THE WHY AXIS

Medical microchips? Bionic eyes? LED tattoos? A lot of people want them, and most people surveyed say they should be allowed.

You used to have to sneak around to get a tattoo. Now, though, a survey from Tidio, a customer service chatbot provider, shows that a majority of Americans are fine with cyborg-level body mods.

Using Amazon Mechanical Turk and Reddit, Tidio surveyed 1,127 people, with a split of 57% male and 42% female and an average age of 37. Men and women agree in equal numbers that cybernetic modifications should be allowed, as long as they’re done by trained pros or, better yet, as healthcare. But when it comes to allowing anyone and everyone to get bodily upgrades, men are much more likely to think people should be able to do anything they want (32%) than women (23%). In fact, more women (18%) think cybernetic enhancements should be illegal than men (8%) when they aren’t done for medical reasons. Six percent of the surveyed group want to ban them altogether.

The breakdowns in how people feel about current trends seems to correspond to how they feel about going part-robot. For example, 65% of people with a tattoo or piercing say they’d be okay with letting their teenage child get a bionic eye. And 75% of those responding said they’d get a medical microchip if they could use it to monitor health and get faster diagnoses. Finally, 57% are ready to upload their consciousness into a machine or a new body.

Tidio also created a chart showing the percentage of people who want specific types of enhancements. While microchip monitors top the list (39%), cybernetic eye implants to record pics and video is up there too, at 32%. The least popular enhancement is an LED-based or UV tattoo with night luminescence, a cybernetic tattoo that you can turn on and off or redesign instantly—that hovers at 30%.

In general, people felt that some cybernetic enhancements have great real-world applications, even if those people don’t personally want them. Microchip monitors again were on top at 44%, but the list includes prosthetic arms (40%), bionic legs (38%), and a brain/computer neural interface with download/upload capability (32%).

Of course, these enhancements carry risks. The biggest perceived concerns are that the tech is nowhere close to ready, and that it’ll cost way too much.