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AIMEE MULLINS: I probably shouldn't be telling you all that.
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And, now, for this portion of the program, we are going to take questions from the cybersphere.
@straublaura asks me are you at all fearful that biomedical & robotics advances will write
out our humanity?
That flesh & blood will be lost to steel and wires?
That's a great question.
It's always gonna be a human being using these things.
There's this very sexy, overlay of the cyborg generation and post humanism and transhumanism—there's
still a human in these things.
That human spirit will continue to put their poetry and whimsy and y'know, softer flesh
and blood impact onto the engagement with technology.
@debsmod asks, do you think we should see more disabled models in advertising and why?
Y'know first I have to address what I think is your presumption of me as having been a
disabled model.
That really wasn't the way I saw myself.
I wasn't doing advertisements for prosthetics or advertisements for y'know assistive medical
devices.
I was modeling clothing.
The broader point of your question is about diversity and inclusion.
Shouldn't we see more representations of the incredibly broad spectrum of human beauty
and the answer is yes, of course, we should and that should be every kind of body type.
I mean, we don't have to subscribe to anyone else's standard of beauty.
We can decide for ourselves and I really believe we save ourselves a lot of headache if we
could give ourselves that gift.
@draskyvanderhof asks, what's your view in open sourcing bioenhancement technology like
cell/skin printers and biobricks to promote post humanism?
Well, draskyvanderhof, because somebody wants to y'know print skin is not necessarily about
promoting post humanism.
This is the kind of stuff that's gonna happen anyway as people share their experiences.
When I was a little girl, y'know, you had to hack your own legs to make them work for
you, but that was your experience unless you actually encountered someone else who shared
their experience with you.
Today, there's open source wikis for so many different kinds of things for people who are
doing just that they're sharing their experience and y'know we don't have to keep reinventing
the wheel with each person's experience.
@ninza asks, how can we empower kids with similar conditions who lack the finances or
resources for fancy prosthetics and the latest in bionic tech?
I was one of those kids that lacked the resources that we share in open sourcing and that we
see the necessity of quality of life.
This is where innovation happens is in the face of this kind of adversity and economic
disparity we get creative.
I don't know if you've seen something called the iRider, but I got really excited by it.
You can see the video on YouTube.
These were some guys who took, I don't know if it was a Playstation, whatever the gaming
technology was off the shelf and hacked the technology and used it to track the eye movement
of a friend of theirs who was an incredible graffiti artist who had been paralyzed and
through the iRider tracking his eye movements, he was able to create images on screen that
then would be projected out his hospital window onto a building across the street, like a
huge building overlooking the LA freeway and they did this with about $250.
My legs were scanned last summer by my friend Scott and a year before, two years ago, I
would have had to fly to California to actually get my leg into this scanning machine that
cost $300,000.
Now, this guy came to my house with a backpack on, pulled the technology out.
This is in a year's time.
So it's happening in leaps and bounds and it will affect the bottom line for everybody.
@brownealexander asks if you are uncomfortable with the label disabled how do you describe
yourself?
I'm Aimee Mullins.
That's it.
I'm begging all of you to go out and subscribe to THNKR!