We can rebuild him. We have the technology.

We can make him better than he was.

Better...

stronger...

faster.

[Downey] Man, when I was a kid,

the Six Million Dollar Man was all the rage.

It's a show about a guy who gets rebuilt with robotic machine parts.

God, I loved it.

And then 35 years later, I got to play a similar role,

a character who enhances himself via technology and engineering.

Now, the term "bionics" goes back to the 1950s,

but the idea of enhancement actually dates back much further,

to Greek mythology, Aztec gods, and even ancient Hinduism.

So these next stories are about augmenting our human abilities,

everything from a bionic limb that behaves naturally and understands intent,

to data that improves performance,

and vision enhancement

that saves people in actual life-threatening situations.

It seems with A.I...

anything's possible.

So it raises the question,

do we even want to be superhuman,

or is imperfection what makes life interesting in the first place?

Whatevs. I gotta get back to the gym.

Normally I'd jog, but I got a wonky knee.

I should probably switch it out.

We can rebuild me.

Better.

Faster.

Stronger.

Seven miles an hour...

full out!

[Hugh Herr] Designers within the field of bionics,

they don't view the human body itself

as designable media.

We now have sophistication in Artificial Intelligence,

in motor technology,

in material science,

in how to talk to the nervous system,

setting the foundation...

[all laughing]

...for the end of human disability.

-[Cathy King] Do you wanna do an omelette? -[Jim Ewing] Sure.

You probably don't want too much onion,

because you'll have bad breath all day.

Oh, thanks, yeah. [chuckles]

Anyway, what were we talking about?

[Ewing] 26 years, 29 years--

Twenty six years, almost 29 years together, yup.

Our first date was, uh, uh... 2000, wasn't it?

-[King] 1990. -1990, oh my God.

[King] I could tell when I first met Jim

that he's highly intelligent,

and he said, "Would you like to go rock climbing sometime?"

and I said, "Sure!"

[Ewing] I started rock climbing in my very early teens,

and I consider climbing to be...

it's more than a passion for me.

It's my lifestyle.

In 2014,

my family and I traveled to the Cayman Islands.

We went rock climbing.

I set up the ropes for the day,

and we'd done a few climbs with no problems.

I started up the final section,

and... shifted my feet and slipped off...

...50 feet to the ground.

[hospital monitors beep]

[King] When I saw him at the hospital,

I have never felt so helpless in my entire life.

It was horrible.

[Ewing] The front and back of my pelvis

were completely shattered.

My left wrist was shattered.

My left ankle was broken into two or three chunks,

but the rest of it was kind of pulverized.

It slowly started to dawn on me

that this was something that was going to be life-changing.

[King] You're at the hospital.

[Jim murmurs]

[King] We're not looking at the photos right now.

I'm looking at 'em.

[King chuckles]

[kissing him] You look all you want, baby.

[Ewing] After a year, everything else seemed to heal well,

but the ankle continued to be a problem.

The bone was mostly dead,

and the main fracture was still there.

[King] He was in severe pain all the time,

and he just became so depressed.

[Ewing] I couldn't do the things that I love.

I could barely walk down the street without pain,

never mind go rock climbing.

[King] Rock climbing is his passion.

I mean, I just see him withering if he could not climb.

[Downey] Jim didn't know what to do,

and then, in a truly incredible stroke of luck,

his past came back to help decide his future.

I began mountain climbing at the tender age of seven.

At the age of 17, I was in a mountain-climbing accident,

and I suffered severe frostbite,

and my legs were amputated.

I really dedicated myself

to redesigning first my own legs,

and then the legs of many, many people around the world.

[Downey] A few decades, a couple of M.I.T. degrees,

and a single-minded focus to innovate later,

Hugh launched the prosthetics industry

into the bionic future.

[Herr] I'm getting a tremendous amount of energy,

power from the ankles,

which enables me to walk uphill

with a perfectly erect posture.

[Herr] My legs, they have the brain.

It's a small computer the size of your thumbnail,

and that brain receives sensory information

from sensors on the bionic limb,

and then it runs algorithms

and makes decisions on how to actuate itself.

And machine learning is used as part of those algorithms.

[Dr. Ayanna Howard] So, machine learning

is what's called a subset field of Artificial Intelligence.

We learn from experience.

Machine learning is basically learning from the experience,

where the experience is the data.

