Humans are good at design. It’s too bad humans are designed so poorly.
As humans we seem to be able to do some pretty amazing things, but c’mon, we’re barely holding it together. If you bought a human being directly off the shelf, you’d definitely think about returning it shortly after you brought it home.
Here’s the first issue: onboarding.
It sounds like each human (aka the product) starts as blank slate and needs to learn almost everything. Not a good start.
While there is some teaching involved, parents have one job for the first few years: keep their baby alive. Wouldn’t babies be more productive if they were self-sufficient from the get go? I mean, even a baby deer can walk as soon as it exits the womb.
When they are learning, humans, aka the product, takes a very long period of time; like years (and are never really done). Why aren’t they able to function more quickly? Ok, so some knowledge and actions are innate: breathing, eating, defecating for a few. But everything else needs to be learned. And they don’t even learn on the first try! Why wasn’t the knowledge of the previous human passed into the new one? Are you aware of how much time we are going to waste teaching these things what everyone else already knows? Is there some way to download the parent’s knowledge and transfer it to the child? Or access the knowledge from a cloud server?
Secondly, adaptability is a huge issue.
Humans are not going to last long if they can only live in a really small window of temperatures. “Most humans will suffer hyperthermia after 10 minutes in extremely humid, 140-degree-Fahrenheit (60-degrees-Celsius) heat. Death by cold is harder to [determine]. A person usually expires [dies] when their body temperature drops to 70 degrees F (21 degrees C)” So if the product gets either too hot or too cold then it’s permanently broken, aka expires, aka dies.
Not only is that bad, but there is only a small area of Earth that can accommodate this small environmental window. Even within the parameters of that small temperate environment, most of them still cannot even be outside in direct sun for more than a 1/2 hour without getting sunburn. That is not good for the longevity of the product.
We could create clothes for the product to survive the more extreme climates but this is just indicative of how bad the packaging is.
I guess it is good that humans can get wet. I spill things on my laptop all the time.
So not only can they only survive in a small window but their senses only seem to work in a limited spectrum as well. Besides the limits of their intake of the visible light spectrum when the conditions are good, they can’t see well when it is dark or too bright. With these parameters it is amazing that they get around at all.
To end, let’s get to the body and its drawbacks.
Ok, so their fingernails and hair can be cut and grow back, and if the product gets a small cut it will heal. If they lose an entire limb, well then it is bye-bye limb. Starfish, salamanders, etc. can grow limbs back if they are severed. Shouldn’t humans?
Yes, if the product gets sick they could probably recover without modern medicine. Maybe. (That’s a big MAYBE) But if they get something severe, like cancer, well… they’re going to expire (yep, dead).
There is a longevity issue as well. As they get older and pass their peak, their shelf life shortens and their parts slowly begin to fall apart. Even with the advent of modern medicine, it is still hard to diagnose when the parts are not functioning anymore or what to do when they do stop working properly.
No matter what you do with the product to make it stronger, the heart and/or other parts will expire in approximately 75 years. Or for unknown reasons the product could just stop working at any point like from a brain aneurysm. This last fact does not inspire consumer confidence.
Human’s ‘battery’ has to recharge every day during sleep. Not only are they doing nothing productive during this time but they are completely vulnerable to an attack. Just another thing to keep you up at night.
I’d have to say that there are just too many drawbacks and unforeseen costs associated with this idea of humans. They sound nice from one angle but their packaging and hardware seems very unstable.
And we didn’t even touch on the operating software...
https://medium.com/hackettdesign