Since we have started getting modern technology the idea of androids has been around us. The idea that we can have integrated biology and technology. While perfect integration doesn’t exist yet, we have all very much become androids. Most of us carry around smart phones now which can act as a map, type writer, calculator, tv, flash light, photo/video camera, and it can even be used as a phone. We already take it for granted, but this technology in the form we have it today didn’t exist 10+ years ago. The only thing really missing from smart phone are tools to interact with physical environments.
So where is this all leading? The dream, to some, is to have integrated biology and technology. The first thing we need in order to do this is biological batteries and this is already being developed. So is our future to have our body riddled with various forms of foreign technology? The answer is, I believe, not what you would expect. Being human we like to believe our technology is something special but really what technology is is rudimentary artificial biology designed to do specific tasks. Take a car for instance, it consumes fuel (food) to generate energy to perform a motor function. A car is a microcosm of the human digestive system.
As our technology advances something will start to happen that we may have not predicted, technology will merge almost fully with biology and by this I mean technology and natural occurrences will seem almost indistinguishable. The future isn’t to have artificial technological devices throughout our body, instead, it is to have modified biology which performs the functions of technology that are indistinguishable from our regular bodies.
This will extend far past ourselves and our bodies. Things like trees could potentially be replaced by superior versions of themselves designed specifically to cater more to human society and provide things like improved pollution filtering. Bio engineers have already started rebuilding bacteria to produce crude oil. All of these things are signs of what is to come.