Robot-Human Hybrids Are Here
Also in this issue: "How Science Can Build a Better You" (NYTs) from my archives; plus a conversation with Juan Enriquez & Eric Schadt on designer people (Arc Fusion Video)
Exonaut Kevin Piette lost the use of his legs in a 2012 motorcycle accident. Now he’s strolling around Paris using the latest exoskeleton created by Paris-based Wandercraft.
In this issue of FUTURES
Theme: Enhancement
New Essay: Robot-Human Hybrids Are Here, by David Ewing Duncan
Q&As: Matthieu Masselin, CEO of Wandercraft, and Exoskeleton pilot Kevin Piette
From my archives: How Science Can Build a Better You, a New York Times essay I wrote in 2012 about human enhancement
Video from my archives: How Far Would You Go to Enhance Yourself? I interview Juan Enriquez and Eric Schadt onstage at a 2014 Arc Fusion Salon
What I’m reading now: a list of recent reads and videos for you to take a peek at.
FUTURES is a column and a newsletter about possible futures at a pivotable moment in history, where the future could turn out wondrous—or not. We’re seeing a flurry of innovations and fresh ideas in technology, health, science, art, policy, and matters of the heart even as we face existential threats like climate change, authoritarianism rising, a crisis of misinformation, and anxieties about powerful new technologies like AI. I’m asking the most interesting people I can find what they are most excited about and most afraid of for the future, and why.
For more check out my website: www.davidewingduncan.com
To view past “Futures” columns and to subscribe or to ask your friends to subscribe, click here.
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New Essay
Robot-Human Hybrids Are Here
Next generation exoskeletons are assisting disabled people—and raising the specter of “exo” enhancement for everyone
By David Ewing Duncan—April 18, 2024
In 2012, Kevin Piette shattered two lower-back vertebrae in a motorcycle crash near Paris. With a splinter of bone severing his spinal nerve, doctors told him that he would never walk again. A gentle, soft-spoken man, Piette didn’t believe them. He still doesn’t.
He told me this not long after I saw him walk again.
Piette’s spine remains damaged beyond medicine’s current ability to fix it. Yet there he was taking steps using a newly minted robo device called the Personal Exoskeleton, a “wearable robot” with leg braces powered by motors and controlled by a sophisticated AI system that enables paralyzed legs to walk again—and to stand-up, step up and down, crouch and sit down, all unassisted.
I saw Piette take a stroll in New York City when he trundled up in a wheelchair to test-drive the Personal Exoskeleton during a demo at Cure, the healthcare campus and incubator that recently became the US home for Paris-based Wandercraft, the company that makes Piette’s robo-suit.
Using human arms made powerful by weightlifting and exercise, Piette first raised himself into the exoskeleton. He tightened several straps, tucked his feet into special stirrups, and stood up. With motors quietly whirring, he took a step, then another as this 35-year-old former Ducati motorcycle mechanic grinned broadly and headed to a stair, which he slowly ascended—a small step for most of us, but a huge step for Kevin Piette.
Video of Kevin Piette walking in Paris.
“The exoskeleton is a suit that you wear by tying it to your limbs and your torso,” Wandercraft CEO Matthieu Masselin explained. “It's equipped with motors that will move your joints in a synchronous way to reproduce human motions. It’s run by algorithms who know what a standing up motion looks like, what a walking motion looks like, and we have a computer that executes those algorithms and continuously monitors what's going on so that if you are slightly unbalanced, it'll correct this in real time.”
The system works using sensors embedded in the bot that detect movement in parts of a user’s body that still function, which triggers movements and changes in the machine. “If somebody is paralyzed from the waist down, we're going to put a sensor on their back so that with the motion of the upper body, they will be able to control the device,” Masselin said. “If the person is paralyzed at a higher level, then we could always put the device on the head.”
