Medicine and the Cybernetic Revolution: On the Way to Control Over the Human Body

In this chapter, the authors will focus on current and, especially, future technological transformations in medicine during the final phase of the Cybernetic Revolution. Medicine is and will be a branch around which different technologies (AI, robots, 3d-printing, bio, nano and cognitive technologies) combine. The present chapter provides more examples of such interrelationships denoted by the authors as MANBRIC-complex. Grinin et al. argue that there is a wide range of prospects for the development of medicine in the twenty-first century. The general vector of breakthroughs makes it possible to expand our ability to modify the human body and genome. These changes will probably include the following: the expansion of the opportunities to perform minimally invasive operations instead of the current surgical ones; the cultivation of specific biological materials, body parts and other elements for the regeneration and rehabilitation of an organism, as well as artificial analogues of biological materials (tissues, bodies, receptors, etc.) and so on. Along with the achievements that have been and will be made in medicine, the authors will also identify a number of serious problems and challenges, such as the increasing medicalization of humans and the current stagnation in the pharmaceutical industry.