk with my robotic feet and I'm in Paris.

00:31:48: So that's a powerful idea called telepresence.

00:31:52: And I think as we merge towards physical AI, this idea that humanoids will be part of our communities, part of our homes, we're going to have a humanoid infrastructure in the coming decades.

00:32:10: When you combine that with the binocs field and these interfaces to our bodies, I think the idea of telepresence can become very real, which will give us a world where the network, the internet, is not only about a human-computer interface, but a human-body interface, a symbiotic relationship with humanoid robotic entities and human bodies and brains.

00:32:40: So that will enable a network where a human can be anywhere on the planet and give the world not only their information, but also their work, their physicality.

00:32:54: And a person can be anywhere on the planet and receive the world's physicality.

00:32:59: So that network will be massive compared to the current network.

00:33:05: which is just about information flow largely.

00:33:07: Well, before we walk to that point, I recall when we had our last talk at your lab in Boston, I laughed because, you know, you have two artificial legs.

00:33:21: And I remember I asked you, well, my legs, you know, I'm now sixty six turning older and older.

00:33:28: And perhaps one day I might not be able to walk.

00:33:32: And I told you, well, then I will come to you and I will ask you to amputate me so that I can get new legs and are able to walk.

00:33:43: This sounds a bit crazy right now, but I think so.

00:33:48: This could be a vision, no?

00:33:50: It could be, yes.

00:33:52: So it's very interesting in my body.

00:33:54: Part of my body is biological, part of my body is synthetic.

00:33:58: As I age, My biological body is experiencing the normal age-related degeneration.

00:34:06: But my synthetic part of my body is actually getting better in time.

00:34:10: So as technology improves...

00:34:12: You get updates.

00:34:13: Yeah, I get updates.

00:34:15: And so that part of my body is immortal.

00:34:17: It's beyond immortal because it's not stationary.

00:34:20: It's getting better and better.

00:34:22: So that's very interesting.

00:34:24: And it should be.

00:34:24: when I'm in my eighties, I have the balance of an eighteen-year-old or even better.

00:34:30: That's fascinating.

00:34:31: that as we march through the twenty-first century and more and more of our bodies become designed, those designed elements of our body kind of become immortal because they can be upgraded.

00:34:44: Well, that's a bit transhumanism in a certain way, so we could live forever.

00:34:50: But before we jump into this really fascinating field, Already now, and within this podcast, which is brought to you by Otto Bock, we spoke in other editions about exoskeleton.

00:35:07: So the fact that you can enhance the body, that you can help workers to, I don't know, lift boxes or use screwdriver.

00:35:15: So we are already entering an age where we see body enhancement, first of all, in the professional.

00:35:24: life of workers, for example.

00:35:26: Yeah, absolutely.

00:35:27: The autobock has interesting products that can be used in an industrial setting to augment strength, to reduce muscle skeletal injuries and so forth.

00:35:38: My company, Defi, has developed a bionic shoe.

00:35:43: So the idea is bionic apparel, bionic shoes that augment our legs.

00:35:48: So imagine the e-bike of legs.

00:35:51: There was a recent announcement by Nike.

00:35:55: Nike is collaborating with my company DeFi to introduce to the world this idea of e-bike for legs, bionic shoes, and apparel.

00:36:05: So with this technology, we can augment a human profoundly, their ability to walk and run at lower metabolic rates.

00:36:16: we can reduce muscle skeletal stress, we can increase walking speeds and running speeds and jumping heights.

00:36:23: So this age of exoskeletal augmentation is here today.

00:36:28: It's very exciting.

00:36:29: But it's interesting.

00:36:29: I mean, you are a mountain climber, and I'm befended with Reinhold Messner, whom you know, perhaps.

00:36:37: Yes.

00:36:39: And we discussed a lot about, well, I mean he was the first to climb Everest without oxygen.

00:36:46: so on one side you have this sort of development which says we don't want any extras it's just the classic human doing something.

00:36:56: and on the other side you are saying yeah we have tools and my climbing has become better and so on.

00:37:02: so Isn't that a contradiction in the way that we humans want to be pure instead of computer-assisted, electro-assisted?

00:37:13: Yeah, it just depends on the sporting activity.

00:37:16: So the Olympics is a celebration of what innate biological bodies can do at the extremes.

00:37:23: Other sports, however, are human machine sports, race car driving, cycling.

00:37:30: aspects of the Paralympics are human machine sports.

00:37:33: It's interesting when comparing the Olympics to the Paralympics.

00:37:36: You know, right now the Olympics perhaps is a more broadly acceptable as a spectator sport than the Paralympics.

00:37:45: I think that's going to change.

00:37:46: I think it'll become dull and boarding what normal bodies can do in the context of Bionics.

00:37:53: And in the future, a sporting event like the Paralympics.

00:37:57: will be far more popular than the Olympics.

00:38:00: It'll be like, oh, it's so boring what normal old bodies can do.

00:38:05: And it'll be so exciting what augmented bodies can do in terms of jumping heights and running times and so forth.

00:38:12: So just, you know, I think one of the greatest inventions in human history is the bicycle.

00:38:19: It's a gorgeous technology.

00:38:21: The human machine interaction of the bicycle is profoundly augmentative.

00:38:27: A person can go much faster on a bicycle than their own two legs.

00:38:31: And a human isn't degraded.

00:38:33: The bicycle makes the human better.

00:38:35: The human becomes more fit.

00:38:38: And because of that invention, we now have a whole new sport called cycling.

00:38:43: So as we march into this twenty-first century and we have all these new inventions in the realm of augmentation, powered climbing, powered running, powered basketball, all these capabilities that will emerge.

00:39:00: There'll be new inventions of sports.

00:39:03: So it'll be a very interesting century, not only in terms of human machine augmentation, but in terms of the expansion and the volume of sporting events.

00:39:14: But even there, let me challenge you.

00:39:18: I mean, I take bicycling.

00:39:21: Here in Europe, we have the Tour de France, which is naturally the big race.

00:39:26: And besides, well, the mechanics of it, there has been a lot of discussion on doping.

00:39:33: So you could also use chemistry or biology to enhance your body.

00:39:40: And there are very strict rules which say we don't want to have doping in that sport.

00:39:46: So this is very clear, setting a limit to What we want what we don't want.

00:39:52: I mean you can imagine nowadays bikers driving up the Mont Ventoux in record speed if they are doped.

00:40:00: and you had one famous cyclist from the US who at the end well had to give back his prices because He used this sort of chemical enhancement.

00:40:14: So are you so sure that this means we we need a a change in viewing at ourselves and accepting, okay, we are just bodies, but we could do more.

00:40:28: Do you see this sort of dissonance in the two directions?

00:40:35: I just think as today, we have both types of sporting activities purely innate where there's a minimization of technology and other sporting activities that embrace technology.

00:40:50: I think we'll continue to have both.

00:40:52: So we'll have a very rich ecosystem of sporting events.

00:40:57: It's just going to become more expansive and more augmentative and more interesting as we march into this century.

00:41:06: I want to pick out one idea because as a child, perhaps like many children, I always dreamt of being able to fly.

00:41:15: like a bird.

00:41:16: So this was something, I was really obsessed about it.

00:41:20: I dreamt about it and in my dreams I could fly, but unfortunately not in the physical world.

00:41:25: Now, with all you said, perhaps in the next Paralympics to come, you could see a flying contest of people, you know, with enhanced bodies and wings and so on.

00:41:40: Is that science fiction?

00:41:41: or do you say, ah?

00:41:43: Could be.

00:41:43: No, I think it's possible.

00:41:45: I also, as a young boy, was obsessed with flight and funny story.

00:41:50: My first attempt to augment my body was to fly.

00:41:55: So when I was, I don't know, four years old, I was convinced I could fly and I built, I built wings.

00:42:01: So I took cereal boxes and I put them on my arms and I taped and feathers on the boxes and I, and I leaped from the the family barn, the roof.

00:42:15: We have a parallel.

00:42:17: I was rudely interrupted by the facts of gravity and it came tumbling down to earth.

00:42:24: I do think it's possible to sculpt the human body to link the skeleton and the nervous system to what I call non-anthropomorphic appendages.

00:42:35: So wings would be a non-anthropomorphic appendage.

00:42:38: And I do think, given what we're learning in the neuroscience of embodiment, that the brain can embody something that doesn't look human, like wings.

00:42:49: So I do think as Bonnex is developed and becomes broadly available to the individual, that you'll see this extraordinary outpouring of creativity on what the body is, what the body can be.

00:43:08: Provocative question, to what degree is human weakness also part of our story?

00:43:17: Weakness also in the sense of being vulnerable, having fears because, well, as we just realized, both of us can't fly.

00:43:28: So, to what degree is this something which is part of our being human?

