The Current Landscape for Human Augmentation
Ariel Poler (USA)
Founder @ Human Augmentation Investment Syndicate, Mentor to Over 100 Silicon Valley Start-Ups
Ariel is an entrepreneur, mentor and investor focused on Human Augmentation. He was the founder of IPRO, the first web analytics company, and of Topica, one of the first email communities. Ariel was a board member of Kana Software, LinkExchange, Odeo, and StumbleUpon. He currently serves on the boards of Freedom Financial, Returnly, and Strava. Ariel's angel investments include AdMob, Flixster, AngelList, Slideshare, BrightRoll, LendingHome, Thync, Thumbtack, Change.org, and Optimizely. Ariel holds a B.S. in Mathematics with Computer Science from MIT and an MBA from Stanford University. He is originally from Venezuela and lives in San Francisco with his wife and three sons. Ariel is addicted to kitefoil racing.
This talk explores the current landscape of human augmentation, focusing on how digital technology can
The brain learns new things throughout our lives, and we can use technology to enhance our capabilities and sense the world in entirely new ways.
Summary
- The landscape focuses on using "bits" (digital technology) rather than "molecules" (chemical interventions) to enhance human capabilities, sensory perception, and physical performance. - Sensory substitution and augmentation through haptic devices allow the brain to process non-traditional data, such as drone orientation or sound, through the sense of touch. - Lightweight, fabric-based exoskeletons are making physical augmentation more affordable and accessible for healthy individuals, reducing the energy required for movement and endurance. - Advanced bionic research aims to create a universal interface—a "USB for the body"—to provide seamless physical and neurological connectivity for the next generation of prosthetic limbs. - Digital technologies, including tDCS and synchronized audio, are emerging as tools to regulate sleep, focus, and mood by directly influencing brainwaves and nervous system responses.
Article
The Current Landscape For Human Augmentation
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm, Ariel Poler Sketched A Future In Which Technology Did Not Merely Assist The Human Body But Quietly Rewired The Boundaries Of Perception Itself
On 19 May 2017, at Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm in Sweden, entrepreneur and investor Ariel Poler offered a brisk, provocative map of a field still finding its language. His presentation, *The Current Landscape For Human Augmentation*, was less a futurist fantasy than a catalogue of projects already pushing at the edges of human capability.
Poler, founder of the Human Augmentation Investment Syndicate and a mentor to more than 100 Silicon Valley start-ups, arrived at the subject by way of mathematics, business, the early internet, and eventually a fascination with what technology might do not simply for productivity, but for the body itself. He framed his interest in distinctly digital terms. Where many in the broader biohacking world had focused on molecules, on what could be ingested, supplemented, or chemically altered, Poler’s attention rested on bits.
That distinction mattered. It suggested a future in which human enhancement would not be led only by pharmaceuticals or nutrition, but by interfaces, signals, feedback loops and wearable systems that taught the brain new tricks.
From Silicon Valley To The Body
Poler’s biography carried the imprint of the last great technological transformation. Originally from Venezuela, educated at MIT and Stanford, he had founded IPRO, described as the first web analytics company, and Topica, one of the first email communities. He had served on boards including Kana Software, LinkExchange, Odeo and StumbleUpon, and invested in companies such as AdMob, AngelList, Slideshare and Optimizely.
Yet the turn that animated this talk was more personal and more speculative. He told the Stockholm audience that science fiction and a TED talk by neuroscientist David Eagleman had helped redirect his attention. For the previous two years, he said, he had immersed himself in human augmentation, trying to understand who was building in the space and where the most meaningful breakthroughs might emerge.
The result was a survey of technologies that, taken together, hinted at a profound shift. The body was no longer being treated as fixed hardware. It was becoming programmable.
The Rise Of Sensory Substitution
The most compelling territory Poler explored was sensory substitution, the idea that information usually processed through one channel could be delivered through another. It was, in essence, a challenge to the assumption that sight belongs only to the eyes, hearing only to the ears, orientation only to instinct.
“We are using technology to take information from one sense and provide it to another, essentially extending our skin and our awareness across distances,” Poler said.
He pointed to Neosensory, the company associated with Eagleman, as one of the clearest examples. Its haptic vest translated environmental data into tactile signals, allowing users to feel information rather than see or hear it. The premise was grounded in neuroplasticity, the brain’s remarkable ability to adapt, reorganise and learn new patterns across a lifetime.
This was not simply assistive technology in the conventional sense. It was a bid to create entirely new perceptual pathways. A drone’s orientation, ambient sound, directional data or external cues could be rendered onto the skin, training the brain to fold these signals into experience. What began as interpretation could become intuition.
Exoskeletons For The Healthy, Not Only The Injured
If sensory substitution sought to expand perception, exoskeletons aimed to transform movement. Poler highlighted Roam Robotics and its fabric-based exoskeletons as evidence that augmentation was becoming lighter, cheaper and more usable outside industrial or medical settings.
“Lightweight, affordable systems can now allow healthy individuals to use less energy to move, giving them the ability to run faster or hike higher than ever before,” he said.
That claim quietly redefined the category. Exoskeletons had often been imagined as tools for rehabilitation or military strength. Poler suggested a broader consumer future, one in which ordinary, healthy bodies could be supported, extended and energised. The machine would not replace effort. It would redistribute it.