It takes input from the world,

and the input could be text in books,

it can be camera images from a car,

it applies a very complex mathematical function,

and then has an output, which is a decision.

[Downey] The bionic legs allow Hugh to walk, run,

even climb,

but for him,

there was still something missing.

[Herr] Because I can't feel my legs,

they... they remain tool-like to me,

and I believe if I could feel my limbs,

they would become part of me, part of self,

and fundamentally change my relationship

to the synthetic part of my body.

[Ewing] I would describe it as just this amazing,

lucky coincidence

that Hugh and I were roommates 34 years ago.

[Herr] We were teenagers rock-climbing together

and living like dirtbags, living like bums,

climbing every day.

[Ewing] So I decided I was going to look up Hugh

and talk to him about what my options might be.

[Herr] Jim was in excruciating pain,

and he asked me if I or my colleagues could help him.

[Ewing] What I really was hoping

was that he could put me in touch

with a reconstructive surgeon that could rebuild my ankle.

Right, so this is your X-ray...

[Herr] Jim was evaluated, and was provided, uh, options

of either maintaining the biological limb

and doing certain procedures

to try to improve its function and to reduce the pain,

or... to amputate the limb.

[Ewing] The thought of amputation was just so big.

What's life gonna be like for me

if I choose to amputate this foot?

But it hurt so bad.

I spoke with Cathy and Maxine about it.

They were behind me 100%.

Whatever I needed to do.

[Downey] How do you make a decision like that?

A few months later,

he agreed to have his leg amputated

and be the first person

to try his friend's bold, but experimental procedure.

[Ewing] It's gonna be good.

-Yeah. -Gonna be good.

Love you.

You too.

Bye, honey, love you.

Love you, too.

[Herr] The way in which limbs are amputated

has not fundamentally changed since the U.S. Civil War...

[soldiers shouting]

...but here at M.I.T.,

we were developing a novel way of amputating limbs.

We actually create little biological joints

by linking muscles together in pairs,

so when a person thinks

and moves the limb that's been amputated away,

these muscles move and send sensations

that we can directly link to a bionic limb

in a bi-directional way.

So not only can the person think

and actuate the synthetic limb,

but they can actually feel those synthetic movements

within their own nervous system.

[Downey] Until recently,

creating a bionic limb that a person can actually feel

has been more science fiction than reality.

Now machine learning

is revolutionizing the way we think about medicine.

If anything can solve the hard problems in medicine,

it's A.I.

Let's take an example, heart disease.

No single human being can have in their head

all the knowledge that it takes to understand heart disease,

but a computer can.

Things like radiology, pathology.

You have an X-ray,

and you wanna see, like, is there cancer in this lung,

and can you pinpoint where the tumor is or not?

A.I.s can, actually, at this point,

do this better than highly trained humans.

[surgeon] Can we get the, uh, Esmarch, please?

It's so light!

It's weird.

[surgeon] It really looks good.

I'm super happy with this,

and you've got a nice degree of padding here.

[Ewing] Right after the surgery,

the incredible, deep, in-the-bone pain

that I had been experiencing for the past year

was gone.

So to me, that was...

that was a success right there.

Never mind whether or not

the experimental part of the amputation was a success,

I was glad to be free of the painful ankle.

He was happy. It was done.

He was ready to move on.

[Herr] Hey, guys.

How's it looking? How's progress?

[M.I.T. tech Eric] Things look good.

I'm gonna go ahead and get you wired up.

[Ewing] The first time I went to Hugh's lab,

Hugh started talking about

"What do you think about a climbing robot ankle?

Would you want us to make one of those?"

[Eric] I'm gonna go ahead and get us started here...

[Herr] It's a specifically designed limb

that Jim can control with his mind,

and actually feel the movements within his nervous system.

[Ewing] I still need the evert.

[Eric] Yup, that's the one we're missing.

All right, so we have you wired to the leg now.

You're driving.

[servos whirring]

[Ewing] Cool.

[Eric] Yeah. Can you give me a fast up-down?

And slow, controlled?

This freakin' blows me away every time you do it.

It's so good.

[chuckling]

When we link Jim's nerves in that bi-directional way,

we're able to create natural dynamics,

so even though the limb is made of synthetic materials,

it moves as if it's made of flesh and bone.

There.

Now it's neurally and mechanically connected.

How does it feel different?

Now it feels like it's my natural foot, somewhat.

Like, I don't have the skin sensation,

but all the motions make sense to my brain.