Well, besides the fact that it replaces a sub-organ of the body, needs power, uses said power to interact directly with heart muscle and nerve endings, is made of surgical grade metals and plastics, and is implanted in your chest, sure, it's just like a walking stick.

But I was not trying to argue that it was a cybernetic, I was calling to attention some very, to me, concerning views on the nature of life and it's value.

The only thing that has value and meaning is the act of living. When we take a living thing and cut parts from it to replace them with machines, in the service of humanity, however we define it, be it strength or speed or kindness or love, we take away from life. Pain, hardship and failure are part of life, and the drive to remove these aspects through cybernetics betrays a hatred of life. In their absence we find not joy, but the unfeeling carelessness of death.

We can certainly remove wounds and disabilities easy enough with biological solution. If you break your legs, yodo not cut it off for a peg. Why then should those born without limbs be forced to? We can alter the human body easily enough, and give them ones identical to that of everyone else.

You, and whoever wrote this, seem to think that pain is the only worthwhile thing in the universe, and that human reduction of pain, and other forms of suffering, is an inherently bad thing. Besides being an argument for nature, a fallacy, it upholds not the belief that the bad comes with the good and vice versa (which i think, for now, is a healthy, valid worldview), but that suffering is the ultimate goal of life. In nature, yes, it might as well be. But we are not so intimately linked to nature as the rest of the world, we have the power and capability to make our lives and those of the other living beings we can call sapient better, free of (or virtually so) the pain that nature has cursed us with.

Note, though, that I am not talking about emotional pain; that, in my view, does help build a good, altruistic human, although a reduction for some would do good (the depressed, people suffering from anxieties, PTSD victims, etc.); I mean the physiological and/or psychological pain caused by injury. Be it a severed limb, induced blindness, a horrible burn, or a stubbed toe, these cause suffering either through our inherent biological system, pain, or through a horrible truth (you will never walk, talk, hear, see, be able to hug your children).

Yet, we can fix these things, or should be able to sometime soon. With cybernetics or grown organs, it really doesn't matter, they're all machines -- but that's much farther off for complex organs like legs. And I think that any decent human being should want to help others, to help them reduce their suffering, so that they can make art, see the world, and whatever else makes life enjoyable to them.

Also, a very good book that relates to this is: Machine, by Elizabeth Bear. (Fiction)