Clothes that do things better than us: Sign of the Apocalypse?
Clothes are starting to do things other than hiding our shame.
From the humble fig leaf, to the nanite treated dockers that repel stains, they’ve come a long way baby.
The latest turn in clothing, probably the most significant since someone invented those sweet pants with the zip away leg that could become shorts, is smart clothing that can do things like detect cancer cells. That sounds swell, and I mean that with no sarcasm.
There are some interesting issues to discuss, but the thing that I find interesting is clothes are actually besting us at our own game.
But I do reserve the right to be a little scared that we are incorporating technology into clothes that are literally our second skin. Can’t we just add an application to the iPhone that detects cancer cells. What’s that? Cell phones might cause cancer? Ok, forget the iCancer widget. We’ll stick to the underwear.
But what to bring this whole idea back to the nanite-stain fighters. I do want to point out Eric Drexler’s theory that nanities might one day consume the entire world, converting us all into a massless goop of a carbon atoms. Just hope keeping that teriariki sauce off my pleated chino’s was worht it.
Who am I kidding. It was.
