Science is putting a human brain in a robot body and nothing will ever be the same

In Superhumanity: Part 1, we reported on the Enhanced Games, an athletic competition that will be staged next May in Las Vegas for a willing contingent of chemically assisted swimmers, sprinters, and weightlifters. Even the last-place finishers will get a paycheque. World record-breakers will be awarded US$1 million. The Enhanced Games may or may not portend a new era of superhuman competition. Feedback from the elites who oversee world sport has been predictably harsh, while others hail this assault on Olympian hypocrisy and defend a person’s choice to jab and juice as she or he pleases.

In Part 2, our attention turns to the Age of Supermachinery that will leave none of us unchanged.

Ten years ago, the Huffington Post asked a selection of science-fiction writers to imagine the Olympic Games several decades hence.

“Someday,” an author named Max Gladstone responded, “a human mind in a robot body will run the 100-metre dash in a second. But for a long time, we’ll say that doesn’t count.”

That “long time” is about to expire.

As evidence, we look back to April 2022, when a small plane thudded and crumpled short of the runway at Springbank, Alta., just off the berm of the Trans-Canada Highway between Calgary and Banff. The propeller was sheared off and the wings of the Mooney M20K dredged themselves into the brown prairie turf.

One pilot died, and 22-year-old Megan Gallagher — a flight instructor who had come down from Fort St. John, B.C., for a check-out ride in the Mooney — well, as James Taylor once sang, Megan, “the plans they made put an end to you” as well, at least as an active, fully-functioning woman.

“Don’t get your hopes up on walking again. It’s very unlikely with your level of injury,” Global News reported back then, quoting Gallagher’s doctors.

But the physicians, born in an earlier century, were too pessimistic; they dealt in nerves and tendons, not in graphite and gears.

Three years after the crash at Springbank, I am in Southeast Calgary with the same Megan Gallagher, watching the epoch of Supermachinery arise. Headless and battery-powered, purposeful and confident, the contraption unfolds itself from the sitting position and stands upright and obedient, awaiting instructions from a hand-held remote.

Take a woman whose legs no longer function, or a striving young survivor of unspeakable tragedy, and strap her or him in, and you have Max Gladstone’s prophecy fulfilled: a human brain in a robot’s bones.

The machine I have come to see, designed and built in British Columbia, is called the XoMotion . It costs US$250,000 and gets a million smiles to the gallon. There is a woman in Vancouver who has taken more than 250,000 steps in this self-levitating, self-supporting, self-balancing, two-footed prototype — one of the most advanced and agile “exoskeletons” ever engineered. She fully expects tomorrow’s XoMotion to jump, race and dance. We’ll hear from her in a moment.

For the intrepid and cheerful Megan Gallagher, and for the other spinal-cord injury patients who have used the XoMotion as part of their slow return to verticality, just the first step alone was transformational.

“It was a little scary having a device move your body, not with your own will, right?” Gallagher tells me at the Synaptic Neurorehabilitation Centre, one of the first clinics in Canada to receive the XoMotion. “I mean, it’s hard enough to have your body break and to not be able to use your body, but then to have a device come in and move your body for you is pretty scary.

“I would say it’s kind of like a carnival ride, the anticipation and waiting as it’s standing me up, right? And it happens pretty quickly.

“I was able to give my dad a hug standing up. I was able to play catch with my mom. So, a lot of stuff that I’m not able to do.

“It’s still a little weird, but it feels very secure. If anything, it’s maybe too secure and not in a bad way, because it moves you in the exact proper patterning that you’re supposed to walk. It’s awesome because I don’t feel like I’m going to fall over.

“I think they have three speeds on it. They had me doing the fastest one, and it is weird. It got me thinking of sci-fi movies and how I could go racing into battle with robot legs, but it felt pretty cool. I haven’t moved that fast in three years. But it does feel quite unnatural.”

It’s not natural. It’s a human mind in a robot body.

“It has helped me become, I don’t want to say fully human, but mechanically more human,” she says. “And I feel like we have already gotten so removed from humanity with our phones and now, are we all going to be cyborgs?”

The answer is yes.

Twenty years ago, a congenitally colour-blind young Catalonian named Neil Harbisson found a surgeon who was willing to drill a hole in his skull and implant a sensor that can convert colour temperature into an auditory signal. Beep-beep for red, bloop-bloop for green, and so on. It even works where human eyes can’t: in the infrared and ultraviolet zones of the spectrum.

