Oh, the Humanity: What Will Tech Upgrades Do to People?

With technology offering a growing list of opportunities for sophisticated enhancement

of our bodies, could we become less than human? Credit: Ezume Images/Shutterstock WASHINGTON — In science fiction, there's no shortage of characters who are enhanced with some form of machinery. Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, wears an electromagnetic device inside his chest that keeps him alive and powers his metal suits. When Star Wars' Luke Skywalker lost his hand in a lightsaber battle, he quickly replaced it with a mechanical hand that worked just like the original — and looked just like it, too. And in the 2015 film "Mad Max: Fury Road," Imperator Furiosa sports a dangerous-looking metal prosthetic arm that appears to have been assembled from bits of power tools, and which she uses to cement her reputation as a ruthless fighter. Even in the real world, technology enables mechanical reconstruction and modification of the human body, from prosthetic limbs and pacemakers to brain-computer interfaces and contraceptive implants. But are there limits to technological "upgrades" to our bodies, and at what point do we simply stop being human, and become…something else? [Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies]