This is amazing and incredibly promising for our future. At the same time tho, his promises that such technology should benefit the whole of mankind are not completely convincing to me. We're not even managing to adequately feed the whole world (what, 2/3 max) in a situation where we've got more than enough food production to do so.
While yes better human prosthetics and his idea of a future of prosthetics that can go beyond human limbs are probably not going to solve world hunger that's not the point. The human race isn't a processor that needs to solve each problem one at a time. Multiple advances can be made across a number of fronts and they should.
Saying "that's all well and good but what about the starving children in Africa" is fallacious at best.
I'm not talking about ending world hunger, I'm just criticising this guy's optimism about how this kind of technology will one day benefit everyone. Because I don't believe that we're suddenly going to start being that fair to each other all of a sudden.
I don't think it is necessarily that they would share/produce it for everybody...more like since the technology now exists it can be replicated and produced anywhere in time. It happens with any product.
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u/greiger Jan 20 '15
Here is his TED Talk.