The significance lay not only in capability, but accessibility. Once augmentation left the realm of heavy, expensive machinery and entered the world of flexible wearable design, it became easier to imagine it woven into everyday life.
The Search For A Universal Bionic Interface
Poler’s discussion of bionics moved beyond prosthetics as isolated devices and toward the deeper problem of integration. He drew attention to Cambridge Bioaugmentation Systems, which was working on what he described as a universal interface for the body.
“The next frontier is a universal interface that provides both mechanical and neurological interconnectivity, serving as a sort of USB for the human body,” he said.
The analogy was telling. The promise of a universal standard is never merely convenience. It is scale. A true interface between biology and machine, capable of both physical connection and neural communication, would alter not just prosthetics but the entire architecture of enhancement. Limbs, sensors and assistive devices would no longer remain bespoke endpoints. They could become interoperable components in a larger human system.
Such a future remained aspirational in 2017, but Poler’s framing captured the ambition of the field. The question was no longer whether machines could attach to the body. It was whether they could belong there.
Tuning The Brain Through Sound And Current
Not all augmentation needed to be visible. Some of the most intriguing work Poler cited involved the regulation of mood, focus and sleep through direct engagement with the nervous system.
He referenced Brain FM and Thync, companies exploring neuro-entrainment and electrical stimulation for cognitive performance. He also pointed to sleep technologies such as Sana and Rythm, which sought to influence brainwaves through synchronised hardware and audio.
Here, the body was approached less as a mechanical system than as a field of rhythms. Focus could be sharpened, sleep deepened, mood altered, not necessarily by chemistry, but by pattern. Digital intervention became neurological architecture.
Poler acknowledged a note of caution. Techniques such as neurostimulation and even hypnosis, he said, were not universally effective. Results often seemed to work for roughly two-thirds of people and not at all for the remaining third. But in a field often dominated by grand claims, that admission lent his survey a useful seriousness. Human enhancement was advancing, but not uniformly. The body still resisted standardisation.
Hearables And The Politics Of Attention
Among the subtler forms of augmentation Poler addressed were hearables, devices designed not merely to deliver audio but to reshape what the wearer could hear. He singled out Doppler Labs, whose technology filtered ambient noise to isolate what mattered.
“We can now add a layer of sound to our environment that functions like sunglasses for hearing, cutting out background noise to focus on the human voices that matter most,” he said.
It was a striking phrase, and not only because of its elegance. In an age of permanent distraction, the ability to selectively mute the world carried social and philosophical weight. Augmentation here did not mean more information, but better curation of it. To hear more clearly was also to decide what deserved entry into consciousness.
If the twentieth century gave us devices that amplified the senses, the early twenty-first was beginning to produce devices that edited them.
New Senses, New Memories
Perhaps the most haunting part of Poler’s talk concerned technologies that did not just sharpen existing faculties but introduced wholly new sensory anchors. He referred to systems such as the North Sense implant, which vibrated when the wearer faced north, and Feel bands, which aimed to map and share emotional states through biometric signals including galvanic skin response and heart rate variability.
“Adding a new sense transforms how we experience the world, making memories of events richer because we have a permanent sensory anchor for our life experiences,” Poler said.
The idea was extraordinary in its implications. A constant directional cue, once internalised, could become less a gadget than a layer of selfhood. Poler suggested that users of permanent sensory implants reported deep psychological integration, to the point that the sensation shaped memory and even appeared in dreams.
This was augmentation at its most intimate. Not stronger legs or sharper hearing, but a different way of being located in the world.
A Field Defined By Bits Rather Than Molecules
Threaded through the presentation was a coherent thesis. The most interesting frontier in human augmentation, Poler argued, lay in digital systems that modulated perception, energy, orientation and cognition without relying primarily on chemical intervention.
This was a significant shift in emphasis, especially at an event like Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm, where conversations around diet, supplementation and nootropics naturally held strong appeal. Poler did not dismiss those approaches. He simply insisted that another paradigm was gathering force. Code, sensors, haptics, stimulation and wearable interfaces were becoming tools of self-transformation in their own right.
The body, in this vision, was not a sealed biological object. It was an adaptable platform.
The Quiet Radicalism Of Human Augmentation
There was, beneath Poler’s survey, a larger philosophical challenge. Human augmentation is often discussed in the language of spectacle, as if the future will arrive through dramatic cyborg moments. But the technologies he described suggested something else: a quieter revolution, one of subtle overlays and distributed capabilities.
A vest that lets skin hear. A fabric exoskeleton that reduces fatigue. Audio that alters sleep. Ear-worn filters that clean up conversation. A compass implanted into the body’s awareness. None of these inventions, taken alone, looked like science fiction’s metallic fantasy. Together, however, they pointed to a civilisation in which the line between person and system was becoming steadily more porous.
Poler’s presentation did not claim that this future had fully arrived on that May day in Stockholm. It proposed that its contours were already visible, if one knew where to look. In labs, start-ups and fringe devices, the human sensorium was being edited, extended and reimagined.
The most radical idea in the room was not that people might become machines. It was that they might become more human by learning to feel the world in ways evolution never planned.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm