Biorobots

[elte]

http://www.gizmag.com/3d-printed-sea-slu...e-91806145

I was wondering about instead of people having horses, just have muscles on life support integrated into machinery.

[C C]

Makes me wonder how much cyborg beasts have stood out in the past's futurism, in comparison to cyborg humans. At least the anthropomorphic variety of animals were conceived all the way back to the first worshiped deities; and "The Island of Doctor Moreau" was prescient for 1896 as one of the early attempts to conceive how they could actually be realized.

In all of this recent hubbub over robots and super-AI sending us out to pasture, the eventual chimeras (with additional GM tinkering and cybernetic augmentations) -- which do not avoid sapient brains developing -- will represent another rival. From Clifford Simak's talking canines in City, to the "underpersons" of Cordwainer Smith's The Ballad of Lost C'Mell finally receiving low-grade rights, to Planet of the Apes, to Cosmo Kramer's sighting of a pig-man in the hospital... there's a wild ride ahead as fiction becomes non-fiction.

[stryder]

Cyberpunk has included animal usage, mostly due to how it followed scientific research using animal test subjects. Such as William Gibson's Short Story "Johnny Mnemonic" (From his book "Burning Chrome") with "Jones" the ex-Navy decrypting Dolphin (Although the real world Dolphin usage was in regards to both mine clearance and spying on enemy vessels).

A Bruce Sterling short also included research into synthetic jellyfish.

And then there is of course P.K.Dicks "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (Bladerunner) where actually animals have become extremely rare through extinction events involving high levels of pollution which leads to people buying artificially created pets.