On Cyborgs
From Max More’s “The Extropian Principles: A Trans- humanist Declaration”
Like humanists, transhumanists favour reason, progress, and values centred on our well-being rather than on external religious authority. Transhumanists take humanism further by challenging human limits by means of science and technology combined with critical and creative thinking. We challenge the inevitability of aging and death, and we seek continuing enhancements to our intellectual abilities, our physical capacities, and our emotional development. We see humanity as a transitory stage in the evolutionary development of intelligence. We advocate using science to accelerate our move from human to a transhuman or Posthuman condition.
Cyborgs, the interfaced man/machine, represents in current literature humanity compromised. Think Robocop, Ironman, and Ghost in the Shell; humans compromising their bodies by outsourcing bigger/stronger/smarter machines to enhance the human form.
Real Cyborgs
In 1998, Professor Kevin Warwick became the world’s first self-proclaimed “Cyborg”. The professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, England underwent an operation to surgically implant a silicon chip transponder into his forearm. This experiment allowed a computer to monitor Warwick as he moved through halls and offices of the Department of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, using a unique identifying signal emitted by the implanted chip. He could operate doors, lights, heaters and other computers without lifting a finger.
Warwick is now not the only cyborg in the techno-tribe. More an accidental android, Jesse Sullivan a 54year linesman from Tennessee had both his arms amputated after accidentally crossing wires on the job in 2001. 7 weeks later he received two new bionic arms from the Rehabilitation Centre of Chicago. The arms are controlled by nerve endings connecting from the brain to his chest, and from his chest to microcomputers controlling the arm giving him direct control over the prosthetic.
Consequences for us?
Originally designed for medical application, this technology potentially could be used as enhancement rather than prescription. Australian artist Stelarc experiments with extra-robotic limbs to question the prosthetic “not as a sign of lack, but as a symptom of excess. Rather than replacing a missing or malfunctioning part of the body, these interfaces and devices augment or amplify the body’s form and functions.” (from official Stelarc website). His later experiments included growing an artifical ear which he originally planned to graft to his head but for complications had to move to his forearm instead. Yeah, I know… creepy.
Writers such as Andy Clark, Katherine Hayles, and Eugene Thacker argue that cyborgs are not necessarily those who have integrated themselves flesh-to-metal…
We shall be Cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry”
(Andy Clark).
Greg Bateson asks his students to consider “Is the blind man’s can a part of the man?” Is technology independent or an extension of bodies? In this way we may consider ourselves already cyborg outsourcing our hands every time we use a can opener, outsourcing our senses when we use the telephone, outsourcing parts of our cognition every time we use the Internet. Cyborgs are here kids, in more forms than one.
TP
You can read more here:
Transhumanist association
Natural Born Cyborgs
Kevin Warwick official site
Stelarc official site
