When both my legs were amputated, they were closed at the upper-thigh, leaving stumps of 8-10cm each. This means that they are too short for me to walk with prostheses and I have been resigned to face life in a wheelchair.

A few weeks ago, one of my colleagues played the below TED Talk video for the whole team of us at work. The progress being made with bionic limbs is truly breath-taking. After watching this, I felt hope for the first time that I might one day be able to walk again.

My colleagues and I got very excited over this technology, and I felt blessed to be working with people who take an interest in my situation.

“A human being cannot be broken. Our environment is broken, our technologies are broken, but we can fix them…”

I felt some trepidation, however, at the suggestion that even able-bodied people should use these bionic limbs in the future to “make life easier” and “reduce the strain on our muscles”. Isn’t that a very bad idea, as obesity is already a huge problem and using bionic limbs for everyday life would surely result in an epidemic of lazy fat people with muscular atrophy?

Soldiers using bionic limbs also worries me, because I really don’t think our armies need anything that will make it easier to create war and kill each other (but that is a totally different discussion about the pros and cons of various methods of conflict resolution).

What do you think about the development of bionic limbs and the potential uses for them?