00:43:35: to accept that, well, we are not able to do everything.

00:43:39: I mean, would you agree or would you say this is old stuff, Ranga?

00:43:44: No, I think it's innate.

00:43:47: I think it's deeply human to use technology to bridge the gap from what was the old limitation or weakness to a future that's augmented.

00:44:02: We've been doing it since the beginning of human time.

00:44:06: And, you know, we are profoundly augmented now as humans.

00:44:11: We often forget it's kind of second nature to get into the machine and fly across the Atlantic.

00:44:19: That's just extraordinary.

00:44:21: It's second nature to have these devices, these computers and artificial memories and to speak to people of a great distances, to artificial intelligence, to have brains that artificial brains that extend our own brains and so forth.

00:44:38: These technologies that augment humanity slowly creep in, and it's slow enough that we can adapt and get used to it.

00:44:47: You know, if both you and I were, we had a time machine and we suddenly projected fifty years into the future, we would just be shocked, dumbfounded.

00:44:58: We wouldn't perhaps be able to comprehend or emotionally deal with that future.

00:45:04: where I would imagine that the citizens in that future would just view everything as completely normal.

00:45:12: You remember me of an interview I once saw with Michael Schumacher, who was a very famous race car driver.

00:45:20: And he said, well, you know, because people were wondering why was he able to drive that fast within a rainy track and so on.

00:45:29: And his answer was, I'm part, this car is a part of me.

00:45:34: So I can feel, you know, there's much more to just driving.

00:45:39: It was a part of him.

00:45:40: So you would say that in a few, well, years, decades, who knows, this technology is literally getting a part of us or we are changing, opening up, I don't know, becoming different human beings.

00:45:56: Absolutely.

00:45:56: Yeah, I think.

00:45:59: I believe in a hundred years that humans, as we know them today, will be unrecognizable in our morphology, in our dynamics, in our cognition.

00:46:10: That terrifies most people.

00:46:13: To me, it's quite exciting.

00:46:17: There are, of course, deep ethical concerns that society will have to deal with.

00:46:25: as society introduces these new augmentative technologies.

00:46:28: But I think we'll largely get it right.

00:46:31: I think we'll do the remarkable thing of largely ending unwanted disability in the world, largely ending many diseases.

00:46:43: And really, again, profoundly extend who we are as humans.

00:46:49: Which we already do now, because if I just think of the amount of technology which has been incorporated into our body.

00:46:59: So you have like pacemakers, you know, just go back a hundred years, the heart was the surge of the soul, you know, and now you have a pacemaker, you have a machine, you have artificial hips and so on, or, you know, both of us, we are using tools to enhance our vision.

00:47:19: So, This is sort of development which has been very continuous, but now the big difference, I think so, is that we see more and more intelligence getting in.

00:47:35: In a few years, who is going to control that?

00:47:38: Is it going to be a cloud?

00:47:40: Is it going to be a cloud with ethics?

00:47:44: I have a body and I can't hit you because this would be aggressive.

00:47:50: you have a cloud which looks after us so that crime rates go down, for example.

00:47:56: Yeah, there's a lot of scary future scenarios if we're not extremely careful in how we use these powerful technologies.

00:48:07: Just broadly speaking, again, I mentioned that the bicycle is my favorite invention.

00:48:13: It's my favorite because it augments who we are and it actually makes us better.

00:48:20: It makes us better.

00:48:21: It makes us more fit.

00:48:24: So I think as designers of technologies, we need to be more careful in what we develop and actually ask the question, does this invention deeply serve humanity?

00:48:39: Or does it degrade who we are?

00:48:41: That test, a lot of technologies we use today, shouldn't exist.

00:48:46: A lot of our technologies degrade our ability to think.

00:48:50: They make it stummer.

00:48:52: They make us more sedentary, which introduces disease states and so forth.

00:48:58: So I think we need, as designers, we need to aggressively ask the question, is the technology that we envision that we're developing, does it actually serve humanity and nature?

00:49:12: Is it actually necessary?

00:49:13: Well, you mentioned the bicycle.

00:49:15: I mean, if you look at the history of the bicycle, which was, by the way, invented in Germany, in Karlsruhe, by Karl Dreis, who invented the Drazien.

00:49:28: And this was a replacement for horses because of, you might have read the story of the Pinatubo, the volcano, which sort of changed climate.

00:49:40: And many horses, you know, there was big starvation in Europe and so on.

