Transcriber: Elizabeth Yu Reviewer: Emma Gon
So how many biological limbs do we have amongst us?
Between us, I’d say we have two and a half. That’s not bad going.
Not bad.
I was taught that when there’s an elephant in the room,
you should introduce it,
And as we said, you might have noticed that,
Hugh and I’s limbs might not look quite like yours.
Hugh, in 1982, you were involved in a mountain climbing accident,
and when you were just 17 years old,
you had your biological legs amputated
due to tissue damage caused by frostbite.
I understand that when that happened, you were dumbfounded
at the technological solutions that existed for you at that time
and you went on to spend your life’s work
devoted to improving human and technological efficacy.
I guess I want to start by asking you,
how did the limbs that you and I are wearing today work,
and what’s your vision for the future of them?
What do I have to look forward to?
Yeah, thank you for that question.
In the future, our synthetic limbs will no longer be these separate,
device-like mechanisms from our biology.
Instead, they’ll be intimately integrated into our tissues.
So for example, our limbs now are attached non-invasively
with a prosthetic socket, it’s a cup like socket.
It’s not terribly comfortable, I think you’ll agree.
It can be terribly painful.
But what we’re now doing is exploring osteo-integration,
where a titanium shaft passes through the skin membrane into the residual bone.
And then what you do is you bolt the external prosthetic robot
to that titanium shaft just as it exits the skin,
so it offers direct mechanical loading into the skeleton.
And you can also make that shaft hollow
and run wires from implants inside the body,
such as electrodes, to the small microprocessors
on the external robot.
At our new center, the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics,
we're also pursuing neural connections, bidirectional neural connections.
We want to give the capacity of a person with amputations, such as you and I,
the ability to think and directly control motors on the robotic limb,
as well as to experience sensory information from the device
mapped onto the nervous system.
Cutaneous touch sensations as well as proprioceptive sensations as well.
That’s fascinating. And Hugh, you often talk about your work
ending human limitation and disability.
But there are many people, and I put myself in this category,
who feel quite proud using that term because of the sense of community you get.
Also some people feel that they don’t have anything
that needs curing or fixing. What do you say in response to that?
And so I’m working diligently, as are, you know,
tens of thousands of other scientists,
engineers and clinicians around the world to advance improved technology
for individuals that are not happy.
They’re very unhappy with their state of experience of disability
and very much want change.
You know, today’s technology is lacking in clinical efficacy.
We’re able to walk fairly well, but we have a long way to go.
I still believe that bionics is in the dark ages.
You know, as an example, a person that has a spinal cord injury,
who wants to move their paralyzed limbs cannot do so.
A person with seeing impairment
that wants to see with their own two eyes cannot do so.
You and I, you know,
I'm sure you'd like to walk across a sandy beach, as would I,
and feel the sand against our prosthetic feet,
cannot yet do so because of limitations of technology.
Now, if a person or a group of folks are happy with their bodies and minds,
then of course, bionic reconstructions,
medical procedures won’t be forced upon them.
Patient choice is a critical principle in today's health care networks,
and it will continue to be important.
So, again, you know, medical interventions,
elective medical procedures won’t be forced on any individual.
So when I say that a human being can never be broke, technology is broken,
I’m wanting to transition
the conversation from that of human weakness and disability
to more of a conversation about human potential and strength.
And I want to remind all of us that current technology is really inadequate
and really needs to change.
And that disability also is not inherent, it adapts,
it changes when technology adapts and changes.
And that, one day, when the technological landscape allows,
every person on the planet
who wants to experience a new body and a new mind will be able to do so.
They’ll have the right to live without a neurological
or a physical condition or disability.
So that’s what I’m thinking about.
I couldn’t agree more, when we break it down
between the option of choice and anything compulsory.
Another thing that people sort of worry about
when it comes to these state-of-the-art, advanced prostheses
is that they aren’t accessible for everyone on the planet.
People who live in poorer parts of the world
might not have access if they need them.
What do you think we can do to democratize this technology tool?
Yeah, the new K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics
right here at MIT, a new center,
a key objective is to not only expand the science and technology of bionics,
but also to increase accessibility of bionic technology
in developed and developing nations.
So our first initiative
is to increase bionic leg production,
and certainly in Africa, by an order of magnitude.
And so how are we going to do that work?
Our model is sustained capital, a mobile delivery mechanism,
boosting infrastructure, of course well-designed
and low price point, high functioning prosthetic components as well.
So, you know, after we get a foothold in Sierra Leone, pun intended,
I want to raise on the order of $100 million and expand
our efforts to about ten additional countries.
And with that kind of money,
we can produce about 10,000 artificial limbs every year in perpetuity.
Fascinating and very exciting.
I think that most people who are aware of your work
who are aware of the work you do for prosthetic limbs
and bionic limbs to replace lost biological ones.
But I think more generally, your work encompasses human augmentation.
What do you have in store for those people who don’t have a disability
and who have all their biological limbs intact?
Right. In 2014, my research group at the MIT Media Lab
was the first to develop an autonomous powered like-exoskeleton
that we showed augments human walking
for persons with intact limbs.
