The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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By Cameron Clarke, Editor

October 28, 2015 | 3 min read

He has been dubbed ‘the leader of the bionic age’ by Time magazine, and at the DigitasLBi UK New Front event MIT professor Hugh Herr shared his belief that technology can end disability in this century.

If you think this vision sounds ambitious, perhaps unrealistic, then bear in mind that Herr has proved people wrong before. At the age of 17, he lost both of his legs to frostbite in a climbing accident and doctors told him his prodigious climbing career was over. Not only did he climb again, but with the use of bionic limbs he scaled even greater heights than he had managed before.

At New Front, Herr spoke to The Drum about his revolutionary work in bionics, and how developments in this field are changing our relationships with technology and forcing us to rethink what it means to be human.

“What is happening on the technological front is deeply profound,” he said. “We’re advancing in the scientific community more and more pronounced, more and more capable technologies, so we have to in parallel advance how we think about this ever expanding volume of augmentative technology.

“How we think of it legally, socially, how we can maintain human diversity and individual freedoms, how we can use the technology in appropriate ways to reduce human suffering. These are the challenges we face and these are the opportunities that we have as a society.”

The marketing industry has become fascinated by the possibilities of wearable technology in recent times, and Herr says “the relationship between the human body and synthetics, designed constructs, will fundamentally change”.

“What we’re glimpsing is this new era where the human is integrating seamlessly with technology. And the level of integration will only improve in the future.”

And while many of us are thinking of technology as brand building tools, Herr’s vision for its potential is much more profound.

“I dream of a future world in which a person loses a limb or their spinal cord is damaged or they suffer a severe brain condition and the technology is so good that we can repair, we can restore people to the capabilities they seek and the quality of life they seek. That’s the world I want to help build.”

You can hear more of professor Hugh Herr’s inspiring story in our video above. We will be publishing more videos from Digitas LBi’s UK New Front throughout this week.

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