You Are Cyborgs: Human Conditioning To Technology

Humans adapt to technology, and it has shaped us into what we are today. As technology keeps on developing, we will soon find out that we are not only adapting to technology, but that the distinction between technology and humans, which is already blurred, will be erased. The distinction will disappear because humans will be replaced by something that will be indistinguishable from technology.

At the start of the course, we began by proposing different definitions of what we thought certain topics like technology, culture, and being a human were, to grasp the class’s understanding of the topics. When tasked with defining what I think technology is, I wrote down, “Scientific advancements that serve a beneficial purpose”. What I thought of technology,

Not the kind that has nanotechnology and circuits inside of their body, the kind that realizes that they are no longer an individual person and lives life accordingly. In You are Cyborg, they give many examples of how humans are cyborgs, one of them being, treating the human body as a machine. “It’s about Donna Haraway going to the gym, looking at a shelf of carbo-loaded bodybuilding foods, checking out the Nautilus machines, and realizing that she’s in a place that wouldn’t exist without the idea of the body as a high-performance machine” (Kunzru, 1997, p. 2). The gym is a place where people go to work on their muscles to make them stronger and train other parts of their body, like the heart through cardio exercises. This type of thinking really resonates with me because when I think of the human body at a basic level, I don’t see a difference from a machine. Much like a machine, the human body intakes energy through food, water, and sleep, and outputs energy through physical movement or thought. It is composed of many different components some of which can be replaced and/or improved, for example, some people replace their hips with metal or people who lose limbs replace them with prosthetics. A machine can intake energy and output energy through the use of a physical component or as information. A machine is also made of many different components which can be replaced and/or improved, such as

Murray Shanahan elaborates on this in Heaven or Hell,

The enhanced human would be neither a user of AI technology nor a member of a hybrid human-computer team. Rather, interfaced directly to their brain, sophisticated AI technology would be become a part of their mind, conferring unmediated access to its computational processes. The result would be a new sort of human being, a bio-machine hybrid species with potentially far greater intellectual capabilities than an ordinary person. The rest of society would then have to decide how to treat such people, while they in their turn, would be deciding how to treat us.

The combined AI human being will be as Shanahan puts it, a bio-machine hybrid species, meaning that it’s no longer human. Even though this hybrid species wouldn’t be a human anymore it would still have to interact with humans and our existing network. Which supports the statement previously mentioned, that a change in one person such as becoming a hybrid species will have an effect on others because we are all on a network. This is significant because as technology advances and biological limitations of the human body are surpassed it would be beneficial to change and allow these transformations, much like medicine today. It’s more practical to use medicine and allow the use of a vaccine to prevent a disease than to try and persevere through the disease with natural