After the prosthetic society

Tthe 1980s and 1990s witnessed the creation of a prosthetic culture. A prosthetic is an artificial device that replaces a human function, and they’re valuable technologies for those who have lost the use of the function in question. If you’ve lost a leg via accident or illness, for example an artificial leg that lets you walk again is a very good thing to have. Still, when a society starts convincing people to saw off their own legs so businesses can sell them artificial ones, something has gone wrong — and that’s not too far from the situation we’re in today.

All that, though, depended on cheap energy, and with today’s plateauing of world oil production and the approach of inevitable declines in the near future, the prosthetic culture of the last few decades is headed for the recycling bin of history.

Energy Bulletin