Re: Made-to-be-Borged Posthumans

"Mark L. Fergerson" <mfergerson1@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:YEtvg.2669$Mz3.1989@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Logan Kearsley wrote:
Suppose you're designing a posthuman with the intention of making at
extremely easy to add cyborg-bits to. What would it come out like?

ISTM you're trying to think strictly organically (which makes some
sense given the subject) but if it were me I'd also think
engineering-wise. That is, what sort of environment(s) will they be
working in, and what are they supposed to be able to do? See, an
engineer thinks ends first, then selects from a range of available means
to get there. So you're gonna have to go from both ends toward a desired
middle, and you have to decide where that middle is. Trouble is, if your
neoBorgs are going to be anywhere as versatile as an unmodified human is
on Earth's surface (much less elsewhere), that middle will be a
constantly moving target, neh?

Well, presumably they won't be, without their machine-bits. The whole point
of cyborging is that the machine bits can make you as versatile as you want.

Again, ISTM the organism is therefore best seen as an unspecialized
(except for the connectivity aspect) substrate to which stuff is plugged
in, and should be capable of unassisted survival.

Agreed on both points.

I figure you'd want to minimize the amount of surgery needed to attach
new
parts, and make the body especially receptive to whatever surgery is
absolutely necessary- minimize rejection of implants, chance of
infection
where bits pass through the skin, rapid healing and all that. Bone
naturally
binds to titanium- perhaps the immune system could be programmed to
ignore
certain classes of artificial materials, and arrange for
skin/muscle/etc. to
fuse with certain structural materials.

For a constantly controlled environment, fine, but you're describing
an immune system so compromised that your neoBorgs probably wouldn't do
so well on a "wild" planetary surface especially an alien one with bugs
our immune systems have never seen. FTM considering the mold and fungus

How so? If you just program the immune system to ignore non-toxic metals and
plastics, it should still do just fine against bacteria and viruses and
stuff, no?

issues on the ISS, maybe not there either. The immune system will need
to be _upgraded_ to a more robust status than ours. Be easier to
restrict implant interface materials to what an ordinary immune system
already ignores, and arrange for the body's habit of "encapsulating"
foreign bodies to be managed so the connectors etc. don't get plugged
up. In Trek Borgs, I wanted to see a specialized form of scar tissue
anchoring all those through-skin hoses and stuff.

Encapsulating scar tissue sounds like a good idea. Although, perhaps not too
good in some cases, like, say, with a pacemaker- don't want extra scar
tissue growing all around the heart.

Side note; are you proposing a single-tier society where everybody's
Borged, or a two-or-more-tier society with frinst altered professional
spacers and normal passengers? "Don't put that in your soup, that's

Either one, I suppose. I was thinking at the time I wrote the top post of an
all-cyborg society, but my posthuman soalr system is quite vast enough to
contain lots of two-or-more-tier societies as well.

'spacer salt' and will kill you!" How do they get this stuff in an
unfamiliar environment, eat rocks that "taste good" the way we get
ordinary NaCl? Maybe special gengineered metal-rich foods?

Ideally, they wouldn't need any extra weird stuff. All of the computational
and electronic stuff ought to be doable with neurons, organic
semiconductors, carbon nanotubes, etc. so that lots of metals aren't
necessary.

As for attaching bits with minimal or no surgery, how about horn pads
for
screwing things to? Where might those be most conveniently placed? It's
been
shown that electrode arrays can be used to send extra sensory
information to
the brain via the skin and tongue, although at low bandwidth- how about
designing special skin patches specifically for attaching artificial
sensors
without invasive surgery (just a bit of non-toxic glue)? I was thinking
of
arrays of organic semiconductors (some version of melanin could be used
for
that), wired up to extra 'empty' sections of the cortex- never hook
anything
up, and they'll eventually get taken over for other purposes, but glue
on
some extra sensors and the extra sensory cortex wires itself up to deal
with
the data. Could the same thing work in reverse for controlling
artificial
limbs? Design some extra sections of motor cortex that are just linked
to
organic semiconductor arrays in the skin instead of muscles?

