 So, thank you so much for coming to our first and incidentally last DEF CON talk. Right? Win. Win. Bravo. That's what I get for upgrading. We're cooking. All right, next slide. So you can show a picture of us doing cool stuff. Did you do all our material already? No, I did the introduction. I'm Replicant. You're Quadi. Nice to meet you. This is who we are. Pretty much any time we're not in Las Vegas speaking at CONs, we are in the hospital studying and taking care of patients and when we come home, we're so tired that we start to hallucinate and do weird things to our household pets. So, yeah, that's pretty much who we are. Let's talk about who we're not. All right. We are not doctors yet. That's another $100,000 in student loans and another two years of indenture servitude. So some ground rules. Even once we become doctors, it does not mean we're competent to do anything. So afterwards, don't come up and ask us, please implant my Arduino in my arm. Please. Can you circumcise me after the talk in the back hall? We talked about it. Absolutely not. We won't do any of that type of stuff. Don't ask us. We refuse to do so. $5, no cut-sees. Okay? We're insurance. Good insurance. All right. Where would I, Jeff, talk be without the obligatory warning slide at the very beginning? It would be a rather unfortunate event if you took anything that we said today and used it as the basis for doing something at home. This talk does not constitute medical advice. All the technologies and research you talked about in this talk are experimental, extremely dangerous, and you'd be just a moron to absolutely try any of these. Don't try them. Always consult your doctor if you have any healthcare-related issues. And lastly, there are a few graphic surgical pictures in this slide. Nothing. It's not every slide. There's probably like five. So if you're sensitive to stuff like that, you might want to go check out another talk. But with that being said, it's going to be a fun ride. You guys ready? Yeah. Don't build up their expectations. Yeah, I talked it up. Shit. Okay. So we have a couple of objectives for you that we sort of hope is what you take away from the talk. We're going to super briefly talk about some interesting points in the history of human augmentation. We're going to sort of set the stage for some issues and ethics that kind of surrounds this stuff. And then we're going to really hit the meat of the material, which are methods of augmentation and enhancement and some of the inherent risks and barriers that you need to be aware of before you jump into this exciting new world. We will try and take questions at the end, definitely in the Q&A session. But if you are going to ask what is the suspicious looking sore on my genitals that appeared this morning, I can answer that right now for you. It's syphilis. Get some penicillin. All right. So we had practiced this originally with individual speakers advancing their slides. So if it gets fucked up, just hit me. I'm sorry. I curse. I'm not getting a job anymore. All right. So you out there are probably wondering, why aren't these two clowns up here showing us some really awesome mods? Now, why are we jumping 12 feet? Why don't we have this widespread technology available to all you today? Why are we not trying to sell it to you? Well, we want to frame the problem of human augmentation as being kind of complex. And that's one of the reasons we're here today is to explain to you an alternative view of this technology so you can appreciate it a little bit more. So when this stuff really hits the ground, you'll be able to be in a little bit more control of it. So let's frame it like this. First, you have to build complex mods that are biocompatible. We'll talk about that very small. They do a lot of stuff. And then lastly, that are worth installing in your body in the first place, right? So if it's not worth all the pain and all the surgical procedure, why the hell would you put anything into your body? So that's what we have to come to at the very beginning when we design these mods. Next, we have to put them into a system that you didn't engineer. It's very hostile. And then lastly, this system, it acts unpredictably from person to person. So the human body isn't a system that always acts predictably. So you have this complex mod, you spend all this money building, you're going to put it in a system you don't know anything about. And then if you screw it up, people die. So that's why this is a harder problem than a lot of people would like to think is that it's going to take a little bit for us to get this stuff mainstream. So once we solve these types of problems, once we get comfortable with this, Replicant and I think it's going to absolutely explode. It's going to be something that's going to be one day something that everyone's going to have. It's going to be the standard. So sort of this paradigm that Quadian and I deal with on a daily basis and the one that 99% of all money and research is spent on is this idea of wellness and disease. So people who are sick in the face of disease, medicine is going to work by treating their symptoms and bringing them back into some balance. And when you start talking about enhancement and augmentation, you sort of see a fundamental shift that moves beyond this concept. You're taking that which is working fine, that which isn't broken and you're fixing it. So in this case, right here, taking Megan Fox and giving her like Robo Boobs or something. And this is sort of an interesting direction. That joke really didn't go over well, especially for the medical community because except for certain fields like elective plastic surgery or dermatology, we're not really interested in doing things to people who don't need them. All right, so we're going to talk about a few definitions here. We intentionally left the definitions off the slide because they may or may not be shared by the enhancement community as a whole. And the reason we're going to be explaining this is that what little sense we're going to make today, maybe by defining these words, we're going to make a little bit more sense. When we talk about enhancement augmentation during this talk, at least, we essentially mean the same thing. And we're going to be defining that as kind of an organic state of a person without any intervention, it being enhanced in some way. So using technology, using some type of intervention, the potential that organism had beforehand is not the case anymore. So with those interventions, we can see stuff like outward appearance changes, changes in lifespan. Replicant is going to talk about the potential for human augmentation to expand our lives dramatically. It can improve existing functionality like the ability to walk or run really fast, making that even better. So there's also a potential for human