This report on human augmentation from the UK Ministry of Defence does not represent the “official policy or strategy” of the UK Ministry of Defense. They also consulted with the Germans. So you heard it here first – the English and Germans are working together to breed drug-fueled, Ironman-suited super soldiers.

I’ve taken a screen shot of a key image below. Hopefully the authors would approve of my sharing it, since they made the report public. They rated each technology by familiarity of policy considerations (how risky or ethically fraught is the technology?), transformative potential, and technological maturity.

We have drugs and computers right now, and I assume we are using them. They don’t seem all that excited about the Ironman exoskeletons. “Non-invasive brain interfaces” are maybe a little farther along than I would have thought. Monkeying with genetics and brains is the science fiction stuff. It is a little surprising that they think monkeying with the microbiome would be fairly transformative.