Higher-bandwidth=closer to the brain, same as is done naturally.

Also, faster signal speed. Engineered nerve-wires that actually conduct
electrons, rather than using ion cascades.

Modified by priority of course; our nasal sensors have priority (in the
sense their inputs hook in closer to the "core processor") because
they're our oldest sense. Everything else goes through a lot more
preprocessing before the conscious mind gets the data.

OTOH you could go with distributed processing, with "slave brains"
(larger-than-normal ganglia) in various places to do pre-processing
before handing data off to the "main brain", also for extra data
storage/memory. They wouldn't permanently specialize themselves the way
normal brains do; just what you need for learning specialized "reflexes"
to operate various add-ons. FTM they can be easily reconfigurable so you
could download those specialized reflexes at need, writing over old ones.

That'd require some way of designing easily reprogrammable bits of brain.
Not too easy to do, it seems to me. Perhaps there's some way of designing a
blob of neurons / organic semiconductors to act as RAM, and another blob
that acts like a processor and can't rewire itself like the main brain can.
Put 'em together, and you could have bio-von-Neumann machines lining the
spinal cord.

Much easier to just add unspecialized bits of brain tissue that rewire
themselves for new inputs/outputs as needed, although that would be slower
to adapt.

I love the horn pads; easy to arrange for genetically. AFAIK the
highest-bandwidth cell types we have are rods 'n' cones, so combine the
mechanical aspect of pads with the connectivity function; they'd have
roughly centered within them "retinas" prolly along with as you say
below outgoing "power pins" from eel-organs. No obvious reason to have
incoming power connectors, but fast-response photocytes (damn
cephalopods keep butting in) to "talk" to add-ons will be useful.

Perhaps one could take photosynthesis machinery, strip out the photosystems,
and replace them with leads to an electrical power source. Then you'd need
incoming power connectors so that the cyborg could recharge from an external
power source, without having to eat.

Is there any particular reason that optical communication would be much
better than electrical? Why not take a cone cell, strip out the opsin, and
replace it with a nanowire? As for outgoing communication, for talking to
the add-ons, it seems that you could either go with the sort of
bioluminescence mechanisms currently extant in nature, which would be rather
slow, or used organic LEDs, in which case you might as well just get rid of
the LED and extend the nanowire that control it through the skin.

There's gonna be a strong market in customizing the connectors on the
hardware end because no two people will have the same connector
arrangement/spacing etc. No; how about complex two-way "eyes" centered
in the pads that can focus on the optical fiber arrays in standardized
connectors, and small muscles to help the "power pins" plug in?

Like, say, compound eyes where every facet has both rod cells and OLEDs?
How exactly would you arrange for muscles to help hold the power pins? I
think perhaps my idea of what you mean by "power pin" and what your idea of
a "power pin" is are somewhat different things.
(Reads below)
Ah! So, like a ring of spines that closes together to hold onto a connector
in the middle?

Biggest problem I see with add-ons is the mechanical issues; our
natural limbs are integrated into the skeleton to distribute loads
within the totality's structural limits. I wouldn't want to say replace
my left arm with a jackhammer because it'd shake my shoulder apart. You
don't just bolt stuff on anywhere; you need structural support, meaning
they'll need to be anchored firmly but compliantly to bone.

Perhaps a common first explant (as opposed to an implant, you see) would be
a support structure screwed into the spine and ribs to help mount further
add-ons.

It would be nice if all of the artificial bits didn't require their own
power supplies. How about adding banks of muscles such as electric eels
have, or some other specialized organ for generating electrical
voltages?
Again, wire it up to organic semiconductor arrays in the skin, and just
glue
on the electrical leads for the cyborg bits.