augmentation that we can imbue in ourselves attributes we never had before, adapt new functionality that humanity's never had the ability to do before. And that's kind of the exciting new world, right? Well, a lot of people associate human augmentation with the cyborg, which is like our third definition, which is defined as an organism that lives as both the melding of organic tissue and mechanical and or electrical components. They're famously depicted in science fiction with things like the Borg, Darth Vader or Robocop, right? We're all familiar with those types of things. But if you apply the strict definition of a cyborg, we've been living around cyborgs for decades now. Cardiac, pacemakers, cochlear implants, hip replacements, those are all implantable medical devices that those people need to use every day to live. And with that being said, that's the perfect melding of exactly what we've been talking about, biomechanical mods that either enhance or replace the function that was lost. Now, lastly, we want to introduce a concept of, I mean, I'm sure lots of you guys in the audience are familiar with this, but the transhumanism movement. It's a social movement that can be kind of described as the big proponent behind changing who we are as human beings. So the premise being that we should use available technologies and advances in knowledge to improve the human condition, to eradicate suffering and disease, and a lot of that is framed around the idea that once we augment ourselves as human beings, are we still human beings? So those are all the intellectual debates that are happening now behind the scenes. There's some organizations we'd like to plug at the end, none of which we're really involved in, but we think all of you, whoa, not by choice, but that we think all you guys should go check out online as kind of the forefront in this arena. Okay, so we're gonna hit the history really quickly. You guys all know this, so I don't really have to even cover this, but 75 million years ago, Galactic Overlord Xenu, as you know, took our fate and souls, brought us to Earth, put us in volcanoes and blew it up. What you may not know, please, come on, that's basic stuff. Why are you clapping? You should be praying. Yes, what you may not know is that in college he was really into cyborgs and cybernastics and stuff, so he is recognized as history's first cyborg. Further, please, click one more. Later in the 1500s, Leonardo da Vinci, when he wasn't drawing pictures of naked dudes with too many legs, was really into designing ass-kicking robots and building them. That's one there on the right, it's a picture of it that was used to great success in French and Italian campaigns. All right, continue. Isn't it funny that? Thank you for laughing at those. We spent some time writing. They gave us track one, which is kind of funny. All right, in all seriousness, there are a couple of things that we wanna hit, and if you're interested in the medical history, our slide references have a lot of really cool things that you can read about, but a couple of points. Prosthetics have been around forever. We're talking like ancient Greece and Egypt. You got your leg cut off in battle, you would add something onto your leg to be aesthetically pleasing. In the 1500s, 1600s, people started to have some idea of Newtonian mechanics and build things that could sort of replicate the function of the missing limb. We're gonna talk a little bit about the current state of the art where prosthetics are right now. In 1984, the FDA approved the first cochlear implant for implementation, and like Quati said, it's really, really big because it's kind of the first brain-computer interface where you're taking something that takes information from the external environment, takes those signals and interprets it in such a way that the brain can then use that as information, so we feel like that's pretty big. All right, so from the macro to the micro, let's talk a little bit about the history of 3D nanostructures, okay? So one of the parts of our talk we'll talk about is the potential to augment your body using technologies at a very, very tiny scale. In 1991, a lab produced a paper talking about the first 3D nanostructure, so it was a cube, which doesn't sound like much, but we'll talk about how important this is. A cube made out of the same building blocks as DNA. All right, they were able to actually design and build this thing and show it, demonstrate proof of concept with that. The same lab in 1999 was able to show the world the first 3D nanostructure. In this case, it was a helix that when they added an external stimulus was able to change its shape and therefore its binding capabilities. So what we saw there is proof that it's possible to build these machines on such a small scale and then have them manipulated to do whatever function we want them to do, kind of laying the foundation for where we're going to be in the future with nanotechnology. Another thing we're going to talk about today is kind of genetic engineering and then using that to augment our bodies. So a little bit of background on that. In 1990, the world saw the first FDA-approved trial of gene therapy to treat Ashanti de Silva. So this is a young girl with a genetic defect that left without an enzyme called adenosine deaminase. And when this thing builds up in your system, it kills your maturing immune cells. None of that's really important, but the point of this was is that this treatment they used to replace this lost enzyme had some efficacy. Unfortunately, it was only temporary and we saw for the next period of years some disappointing trials with gene therapy. Until about five years ago, there's been a series of really exciting gene therapy trials. One of the ones I think is absolutely amazing is some researchers were able to use gene therapy essentially to replace lost color site in monkeys. So these monkeys were essentially color blind. They were able to introduce a gene that expressed a certain cell and restore color vision to these monkeys with kind of great promise for humanity. So all of you guys are color blind out there. Keep on the radar here. There's gonna be some cool stuff coming to you guys now where you might be able to cure your color blindness with just an injection that we're gonna talk about in a little bit. With that being said, very exciting stuff going on in human augmentation. This is just recently, and this stuff is exponentially speeding up. There's so many labs cooking things that we don't even know about, that haven't been published, that are really gonna knock your socks off and we think it's an exciting thing to get on the ground floor of. All right, many of you out there would probably jump at augmentation here. I think this is a unique crowd of absolutely amazing people that without a doubt would sign up tomorrow if there were some cool mod they can implant into their body. But some of you out there might be thinking, oh, why should I do this? This is scary stuff and I don't wanna do any of this stuff. I like the way I look. I don't want to be able to have earth-shattering slam dunks. I don't wanna live forever as a god. Stuff like that. Well, to you, I offer three reasons to augment. We've talked exclusively about this. We've distilled it down to these three reasons to augment. One, I think we can both, everyone in this room agrees. Most importantly. Two impressed chicks, seriously. Yeah. Yeah, say that for ladies. Two, titanium abs. Think about it. All right, three, probably perhaps the real reason. And a reason I think a lot of out there feel. How about because we can? We are here at DEF CON 20. Can we give our round of applause? Please, this is just absolutely insane. We're here at the world's largest hacker gathering, like-minded people all around us who understand the value of breaking down a system, exploiting its weaknesses so that we can build it up better than ever before. Apply that same paradigm to human beings. We're full of weaknesses. We age, we die. A lot of us are assholes. We can fix that stuff. I don't know about that last part. I'm not on board with that. I think we can. Don't quote me on that. So it's not a question of should we augment anymore. It's why should we not? It holds such potential promise. Absolutely, look around our world today. We see tremendous suffering and pain. And one of probably the most realistic approaches to this is being able to come to the world with this technology and kind of solve it from a different angle, not from the political and from the social but from the actual technology within our own bodies. Okay, so I think I've wasted some time. No, I'm sorry. We also wanted to teach you guys about kind of the medical aspect of it. So something you might not normally see at DEF CON talk. We're gonna give you some kind of practical stuff about why augmentation is hard and things you have to take into consideration from the kind of medical stance. And the reason we think this is important for you guys is because you guys are gonna be adopting it. You guys are incredibly intelligent and you guys are the kind of do-it-yourself people. Not that we encourage that or anything but you're gonna have to know about what we're gonna talk about. Infection, tissue rejection, powering these bad boys and et cetera, et cetera so that you guys can have more control of your own mods. All right? Okay, you're pontificating just a bit. So we started a little bit late, yet kind of just speed it up. Okay, so we've given you some background information with a healthy dash of juvenile stupidity. We're gonna dive into the core of this talk. So we've sort of assembled the 10 main ideas or steps that you need to sort of understand or take before you wanna become the next Robocop. So our first step is the most basic. We need to decide what it is that we actually want to augment. Let's take a look at the possibilities. We're gonna start from the big and work our way down. So this is kind of what everybody thinks about when they hear the word cyborg, robotic limbs, arms that turn into laser brassers, et cetera, et cetera. And it turns out that this stuff isn't really too far away, at least the former. This is a picture of the spring ankle with regenerative kinetics or Sparky project in action. So let's take a quick sort of couple of seconds to outline where prosthetics are right now. We have them ancient Rome and Egypt sort of as just aesthetic things in the 16 and 1700s. They became a little bit more functional, but it was really only in the 1990s where we started to see motorized prosthetics with microchips that were able to actually replicate the gait of people's unaffected limb and help them walk. So prosthetics got pretty good at doing their job, but in reality, the problem's a little bit more complex because our joints aren't simple, just ball and socket or hinge apparatuses. There's a very complicated pattern of tendon insertion and muscles and innervation of nerves that allows us to do some of the really cool things that we do. So prosthetics in the last 10 or 15 years have been really trying to capture the function of our natural limbs. A big problem is that you and I expend energy every day when we're walking around and it's probably something that we don't even really think about. But we spend about 35 joules of energy in 250 watts of power with each step that we take. And up until now, the only way that prosthetics could really capture that was by having these motors that were very, very heavy and very, very expensive attached to these prosthetics. What the Sparky Leg does is it actually has robotic tendons that are able to capture the kinetic energy of our downstroke. So when we hit the ground, there's kinetic energy that's generated. These tendons capture that and use it to power the subsequent upstroke. What does this have to do with augmentation? Well, we have the paper attached to our slide references and this is actually something that does this in such an efficient way that it's projected a couple of years down the road, we're gonna be able to do this better than our current legs right now. So we could see a future where maybe you have arthritis or maybe you just wanna run the 500 meters 10 seconds faster where you say, my leg's perfectly fine. It works great, but I'd like to cut it off and put on one of these robotic legs and basically be able to jump 10 feet. It's really kind of interesting because I mean, we're approaching a threshold in which we will be able to build things that work better than their natural counterparts and that's really all what human augmentation is about. The alcohol is starting to seep in so elocution is getting a little bit more difficult so I'm gonna enunciate. All right, so maybe you're a little bit more conservative, you don't wanna lop off your own limbs, maybe you pop pills, I get ya. Maybe you want your augmentation in the form of pill. If you can read, this is a commonly used drug for the treatment of ADHD, Adderall. It's also a commonly abused drug for its cognitive enhancement as well as its concentration effects. So what does all this mean? Well, augmentation may come in the form of a pill. Let's talk a little bit about how Adderall works. You guys can kind of understand that this sets this new field up of what are called new tropic drugs. All right, so I'm gonna use, can you see my little pointer coming across? I have a fancy laser pointer, but they ain't going to work. So what we see here is a very fancy and complicated diagram of what's called synaptic transmission. I'm gonna talk a little bit about this, not to any detail that you ever would have to remember, but so you guys can understand how these drugs work and understand that there is absolutely endless abilities to exploit these neurochemical pathways to use them to enhance our own bodies. All right, so let's see if I can get through this. Here are two neurons that are coming together and synapsing in this space right here. This is another neuron, you can't really see the rest of its body. See these little arrows? They're signifying a signal that's transversing, that's basically being sent through these neurons. All right, how does it send this neuron? How does it send this signal? Well, it sends it actually through an electrical current, a sodium gradient, and it travels very fast. But when it gets to the end, you can see these neurons don't connect. They can't continue that electrical signal to the next nerve to send down maybe signals of pain, signals of temperature, or perhaps to tell certain muscles to contract. What it has to do then is to actually change that electrical signal to a chemical signal, and you can see that being done right about here. It sends out these little vesicles that are filled with neurotransmitters, they get expelled into this cleft right here, and then they kind of travel over and stimulate the next nerve. When that happens, the signal continues. So what does Adderall do? What does essentially, what does Meth do? It's the same thing, it's pretty much Meth for the kids. Well, it stops the breakdown of these products, right? So they hang around for longer amounts of time, or I'm sorry, in higher concentrations. So these kind of neurotransmitters, these chemicals that have to stimulate this next neuron, they don't get broken down as quickly. So it means they can continue to stimulate this next neuron. The second thing it does is it stops the uptake. These things get re-uptake. They get taken back up in the neuron. I haven't been drinking at all, I have no sense. So they can't stimulate the neuron. So we have a two-fold increase in its ability to stimulate the next nerve. There's more of it around, and it hangs around for longer amounts of time. That's the mechanism behind increased concentration, increased cognitive ability. That's the pathway exploitation. We use a drug to exploit a weakness in these neurons. That's just the absolute most basic form of it. This drug has been around for decades. So what do we see? We see a great potential, and pharmaceutical companies all around the world see the abuse potential of these and recognize dollar signs. They say, holy shit, people will pay tons of money if we engineer drugs, and do the same thing. Imagine a pill, you pop a pill, your IQ jumps 50 points. Imagine a patch that slowly secretes a chemical that'll increase your concentration. Or mood enhancers, perhaps it gets rid of your apprehensions so you can go talk to those ladies. That is a huge, huge, huge money opportunity for these people, and there's a tremendous amount of money being pumped into these things. All right, I'll shut up now. Nanobots, who's excited for nanobots? Yeah, no one. No one at all. So we can skip over this slide, let's go on. So these are things that are a little bit more in the realm of the conceptual and theoretical augmentation. So they're cool ideas, they've taken their baby steps in the lab, but they're not really ready for use in humans right now. I mean, it's a big buzzword, nanobots. People think of these little robot submarines that swim through your bloodstream and zap clots or stretch your muscles. And those things are kind of still in the realm of pure science fiction, unfortunately. But the field of building, these programmable and replicating structures on a nano-sized level is still very much an area of active research and progress. So something I like to do really quickly is stop and hit the scale here. So a meter is to a nanometer as the circumference of the earth is to a marble. So we're talking incredibly tiny scales here. Quadi shaved this morning. He took a razor, picked up and put it to his face. His hair grew approximately one nanometer in the time that it took to do that. So we're talking about infinitesimally small scales here. And it's really cool that we can even do this. So if we understand sort of the biophysical chemistry of how these tiny building blocks like DNA or RNA or carbon nanotubes can interact, we can design on kind of like a one dimensional scale, a blueprint that then gives rise to a 3D structure that's able to actually do things. And molecules like RNA and DNA have catalytic activity. And what that means is that they can sort of facilitate chemical reactions. It's pretty mind blowing, but you can build these structures that then assist in the building of more copies of themselves. And this isn't really an idea that is sort of new because there are different diseases that have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years. So mad cow disease is a disease where basically you have a misfolded, bad protein that interacts with other proteins and misfolds them into the same shape. And it's sort of like this huge explosion that basically destroys your brain from the inside out. So not a good way to die. Don't eat beef with mad cow disease basically. People in laboratories have been building these really cool small structures. And again, all of these papers are in the reference materials or should be. But basically we've seen things in the lab already. Tiny little boxes made of DNA that only open when unique DNA keys are presented to them. Little tiny motors, little tiny vesicles that can hold certain types of medication. So if you have cancer and you need chemotherapy, you could maybe take a little nano pill that contains this and we'll only let it go when it's in the tumor. So you avoid all those terrible systemic effects of chemotherapy. What does this again have to do with augmentation? Are we at the point of those robot submarines yet? Not really, but we can sort of foresee a future in which we could do something, like have these little tiny self-replicating structures hang out in your cells and basically clean up the metabolic or oxidative waste that is generated by your cells in its day-to-day activity. What does that mean? Basically we could sort of foresee a future in which we have little micro custodians that keep us from aging. All of those bad things that our body produces in its day-to-day life, cleaned up by these little tiny nanostructures. This is something that's, I mean again, it's years and years away from being implemented, but it's really, really interesting. Please definitely check out some more of these papers if you're at all interested in this. We're gonna go from this straight into genetics. This is a jellyfish right here. We all have a unique genetic code, right? And it gives our cells basically instructions about the types of proteins to produce, to give rise to all of those different attributes that make us who we are. And for a really, really long time, we thought that this was something that was basically unchangeable. So barring some random mutation that would give you a really nasty type of cancer, you were born with these genes and you would die with these genes. And we know now, after a couple of decades of research, that this just isn't the case. We can fiddle with and rewrite our DNA at a very integral level with greater ease than ever before. So our very DNA is a code that we can actually modify and rewrite. I did a little bit of this work in college, using bacteria, but the principle is the same because we all share the same genetic code. So we can rewrite genes, which produce proteins. We can also rewrite some of the instructions. So we all have different types of instructions. Operators and promoters are regions of code that tell us how to transcribe our genes. So sometimes we may want to produce this type of protein. Other times we might want to produce a different type of protein. We can rewrite all of that. How do we do it? We basically write our code and we put it into something called a plasmid. And a plasmid is basically a large region of circular DNA that we can then introduce to cells and the natural machinery of the cells will either take up that DNA and start to transcribe it and produce those proteins or that DNA can be integrated into the very genome of a cell, which means that when it replicates it will continue to hold that DNA with it. How do we do that? If I wanted to make a new piece of code that told Quadty's muscles to increase 30% in size, I couldn't put that in a pill and just give it to him because DNA is very, very volatile and would break down in seconds within his bloodstream. So we kind of have to be a little bit inventive with introducing DNA into cells. And there are a couple of techniques to do this. One that's really cool is something that's called a gene gun and the name basically tells you what it does. So it takes DNA in the form of plasmids and it complexes them with gold colloid particles. So these gold particles can then be shot directly into your muscle and the gold prevents the DNA from breaking down. When it gets inside your cell it's a little bit of a different environment. The gold dissociates from the DNA and it's not toxic so this DNA can then be picked up and transcribed by the machinery of your cell. It's pretty cool. It's used in plants and animals and humans to introduce new types of DNA. Something else that we can do is we can actually take viruses and we can remove the bad portion of the viruses that make you sick and put in new DNA. So the virus then affects your cells but introduces this new DNA and instead of giving you HIV it could give you basically some code that may make your muscles a little bit bigger or increase the amount of red blood cells you have so you could hold your breath longer underwater types of things. So this is to me something that's really fascinating as probably one of the most promising ways to just from the ground level change who we are as a species. It's just rewriting our genetic code. Okay, so that was step one. Step two, we need to decide exactly what our augment or enhancement is going to be built of. It's very important to carefully consider the types of materials or chemicals that we will be building our mods from. And these devices and compounds are gonna be forming literal interfaces with our bodies and it's incredibly crucial that what we put in is not toxic or harmful to our natural structures. So biomaterials is a field that you will be intimately familiar with if you are an orthopedic surgeon or body art specialist. Do we have any orthopedic surgeons in the audience? Thank God. Yeah, they're assholes. There, yeah. So that's... If you're not either one of those you could do a little digging on some basic literature to get you started. So in our research we came across this 260 page little paper that for $4,400 will get you on your way to a solid understanding of biocompatible materials. If you don't have that kind of cash spread around we can help you out with a quick overview. So we wanna hit two main points here with biocompatible materials. First we wanna provide the strength to be able to sustain the form and function of what it is that we want to augment. So if we have an artificial heart it needs to be able to withstand the physiologic stresses that we're gonna be pushing on it for a lifetime of pumping, okay? We also wanna be able to have materials that the body is not gonna inherently try and kick out which is a phenomenon that Quaddi will address here in a little bit. So as far as surgical implants are concerned if you get a car accident and break a couple of bones and need some fixation of your bones we're gonna be talking about titanium and chromium and different types of metals that aren't gonna be very reactive. Biopolymers is also an exploding area of research that's really interesting for types of sutures and other types of plastics that we need to have inside the body. Something interesting about that is that spider silk is actually something that's being researched at a couple of different labs across the country. It has greater tensile strength in other physical properties than anything that we've been able to come up with so far in labs. So that's kinda cool. All right, so if you don't buy that $4,000 ton of information, you're boned. You are gonna risk, I'm just kidding, don't buy that at all. Google it or get it from someone and steal it, whatever you want. What we want to avoid is unleashing the immune system on our mod, right? So we're gonna spend all this money, all this pain and suffering you get it put in. We wanna make sure it doesn't get kicked out. So we're gonna talk about a process called form body rejection. Essentially how it works is your immune system is a collection of cells, proteins and chemical signals that is function is to destroy foreign bodies or inactivate them so they don't harm you. Now, a foreign body reaction to your mod is gonna either destroy your mod or cause significant harm to yourself. The human body through unknown mechanisms, it's not fully understood now, recognizes the implanted mod as foreign and some people think this has to do with the texture of the mod or perhaps varying degrees of biocompatibility among humans. In any case, if the process begins with the recognition of it being foreign, certain cells are gonna come in, all of a sudden they're gonna be like holy shit, your mod, it's hurting us, what's this deal here? It's gonna start spilling out all these chemical mediators that are gonna tell your body to do things like swell, get red and get very painful. This is the reaction we're all familiar with, kind of that inflammatory reaction, right? So these early cells come in, it's gonna be a very painful experience but then about two days later, some other cells migrate to your mod and they start telling everyone around there, we gotta wall this guy off, this thing's not supposed to be here, we gotta make sure it doesn't affect our body. So these macrophages come in, these fibroblasts come in and they essentially start walling off your mod. All right, they're gonna encase it in a thick, fibrotic shell and it's gonna be so extensive that your mod probably won't work after that happens. You really wanna avoid this process and even if it still works, it's extremely painful. Let me show you a little bit of an example so don't freak out, this is a microscopic slide. We're gonna talk a little bit about it just so you guys can see, this isn't a hard thing to understand, just let's just get oriented for a second here. So this is the epidermis, the layer of skin that all of us are familiar with, I can see all your eyes as epidermis is right now. Below, that wasn't, yeah, I should have said that. That was a bad joke, 11, 30. You can see healthy dermis tissue below that on the left side here, so this is kind of normal stuff. You can see there isn't a lot going on there but in the middle and on the right here are two foreign bodies that have been implanted in the skin. You're probably wondering, oh my God, is this a mod? No, this is actually a splinter, all right? You can tell it's a splinter because these cells right here have thick cell walls not seen in the normal tissue and plants have thick cell walls. So you can see this is actually a splinter, a foreign body that's been introduced into the skin and the processes we've been talking about are happening. So we have these kind of darkly stained cells, those are the ones that are releasing all those nasty chemicals. We have essentially a wall being built around it, isolating it. That's exactly what's gonna happen to your mod if you don't pay attention and use biomechanical materials. All right, that's enough about that. Lastly, oh, lastly what I wanna say about biocompatibility. Yeah, I ruined that joke, I'm sorry. Is that it's not a guarantee. What might work in you, what the mod that might not react to your immune system with the same materials might react in another human being, it's not a guarantee. So this is one of the things we talked about earlier is that bodies can react differently from person to person. So this is gonna be a hard thing to start developing as we go forward with human augmentation as kind of seeing these variances between people, being able to predict that, et cetera, et cetera. All right, now for the joke. All right, buddy, we gotta book it. So I, this is like an amazing anecdote to be able to talk about rejection. Dick Cheney has gotta be the only person in the history of ever who accidentally shot a man in the face with a shotgun and was later apologized to by that same man for the trouble that Dick Cheney was put through when he shot a man in the face with a shotgun. You may remember this. This was a couple years back when Dick mistook his hunting buddy, Harry Whittington, for a flock of quail and blew his wad, which is the technical term for shooting a shotgun, all over Mr. Whittington's face, neck, and torso. So surgeons, I mean, when he got shot in the face, surgeons, unfortunately, and you can go to the next slide, had to leave about 50 of these pellets still in his body. This isn't his x-ray. It probably looks something similar, though. Read the quote at the bottom, it's hilarious. He's gonna have those pellets in his body for the rest of his life. So what does this have to do with rejection? Well, shotgun pellets contain lead, lead's kind of reactive. These particles are probably going to react against those inflammatory cells in his body, forming that process that walls him off with fibrous tissue and scarring. It's not a big deal unless they start to move around, endangering adjacent structures like the crotted artery or various nerves, the vagus nerve, or become infected and require further surgery. So it's a pretty good example, and I just like talking about it, that you need to make sure that when you put stuff into your body, you have some idea of what's gonna happen to it over the long term. All right, we're on to step three here. You've picked what you wanted to mod. You've made it out of the right materials. Now you gotta pick where you wanna put it. So I think it goes without saying that you wanna match the function of your mod with the location. Once implanting the mod, though, it's also important to recognize the potential for removal in case of emergency, regret, or as many of you people are probably wondering, upgrade desirability. So a good rule of thumb is that the heart of the mod is to put in, the harder it's gonna be to remove. And also being said, some mods, once they get put in, are never gonna be able to be removed. Just due to the danger, removing these things is gonna pose the person who's already augmented. So lastly, I think in this slide right here, it's very important not to disrupt the local tissue. And let's talk an example about that, because I think it's a good understanding is you just can't put something in your body. You have to be cognizant of the adjacent structure. All right, let's talk about the armpit or in fancy doctors speak, the axilla. In addition to producing sweat and stench and embarrassing you on those dates, it houses very important vascular structures, so blood vessels here, like the axillary artery and the brachial vein. If you nick one of these guys while trying to implant bionic muscles for FAP enhancement, you may prematurely end your life with a fountain of blood, all right? I didn't time that well, I think. In addition to that, we have this kind of super highway of nerves called the brachial plexus. Nick one of these guys, you're not gonna be able to move your arm right or you're not gonna be able to have the sensation of temperature or perhaps pain. And then additionally, it's just gonna really hurt. Lastly, there are these little structures that run throughout your body called lymphatic ducts. They kind of drain the fluid from your body. If you cut these things, they're nearly invisible. If you cut these things, your limb is gonna swell up and it's gonna be extremely painful. So these are the type of things that take years and years of training to be able to understand and be surgically trained to avoid. But just putting something in your arm is not, it's not that simple. All right. Here are some possible sites for implantation. We've had some success. We, I mean, the medical community has had some success in putting in. So you're probably wondering, where can I put stuff? So the brain perinkum or brain matter is very, very sensitive, but there are some techniques and abilities to put electrodes into certain deep structures of the brain safely. So that's a possibility. There are also things called ventricles in your head that are basically fluid filled cavities that produce what's called cerebral spinal fluid. This fluid coats and protects your brain as well as gives nutrition to some parts of it. But these are actually cavities that are actually ripe for implantation of small devices. And we're gonna talk a little bit about that in a minute. The middle ear, and this is a picture of, so the middle ear, it houses a mod, I like to call it a mod. Some people call it a medical device, called the cochlear implant. The cochlear implant is used to restore hearing from deaf people, basically, or a severely hard of hearing people. And what you can see here with my cursor is that this is the middle ear right over here. There's an electrode planted right into the cochlear that comes up and talks to this transmitting coil. That transmission coil is actually placed underneath this flap of skin, and it has a magnet. On the other side of that skin, when they saw this thing up, is gonna be the external part of it, which is gonna house a microphone and a sound processing unit. So, the external microphone will pick up sound, the sound processing unit will be able to filter out the things that it thinks isn't important, and then it's gonna translate that signal into a signal that your brain can understand. Then it sends it over FM through the skin to the transmission coil that gets sent back into the brain. So what you can essentially have is replace the function, replace the function of the ear with this, if it's lost or if it's damaged. You can easily imagine being augmented in the future, this type of brain machine interface is absolutely what we're gonna need to experience, what we're gonna need to implant into people, what we're gonna need to do, because it's very possible these things are gonna function better than our own hearing. And this is kind of a completely ripe area right now. In addition, if you don't want to put stuff in your head, there are a couple cavities, the thoracic cavity above the diaphragm and the abdominal cavity below the diaphragm. We recommend staying away from the thoracic cavity because it's got important things like the lung and heart. It's also surrounded by your ribs, which makes it kind of hard to distend. So that's not really gonna be very accommodating for a cool mod. Your abdominal cavity is a little bit more distending and it also houses important mods, so you might want to consider that. Lastly, what we think is the most viable approach for implanting your mods is gonna be subdermal, right? It's gonna be right below the skin. This is an example, this picture shows both an invasive mod and a subdermal mod. And the reason they pick subdermal mods is because they're easy to put in, they're easy to remove. And we have lots of experience with them already. We have cochlear implants, we have pacemakers, we have certain forms of birth control that you can plant right underneath the skin and it slowly seeps out a birth control chemical for years and years and years. We have experience with this. This is gonna be the easiest thing for us to do. Because if you wanna upgrade when the new one comes out, you just kind of pop it out of the skin, apply some local anesthetic, put the new one back in and hook it back up. Not a big deal. Okay, so we don't have that much time left. We're gonna have to book a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about infection and why it's not a good idea to have these people in the back alleys putting in your mod. All right, so let's talk about what you need to get this thing put in. So that's our fourth step if you wanna put it in. All right, so you're gonna need some expertise. You're gonna need the help of surgeons and surgical suites, right? You don't want to get your mod done in the back alleys because like other back alley jobs, antibiotics may or may not be able to cure it. So you don't wanna avoid that type of stuff. There's lots of risks involved and with any surgery avoiding things like infection are gonna be key. So we're gonna book it through this one but this is a picture of an infected pacemaker. Now, let's put this in context. This was done by trained cardiac surgeons that took decades of training. It was done in a sero-surgical suite and it had some of the best post-operative care available on the planet and it still got infected. So if you do your modding in your own garage, your infection is gonna look like a pinprick compared to this. So don't be an idiot. You really need some help when it comes to implanting this stuff in your body because that is bad news bears. All right, so once you put all this stuff in it's really important to connect our mod. I don't have time to fully go through all of this but it's one of the biggest problems that we still have ahead of us in human augmentation. I've got a lot of really cool neuroscience here that I don't have time to go into if you wanna talk about that and Q and A feel free but basically, and you can go to the next slide, our brains are kind of the most complex and amazing computers that have ever existed in the universe so it's not just as simple as soldering a neuron to a microchip and turning it on, okay? We've got incredibly complex neuroscientific patterns that we need to fully understand before we can really hook a brain machine interface in and expect it to work. However, with that being said, there is some incredibly cool research going on. You can go to the next slide. You might have heard about some research going on between Stanford and this gentleman right here seen in his natural habitat. Trying to understand sort of and map his electroencephalogram to sort of understand the patterns that his brain uses to come up with ideas so that he can someday be able to speak just by thinking instead of having to blink his eye like this for half an hour to get his sentence out. Okay, so that's step five. We really need to understand how our brain works in order to fully connect these things. Step six is incredibly important as well. We need to power our mod. We talked a little bit about this with the Sparky leg. There are some really cool ways to take those types of physical prostheses and power them but if you go to the next slide, we can talk about lithium ion batteries that might be in your cardiac pacemakers or your cochlear implants and those are actually very similar to those found in your cell phones so there's not a whole lot of a difference there to the very, very, very small. So recently there was a cool paper published at MIT where they talked about a fuel cell that they could implant into the brain either in the ventacles or the spinal cord that actually ran on the glucose present in that seripospinal fluid that Kowati talked about. And that's sort of cool because it really highlights a couple of the key topics that we've been talking about. These cells are made of silicon and palladium which are relatively inexpensive non-reactive metals and they're put into a location, the spinal canal where there aren't many immune cells around to reject them. All right, step seven, save your pennies, maybe a step that should've been taken before initiating. However, if anything, if we know anything about human augmentation, we know right off the bat it's gonna be really expensive. We've pulled up some costs of some of the current implantable devices now. Cardiac pacemaker sets you back 22 grand as well as a hip replacement per hip, of course. Leg prosthetics of the more advanced kind upwards of 35. And then if you want stereo sound for your cochlear implant, you're gonna need to fork up $80,000. Now what does this mean? And we don't have a lot of time to talk about money and that's not our point with this but what it does do is introduce a very valid criticism, just one of many of human augmentation and that's who's gonna get these mods? What happens when these people that get augmented they can outperform the people that don't have the mods? Are we gonna create kind of an artificial, like a ceiling essentially that the unmodded can never kind of compete with? With that being said, we can't answer these questions. These are the types of things that we as a community have to come together and start solving. We would really need, we really like to solve these things before we let the cyborg out of the box, before we kind of introduce these problems now. One of the things we definitely gonna need to do is come together as a community, all right? So it's important that us as all of us here kind of understand that we're gonna need to be approaching this with encouraging open standards, driving the market for these mods and encouraging kind of equal access to modifications so we can kind of avoid a lot of these problems. So kind of an interesting thing. All right, so step eight, we want you to support your local augmented, all right? So this is a very, here we go. Community is important. You know that, we know that, that's why we're here at DEF CON 20. Helping to build the support of the transhumanism community of the future is just as important as the research and work that goes into creating individual mods. Like most up and coming revolutions this is one that will be met with a bit of backlash and resistance from people who either don't fully understand the goals and ideals of the movement or have objections, some valid, some not, due to ethical, practical or religious concerns. It's important then the same sense of unity that we bring to this weekend can be harnessed in the future when the first few brave souls take the initial steps into enhancing their body. There are several online communities and organizations we encourage you to check out. We like the Humanity Plus, the Singularity Institute. These are kind of what we're talking about the social movements involved, kind of on the ground level here. All right, let's do this. So we're at DEF CON, let's talk a little bit about it. DEF CON 16 shocked us with the dangers of unsecured wireless pacemakers. Black Hat 2011 tanked our blood sugars while showing us how easy it was to kill a person with a wireless insulin pump. The stakes are high now, just imagine when augmentation is widespread. Everyone's body connected wirelessly and those who harm with keystrokes now are not gonna hold back then. We can't leave it up to the device companies whose only concern is being first to market. We can't leave it up to the FDA because they're hopelessly behind the technology curve bound by inline bureaucracy and influenced by legislators some of which still believe the earth is only 6,000 years old. We need to do the best we can now to secure these mods. If we don't, we risk the very boring and likely outcome that at DEF CON 50 all we're gonna be talking about are zero days of our own bodies. All right, that would suck, I like other stuff. So let's do this in our community. Let's understand it and secure these things from the ground up so that we can avoid a lot of the problems we've seen and we're talking about at DEF CON today. Okay, so I have an incredibly eloquent closing statement or something to take my word on it because I wanna finish by 1150 to give our goons the time that they deserve. Moral of the story, the Cliff Notes version is that, so basically Quadi and I talked about doing something for this talk. The summary here that we wanna sort of convey to you is sort of prepare for unforeseen consequences. So we talked about doing something cool for this talk as like a proof of concept. Let's show them something cool type of thing where we could interact with our audience. We did a little bit of research into RFID chips as cliche and done as that has been. People as early as 98 were putting these things in to open up their garage doors or turn on music in their house. So we did a little bit of research. The only RFID chip that was approved for human implantation was done so in 2004. It's called the Verichip ID, very, very similar to the microchip that you put in your dogs and cats if they ever get lost. Cool, so what happened was in 2007 there was a report that came out collecting several clinical studies that showed that these chips when put into mice and rats, in one to 10% of these animals generated an invasive tissue cancer called the sarcoma. Okay, so instantaneously this thing before it even was put through further human testing to see is there a similar risk, is there a similar chance that this happening in humans was taken off of the market and immediately shut down and you're not gonna be able to find this thing and advertise on its company's website anymore, okay? So the moral of the story here is prepare for unforeseen consequences. So Quadi talked in the very beginning of this talk about taking a system, a complex system that we don't fully understand and attempting to drastically alter it. And so along with any of these potentially new enhancements and augments that we may develop, we could also potentially create entirely new types of pathology and disease that we have no idea how to even manage or treat. So along with this wonderful incredible promise that these types of technologies present, there's a dark side behind that promise and human augmentation is gonna have to be a field that is both very bravely and cautiously explored. That about wraps us up. We'd love to talk to you over at the Q of A session. Come and hang out with us and introduce yourselves and if you wanna try and make yourself into a side work, we'd love to work with you on that. Thank you so much for coming. We really appreciate it.