Soon afterward, Harbisson, who is a dual U.K.-Spanish citizen, went to renew his travel documents at the British passport office and was told that applicants with metallic antennae sprouting from their craniums were not eligible.

Unable to simply unscrew his hardwired appendage like a light bulb, Harbisson protested and eventually won his case, thereby earning the privilege of calling himself the first cyborg to be issued a passport. A popular TED-Talker and painter of portraits tinted by the hues he hears, he has been dining out on his trans-sensory uniqueness ever since. In the ensuing decades, his device has been upgraded to receive phone calls and connect to the Web.

In contemplating our future as flesh-and-metal hybrids, I thought it would be instructional to speak with Cyborg One.

“Do you consider yourself a superhuman?” I ask Harbisson, who resides in Barcelona.

“I don’t like the term ‘super’ because it feels like it means superior, and that’s not necessarily true,” he replies. “If you have more senses, organs or intelligence, that doesn’t mean you’re better. You might have new abilities but still not use them in an intelligent or meaningful way.”

“Did you do this for money?” I wonder, lucre being the overt reason for the Enhanced Games.

“For me, no,” Harbisson says. “My aim has never been to enhance the body itself but to expand the brain — specifically, to add new senses. The word ‘enhancement’ in my case is about expanding human perception, creating new ways to interact with reality. The Enhanced Games are an interesting idea but not necessarily aligned with my philosophy, which is about perception, not performance.

“Breaking the 100-metre record,” he says, “depends on why you’re running. The reason behind using that speed matters — it doesn’t automatically make it ‘better.’”

Most of us need an exterior antenna like we need a hole in the head, but Harbisson was hardly satisfied with just one bit of aftermarket hardware. He has had a sort of compass implanted in his knee that senses the direction he is travelling — “I don’t need to see the sun to know where I am” — and he says he is working on a so-called Solar Crown that would follow the sun in its daily arc. He calls this “an organ-in-progress” and explains that “it creates a point of heat that takes 24 hours to move around my head, allowing me to feel the passage of time and the Earth’s rotation. It could eventually help modulate jet lag.

“These implants aren’t about having a ‘better’ body — they’re about having a different perception of reality.”

Harbisson tells me about a woman he knows who had a seismic detector embedded in her leg, and someone else with a device that can measure cosmic rays.

“I think about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in practice,” he says, “using new organs that allow us to  feel time differently, the way we create optical illusions visually.”

“Will we all be cyborgs?” I pose.

“Yes, I think so, in a way,” Harbisson says. “All the code we’ve developed is open source. Anyone can recreate the sensory organs we’ve built. With AI, it’s becoming easier and cheaper.

“There’s still so much to explore. Technology opens up endless possibilities for perception. Merging with chips will soon feel old-fashioned. We’ll likely print new organs using our own DNA.

“In the future, we’ll modify our DNA to add new senses. We’ll use our own body’s energy to power implants, perhaps through turbines inside our blood vessels, removing the need for external electricity.

“There will be a diversity of humans,” says Harbisson, “some who merge with technology and some who don’t. What we call ‘diversity’ will expand. There will be many coexisting perceptions of reality. Just like now, when we switch between online and off-line worlds.”

It was clear from the arrival of the first XoMotion at the Synaptic rehab centre in Calgary that there was one young man who was a perfect candidate to try it out.

This was Ryan Straschnitzki, who was just turning 19 when his Humboldt Broncos ’ team bus was rammed by a tractor-trailer at a Saskatchewan crossroads in 2018, leaving him paralyzed below the waist and 10 of his beautiful teammates dead (16 people were killed in the crash including two coaches, an athletic therapist, statistician, radio announcer and bus driver).

Now there was a new machine that, though powerless to cleanse away the grief and the remembrance, could at least raise him for a moment from his two-wheeled life.

“I forgot how tall I was,” the young man beamed the first time the robot stood him up. A minute later he was throwing a football and stickhandling a plastic puck across the clinic floor.

“It was an incredible experience,” Straschnitzki tells me now. “I never had the opportunity to stand and use a hockey stick normally again.

“Words can’t describe the feeling. It helped me remain hopeful for the future. There were instances I thought I would be able to walk again. It’s been a while. It kind of gave me confidence. It gave me a bit of power back.”

