EVOLUTION BY INTELLIGENT DESIGN - HUMANS WITH NEW SENSORY ORGANS
Liviu Babitz
Liviu Babitz is the CEO and co-founder of Cyborg Nest, a company aiming to help people expand their perception of reality by adding artificial senses to their life. Cyborg Nest launched the North Sense, a miniature piece of technology connecting the owner to the earth’s magnetic field. In a world dominated by artificial intelligence created to make our phones, cars and homes smarter, we decided to make people smarter instead. In his previous role, Liviu was the COO of Videre est Credere, managing undercover networks of people capturing human rights violations in the most remote places on the planet.
Liviu Babitz explores "hacking the human experience" by integrating new sensory organs
Our biological evolution is wonderful, but it is way too slow. We can upgrade ourselves and take a hand in creating a different world. If we sense more, we understand more, we create more, and we answer questions that we had no answer to before.
Summary
- The North Sense is an artificial sensory organ that vibrates when facing north, establishing a permanent, subconscious connection to the Earth’s magnetic field. - Unlike tools that require deliberate action, an integrated sense is always active and becomes a fundamental part of reality, similar to natural hearing or sight. - Artificial senses enhance memory and emotion by adding new data, such as spatial orientation, to life experiences, fundamentally changing the perception of space and alignment. - Technology enables "intelligent design" to accelerate human evolution, allowing for the perception of natural forces like magnetic fields that are invisible to biological senses. - Expanding human sensory capabilities will foster an "evolution economy," leading to new industries, creative expressions, and answers to previously unsolvable questions.
Article
Evolution By Intelligent Design: New Sensory Organs And The Future Of Human Perception
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, Liviu Babitz Argued That The Next Leap In Human Evolution May Be Chosen, Built And Worn On The Body
In Helsinki, at Biohacker Summit 2017, Liviu Babitz stood before an audience already primed for talk of self-optimization and radical futures and offered something more intimate, more unsettling and perhaps more profound. His presentation, *Evolution By Intelligent Design - Humans With New Sensory Organs*, was not simply about gadgets, implants or the familiar techno-utopian promise of smarter devices. It was about remaking perception itself.
Babitz, the CEO and co-founder of Cyborg Nest, described a future in which human beings no longer waited for biological evolution to inch forward across millennia, but actively redesigned the boundaries of sensation. At the centre of his argument was the North Sense, a bio-integrated device attached to the body that vibrates whenever its wearer faces north, creating a constant haptic relationship with the Earth’s magnetic field.
His proposition was both simple and radical: if senses are the means by which humans know reality, then adding new senses means adding new reality.
A New Organ For A New Age
The distinction Babitz drew was crucial. The North Sense, he insisted, was not merely a tool. It was not a compass in a pocket, not another screen demanding attention, not one more digital interruption in an already distracted age. Its significance lay in permanence.
“A compass is a tool,” he said. “The difference between a tool and a sense is that a tool is something that I need to make a deliberate decision to take it out of my pocket, look at it, use the information that it gives me, and put it back in my pocket.”
A sense, by contrast, is relentless. It does not ask permission. It does not wait to be consulted. It becomes part of the background architecture of consciousness, as unavoidable as sound, as immediate as light.
“Senses are part of our reality,” Babitz told the room. “I do not ask my sense if I am interested to know the information, just as we cannot choose not to hear noise. It is part of the environment and how we experience life.”
That idea gave the North Sense its philosophical force. It represented a shift away from externalized information toward embodied knowledge. The data no longer sat on a device to be checked. It arrived continuously, quietly, beneath language, as part of lived experience.
More Than Data, A Rewritten Inner Map
Babitz described what happened when directional awareness ceased to be an occasional calculation and became a continuous sensory fact. Memory changed. Space changed. Even emotion, he suggested, changed with it.
The wearer did not simply know where north was. Over time, the body began to build a subconscious cartography. Streets, rooms, doorways and landscapes became emotionally tagged by orientation. Experiences acquired an added layer of meaning, one unavailable to the unaugmented body.
He explained that photographs taken around Helsinki all shared the same orientation, facing north. For him, this was not trivial metadata but part of a larger mental transformation. Places were no longer remembered solely by colour, smell or sound, but by their alignment on the planet.
This was among the most arresting claims of the talk: that artificial senses could alter not just what humans perceived, but how they formed memory itself. A child entering school, a walk into a garden, a moment in a foreign city, all became stitched together by a sensory thread that had not existed before.
In Babitz’s account, technology was no longer only extending the body’s powers outward. It was reshaping inward experience.
The Case For Intelligent Design
There was, of course, provocation in the title. Babitz used “intelligent design” not in its theological sense, but as a challenge to the passivity of natural evolution. Biology had brought humanity this far, he acknowledged, and its achievements were extraordinary. But it was too slow for an age in which human beings could engineer new forms of perception for themselves.
“We are getting to a place in our evolution where information and data can be part of us,” he said. “Information is no longer something we need to look at to understand; the information simply comes to us.”