To be sure, this isn’t exactly Avatar, the film about a future where anyone can climb into advanced exoskeletons and use them to run and jump and lift impossibly heavy objects—and, in the movie, to fend off exo-enhanced bad guys on a distant moon. Nor is it a full-on robot-human hybrid like Robocop, since no machine parts are implanted or permanent in the user, although there are scientists working on this. Some companies, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, are also tinkering with technology that will use brain implants to “read” neural chatter in the motor cortex and translate them into movement. Truly synching brains to machines, however, is probably decades away.
For more Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) check out my NPR story about the first human to ever be outfitted with and use a BMI device called Braingate—and a follow-up story on BMIs I wrote for The Atlantic.
For now, the Personalized Exoskeleton is a wearable bot that offers baby steps into a future where machines will not only help someone like Piette walk again, but also could lead to machines created in the future that allow people who are not disabled to run faster, jump higher, and, if the occasion arises, to ward off bad guys.
Imagine Amazon warehouse workers who aren’t replaced by machines but become fused with them; super soldiers who are able to double-step march farther and faster into combat; or exoskeleton-enhanced athletes who can outrun non-hybrids. Perhaps one day you will be able to buy your own “exo” to power-walk to work—50 miles away—or to carry heavy loads around the house.
Masselin, who is 35 years old and not disabled, tells me that he’s tried the Personalized Exoskeleton himself. I asked him how it felt. “You feel safe,” he said. “The first thing you realize is: ‘wow, this can really get me up, and I'm not going to have any issue with this.”
I asked him if it could make him stronger at some point. “Definitely,” he said. “I'm confident that at some point it could make people faster and more agile. I have no doubt about it. Not now, but in the near future.”
Currently, the Personalized Exoskeleton helps a user to take only slow, deliberate steps, and to climb a stair or two. But this is better than earlier versions of this tech, including an exoskeleton that I saw demonstrated back in 2012. That “exo” was awkward and required the user to use crutches and to wear a heavy backpack stuffed with instruments. A human assistant walked behind to operate the device via a control box attached to the backpack with a wire.
Wandercraft’s new technology is less clunky than most other exoskeletons, Piette said. It is self-stabilizing, meaning that users don’t need crutches or canes. It also doesn’t require another person to follow behind to guide the machine.
Masselin said they are working with the FDA to get the Personal Exoskeleton approved for use in the home and out and about, say, on the streets of Paris. An earlier Wandercraft exoskeleton called the Atalante X is approved by the FDA for use in rehabilitation centers in Europe, the US, and Brazil for people with spinal cord injuries, strokes, head trauma, and other injuries and conditions that impact motor movement.
Exoskeletons aren’t cheap. Wandercraft didn’t tell me what they’re charging for the Personal Exoskeleton, but most advanced exos run upwards of $100,000, including the Indego Personal from Ekso Bionics, the Personal 6.0 Exoskeleton by Lifeward, and ExoAtlet-II by ExoAtlet Asia. Medicare recently started covering some exos, including the Atalante X. The company expects Medicare to cover the Personal Exoskeleton, too.
One key factor of Piette’s success is something the engineering team at Wandercraft can’t build or program into their robo-human hybrid: his state of mind. “I want this to work, and I have a strong willpower.” he said, a man who not only believed he would walk again, but also became a champion disabled tennis player and motorcycle racer not long after his accident. Piette also has participated in the exoskeleton race at the Cybathon games held in Switzerland, where disabled athletes compete using powered prosthetics that range from exoskeletons and powered prosthetic limbs to devices that aid in seeing and brain-machine interfaces.
His accomplishments as an athlete are why Wandercraft chose him in 2020 to be a test pilot for their new technology, knowing that his verve and resolve would combine with the algorithms, gears and processors to create a potent blending of human and machine. Piette also believes that exoskeletons are part of a movement to better integrate disabled people into society, which is long overdue.
“People are finally able to realize what our daily lives look like,” he said, “and I can feel things are changing around me. When I think about 10 years ago compared to now, I see great improvements, and for that I am excited.”
*I am the part time Creative Director of Cure. No company or organization exercised influence or control over the content of this story.
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Wandercraft CEO Matthieu Masselin.
Q&As with Kevin Piette and Matthieu Masselin
Below are brief conversations I had with exonaut Kevin Piette and with Matthieu Masselin, CEO of Wandercraft. As always with this column on possible futures, I start out by asking the question I ask everyone:
What are you most excited about and afraid of for the future, and why?
Conversation with Kevin Piette
Thanks to Emmanuelle Brès, an R&D Engineer at Wandercraft, for translating Kevin Piette’s comments from French into English. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What are you most excited about and afraid of for the future, and why?
Personally, I am afraid of how my body will feel at 60. After a life in a wheelchair, ingesting medication for 40 years, will I still have some good years ahead of me, or will it be the beginning of the end?
Society wise, I am not afraid. I have complete faith that things are going in the right direction. For people with disabilities, the development of innovative new technologies has opened many doors. With social media and better information exchange, we have more visibility than ever. Of course everything is not perfect. I hope we will improve financial access to necessities people have with disabilities. I also hope the improvements will be available to everyone worldwide.
After your accident in 2012, how were you able to cope with such a debilitating injury?
The doctors told me really fast that I was not going to walk again. But I didn't want to believe them. I thought: ‘they don't know me, that I'll make it happen somehow.’ I knew it would be really tough, but I managed to build myself up again with the rehabilitation.
What was it like to walk again?
I was happy, but it's really different, and not very smooth. I like being able to stand and move around. But it's not very fast. It's also a little bit strong, pushing you. You have control, but it’s doing the work, not you. The motors are also noisy.
What are the benefits of walking in an exoskeleton for your body?
Engineer Emmanuelle Brès answers: At the beginning, I don't think Wandercraft and everyone realized how beneficial it would be to stand up and walk. More than the actual movement are all the consequences of standing up and walking. Digestive. For pain as well, headaches. Also, for stretching the muscles. Every time Kevin stands up, he has a little spasticity in muscles, but the fact of walking has improved that and reduces the spasticity.
Kevin Piette adds: The better circulation means more no pain. Circulation of the blood is better, and the spasticity is better. I like having no pain.
Conversation with Matthieu Masselin, CEO of Wandercraft
Matthieu Masselin is an engineer who co-founded Wandercraft in 2012.
What are you most excited about and afraid of for the future, and why?
I'm an optimistic person, so maybe I should talk about what I'm excited about first. I guess that's the progress we’re making towards getting us closer to the truth of how our species works, how the universe works.
And what are you most frightened of?
What scares me the most is that as we create technologies like AI, are we creating something that will one day do to us what we have done to God? I mean, the belief in God as an all powerful being that created us was once very strong in us, but now has disappeared for many people. God the creator has become irrelevant. Will that happen to us with AI? My sense here is not literal about the existence of God, it’s that it’s possible that the idea of the creation versus the creator can shift, which might lead to AI forgetting about us. Or possibly AI will eradicate humanity even without realizing it.
Are you talking about humans now believing that they have powers they once ascribed to God or the gods, and that this shift in attitude may be passed on to our creations?
Yes. This attitude is why a lot of species have become extinct, and ecosystems have died. It’s not because human beings destroyed them on purpose, but instead caused their destruction almost by accident, or without taking it seriously. So that's why I say maybe AI in the future, without even realizing it or wanting it, may eliminate us.
But hasn’t our technology, our creations, on balance delivered some great benefits for humans?
In just a couple hundred years, we've moved from a species where people would die at 45 years old and a sometimes miserable life for 99% of them. Now for most people our conditions have evolved for the better in amazing orders of magnitude. That's thanks to people who've pushed the limits of technology that allows us to do things that people would have considered godlike even 200 years ago. But there may be this transition where our machines become godlike and start to serve themselves instead of us.
How do we prevent this?
We need really powerful and very capable people and creators to own their responsibility to our species. If you're a top AI scientist, you have two choices: one is to move fast and not take responsibility, which is a little bit better for you personally. The other is that you take responsibility for the species as a whole and do a little bit more to make sure our creation doesn’t destroy us.
Do you have a specific creator in mind?
No, this is not just one person, not even if he is Sam [Altman] will decide on whether we have good AI or bad AI. I think there are a myriad of scenarios in between, and it all depends on lots of people making the right choices.
Is there any aspect of your technology that you are afraid of?
I think we have one of the most powerful and well-performing bipedal or humanoid robots in the world. And humanoid robots can be used in ways that can be harmful to people. Right now, we’re helping people [at Wandercraft] who have a deficit, but then you could use this technology for people where the deficit is not so clear, and you could enhance them. This might be okay, but we have to do it in a way that is done for good.
And avoids creating machines that end up with a god complex?
Yes, that is something I’m afraid of, that we need to be aware of, and to work hard to prevent.
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From My Archives: The New York Times
This is an article, book excerpt, or broadcast from my archive of over 600 stories written and produced over the years.
The essay below was written in 2012 about the fine line between health tech and biological discoveries created to treat disease and damage and their use to enhance healthy people. Twelve years later, the technologies have improved, and the question of how humanity should handle this more urgent.
How Science Can Build a Better You
By David Ewing Duncan
The New York Times, November 3, 2012
IF a brain implant were safe and available and allowed you to operate your iPad or car using only thought, would you want one? What about an embedded device that gently bathed your brain in electrons and boosted memory and attention? Would you order one for your children?
In a future presidential election, would you vote for a candidate who had neural implants that helped optimize his or her alertness and functionality during a crisis, or in a candidates’ debate? Would you vote for a commander in chief who wasn’t equipped with such a device?
If these seem like tinfoil-on-the-head questions, consider the case of Cathy Hutchinson. Paralyzed by a stroke, she recently drank a canister of coffee by using a prosthetic arm controlled by thought. She was helped by a device called Braingate, a tiny bed of electrodes surgically implanted on her motor cortex and connected by a wire to a computer.
Working with a team of neuroscientists at Brown University, Ms. Hutchinson, then 58, was asked to imagine that she was moving her own arm. As her neurons fired, Braingate interpreted the mental commands and moved the artificial arm and humanlike hand to deliver the first coffee Ms. Hutchinson had raised to her own lips in 15 years.
Braingate has barely worked on just a handful of people, and it is years away from actually being useful. Yet it’s an example of nascent technologies that in the next two to three decades may transform life not only for the impaired, but also for the healthy.
Other medical technologies that might break through the enhancement barrier range from genetic modifications and stem-cell therapies that might make people cognitively more efficient to nano-bots that could one day repair and optimize molecular structures in cells.
Many researchers, including the Brown neuroscientist John Donoghue, leader of the Braingate team, adamantly oppose the use of their technologies for augmenting the nonimpaired. Yet some healthy Americans are already availing themselves of medical technologies…
Which leads us to the crucial question: How far would you go to modify yourself using the latest medical technology?
For the rest of the essay, go here.
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Video from my Archive
How Far Would You Go to Enhance Yourself? (Click to see video)
In 2014, I interviewed Juan Enriquez and Eric Schadt at an Arc Fusion Salon in San Francisco. Arc Fusion was a meeting I curated and hosted from 2014 to 2019 in over a dozen cities in the US and abroad. These were boutique gatherings on a life science/health theme with amazing speakers, music, dance, theater, demos, and more, followed by a dinner with a well-known chef and a guided conversation on the evening’s theme.
What I’m Reading Now
The New York Times: A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive, Given troves of data about genes and cells, A.I. models have made some surprising discoveries. What could they teach us someday? By Carl Zimmer
BioFutures Newsletter: Microplastics are bad for your health, By Bill Haseltine
The New York Times: The Psychedelic Evangelist, a Johns Hopkins scientist was known for rigorous studies of psychedelics, was he a true believer? By Brendan Borrell
The New York Times: Geologists Make It Official: We’re Not in an ‘Anthropocene’ Epoch, The field’s governing body ratified a vote by scientists on the contentious issue, ending a long effort to update the timeline of Earth’s history, by Raymond Zhong
MIT Technology Review: Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media, social media’s unregulated evolution over the past decade holds a lot of lessons that apply directly to AI companies and technologies, by Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneieder.