When we end up voluntarily ceding control of our own body parts to AI (for example so we can automatically walk around the grocery story while simultaneously catching up on boxsets on a VR headset) I wonder what that will feel like.
The underlying tech is currently in research phase.
What I mean is that humanoid robots are coming (as previously discussed).
And while robots are a mechanical challenge and a software challenge, some people are asking: what if you took that software part and pointed it at something else? Like, not a robot shaped like the human body but the human body itself.
For example: you can directly drive the muscles using Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS).
Here’s a new wearable called Human Operator which won MIT Hard Mode 2026.
Human Operator is a human augmentation tool that allows AI to briefly take control of your body to help you learn and do things you normally cannot do. To do this, it uses a Vision-Language Model for human motor control through Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS). Vision-based commands are generated via open-ended speech input through the Claude API to control finger and wrist stimulation for intuitive on-body interaction.
So you wear this augmentation over your arm. It looks like white fish scales.
Then you talk to it. And it zaps your muscles to play the piano: AI stimulates fingers in sequence to play melody.
That’s the link to the GitHub page in case you want to build it yourself.
Cognitively, zapping your muscles to perform a task frees up your brain to do other stuff!
Here’s a paper that studies this:
Nith, R., Ho, Y., & Lopes, P. (2024). SplitBody: Reducing mental workload while multitasking via muscle stimulation. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘24) Article 81, 1-11. Association for Computing Machinery.
The authors point out that mostly EMS is used for tasks the subject is already focused on, e.g. playing a musical instrument.
And also EMS is distracting, either because it causes a tingling
or generally it will decrease the user’s sense of agency
.
But despite that, would it be possible to perform two sub-tasks, such as:
continuously stirring the pot to make caramel (a repetitive muscle movement) and writing an essay (a cognitively-demanding task).
The researchers called their EMS implementation SplitBody. It looks like a cigarette packet strapped to your upper arm.
Results:
We found that with SplitBody, participants reported less physical-demand (decrease of 31%) and less mental-demand (decrease of 26%) than when performing the task by themselves. Moreover, the performance increased by 35% (averaged over both tasks), including the task that was not automated by EMS, which increased by 18%.
i.e. if you’re on a work call and cooking at the same time, you should let yourself get electrocuted to do the cooking because, although it tingles, you’ll end up doing better at the work call and the cooking too.
Multi-tasking!
Electrical Muscle Stimulation is step one.
You could go direct to the brain?
Like, you can have robot cockroaches:
There’s a backpack that you can install on cockroaches that drives them around by zapping the neurons in their antennas with electrical pulses.
It was a Kickstarter in 2013: The RoboRoach: Control a living insect from your smartphone!
There’s also a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation that you can use with humans: you zap your brain with a whopping great big magnet, and if you point it at your motor cortex then it can move your arms and legs.
Apparently it feels like free will.
Every so often I dream of a transcranial magnetic stimulation helmet that can walk me to the shops (2015):
That way your can check your email and Skype your mum, while the Walking-Down-The-Street Hat takes care of the tedious job of moving your legs, and collision-detecting your way around obstacles like buses and humans.
Whenever I meet someone who I reckon could genuinely build me a TMS helmet (I met such a person the other month at a lab in New York) I pitch the idea so it lives in their head.
And it turns out that, when you propose a special hat that automates your legs so you can walk to work while you’re also doomscrolling or whatever, they look at you like you’re loopy. Especially if you also act it out.
We have this image of ourselves as being singular, right? We do one thing st a time.
Yet I don’t consciously think about my legs when I stand up and walk, and I’m clearly multi-threaded in my thinking otherwise ideas wouldn’t develop in the background and pop up in the shower later, and I delegate my way-finding cognition to Google Maps and my memory to my notes.
It’s just an extension of that.
But I wonder whether it will feel alarmingly alienating, like voluntary disassociation as soon as you hit that button of the app that walks your legs to the office (it will inevitably use an app); or will it feel like being in the back of a cab where you can chat with your friends instead of thinking about driving?
And, as we get accustomed to running multiple embodied tasks in parallel, will we start feeling comfortable with renting our parts of ourselves on demand, just casual you know, and somehow it won’t undermine our sense of self?
It’s not so much that I think that a bodily-automation helmet is a good idea, it’s that it feels like an economic inevitability – once possible.
For example:
- Would you spend the price of a car on a home robot that can do the washing up and fold the laundry and tidy the kids room? Instead you could spend 10% of the money on an AI sleeve that takes over your arms to be the robot, and you can delegate your zombie limbs to do the chores while also attending your work zoom or winding down by doing your puzzles.
- Would you accept wearing AI gauntlets to drive your car if it meant lower insurance?
- If I’m sitting around just watching TV, why not wear an Apple Vision Pro so I can carry on watching my programmes on the inside, and meanwhile people on the other side of the world can dial into my body and go touristing around my neighbourhood, experiencing it from their headsets? I wouldn’t even have to know.
- Will a factory really bother investing in precision robotics to assemble their parts, or even time in training people to do the same, when they can strap workers with dextrous fingers into pre-trained software to do the job immediately – and the workers accept less pay because they are doing double-duty by working second tier call centre support jobs at the very same time.
Ok horrific.
But what extra could you do too?
Like, I wouldn’t trust myself to free-climb up El Capitan.
But maybe Electrical Muscle Stimulation could drive me up there safely, and I’d just be along for the ride as I (or whatever split body “I” am at this point) ropelessly ascend 3,000ft of sheer rock face, AI controlled hands and feet, high up in the fresh air of Yosemite, body tingling as a thousand tiny electric pulses zap me hour after hour through my fish-scaled cyborg bodysuit.
When we end up voluntarily ceding control of our own body parts to AI (for example so we can automatically walk around the grocery story while simultaneously catching up on boxsets on a VR headset) I wonder what that will feel like.
The underlying tech is currently in research phase.
What I mean is that humanoid robots are coming (as previously discussed).
And while robots are a mechanical challenge and a software challenge, some people are asking: what if you took that software part and pointed it at something else? Like, not a robot shaped like the human body but the human body itself.
For example: you can directly drive the muscles using Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS).
Here’s a new wearable called Human Operator which won MIT Hard Mode 2026.
So you wear this augmentation over your arm. It looks like white fish scales.
Then you talk to it. And it zaps your muscles to play the piano:
That’s the link to the GitHub page in case you want to build it yourself.
Cognitively, zapping your muscles to perform a task frees up your brain to do other stuff!
Here’s a paper that studies this:
Nith, R., Ho, Y., & Lopes, P. (2024). SplitBody: Reducing mental workload while multitasking via muscle stimulation. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘24) Article 81, 1-11. Association for Computing Machinery.
The authors point out that mostly EMS is used for tasks the subject is already focused on, e.g.
And also EMS is distracting, either because it or generally it will .
But despite that, would it be possible to perform two sub-tasks, such as:
The researchers called their EMS implementation SplitBody. It looks like a cigarette packet strapped to your upper arm.
Results:
i.e. if you’re on a work call and cooking at the same time, you should let yourself get electrocuted to do the cooking because, although it tingles, you’ll end up doing better at the work call and the cooking too.
Multi-tasking!
Electrical Muscle Stimulation is step one.
You could go direct to the brain?
Like, you can have robot cockroaches:
There’s a backpack that you can install on cockroaches that drives them around by zapping the neurons in their antennas with electrical pulses.
It was a Kickstarter in 2013: The RoboRoach: Control a living insect from your smartphone!
There’s also a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation that you can use with humans: you zap your brain with a whopping great big magnet, and if you point it at your motor cortex then it can move your arms and legs.
Apparently it feels like free will.
Every so often I dream of a transcranial magnetic stimulation helmet that can walk me to the shops (2015):
Whenever I meet someone who I reckon could genuinely build me a TMS helmet (I met such a person the other month at a lab in New York) I pitch the idea so it lives in their head.
And it turns out that, when you propose a special hat that automates your legs so you can walk to work while you’re also doomscrolling or whatever, they look at you like you’re loopy. Especially if you also act it out.
We have this image of ourselves as being singular, right? We do one thing st a time.
Yet I don’t consciously think about my legs when I stand up and walk, and I’m clearly multi-threaded in my thinking otherwise ideas wouldn’t develop in the background and pop up in the shower later, and I delegate my way-finding cognition to Google Maps and my memory to my notes.
It’s just an extension of that.
But I wonder whether it will feel alarmingly alienating, like voluntary disassociation as soon as you hit that button of the app that walks your legs to the office (it will inevitably use an app); or will it feel like being in the back of a cab where you can chat with your friends instead of thinking about driving?
And, as we get accustomed to running multiple embodied tasks in parallel, will we start feeling comfortable with renting our parts of ourselves on demand, just casual you know, and somehow it won’t undermine our sense of self?
It’s not so much that I think that a bodily-automation helmet is a good idea, it’s that it feels like an economic inevitability – once possible.
For example:
Ok horrific.
But what extra could you do too?
Like, I wouldn’t trust myself to free-climb up El Capitan.
But maybe Electrical Muscle Stimulation could drive me up there safely, and I’d just be along for the ride as I (or whatever split body “I” am at this point) ropelessly ascend 3,000ft of sheer rock face, AI controlled hands and feet, high up in the fresh air of Yosemite, body tingling as a thousand tiny electric pulses zap me hour after hour through my fish-scaled cyborg bodysuit.