Pistorius, Paralympics and the Singularity

Being both South African, and a Mechanical Engineer, I have been rather fascinated by the Paralympic Games for 2 reasons other than sport - firstly, for the inspiration that South African athlete Oscar Pistorius (above) has provided - especially this year when he competed in the Olympics as well - and secondly for the incredible engineering that has gone into so much of the paralympic athletes' equipment - from Oscar's blades, through to the ultralight wheelchairs, bikes/prosthetics systems etc. Its mainly the engineeering and materials science that is improving, but also the better understanding of design has come on in the last decade or so.

Now earlier this week there was a kerfuffle when Brazilian sprinter Alan Olivier beat Oscar for gold on the 200m run, by switching to 10cm longer blades for these London Paralympic races (as I understand it, Oscar was limited to the ones he wore during the Olympics). But that wasn't what really interested me. Rather, I was interested by the real lesson here - the rapid and massive performane increase Alan got just by adjusting the technology. Who needs drugs?

I've been following the debate whether to allow Oscar to compete in the Olympics with interest over the last few years, at the moment the view on whether modern technology beats good old human evolution is divided. But blade technology is improving rapidly - technology cycles run a lot faster than evolutionary ones, after all, and still has barely started to be influenced by the more modern materials technologies. Where will smart materials and nanotechnology take us by 2022, and by then will onboard digital controllers be used to optimise athletic device performance as they do for high end prosthetic limbs? (currently they are not allowed in the Paralympics as some athletes cannot afford them, but as prices fall....)

Add to this the speed of advances in digital, robotics and materials sciences in the last decade. Also, the self-optimising feedback loop is increasingly becoming a consumer led industry as the Quantified Self movement takes off.

(For the above reasons, I think the "acceptable technology to race with" issue is going to become increasingly inevitable as the technology advances - its a sign of innovation vitality overall, although frustrating for the athletes, and will have to be sorted by tighter definitions of what can and can't be used in races in future).

And while at the moment, all these elite sports devices (and much of the rest of these emerging technologies) are expensive, the history of technology can be written as a learning curve - things get better and cheaper over time.

Putting all this together was when the Technology trend predictor in me started to get interested.

Now, while I think a lot of the digital technology hoo-ha around the Singularity Intelligence event horizon is a lot farther than they think, I believe the micro-processors, the mechanical and electronic engineering - the mechatronics - and the biofeedback systems are coming up on us very fast.

When will the first Parlaympics 100m sprinter run faster than the contemporary Olympics 100m sprinters? The 200m? The 400m, 1500m, 5000m? The High Jump? The Long jump? Its going to happen, the engineering trajectory of these devices predicts it, so the only question is when.....and when that happens, then what happens?

And what happens when this sort of technology starts to hit the mass-market? In fact, we are already augmenting our reality in all sorts of ways - teeth and plastic surgery, for example. The future extended phenotype is already here, just unevenly distriibuted. But this will be small beer compared to what will come in the next few decades, I think. Going down the list of who can afford it from elite atheletes, to the military, to rich patients, to early adopters, to the early mass market also is instructive in thinking about likely requirements, developments and timings.

So, for example how long before soldiers wear next generation blades in action to increase their speed? Before prosthetic technology iis integrated into exoskeletons for industrial use? (There's no doubt that military research will push this area as hard, if not harder, than medical or athletic research).

When wiill people recogniseably become supermen by becoming cybermen?