Cyborg - human or machine?

When Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline coined the term "cyborg" 50 years ago they were talking about people living in the outer space. Today we can define a cyborg as a human (or other organism) that get increased capabilities with the help of technology. With a passive definition like this most of us are cyborgs already. I think that the term is not interesting until it is technology that substantially improves our abilities. We have many examples, such as pacemakers, prostheses and even wheel chairs. They make things much better for the individual in question but maybe not with much better functionality than a healthy body. Transhumanism is a term that is very related to cyborgs. Transhumanism is a philosophy (or maybe philosophies) that not only believe in a very bright posthuman future but also strive for it. The typical transhumanist have great hopes on the The Singularity.

New technology, new materials and new knowledge about how our body works will give us human spare parts with even better performance than the original. We will see this in sports where the current problems with steroids, blood doping and other kind of doping is just the beginning. In the Olympics in Beijing 2008, we had examples of contestants who ran with a prosthesis. The Olympic Committee approved it. Next time, 2012, the prosthesis are so good that they will win if they still are approved to attend.

Will the disabled be the first superhumans?

This may sound strange but it is probably close to the truth. Let's make a little test:

The man who run 100 meter in the shortest time is regarded as the fastest man on earth. Today, the fastest human ever is Usain Bolt from Jamaica. He run 100 meter in 9.69 seconds at the Olympic games in Beijing, August 2008. This is an amzing speed.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

If I offered you legs that would make you run faster than Usain Bolt, would you receive them? You must of course cut off your own legs and replace them with the new legs. My guess is that you would say no! Well, maybe not. If you are one of the disabled people who have no legs, I guess that you would say yes!

So when these legs are here, we will see disabled people with supernatural powers. Jumping and running like no one ever done before.

Of course this can be true for any human organ. We will probably be reluctant to replace fully functioning organs with mechanical stuff but if the organ is missing or dysfunctional we will say yes.

In the future we will also see mechanical components that can be mixed with our organs and implanted in our bodies. Not replacing organs is a little more easy to accept, I think.

The limits will then still be our bones, flesh and nerves and not the mechanical parts. The one who can get a complete mechanical set will probably have even better features.

I am not a medical expert but I think that the future for many kinds of disabilities looks rather bright!

Some ethical and hard questions

If you know that you will live x years extra if you replace your functioning liver with a mechanical one, will you do it? How about your heart? Your brain?

Before we answer we must also think about how it will be done. We are talking about a future where the surgical methods are different from today. Maybe nanorobots injected in our system, can do all or part of the job, maybe micro surgery done more or less by robots or maybe some other method not yet invented. Mistakes are very rare and repairable. Painless and shorter period of recovery compared with current methods. It is maybe easier to say yes under these conditions?

The ethical questions are numerous however. What kind of ethics and culture will be present at that time? I think that we will gradually get used to the idea. Just take a look at how the perception of plastic surgery has changed over the years.

So far we have been talking about replacing one or another organ with artificial artifacts. Let us go one step further. Imaging a situation where most or all of our organs can be replaced by artificial compononents that performs far better than the original. How much can we replace before we are more machines than humans? Maybe it is the brain that makes us human? Some day even the brain will be possible to replace but I don't want to fantasize about its implications. Replacing the brain is so far ahead and science fiction that I will stop here.

I think that we are in a period where the combination of IT, nanotech, genetics and other technologies are improving with an exponential pace. If not ourselves so will our children certainly face these challenges and questions. The 2 TED talks in the links below show us that in some sence it is already here.

Links:

TED Video: Aimee Mullins and her 12 pairs of legs

TED VIdeo: Juan Enriquez shares mindboggling new science

Blogs about cyborgs

Blogs about Transhumanism

10 Future Shocks for the Next 10 Years - Business Center - PC World.