**1. Introduction**

The future life of superhumans with fantastic abilities has been extensively investigated in philosophy, literature and film. Despite this, the concept of human enhancement can often be merely directed towards the individual, particularly someone who is deemed to have a disability, the idea being that the enhancement brings that individual back to some sort of human norm. Cochlear implants, artificial hips and even deep brain stimulators for Parkinson's disease are all good examples of the sort of technology designed for a specific group need. This form of enhancement is not the main subject of this paper. Rather, here we concern ourselves with human enhancement which takes a human (norm) as a starting point, employs technology by means of an implant in some way and as a result realises a superhuman.

When looking at ideas from science fiction, the fundamental concept of the superhuman tends to be limited by the restrictions of the imagination of the creator of an idea and/or those who will take on board what has been suggested. Hence, many ideas of the superhuman ignore the capabilities of technology today, never mind technology of the future, and produce superhumans with a pretty limited set of capabilities—for example, the Hulk, who is bigger and stronger, and Superman, who can fly and has enhanced hearing and cold breath or superspeed; coupled with that, the script writer will most likely be limited in terms of their knowledge as to what is technically possible and what is not. Further, for popular media, it usually has to be possible to visualize (on a screen) and understand any enhancement employed, and this eliminates a plethora of possibilities.

An example of such restrictions at this time might be useful. Consider the film of the story *I, Robot* [1], starring the actor Will Smith. Essentially, the control of physical robots in the world is taken over by a computer system, thereby causing havoc amongs<sup>t</sup> humans. Each robot is

itself not particularly intelligent—nothing wrong there—but the computer system which controls them is. But firstly, the robots all look like metallic versions of humans, whereas that is not what most machines/robots actually look like or would need to look like. Secondly (and more importantly), the computer system turns out to be one big supercomputer in one specific building, which of course our hero Will Smith can gain access to and destroy, thereby saving the world. Even now, we have cloud computing (was a version of that filmed in *The Terminator*?), and it is network-based (how could we switch off the internet even now really/practically?).

In the next section, I have a brief look at some therapies that can be modified into some sort of enhancement and then very quickly mention available technologies and where they might lead, if anywhere. Following this, I focus more on such technologies as growing brains and direct connections into the human brain and nervous system specifically for enhancement. Subsequently, I briefly discuss some of the ethical issues, in a realistic way, and finally, rather than trying to draw some conclusions, there is a meandering discussion.