Since that initial success, I co-founded a company
called Dephy with my colleagues Luke Mooney and Jeff Duval.
Today, Dephy has produced, you can see it here,
basically a bionic shoe
that is able to augment walking and running, reduce metabolic cost,
reduce the amount of muscle-skeletal stress,
increase jumping height and so on.
I think in 20 years we're going to look back and say,
remember that time when shoes didn’t do anything?
So bionic shoes and bionic apparel is coming.
So exoskeletons have a vast array of applications,
in many, many business sectors.
In the future, warehouse workers will use exoskeletons,
The elderly will use exoskeletons, athletes will use exoskeletons.
So exciting, I want one.
(Hugh laughs) They’re quite fun.
And so is this an area that you see being almost a bigger opportunity
for society and people generally
designing bionics for people who are not missing limbs?
Yeah, absolutely. Using bionics for human augmentation
is a tremendous business opportunity.
Bionic apparel and bionic shoes in particular, I’m very excited about.
So imagine augmentative technology that,
you know, protects an athlete from injury.
Imagine a technology that allows
a person’s innate athleticism to be maintained across their lifetime.
Imagine running your best marathon time at the age of 60
when you’ve been running marathons since the age of 18.
So, yes, indeed, the bionic apparel, bionic supplied to athleticism
is a really exciting space.
Sounds it is. So the theme for today is superpowers.
And I think when we talk about these powers,
we have to think long term and into the future.
What’s your vision for humanity and how technology can integrate?
No small question. Yeah, so in my research group here at MIT,
we’re pursuing a neural-embodied design approach
wherein biological constructs are co-designed
or co-engineered with synthetic constructs
to enhance or maximize the human-machine communications,
mechanical-neural communications.
So we're thinking fundamentally,
how do you attach wearable robots
to the human body in a comfortable, safe manner?
How do you attach machines to the brain?
How can we build machines so that the sensory information on the machine
is reflected on the nervous system, where a person can feel the synthetics?
And how can we have a situation of great agency
where a human being attached to that machine can think
and directly affect the movement of the machine.
So the value of such seamless integration,
such seamless communications is embodiment.
So our devices today are fairly crude,
I said earlier, we’re in the Dark Ages.
We can both just pop our legs off.
In fact, that’s what we do when we get home.
They're very powerful tools,
but they're not integrated seamlessly into our cells and our tissues.
So that’s the future,
and the value of doing that level of integration is embodiment.
Our goal here at MIT and across the field is, in the future,
when you ask folks like Patrick and I
that have part of their body that’s synthetic,
what is your body, that we would actually respond
and include in our body image the synthetic part.
Most of the time that doesn’t happen today.
I mean, I view my body when I walk, It goes the whole way to here.
But when I sit like this, you know,
I only go to the biological end because I don’t have that connection.
And my thesis is that this form of human-machine interconnection
or communication that leads to embodiment will also be possible
for non-anthropomorphic devices, such as wings or an additional limb.
You know, I always say that in the twilight years of the century,
human morphology and dynamics
I think will be unrecognizable from what they are today.
If we’re able to understand how to design constructs
and embody them into the nervous system,
I think the level of human expression will be so surprising and so remarkable.
And I have to ask you, just finally,
are we ready for that kind of comprehensive shift
- I’m ready.
our brains have never experienced? Can our biology handle that?
You know, as a society, we’re often very limited
in how we can imagine things that we cannot yet do.
And the future technology will be this incredible lever
for our creativity and our imagination.
My hope is that, 50 years from now,
when one walks down streets in every major city the world,
one will see this profound human diversity
that’s a consequence of human imagination manifested into physical form,
a future world where we no longer have this social construct
of a human difference from a norm, because difference will be the norm.
A future where every person is unique and cherished
and is fully able to express.
You know, today’s world, we have these narrow views
of what a beautiful man is, what a beautiful woman is,
what intelligence is, all these narrow social constructs.
My hope is they’ll be shattered
and will see this tremendous, glorious human diversity.
Now, as a society, we cannot go in the opposite direction.
We cannot use future augmentative technologies in a way,
inappropriate way that collapses human diversity
and collapses individual freedoms.
What we need to do as a society is develop public policy
at a rate commensurate with this ever expanding augmentation technology.
Yes, to incentivise creativity and innovation in the space,
but also to mitigate unintended, nefarious uses of augmentation technology.
It’s not difficult for any of us to imagine a hard future of, for example,
parents designing their future babies, their future offspring,
or governments controlling the mood of the citizens,
or many other Brave New World outcomes.
But I believe as a society,
we have the power and the creativity to do something
as wonderful as solving disability.
But at the same time, thank you, one soul,
at the same time, you know, being very careful
in mitigating any inappropriate uses of technology
that would really disrupt what we hold dear,
such as human diversity and individual freedom.
So I think we'll largely get it right
and we’ll finally break out of these rigid molds
that we now find ourselves in.
We’re excited to see it happen, thank you, Hugh.
Thank you. Cheers.