Most people are born with two arms and hands, with each hand containing four fingers plus an opposable thumb. Those hands are a remarkably flexible and protean way of interacting with the world.
From the time we are little we develop a powerful sense of proprioception. You can generally reach for something with wonderful accuracy even when your eyes are closed. After all, your brain has spent years and years learning your body, in all of its possible configurations.
But as technology starts to allow physical experience to become more visually virtualized, and we begin to make ever greater use of unseen helper robots, it might be possible to tinker with this basic architecture. Not by changing our physical armd and hands, but by changing our mind’s perception of them.
We might find it convenient, for example, to reach across a room to pick something up. We wouldn’t actually be stretching our arms across the room, but the illusion that we are doing so might be achieved by a combination of cyber-modified vision and helper robots that can pick up distant objects and place them in our grasp.
Today’s technologies allow us to do “impossible” things all the time. We move our bodies across oceans in a matter of hours, chat with people on the other side of the planet, and jot down our thoughts in a way that is potentially readable by billions of people (just as I am doing now). Because we are so used to performing these miraculous feats, we don’t realize how remarkable they are.
Similarly, emerging technologies will eventually allow us to reach across a room and pick up an object fifty feet away. And one day kids will be born into a world where that sort of thing is commonplace. They will think nothing of it.