Farmer Cyborg

Most of you, thinking of the word 'farmer', will probably associate towards a curmudgeonly scruffy old man with large hands and little to say. But behold, the future farmer is a superstreamlined sleek cyborg, as light, crispy and fresh as sunrays scattering under the surface of a grape's skin. No more automation, we want sensory connection to our food again! Man becomes machine, rather than a consumer of the machine.

Who would have thought that the Japanese would target their amazing robotic exoskeletic power-assist suits to a user group so underpopularized as the farmers? But it makes a lot of sense. Especially considering that our populations are becoming more and more silver-haired, with over two thirds of Japan's body of farmers being over the age of 65. The heavy version of the suit, developed by Shigeki Toyama, a professor at Tokyo Agriculture and Technology (TAT) University, weighs about 72 pounds, and can empower the wearer with 62% of added strength. I know it all looks strange, but I truly believe that this is the way to go, and we will see a lot of improvement once materials become more adaptive and we can miniaturize this technology.

HAL in the wild

Probably you've all seen Cyberdyne's HAL 'assistive limb' device, that in the future will render your biological legs obsolete. That is, if we start using these as casually as these three jolly Japanese roaming the streets with their new externalized skeletons. To me a showcasing of a technology in actual daily use as in this video is always much more interesting and insightful than the usual spotless and clean studioimages. In the evolutionary tree to-be of assistive walkers, I would warmly welcome an four-legged assistive device with dry-adhesive undersurfaces.

Human exoskeleton

If you combine my recent post about the T-1000 and the previous one about resolving the mechanic-organic dichotomy, you get this.

It is a robotic exoskeleton for humans, meant for lifting heavier weights, so you do not have to go to the gym anymore. It has a variable ratio with which it amplifies your muscle power and is connected to the skin, from which it detects the faint synaptic impulses from the brain.

How literally can you empower people?
How lazy can we get?
How evolutionary inferior can technology make you feel?
How is this not the first step in becoming fully hybrid?
How can this never be made in another country than Japan?

A few nice trivia are that this device is actually called HAL (while it is actually the opposite: physical, non-intelligent, unobtrusive). But the best, or the scariest, is that it is developed by a company called Cyberdyne. Yes, the same company that invented the Terminator! I'm getting paranoid.