"Technically, you're already a cyborg..."

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/dilbert_pocket/

by robg • 17 years ago

54 22 17 years ago

jimbokun• 17 years ago

By the same token, a pen and paper day planner that you carry around also makes you a cyborg, as you are delegating part of your memory functions to it.

CapitalistCartr• 17 years ago

Hmm, so we started down this road with the invention of writing . . .

eru• 17 years ago

I wear a vision-enhancing explant. (It's not an implant, because my glasses just sit on my nose and ears, not inside my body.)

Deestan2• 17 years ago

As far as I understand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics , the planner must be able to actively communicate to you before carrying it makes you a "cybernetic organism".

shpxnvz2• 17 years ago

Then I suppose my laptop counts as well, since I carry it on my back.

To be honest, it doesn't seem like a particularly useful definition of cyborg to me.

yannis• 17 years ago

My multiple exobrains have been living in my bookshelf for a very long time!

geekles• 17 years ago

Google is the exobrain. All the world's knowledge in the palm of your hand.

atamyrat• 17 years ago

http://abstrusegoose.com/171

zandorg• 17 years ago

For full description of the origination of the term 'cyber', check out Dark Hero of the Information Age about Norbert Weiner. Cybernetics means 'steersmanship'.

panic• 17 years ago

Anyone with eyeglasses is a cyborg.

sjs2• 17 years ago

Our iPhones don't make us cyborgs, hackers like Steve Mann are cyborgs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann

http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~mann/

http://wearcam.org/pictures.html

jerf• 17 years ago

As is so frequently the case, it's all a matter of definitions. While "a cyborg has unremovable implants in the body" certainly has a long pedigree, it's arguably less interesting in practice than "a cyborg is a person whose brain has adapted to using artificial intelligent tools as an extension of itself". (Note I don't mean "tools with AI" in the usual sense, just tools that themselves bring some intelligence to the party, however limited it may yet be.)

Neither is "right" or "wrong"; they're both just definitions.

sjs2• 17 years ago

Steve Mann doesn't have anything unremoveable in his body that I know of, just a higher level of integration between his body and hardware.

billswift• 17 years ago

See Andy Clark's book "Natural-Born Cyborgs".

stevenbedrick• 17 years ago

As somebody who is basically face-blind, I've been wanting a face-recognizing, Facebook-enabled implant (or heads-up display, or whatever) for years. It'd be particularly handy at conferences. I mainly just want it to tell me whether I've met somebody or not, and, if I have, where and when the meeting took place and what the other person had been wearing at the time ("blue shirt", etc.). That's usually enough to jog my memory.

Really, the only major thing keeping this from being at least mostly feasible today is the lack of a good way to do the user interface. Glasses-mounted HUDs don't seem to be production-ready yet. I guess if I were one of those people that always wore a Bluetooth earpiece, I could just route it through that, but I want something a little (ok, a lot) more subtle.

hpvic03• 17 years ago

The HUD will definitely be feasible once OLED's are more developed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G3wWmtkN88

dubcomesaveme• 17 years ago

I think this notion was already captured in 1929 by Freud with 'Civilization and Its Discontents'. http://www.archive.org/details/CivilizationAndItsDiscontents

He more broadly introduced the idea of Tools as Prostheses. Telephones can be considered prosthetic ears: they can extend your power of hearing across continents. Ships can be considered prosthetic feet, they extend your power of travel, etc.

"Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. ... Future ages will bring with them new and possibly unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still more."

chrischen• 17 years ago

But a cellphone would be like connecting a DVD player up to a TV with composite cables, whereas an ideal cyborg would have something akin to an integrated harddrive and video processor inside the tv.

winter_blue• 17 years ago

Just a play on words..

PG wrote in How to do Philosophy: "Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language."

Here the author fiddles with the word 'cyborg', bending its definition in a fruitless philosophical argument that benefits us not and humors most of us not.

araneae• 17 years ago

I always thought of a cyborg as having organic parts replaced with mechanical ones. So, people with prosthetics or cochlear implants would be cyborgs, but simply augmenting your brain wouldn't count.

"Technically, you're already a cyborg..."

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