This is only the infancy of the Age of Supermachinery. Even the XoMotion, though it strides more smoothly than Frankenstein’s monster, is a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal compared to what someday will be.

“The opportunities that could come from this in the future are endless,” Straschnitzki predicts. “Imagine running, playing soccer, being able to be an athlete again.”

“I did not think that this was going to happen in my lifetime,” says physiotherapist Uyen Nguyen, the co-founder and executive director of the Synaptic clinic. “I used to read all the medical books and the research and still think it was science fiction. I thought that we were so far away from having it in clinical use.”

“When you look at the XoMotion, what do you see?” I ask her.

“I see possibilities, I see potential and I see progress,” she replies. “It’s really exciting for me to see this in my lifetime, where the person cannot do it and the machine is doing it for them.

“From the beginning of time, humans found that our physical abilities diminished over our lifetimes based on all the external factors of health, socioeconomics, disease, all those different things. We found that the mind can outlast the body. Science, though, is actually closing the gap and we are probably looking at a state where the physical part is going to outlast the mental and the cognitive side of humanity.

“Ryan and I joke about him being able just to go get groceries and gas at Costco. That’s like the epitome and the ultimate. It’s a really uncontrolled environment. There are people in carts everywhere. And knowing that you can do that with confidence and safety — for Ryan to compete athletically in this is one thing, but it will be more meaningful for him to be able to get gas by himself.”

This is the first generation in clinical use. Nguyen imagines Generation Five. “It runs, it climbs, it jumps. It would be lighter, it would be stronger, right? It would have more degrees of movement. Maybe by Generation Five some of this will be controlled cognitively. Or just taking away the hand control, because not everybody has hand function. Could we voice-control this?”

“A human mind in a robot body will run the 100-metre dash in a second …” I quote.

“Does it count for who wins the Olympic 100 metres? I don’t know,” says Nguyen.

“I think the physical and the soul of humanity are two very, very different things.”

In April of this year, 21 soulless automatons and more than 10,000 members of Team Homo sapiens competed in a half-marathon through the streets of Beijing . It was said to be the first time that robots went mano-a-metal with actual people over such a punishing distance.

The humans won.

“Stumbling and overheating, most humanoid robots fail to finish half-marathon in Beijing,” headlined WIRED.

“Chinese robots ran against humans. They lost by a mile,” gloated CNN.

“Victory tastes like lithium,” riffed RUN.

“Chinese humanoid robots get reality check,” reported the Asia Times.

Here’s another reality check: When I lived and worked in Beijing 40 years ago, there were more horses in the streets than private motor cars, an antiquity invisible and risible to the millions of hard-driven Chinese who are growing up in the epoch of Supermachinery.

“Generally, these are interesting demonstrations, but they don’t demonstrate much regarding the utility of useful work,” a professor named Fern from Oregon State University was quoted by the television network France 24, remarking on the half-marathon.

Similar ridicule often follows other inhuman competitions that Chinese engineers have been staging to showcase their machines, including boxing matches and soccer games that send audiences into fits of hilarity each time a robot’s rheostats catch fire or its ankles ankylose.

“Several had to be carried off the field on stretchers by staff, adding to the realism of the experience,” The Associated Press noted of one football match in June.

But it is early in the game. Imagine if that race was not 13 miles, but 1,300. Robot keep running. Robot don’t care.

“Your accountant, your masseuse and your butler will service your needs via a symphonic confluence of circuits and hydraulics,” author Patrick Hemstreet predicted in that Huffington Post article, back in 2016. “Lightning-fast computation and enhanced processor precision will ensure all pertinent tasks are performed efficiently and free of error.

“But I still want to see humans interact with other humans to demonstrate abilities gained through training and talent alone. To see members of our species blow past seemingly insurmountable barriers is the greatest form of entertainment. Hearing a new story or marveling at the creativity of a new artist is an experience that is firmly enshrined in flesh and bone. This exchange between souls is, dare I say, sacred and will never be yielded to non-sentient metallic automatons.

“When the day comes that we are surrounded by walking IBMs and Apples, we will come to a greater appreciation of what it means to be human, warts and all. Think of it, the sanctity of sportsmanship (and all human endeavour) resurrected and cherished.”

So, there are three finalists competing in the race for the future: the man fortified by wonder drugs; the woman re-engineered by wearable machines; and the stubborn natural clinging tight onto whatever, for better or for worse, his gods and his genetics gave him.

Which of the three are you betting on?