00:49:44: Horses died.

00:49:45: So Karl Dreis invented something to replace the horse.

00:49:50: So this was invention due to the necessity.

00:49:55: If you look into the future, well, with the world, which should be more sustainable, which should, is there a necessity that we perhaps also have to get into becoming more and more cyborgs.

00:50:11: You know, the bicycle augments and it enhances.

00:50:15: We can go further faster, right?

00:50:18: So that's nice.

00:50:20: And again, it serves humanity.

00:50:23: There's a clear purpose that's beneficial and it makes our bodies better.

00:50:28: So in a modern technology like artificial intelligence, we need to ask, what is the AI that actually makes humans smarter.

00:50:38: There's a profound risk that the AI we're developing will degrade our own biological neural nets.

00:50:46: We become so dependent.

00:50:49: Steve Jobs has this wonderful quote that, the computer is the bicycle, the human mind.

00:50:55: I really hope that will be true.

00:50:57: I really hope that society will develop these powerful neural net platforms.

00:51:06: that interact with our biological neural nets in a really nuanced way that actually allows humanity to flourish instead of degrade.

00:51:18: At the end.

00:51:18: there is a deeper question which is you have man and you have machine and the question is who programs whom?

00:51:26: This could reverse in the sense that, you know, the logics of AI of the machine world slowly starts shaping us into, I don't know, what?

00:51:37: Yeah, again, society, we need to aggressively develop young minds to think about the future of law and policy around augmentation.

00:51:52: It's critically important that we... we get this right.

00:51:58: As you state, you have AI agents, you have synthetic neural nets and biological neural nets, you have AI agents and humans.

00:52:10: For the AI agents to input information and to exert control over our brains is very, very, very scary.

00:52:19: Lots of applications, but very dangerous.

00:52:24: Our biological brains being in control of artificial neural nets, huge profound benefits if we get that right.

00:52:34: Again, we need to push policy and law around these areas aggressively.

00:52:40: We're not doing that, in my opinion, at the speed that's required given the precipitous increase in technology that's happening.

00:52:51: So a call to action.

00:52:53: Well, it's interesting because, you know, the first machine which we strapped onto our body had a heartbeat and it was the watch, you know, the watch which has a heartbeat which we carry with us.

00:53:12: This watch now has been replaced with a smartphone.

00:53:17: So we have a tendency already of, you know, Looking at us as, well, extra somatic in that sense, still tools which are part of us.

00:53:29: I mean, when my children were young, I mean, if I would, you know, take away a smartphone from one of my children, it was like taking away an organ, you know.

00:53:40: So it is already there, something happening.

00:53:45: I ask myself, is this, first of all, it's fascinating.

00:53:50: But will we perhaps see some development which is going to go in the exact opposite direction?

00:53:57: Why do I ask the question?

00:53:59: if I look at food?

00:54:01: Food nowadays, I mean, the chemistry industry could produce everything, you know, with every flavor, with every color, any vanilla pudding, which has never seen vanilla.

00:54:13: But there is... I call it sort of, you know, this bipolarity in human evolution, where on one side you could do it, but then you see that there, suddenly, people are very picky about, well, natural food and no ingredients and no... Will this sort of happen not only on the food sector, but even, well, on the enhancement factor?

00:54:38: Yeah, I mean, there was a... Looking into the past, there was a farming... Revolution where the mass production of food was thought to be solved But many potentially harmful chemicals and practices to our physiology were introduced and now there's a backpedaling and Organics and so forth and local food production and so forth, you know, just like social media, you know Yeah, this this technology was was delivered at a fast-paced humanity, and now we're seeing, oh, there's many detrimental ways that that is impacting humanity.

00:55:24: And hopefully there'll be a circling back and a redesign and so forth.

00:55:28: As the technologies get more powerful, for example, AI, I think we need to just not just send technology out and do these global experiments on prototypes.

00:55:41: but be a little more careful because the damage could be so great potentially that we can't reverse and redesign and improve the design.

00:55:55: So yeah, I call to action this idea of a humanistic design approach where we deeply ask the question, will this lead to human flourishing?

00:56:08: What are the risks?

00:56:09: and how do we from the onset, develop technologies and systems and architectures that are in service of humanity.

00:56:20: I quote you.

00:56:22: I wrote it down.

00:56:24: You say we're soft and squishy, we're chemistry, electricity and mechanics, not robots.

00:56:31: Bionics must embody what is dear to us, emotion, passion and compassion.

00:56:40: who is going to decide on what is good or not good, perhaps even with a big variety of cultures.

00:56:46: I mean, in the US, you might decide on something which is good, whereas in China, something else is good.

00:56:52: So will we see even cultural diversification in a certain way?

00:56:58: We should, absolutely.

00:57:00: Local communities should be able to design and construct and reflect their own cultures on.

00:57:09: the technology.

00:57:12: You just hinted at a point of augmentation.

00:57:21: A human computer augmentation, as we've experienced, our brains are good at certain things, but not good at all things.

00:57:30: The calculator enables us to multiply very large numbers together, which most human brains are not able to do.

00:57:38: It's very important that when we mesh technology with humanity, that we enhance what humans are good at, and we augment humans with what we're not good at.

00:57:56: With AI and robotics, it's very interesting.

00:57:59: It's a deep question of what does humanity have to offer in that interaction?

00:58:07: Potential to love, empathy, currently the potential to make extraordinary intellectual leaps.

00:58:15: You know, the point was taken if you built a large AI model in nineteen oh one, the model will not come up with the Einsteinian theory of relativity.

00:58:29: It just wouldn't.

00:58:30: So we humans still have this capacity to make these extraordinary leaps forward.

00:58:36: So again, getting that augmentation, that interaction right, where the design part of the world enhances things that we are incapable of doing, but the humanity is still introducing what we hold dear, what's special about us, what's special about humans.

00:59:00: And together, one plus one is equal to millions and millions of capacity.

00:59:05: But in your equation, perhaps the feeling, perhaps the illusion of human control will be very important.

00:59:17: So as long as we believe we are in control, even if we are not, this could be very crucial.

00:59:27: So we don't want to be dominated by machines.

00:59:30: Yeah, and it's interesting.

00:59:32: With the rapid advance of AI, AI will be certainly more intelligent than all of us very, very soon.

00:59:41: In many dimensions or metrics of intelligence, that's already true.

00:59:46: So you have a capability, a synthetic being or organism, if you will, that's far superior in terms of intellectual capacity to any human.

01:00:00: Throughout history, more intelligent things dominate less intelligent things.

01:00:05: So we have to be very careful in that relationship to make sure humanity still has autonomy and authority.

01:00:14: I would challenge you because, you know, in my childhood in India, I saw Mahuta and elephants.

01:00:21: Elephants are much stronger than human beings, but this small Mahuta sitting on the elephant was able to control him.

01:00:28: So Perhaps it's just the illusion of control, although these systems might be much more performant than we are.

01:00:37: Who knows?

01:00:39: We are slowly coming to our end.

01:00:41: If I would visit you in twenty years, let's suppose in twenty years both of us are still robust enough to- We

01:00:50: absolutely are.

01:00:51: A hundred percent.

01:00:52: You will be in any case as your legs are getting updated and all the rest.

01:00:57: I hope me too.

01:00:59: what will be sort of the reality within the field of bionics, of, well, protetics, but even more exoskeletons and so on.

01:01:12: So what words, you know, perhaps we are discussing things which will be real by then?

01:01:18: In twenty years, I hope to see a vast improvement in society's ability to... mitigate or completely eliminate unwanted disability.

01:01:30: So a person with amputation will be as good or better than a person with innate biology, extending across paralysis, spinal cord injury, stroke, and even going into areas of brain conditions like severe depression and anxiety and so forth.

01:01:51: And then beyond kind of that therapeutic use of technology, I hope we in twenty years see critical examples of augmenting humanity in ways that, again, really enhance our flourishing, that increase human diversity, that increase our autonomy, and so forth.

01:02:19: Again, I think we'll largely get it right, but we have a lot of work to do in terms of of the laws and policies around the emerging augmentation technologies, whether it's AI or bonnick limbs.

01:02:33: So exciting future and I really look forward to seeing you in twenty years.

01:02:39: Yes, so do I. It was a pleasure as last time also this time and just imagining a world where disability disappears in the classical sense is already quite a challenge.

01:02:56: and well, we have a date in twenty years.

01:03:00: Thank you for being with us and naturally, thank you for listening to our podcast, A Taste of Bionics brought to you by Otto Bock.

01:03:10: And if you enjoyed today's episode, well, as it is usual, subscribe and

01:03:16: share.

01:03:17: Thank you, Hugh.

01:03:18: Thank you so much.

01:03:19: Cheers.