Cyborgs aka "iPeople"

Before the idea of the Cyborg was introduced to us on Mondays lecture, I thought a Cyborg to be a strictly physical concept.

The infusion of man and machine in some sort of weird and unnatural combination of gears and flesh all making up what loosely resembled a human.

Instantly I thought of the Borg race from Star Trek; Pictured to the left is Captain Jean-Luc Picard after he had been "upgraded" to have machiney parts by the Borg race. (note: the fricken laser beam attached to his head)

How close are we to being able to replace our bodies with machines?
Check this link out. 16 actual parts of your body that they can or will be able to replace in the near future. Some parts on the list that you might find astonishing:
-Heart
-Lungs
-EYES...

YOUR EYES!?!? And they even have different degrees of enhancement... You could go for the full eye replacement; which has the potential for all sorts of stuff: different "modes" of vision where you could see in night vision, infra red and heat vision. Crazy amounts of digital zoom etc.

Or if you're feeling tight on the budget, there's an alternative; enhanced contact lenses. These project extra information onto your eye like a "heads up display" in a jet fighter for example (see picture).

Now imagine for a second you're walking down the street with your robotic contact lenses in, surveying the street in Terminator fashion when an update from facebook pops up into your sight and its a friend request from your new friend in FTVMS 314.

This is a very likely implementation of this technology, in my opinion, as we already use Facebook on the go via our smartphones.

I think the desire for people to bring technology closer and closer is inevitably going to lead to an integration of human and machine in a way that will allow users to access their technology faster than is already possible (the time it takes to reach for your phone in your pocket).

Imagine the time you could save if you were in some way able to communicate with computers with merely your brain signals. Currently, if you want to update your facebook status, you have to access the internet (either by smartphone or computer), log in, type your status, then hit enter, casting it far out into the interwebs.

On the other hand, lets look at the steps that would be needed if you could think all of those steps and a computer could understand your thoughts; it could literally be as easy as thinking this sentence, "I want to update my facebook status as: Man this weather sucks, I wish I was in Fiji, with a mojito." Done.

I appreciate the benefits that technology brings to us day to day, and I'm definitely a fan of pushing technology further to benefit our everyday lives and make it easier to keep in contact with the people in our lives as well as the world around us (aka technology is my slave).

However I do see some of the pitfalls that lie within the discussion of "how much is too much technology?". If we become too reliant on technology we run the risk of having something go seriously wrong and the whole system crashing with some serious, real world results.

I think the development of technology will be carefully controlled and monitored, to avoid any sort of "machine uprising". As humans we're already so paranoid about technology revolting I think that we would avoid at all costs, putting ourselves in a position where our iPod would have the initiative and capability to try and kill us.

In closing, I think people will definitely have varying opinions on the moral issues of merging our bodies with technology to the degrees mentioned, but you can't argue with the benefits it could represent and ultimately the time it would save us.

Thanks for reading.

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