The Future is Now. Again.

A South African amputee came in second in a 400m race in Italy. He's got these curved carbon fiber springs instead of feet and lower legs. The International Association of Athletics Federations is seriously asking if these prosthetics give him an "unfair advantage".

My initial feeling was to be appalled that the IAAF was going to discriminate against their legless man, but I guess then my critical faculties kicked in because I realized that these curved carbon fiber blades were cybernetic enhancements. And even if these particular prosthetics weren't an "unfair advantage", it was only a matter of time, and probably a brief period of time at that, before some prosthetic was invented that was so great that the person who had it would simply be unbeatable by people without similar or superior enhancements.

So, the future is here. Again. An international sports body is legitimately considering the possibility that a prosthetic limb is inherently superior to flesh and blood limbs.

I mean, for the sake of my own curiosity, I hope they do rule that the runner can keep racing. I'm curious when it'll come to pass that ambitious athletes are willing to, say, voluntarily cut off their own legs below the knees to have these techno-feet. I know the curiosity is deeply morbid, but the curiosity is still there. I feel that it is inevitable that people will start to replace their body parts with superior technological models, but as far as I know this is the first time that has practically occurred, that people have actually said that a prosthetic is possibly better than a normal working limb.

Friends and enemies out there, our lives are soon going to get increasingly weird. No cyberpunk novelist has done much to prepare us for the inevitability of the deeply disturbing future shock that is very much right around the corner. What it is to be human is really breaking down, and not in some abstract, but in the immediate present.