Don’t Worry, We’re Already Cyborgs

I got some news to tell you: you’re (most likely to be) a cyborg.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nothing personal. But you’re probable one.

As Alejandro Iñárritu once said: “15 years ago, the Internet was an escape from reality. Now, the reality is an escape from the internet”. For you to have an idea, the effects our relationships with social media are just a small sign of how hard are the times we’re living in.

What was the first thing you did this morning? I bet it was looking at your phone. Last month, at the IAM Weekend in Barcelona — an event that celebrated the randomness of internet culture through different perspectives about the futures of media, education and the arts — Kate Coughlan and Dan Ramsden from BBC told the audience that on a recent survey they found out that young British couples sleep closer to their phone than to their significant other. Even though that’s not new news, it’s an impressive fact.

I know we can’t live without technologies anymore and our phones are like an extension of ourselves, psychologically and physically speaking. The point is, our identities nowadays are not built upon only on what we do in the “real” world but also in the digital one. We are our bodies and our social media profiles.

It soon reminded me of my graduation thesis, “The Impact of Technology in Contemporaneity: An analysis of the movie Her” (written in 2015) in which I used Spike Jonze’s Her to bring to light how our relationship with technology is shaping society and our identities, what leads us to a panorama of human’s cyborgization and the humanization of machines (but that’s something for another post).

After 3 years, taking a look back at it, I started to question how will this relationship evolve in the coming years. Are we going to cannibalize each other or find a way to coexist? According to Hyper Island, we’ll go probably go through three phases of synchronicity:

1) Humans enhanced

The first phase will come with an explosion in human capability. Robotics, nanotechnology and synthetic biology will allow us to program our bodies to live longer, stronger and better lives.

This phase is deeply connected with social trends such as using technology to understand better and have a profound control of our bodies. A sign of it is the number of health apps and wearables available out there. One example that really caught my eye is this memory prosthesis that boots your memory by 40%.

2) Cyborgization

The second is the evolution of the cyborg phase. Cyborgs are beings with ‘both organic and biomechatronic body parts’ and this will lead to a merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence — the era of the brain/computer interface.

A really interesting example of entities that are already on that phase is the Barcelona based Cyborg Foundation — an online platform for the research, development and promotion of projects related to the creation of new senses and perceptions by applying technology to the human body, created by Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas.

3) Human machines

Enhancement of our cognitive and sensory abilities, known as transhumanism, or the symbiosis between humans and machines (supported by Elon Musk) will lead us into the third phase in which machines become human — to the point where we can’t distinguish one from the other. (Yes, like in Blade Runner. There’s a small dose of fiction in every reality as I mentioned in my previous post, “Can Sci-Fi authors predict our future?”).

Regarding it, we can go from less disruptive examples such as Microsoft’s talking machines to cyborg rights (to be even more specific, there’s a lot of discussion around why a sex robot should have rights too).

After all, are we heading to a point in which we can’t distinguish humans from machines and machines from humans? What will be the impacts of this symbiosis? I believe we can’t know the accurate answer, but personally, I believe this synergy will allow us to reach new levels of consciousness. In the meantime, we can rely on science fiction as a tool to build possible scenarios and hopefully design better futures.