Don't see why not, except for the (hard to make conductive) glue
part. Maybe metal-rich end connector organ "pins" grown from
noble-metal-rich "spacer salt"? Shiny spots on the horn plates?

Providing power would be a bit more complicated than sending data. Chitin
spines covered in conductive nanotubes / organic semiconductors?

At the moment, I've got this image in my head of something like a cross
between a human fetus and a seahorse. Proportionately oversized head to
hold
extra brain for dealing with lots of extra artificial sensors and limbs,
with the body reduced to little more than a life support and connector
system for the brain. Horn plates running down the spine and ribs. We
don't
want the creature to be completely helpless without artificial bits-
presumably it has to be born at some point, and grow up a bit, so keep
eyes
(but how complex? maybe we should do away with mammalian eyes and just
put
in a simple fixed-lens system, just enough to hold it over till it gets
artificial ones, made-to-order) and arms with hands, but get rid of the
legs- they'd just get in the way of replacement, and we want to minimize
the
amount of surgery to be done. Long, muscular abdomen filled with
electrical
organs. But where would be good places for input/output arrays?
Presumably
the head and neck would be covered with sensory-input arrays, but it
might
be nice to have a few scattered over the rest of the body. And what
about
the electrical power arrays? A positive strip all down one side and a
negative down the other, perhaps?

Any comments / other ideas?

Keep the base organism relatively unspecialized, as in able to get by
absent all add-ons.

The add-on connectors can _be_ extra (or the only) short-focus eyes,
and could prolly default-modify themselves to 20-20 general-purpose
"normal" eyes over a short time if they weren't connected to anything.
They'll need "eyelids" to prevent accidentally shorting the power pins
(no unprotected strips). Maybe go with muscled and innervated horn
"fingers" with metallized inner faces to grip connectors/make electrical
contact? They'd look more like ornate barnacles with eyes inside. Will
need one specialized optical accessory cortex for primary data
reduction/multiplexing per each.

The power pins could be the eyelids- shape them like wedges of a circle to
close over the central eye, and put non-conductive horn right at the edges
so they don't short each other.

Thing is, barnacle-eyes with integrated I/O and power connectors are much
more complex and more limited than having separate pads for I/O and power
spread over the body. Presumably, they would all carry the same voltage, and
there's only a limited number of them in pre-defined spots (and it needs to
be worked out how the electric organs are connected up to the various
barnacle-eyes), whereas with arrays in the skin you could add as many new
connections as you like until you run out of surface area.
Perhaps the body could be programmed to grow a new barnacle eye as needed in
response to some primer chemical or something. Easiest to do that if the
eyes are just for I/O, and power supply remains separate.

If injured or otherwise unable to reach techy bits, open
barnacle-eye, focus on add-on's input, tell it to crawl toward you on
battery power.

That might be a bit of a stretch. It would require higher output, extremely
good focusing ability beyond what is required for normal hook-up, and the
ability for the eye to form images and the brain to rapidly switch over to
image-processing mode when a barnacle-eye is disconnected.

Redesign the legs as arms with hands for emergencies or downtime (per
Lois McMaster Bujold's "quaddies"). Can walk either upright or
quadrupedally, or brachiate regardless of gravity. All joints
double-jointed if they spend much time in zero-gee. Circulatory system
modified also per need.

Being able to walk upright or quadrupedally on arm-legs is probably asking a
bit much. How about just restricting it to quadrupedalism in gravity?

Barnacle-eyes on skull and neck, shoulder/hips, all four elbows and
wrists near protruding bone/horn spurs to anchor limb extensions. Don't
forget ittle tiny cranial lumps for the accessory cortexes.

Slave brains in upper chest and lower abdomen. Extra bone cages to
protect them.

Advanced digestive system to supply metallic stuff for regrowing
power pins when needed.

Oh, and completely genetically incompatible with "normals" in case
of, um, unforeseen interpersonal events. ;>)

No normals in my universe. Just lots of wildly different posthumans.

-l.
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