In Part 1 of this series, I asked Aron D’Souza, the ultra-confident creator of the Enhanced Games, if he envisions a time when people will choose to have their feet amputated and replaced by carbon-fibre blades.

“I can see an age in which, just as we have hip replacement surgery and it’s commonplace today, that humans will choose to enhance themselves long before disability sets in, where the point of all technology is to enhance the human condition,” the Australian answered.

“Why should we accept our biological limits?”

At Synaptic, I meet a patient — and pioneer of bariatric surgery for the obese — named Dr. Richdeep Gill. Seven years ago, Gill suffered a grievous spinal-cord injury while boogie-boarding in Hawaii. Incisive and realistic, he operates now on the timetable of incremental rehabilitation and the fantasia of tomorrow’s Supermachinery.

“I don’t have hands,” he says. And he tells me that if — or when — a mechanical hand is perfected that can restore the fine-motor function that once allowed him to use his life-saving skills, he willingly would surrender his flesh to the machine.

“It’s just the idea of having something functional,” the surgeon says, waiting another day.

Chris Neilson is on the phone from Edmonton saying, “I’m a research partner, but I also call myself the guinea pig.”

Neilson, who lost his left arm to a workplace accident, recently returned from Zürich and the international competition for inventors and users of advanced prostheses and other such devices that is called CYBATHLON. Wearing a mechanical hand designed at the BLINC (“Bionic Limbs for Natural Control”) laboratory in the Department of Medicine at the University of Alberta, Neilson raced the clock in such mundane household tasks as stacking plastic cups and folding laundry, using the hand’s pressure-sensitive skin-to-silicon interface to manipulate the five-fingered bot.

Someday, a hand perfected at BLINC may restore Chris Neilson and Richdeep Gill to their professions and the fullness of their touch.

“What did you see at CYBATHLON that impressed you?” I ask Neilson.

“There was a lot of stuff using the brain that I thought was very cool,” he replies. “There were games that people were controlling with their minds — like, they’re literally just staring at a screen and they’re controlling an object on the screen just with some type of thought or something. I don’t fully understand it, but that’s what was impressing me.”

“The CYBATHLON didn’t just have, like, bionic arms competition,” says Michael Rory Dawson, lead research engineer at the BLINC lab. “There was a competition for bionic legs, for powered wheelchairs, exoskeletons, brain-computer interfaces. They had assistive technology for persons with vision difference, things like that.”

Neilson says, “When I was growing up and I was getting into computer gaming, one of my dreams was like, oh, man, how cool would it be to have a cellphone, you know, connected to the internet, and I could game wherever I wanted! Now I just keep seeing these huge leaps and bounds forward, and we are living in science fact, and science fiction just becomes more and more reality.”

Still, BLINC has not yet been able to engineer a mechanical hand that could persuade Richdeep Gill to opt for an irreversible trade-in or fully restore the appendage that Chris Neilson lost while at work.

“How far away is the tipping point?” Dawson ponders. “For as long as I’ve been doing this, it’s always seemed to be five to 10 years out for the interface technology that pushes towards peripheral implants — instead of just putting, you know, a little electronic sensor on the surface of the skin, actually implanting electrodes into the muscle or into the nerves directly. And people do this in the laboratory, but it has been very difficult to translate into something that can be used clinically.”

“I like being involved so I can kind of see a little bit further ahead than others,” says Neilson, the guinea pig. “But I still don’t see where that tipping point is, where all of a sudden I will get a prosthesis that is more life-changing than what I have now.”

Like Ryan Straschnitzki, my university roommate was a heck of a hockey player.

Like Megan Gallagher, he was a pilot in love with the sky.

Like both of them, an ill-fated journey across our mortal Canada stole the use of his legs.

Kirby Rowe of Owen Sound, Ont., was 28 when the small plane his brother was piloting crashed in Northern Ontario the day before the brother’s wedding. Kirb had graduated with me from Rensselaer in 1971, after playing defence for the mighty Engineers at the NCAA Division I level. He assisted on the overtime goal that cost Cornell goalie Ken Dryden the only loss of his senior season. He was working for TD Bank in Toronto when the ship went down.