Behind that statement sat a broader argument about human history. Everything built by civilisation, Babitz said, emerged first through sensation. Art, music, food, architecture, tools, all of it began with what human beings could see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Expand the sensory palette, and the range of possible culture expands with it.
“Everything we ever created in this world, we created because of our senses,” he said. “Without them, we would be a very smart brain in a box with no possibility to connect to anything or understand the world.”
The implication was immense. New senses would not simply offer novelty. They might become the foundation of new industries, new aesthetics, new sciences and new ways of living.
From Human Rights To Human Augmentation
Part of what gave Babitz credibility on stage was the unusual trajectory that brought him there. Before Cyborg Nest, he had worked as the COO of Videre est Credere, managing covert networks that used technology to document human rights abuses in places too remote or dangerous for conventional journalism and advocacy.
That earlier work shaped his worldview. Technology, in his telling, was not an abstract force to be feared from a distance. It was a practical instrument that could surface hidden truths and alter real lives. It could expose suffering. It could create change.
He linked that instinct for transformation back to his childhood in Romania, where the 1989 revolution had left a permanent mark on him. As a child raised in a repressive society, he watched people fill the streets and turn the impossible into the real. Change, he learned, was not magic. It was collective action.
That lesson carried through his remarks in Helsinki. If sensory augmentation was to become meaningful, it would not happen because one founder had a striking prototype. It would happen because a wider public chose to inhabit the possibility.
The Mainstreaming Of The Once Strange
One of the more telling moments in the presentation came when Babitz described the people who had already adopted the North Sense. The early users, he said, did not belong to a single niche. They were not only hackers, futurists or body-modification extremists. They were lawyers, accountants, engineers, artists, ordinary professionals with an extraordinary appetite for new experience.
That diversity mattered. It suggested that what began at the margins of biohacking might not stay there for long.
Babitz framed this shift through cultural analogy. Hip-hop had once been dismissed as fringe noise before becoming the dominant language of popular music. Rock and roll had once been garage rebellion before becoming canon. Bio-integrated sensory technology, he implied, was on a similar path, moving from improvised experimentation to social legitimacy.
The point was less about hype than about pattern recognition. Radical ideas often arrive in ungainly form, mocked before they are normalized. The crude early music player becomes the seamless smartphone. The garage prototype becomes an industry.
In that sense, the North Sense was being presented not as a finished product, but as a first crack in the wall.
The Evolution Economy
Babitz spoke of what he called an “evolution economy”, a phrase that captured both commercial ambition and civilisational possibility. Once new senses existed, he suggested, ecosystems would form around them. Designers, artists, engineers and businesses would create products and experiences tailored to augmented perception.
This was one of the most intriguing aspects of the argument. New sensory capacities would not remain isolated technical achievements. They would demand a surrounding culture. Just as hearing gave rise not only to music but to instruments, headphones, concert halls and recording industries, so too could artificial senses generate layers of invention that could not yet be fully imagined.
There was, in this vision, a distinctly economic realism. Human enhancement was not being cast merely as a laboratory curiosity. It was being pitched as the basis for new markets, new professions and new forms of value creation.
Yet Babitz’s language also carried a moral insistence. The question was not whether technology would shape humanity, but how humanity would shape technology.
“It is our role and our creation,” he said. “It depends on us how we take technology from here and what we do with it to create a prosperous world. It is our responsibility and we are ready to take it.”
Beyond Fear, Toward Responsibility
The modern technology debate often swings between evangelism and dread. Babitz tried to carve out a third path. He acknowledged the anxiety that clings to powerful tools, the fear that technology may dominate rather than serve, but rejected fatalism. His own experience, in human rights work and now in sensory innovation, had taught him that tools do not arrive with fixed moral destinies. They are directed by human choices.
That insistence on responsibility was one of the speech’s most resonant notes. Sensory augmentation, in his account, was not an inevitable march toward dehumanisation. It could instead be a deepening of human engagement with the world, an expansion of awareness rather than a retreat from it.
There was something almost poetic in the image he offered: a species long confined to five inherited windows on reality beginning, at last, to cut new openings.
A Richer Life Experience
At its core, Babitz’s presentation at Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki was a defense of curiosity. Why seek new senses? Because human beings have always reached beyond strict biological necessity. There was no evolutionary requirement to go to the Moon, he noted, just as there was none to dream of Mars. Yet people did both in imagination and ambition because they wanted more than survival. They wanted a larger experience of existence.
“As humans, we are curious creatures,” he said. “There was never a biological reason for us to go to the moon or Mars, but we want to experience more, learn more, and live a richer life experience.”
That may have been the cleanest expression of what the talk ultimately offered. Not a manifesto for machines over humanity, but a plea to take human possibility seriously. If the future of perception can be designed, then the challenge is not merely technical. It is existential. What kind of beings do we want to become when reality itself can be widened?
In Helsinki, Babitz did not claim to have finished that answer. But he made a compelling case that the question had already arrived.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki