{"id":29576,"date":"2016-08-31T21:32:38","date_gmt":"2016-09-01T04:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/how-a-hillbilly-delivery-man-is-trailblazing-our-cyborg-future"},"modified":"2017-04-24T19:43:29","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T02:43:29","slug":"how-a-hillbilly-delivery-man-is-trailblazing-our-cyborg-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/how-a-hillbilly-delivery-man-is-trailblazing-our-cyborg-future","title":{"rendered":"How a Hillbilly Delivery Man Is Trailblazing Our Cyborg Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Never under estimate people you never know who may be the next Bill Gates.<\/p>\n

\n

After losing his left arm to cancer in 2008, Jonny Matheny\u2019s life changed radically. The self-styled West Virginia hillbilly, formerly a retail bread sales and delivery man, started traveling to medical research facilities around the country to volunteer as a test-subject for advanced prosthetics and experimental surgeries. Today, Matheny is something of a Model T for cyborgs, wielding one of the most advanced mind-controlled prosthetics ever built.<\/p>\n

When I met Matheny<\/a> at a DARPA technology expo earlier this year, I was astounded by the flexibility and responsiveness of his Modular Prosthetic Limb<\/a>, the latest in a series of mind-controlled prosthetics developed at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. But nothing drives home the revolutionary potential of a device like this than seeing it used to perform mundane tasks: effortlessly putting on a hat or stirring a pot, for instance.<\/p>\n

A new video by<\/a> Freethink<\/em><\/a> <\/em>gives us a behind-the-scenes look at Matheny\u2019s journey to become the world\u2019s most sophisticated bionic man. Honestly, more than reading any detailed scientific primer, watching a guy serve salad with a carbon-fiber arm that takes cues from his brain convinced me that the future is going be full of cyborgs, and that the rest of us will be be jealous.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Never under estimate people you never know who may be the next Bill Gates. After losing his left arm to cancer in 2008, Jonny Matheny\u2019s life changed radically. The self-styled West Virginia hillbilly, formerly a retail bread sales and delivery man, started traveling to medical research facilities around the country to volunteer as a test-subject [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1499,47,1501],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-cyborgs","category-neuroscience","category-transhumanism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29576"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49948,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29576\/revisions\/49948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}