It's What's On the Inside That Counts

A Speculative Artifact on the Challenges of Prosthetics

May 11, 2024

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by Charles Rosenbauer

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human hand”

Biology is often a far greater engineer than humans, with a four billion year headstart on us. There are a tremendous number of things that biological systems can do that we have no way of replicating and often the best tactic we have for trying to close this gap is biomimicry; plagiarizing the solutions that nature has spent billions of years iterating on is often much easier than trying to solve them from scratch.

This isn’t to say that progress can’t be made, but that we should be mindful of the difficulty of the problem here.

There are many proposed technologies that have failed to pan out - perpetual motion and cold fusion for example - and have gained a reputation for being dead ends, with the few who continue to work on them being viewed as eccentric cranks. Because of the difficulty of integrating deeply with biology, we expect that certain aspects of biotech may over time gain similar reputations. At the same time, some biotech works and solves important problems, even today, and so a complete dismissal is unlikely.

For the vignette, we’re imagining that the insult “Pygmalions” is given to people obsessed with replicating the human form against this common wisdom, but they are more tolerated if they contribute to prosthetics. Prosthetics isn't a gigantic market though and competition in the space is tough while funding is lacking, which perhaps amplifies eccentricities and bold claims.

The vignette takes the form of an off-topic discussion on an anime forum.

Deepfakes and AI image manipulation have been around for long enough that they are accepted and even a common tool, but there are expectations around where and when it should be used, and what counts as deception. This ad perhaps falls in a gray area. “AI” is also a term that’s no longer used for this kind of thing (exactly what the term AI refers to has changed over time, it usually tracks trendy frontier technologies), and it’s gained a much more mundane term. Deep learning isn’t even used anymore, in favor of other techniques, we’re assuming something based on ising models. Image generation is called “isefakes” and edited images are called “isefilters”.

Perhaps there’s debate over whether the prosthetics company mentioned even exists? Their website (or whatever replaces websites) is pretty empty, mostly just promotional.

Panel gaps on her limbs are believed to be recent tattoos to go deeper into transhuman aesthetic.

The “traditional” or “humanist” viewpoint is nuanced; human engineering has a role and healthcare is accepted, but we must accept that biology is a far greater engineer and that humans have a lot of catching up to do. Transhuman hubris is discouraged, humans have their place and aren’t going anywhere for a while. The importance of medical intervention is acknowledged and respected, but is taken with some caution.

The model was in an accident a couple months earlier. Most people believed it was the end of her career, but she is now returning and showing off her post-surgery look. She’s boasting custom-made artificial organs.

The model's name is Cathy-Anne, she now goes by Cathy-Anode (a pun on cathode/anode), also boasts that it symbolizes her “turning negatives into positives”. One user argues that this is too much of a coincidence and must have been planned from the beginning. Other users argue “haven't you seen the accident photos? She's lucky to be alive, there's no way this could have been faked.” An accusation is made that the accident photos could have been faked.

Artificial alternatives exist for most organs, but they’re generally considered inferior and the decent “nanotech” ones are expensive and can take over a year to manufacture. One user argues that the only way her organs could be custom would be if her accident were planned years in advance.

Someone speculates that the organs may not be fully custom; instead a custom, printed frame with stock subcomponents added in.

Artificial organs often struggle with complex interactions with biology; artificial livers are particularly hard, and organs often don’t listen to the body’s commands very well. Some narrow augmentations are possible, someone remarks that they have a liver implant for breaking down alcohol and that it’s impossible to do business in Japan without a very good one.

The long-term approach that works best is to grow new organs, artificial organs are a temporary placeholder because new organs take a while.

The model is scaling back her public image after the accident but is trying to raise awareness for prosthetics, promote dignity for people with such medical interventions. There’s some debate over how genuine she is, but most people are at least cautiously optimistic.

Concept Art

This vignette has been a rollercoaster for the Possibilia Team. The artist for the vignette we had planned for this week got sick, and our replacement Fiverr artist took three days to send us some particularly bad AI art covered in his watermark.

We scrambled on publishing day to make a quality vignette from scratch by repurposing some old art from our graphic designer, Andres Osorio. We’ve been especially happy with how it turned out and we hope you enjoyed it as well.

Here is some of the original concept art behind it: