PRIMO 3M+ 2001 - Skin
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Smart S K I N ("sS")
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Smart Skin ("sS") — TIMELINE: Biological, Technological, Communications & Design Evolution — Artificial Intelligent Skin (AiS) — Multi-functional Design Options — The Spin on Skin — Squaring the Curve of Design
Primo — Radical Body Design
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The smart skin of the future combines the historical evolutionary role of survival from the earliest of human ancestors, the Australopithecus, to our future Posthuman whose survival will be conditioned to a far different world than we realize today. The architecture of this transition is both biological, as our genes shape our lives, and technological, as we merge and mingle more and more with the technology around us. It is also self-directed, as our intellectual capacity and our need to problem solve, progress, and survive lies at the forefront of our nature—our human nature. The smart skin of the future will be a multi-functional design coalescing safety and survival, sensation and texture, beauty and elegance, fluidity and mobility, and terraced layers of what we know as the "self". The smart skin of the future will function as an exterior protection and interior utility; it will combine artificial and natural design options; fuzzy membrane, both natural and synthetic; a sensorial surface; and ultimately square the curve of design.
The largest human organ, covering 99.9% of our bodies—the first organ to be engineered —the premiere organ to be cloned, is known as skin. Skin, the cultural symbol of health and vitality or disease and decay, protects our inner organs and communicates with the outside world. Each goosebump, spring blush, summer sweat, or winter shiver communicates our emotions to the world. Skin represents the character of culture by displaying human strength. Skin stands up to brushing, cut and tear. Skin’s ability to adapt to environmental change while acting as our bodies’ temperature regulator shows its flexibility and resourcefulness. Skin tells us when we are ill by presenting abrasions, sores, flaking and blemish. It reminds us to cool down or heat up, and its pigment masks the body from perilous ultraviolet sunrays. It acts like a safeguard in preventing excessive loss of corporeal moisture. It allows us to reach yet another mile, a higher jump and faster pace by expanding its pores and breathing with us. Skin reflects our inner nature and outward appeal by appearing fresh, clean, and smooth to the touch.
How did skin become so very wise? Skin emerged as a sheath-like covering for animals, amphibians, mammals and other life forms. The central role of skin has been to stretch across our bone and muscular system to protect it from outside toxins and to regulate temperature. Early on, skin may have been covered with hair, resembling fur-like coats. As we evolved into Homo erectus, skin began developing more pores and growing less and less hair. Skin has also become manufactured by engineering cell cultures to mesh fabrics. This homegrown skin resembles original skin in many ways. While artificial skin looks and feels like "real" skin, what about Smart Skin ("sS")? Imagine skin that regulates according to the brain’s directions; changes colors according to the mind’s moods; alters textures according to the body’s emotions; or changes structure according to the individual need. The applications of artificial intelligence in the engineering of biotechnology will affect how human senses are perceived and how senses, as well as organs, can be augmented. One of these organs is our human skin.
Once again, skin is at the helm of the pioneering human design for improving life. If we sketched a timeline of events in the evolution of biological change, it would surly illustrate parallels of the technological and cultural advances toward an engineering of Artificial Intelligent Skin (AiS) and the advancement in the design of communications, transportation, values and ideals, ingenuity and discovery.
The following Timeline is designed to be helpful in viewing how human advancement and adaptation to change has been a step by step process from where we began to were we are heading. The fusion of ideas generated through technology, science, and culture’s aesthetic awareness and creative artistic expression have been catalytic in the innovation of ideas and materials. These multifaceted, multifunctional and cross-disciplinary trades have coalesced by intention and sometimes by default in developing a design paradigm for the future.
A TIMELINE OF EVENTS
BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION First cell divides: Terrestrial Life — 4 billion years ago
Biped — 4,000,000 BC
Skin color differentiation Homo ergaster —1,700,000
Homo Erectus 1,000,00 — 300,000 BC
Human 50,000 — 30,000 BC
Early Transhuman — late 20th Century
Posthuman — late 21st Century
From the biped to the human, we have gained more pores for sweating and less follicles for growing hair. Our skin has mutated into a variety of shades and tones, from absorption of melanin for ultraviolet light protection, to a minimum of melanin for colder climates.
The evolution of sweat glands and skin pigmentation suggests that early humans had few sweat glands causing our ancestors, perhaps the Homo ergaster of 1.7 million years ago, to evolve with a better cooling system. In that the humans with more sweat glands could forage better in the sun, the better chance of having healthy offspring. "A million years of natural selection later, each human has about 2 million sweat glands spread across his or her body." Simultaneously, due to the mobility of our ancestors, melanization took place which increased the thickness of melanocytes in the epidermis and caused the skin to darken to protect the skin from radiation. "Scientists long assumed that humans evolved melanin, the main determinant of skin color, to absorb or disperse ultraviolet light." Over these millions of years our genes stumbled upon unpredicted changes that effected the human body with an intended design purpose—to adapt to the world and to survive.
In these next decades we will see the emerging of the transhuman (the transition from being biological human beings to the altered biological and genetic makeup of the posthuman) who will engage more readily with technology, smart computers, nanotechnology and robotics—all to protect and extend life.
The engineering of skin and our DNA will affect the human species. While transhumans are considered humans who have adaptive and augmented body parts that are not developed through natural selection of biological mutation, they will be still Homo sapiens and share the same genetic coding for skin, however modified and improved.
TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
Tools as Technology/fire 1,000,000 — 2,000,000 BC
Thermodynamics (Thomson/Carnot) — 1849
Sex change — 1931
ABC (electronic computer) (Atanasoff & Barry) — 1942
A-Life: Cellular Automata (von Neumann) — 1948
Artificial Intelligence (Turing) (Minsky, McCarthy 1956) — 1950
Skin is grown — 1950s
"The Pill" (birth control) — 1950s
Human in space (Gagarin on Vostok 1) — 1961
Transhuman cryonically suspended — 1967
The Game of Life (Conway) — 1969
Implants (artificial heart) (Cooley) — 1969
Skin is patented — 1970s
Genetic engineering (Cohen & Boyer) — 1973
Skin is Bioengineered - TransCyte — 1977
Nanotechnology conceptualized (Drexler) — 1981
In Vitro Fertilization — 1978
Cloning (Dolly) — 1997
DNA Secquenced (Venter) — 2000
smart Skin (sS) conceptualized — 2002
Artificial Intelligent skin (AiS) conceptualized — 2002