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When Augmentation Vacates Function

Last year, the U.K. and German ministries of defense released a joint statement entitled "Human Augmentation: the Dawn of a New Paradigm." The statement explored technology that seeks to "enhance" people beyond the limits of biology, especially for military purposes.

"Six million years of evolution to where we are today," the authors claim, "and now we have the tools in our hands to decide how our continued evolution should be shaped." It's as if they don't even know of all the bad guys who used almost this exact language in some movie before nearly destroying the world. This time, it's not a sci-fi character making a promise he cannot keep.

Rather, these predictions come by...