Cyber Heroes

The day before the next operation, Lu Xuanyu received a notice asking him to go to a conference room in the medical center alone.

When Lu Xuanyu arrived, he saw Xiang Shan standing there.

"Mr. Xiang?" Lu Xuanyu was a little surprised, "You came to me specifically for something?"

While waiting for Lu Xuanyu, Xiang Shan moved his hands in front of him, as if he was using AR smart glasses to handle something. After Lu Xuanyu entered the door, he waved his right hand widely to hide all the interfaces, and then looked at Lu Xuanyu.

After a few words of greeting, Xiang Shan asked: "Um, Lao Lu, I have a little problem recently."

As he spoke, he took out a small stack of documents from his side: "These experimental reports show that when you were recently working on projects related to tactile feedback and motion signals, you had records of connecting and operating non-humanoid prostheses and sensory prostheses for a long time. ,Right?"

Lu Xuanyu took it and turned it over twice: "Yes, there is such a thing."

"So... this record of 'volunteers showing discomfort' is not an exaggeration, right? Or is it a concealment?"

Lu Xuanyu looked at it and found that his embarrassing incident of spitting out his lunch due to operating a tactile prosthesis was also recorded. He felt a little embarrassed and said, "This is recorded truthfully."

Xiang Shan sighed: "Actually...how should I put it, you can refuse. Really."

Lu Xuanyu heard something at this time: "You mean, Old Chen... Director Chen's behavior is not good?"

"It can't be said that it's not very good." Xiang Shan said: "I believe that Lao Chen has good intentions, and he does believe that based on the records of animal experiments, theoretically these projects will not bring long-term, irreversible adverse effects. However, different scientists have different understandings of the world. And scientists' understanding can only be said to be closer to 'reality' than that of non-academic people. In the final analysis, it is not reality..."

Lu Xuanyu said: "Wait a minute, can you make it simpler?"

"Let's put it this way, when Yawgmoth performed the first genetic surgery for Homo sapiens to transform baseline humans, he estimated that the surgery would be 'not a big problem.'" Xiangshan said, "In the end, in order to save his life , I don’t know how many gray areas I have walked through, and Niyaguti even bet her career on this. Scientists are not gods, and scientists sometimes go wrong - even in their own professional fields."

"Lao Chen is also like this. Even if he believes that there is no risk of sustained damage based on animal experiments, he cannot actually rule out the possibility of problems."

Lu Xuanyu scratched his head: "Did you receive some small report or something..."

Xiang Shan shook his head: "During the internal meetings these days, Dr. Tao compiled his report and pointed out some problems to me."

"this……"

Xiang Shan laughed angrily: "Lao Lu, I am the one who is worried about your life safety. Why, you think I am not loyal enough to Lao Chen?"

"This..." Lu Xuanyu was a little embarrassed: "Well, it's a little bit. These projects are all approved by me, and I think they are indeed very meaningful... or Lao Chen said they are very meaningful."

"I don't deny it. But that's not the problem." Xiang Shan rubbed his forehead: "Human life is priceless, and all lives are equal. Scientists cannot actively sacrifice a few to complete a 'meaningful and great cause'. "

Lu Xuanyu didn't know whether to laugh or cry: "Wait a minute, you will feel dizzy and nauseous, right? What kind of sacrifice is this? People who practice martial arts can still bear this little hardship."

Xiang Shan took a deep look at Lu Xuanyu and changed his subject: "Did you know? Lao Chen started his career in visual processing, so when we first developed the prosthetic eyes, we asked him to put forward his ideas first. But his ideas He was also the first one to be killed. Why? He thought that the image data generated by the computer could be collected directly from the CCD, and then injected into the middle and high-level cortex together."

"If you do this, you can skip a series of problems such as simulation and positioning, and you can also bypass the bandwidth limit of the artificial optic nerve and directly achieve superhuman vision. And in theory, this is also feasible. Human visual processing The mechanism has strong plasticity. If you put on a person's "glasses that flip the field of vision up and down," the person will not be used to it in the first few days, but after a few days, he will feel as if the glasses do not exist, and what he sees is the normal world. .”

"However, we are still making artificial retinas and artificial optic nerves honestly."

Lu Xuanyu couldn't help but ask: "Why?"

"What if, what if, your vision is filled with all kinds of indescribable lights and shadows for a long time...their shapes and colors are completely different from the objects you have seen before, and you cannot connect them with the tactile and olfactory signals that you are exposed to at the same time. Get up. What do you think will happen to you after you stay in this state for a few days?"

Lu Xuanyu shook his head: "I don't know."

Xiang Shanyi spread his hands: "I don't know either. But Dr. Tao told him at the time, 'If it causes epilepsy, then I have no position to defend you in front of the ethics committee.'"

"Humans are the only creatures that have all advanced thinking activities. From this point of view, humans are indeed special creatures. This kind of project involving human perception and spirit cannot get the full picture from the results of animal experiments."

"And we are not completely rejecting his idea. At least we can continue to accumulate data in monkeys. The same is true for artificial multi-color vision. We are just opposed to allowing adult human volunteers to test such projects at this stage. "

"I emphasize again that Lao Chen does not have any malicious intent towards you. The inferences he obtained from the results of animal experiments are indeed logical. We can indeed believe that his experiments will not produce any results in most cases. Long-term adverse effects. But there is still the possibility that he may have miscalculated. Based on understanding this, you can selectively refuse some of his requests.”

Lu Xuanyu seemed to know Xiang Shan again. He looked at Xiang Shan and said: "Mr. Xiang, um... I have always thought that you are a radical among radicals... something like universal genetic modification, human prosthetics and so on..."

"I took it as a compliment."

"But it turns out you also have a conservative side..."

Xiangshan grinned down: "This is why our company is so big. Before we achieve a staged victory, we cannot make a single mistake."

With that said, Xiang Shan patted Lu Xuanyu on the shoulder: "Get ready for the surgery."

This is just a small episode. The next day Lu Xuanyu entered the operating room again.