If I’m ever stranded on a frozen mountain due to a plane wreck, the first thing I’m going to eat when the airline peanuts run out is my left arm. It is nearly worthless. I’ve been watching it for some time, and it seems to have three basic functions:
- Balance.
- Assist the useful right arm by holding things still.
- Emergency food source.
I don’t want to replace the whole arm, just from the elbow down. We already have the technology to implant electrodes into the nerves of the stump to control simple devices by thought. For me, the most obvious replacement is a crusher. It would be a mechanical hand with an opposable thumb, but the grip would be thousands of times stronger than my current grip. It would still be able to perform 95% of the tasks that my left hand does, and supergrip would be a good trade off for the other 5%.
Airic’s Arm - robotic arm by Festo (click to see it in action)
Interchangeable hands would be ideal. I need a prosthetic lower arm with a socket to hold various tools. This would be a good starter/gift set:
- Crusher - clearly awesome.
- Flat fingers - good for flipping pancakes, and swatting flies. Could have credit card magnetic strip. At the grocery store checkout I could swipe my pinky.
- Hammer - however, a crusher would probably be tough enough to use as a blunt object.
- Scissors - good for trimming bushes to look like animals.
- iPhone
- Hook - for dressing like a pirate.
They could sell them in a six-pack with a carrying case like they do with cordless power tools.
The wife pointed out that I do a lot of typing with my left hand. That and the fact that I fly a lot are the reasons I haven’t lopped it off yet. In a few years brain implants should progress to the point that I will be able to type using my thoughts. If the prosthetic lower arm can have a small storage compartment for beef jerky, there will be one used left arm on Craigslist, but I suspect it won’t be worth much when supercrusher replacement hands become widely available. Left hands are the CRT monitors of the future.