The groom and his best man suffered spinal cord injuries in the wreck. The brother healed. Kirb was in a wheelchair for more than 40 years. He still drove his car, he had a single-engine aircraft retrofitted with hand controls, he tuned his radio to the tower at YYZ and watched the big jets sail in, he joined the Air Reserve Wing of the Forces, and he served the Canadian Paraplegic Association with dignity and distinction in Ontario and B.C. — giving much, though so much already had been taken from him — but he never walked again. I will always remember skating with our wives on Grenadier Pond in Toronto and seeing him, gamely smiling, in his chair on the snowy shore.

Kirb died of cancer in 2017, too early to stickhandle in the XoMotion, and to benefit from all the Supermachine miracles that are yet — perhaps soon — to arrive.

“My heart aches every time I see someone get injured, because I know a better world is coming,” Chloë Angus is telling me now from Vancouver. Angus’s career as a designer of women’s apparel inspired by West Coast Indigenous art was, if you will pardon the sad simile, just taking off. Then, without any warning, after a short run, she began to experience tingling and numbness in her feet, then her legs.

Twenty-four hours later, diagnosed with a rare and inoperable tumour that had left four tiny drops of blood inside her spinal cord, she could no longer walk or even stand. Now she serves as “director of lived experience” for Human in Motion Robotics, the company founded by two professors from Simon Fraser University that developed the XoMotion.

“For the last 250, almost 300 years — ever since someone invented the wheelchair — mobility for the disabled has meant, ‘Here, sit in this,’” Angus says. “That shouldn’t be acceptable. We shouldn’t leave people seated, especially when they’re still able-bodied or recovering from injury or disability.

“You know how you feel after a 14-hour flight, how you can’t wait to get out of that little seat? Well, imagine living the rest of your life in an airplane seat. That’s what it feels like.

“I was told there was no point in trying to recover any lower-body function. A wheelchair and a handful of fentanyl for the pain? That didn’t seem right to me. I could already see the sedentary effects of being stuck in a chair. The limitations they talked about were based on a history where they’ve never seen recovery, so they assume it’s not possible. I thought: What if I look beyond what we have today? How do I get around this?

“Ten years ago, ‘wearable robotics’ sounded like science fiction — Iron Man, The Terminator. In the movies, the robot was always a threat. But now I look around a crowd and think, ’You’re all going to end up with a motion disability someday, because of aging.'”

“Imagine XoMotion 2.0 and 3.0,” I nudge her.

“It will be your everything,” Angus responds. “A device that walks out of your closet, sits beside your bed. I see it as my total gym, my physiotherapist, my trainer — everything. You’ll just customize it. Download the apps you want. Order it like a Tesla online. It shows up at your door and says, ‘How can I help you today?’

“Some people worry we’ll lose human connection to robots. But to me, they’ve given me back my connection. My husband spent so much time doing the things I couldn’t do. Now, I’m always trying to convince someone to race me. We’re not kidding around anymore. The future is now.”

She tells me about a lab at U of Alberta that just received $24 million to develop “soft robotics,” wearable, intelligent fabrics that sense weakness and actuate stiffness in artificial muscles.

“Is this ‘superhumanity’?” Angus asks. “Yes, absolutely. It gives people their lives back. It gives them strength — the ability to move themselves again. I’ve taken a quarter of a million steps across five countries. I can’t tell you the joy I feel when I’m in it. To see someone else get into an exoskeleton and stand up and walk — that is a superhuman feeling.

“To me, superhumanity means more than just augmenting your own strength or mobility. It’s about being strong enough to support others — to bring strength to the rest of humanity. People focusing more on one another.

“Sometimes I consider cutting off my legs — they’re a burden to me now. They don’t work. If I could get that motion another way, I would. You’re already attached to a piece of metal. I want it enhanced. I want it all.

“Getting from a great idea in the lab to reality is hard. They say there aren’t enough people like me to justify the cost. But there are millions of us. And we’re told that the next iPhone matters more?”

“How would you define superhumanity?” I ask Megan Gallagher, the plane-crash survivor, as we reach the end of this flight of pain and possibilities. “A robot waltzing you around, is that superhuman?”

“I would define it as more what’s on the inside,” she says. “Like finding the humanity within actual people.”

We’re in a quiet room at a Calgary clinic, in the summer of supermen.

“It’s places like this, you know, right? Places like this that are trying to make people into superhumans, but not through brain chips and through a bunch of drugs and stuff, but by helping people become the best versions of themselves.

“I think the biggest superhuman would be someone who’s giving back and helping other humans. Not worrying about making themselves stronger, but what can they do to help everyone else out.”