Singularity Fashion

Image Source: Urban News.

Back in this post, I talked about proposed fashion concepts such as digital skins and skin lace. These are invasive technologies which will potentially be used as forms of dress or bodily adornments. They fit in readily with the already burgeoning body modification movement and the communications revolution which saw amateur porn become a lifestyle choice and not-so-underground fashion trend.

Futurists assure us that the integration of advanced technology into our lives will continue exponentially and eventually become seamless, invisible, and quasi-natural in a way that will be disturbing to our current sensibilities, but perhaps not to those of tomorrow. Case in point: Urban News reported in 2011 on a California doctor who is developing the technology to turn brown eyes blue; the technology will likely be available outside the United States in 2013 and inside the USA in 2014 for the cost of USD $5,000:

A California doctor is developing the technology for a laser procedure that will turn brown eyes blue.

Dr. Gregg Homer of Stroma Medical says a 20-second procedure will remove the melanin pigment that gives brown eyes their color, making them permanently blue without affecting a patient’s eyesight.

Homer goes on to say that the majority of the world’s population has brown eyes, and the number of blue-eyed people is decreasing in America. But brown-eyed people have blue pigment in their irises, and a treatment session under a specially-tuned laser can destroy the melanin in the eye, gradually changing the iris color from brown to blue over a two-week period. “However,” says Dr. Homer, “the procedure cannot change blue eyes to brown.”

Although this cosmetic procedure will be controversial and offensive to some, according to a report in the Daily Mail, Dr. Homer denies that the procedure is "ethnically insensitive." As technology pushes foward and expands our capabilities, we will repeatedly confront the question: should we do something just because we now can?