I, Cyborg
Where do we end & our digital selves begin?
“We’re already a cyborg. People don’t realize — we’re already cyborgs because we’re so well integrated with our phones and our computers. The phone is almost like an extension of yourself. If you forget your phone, it’s like a missing limb. — Elon Musk
The rise of the modern man-machine
It’s interesting we’re still having this conversation because it’s been almost 15 years since I remember reading an article in Reader’s Digest Magazine about Kevin Warwick, who is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system.
He implanted an RFID chip in his arm and became the first modern human cyborg. The implant allowed him to interact with computers, with lights, doors, and even to control an electric wheelchair.
“I was born human. But this was an accident of fate — a condition merely of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change.” — Kevin Warwick
Science fiction to shaky reality
And while cyborgs are a common idea in science fiction, they’re just as exciting to us they were in the 1960s.
We replace hips and knees with titanium and steel, artificial hearts are reasonably commonplace, and there are a lot of people who have surgically implanted computers with direct neural connections to their cochlear to fix their hearing. It’s only the degree of sophistication of these augmentations that is getting more and more refined as our communication & microfabrication technology improves.
I don’t think I will get a high-bandwidth wireless brain implant within my lifetime, but I’m sure that our children & grandchildren will live in a world where that will be common.
Practical Immortality
If we had enough memory storage capacity and computing power to be able to recreate a brain and take a snapshot of persons entire map of reality, then it’s a short jump to consciousness that can be transferred from that body to a machine, at least theoretically.
That is when we would start to truly become immortal, because everything that we consider as normal is based around the idea that humans, just like all living things, are subject to the cycle of birth & death.
It’s believed in certain Eastern spiritual traditions that some aspect of your consciousness remains after death, it’s just the physical body that is replaced from time to time. It is possible that in the future, though unlikely within our lifetimes that we might be able to take a snapshot of a person’s consciousness, store it in the cloud and then interact with the digital representation of that person.
Once this representation becomes high-resolution enough, then you might be able to recreate almost all aspects of that persona. Carrying all the memories & learnings that you have had so far over your lifetime, you might even live forever in the cloud.
How to build a brain: Moravec Transfers
Proposed by Dr Hans Moravec in the book ‘Mind Children’, this process describes how a human brain could be transformed into a mechanical structure made from nanobots, without the brain in question losing consciousness:
A neuron-sized robot swims up to a neuron and scans it into memory. A computer starts simulating the neuron. The robot waits until its simulation inside the computer perfectly matches the neuron, and then replaces the neuron with itself as smoothly as possible, sending inputs to the computer and transmitting outputs from the simulation of a neuron inside the computer.
This entire procedure does not affect the flow of information in the brain, except that one neuron’s worth of processing is now being done inside a computer instead of a neuron. Repeat, neuron by neuron, until the entire brain is composed of robot neurons whose guts are inside the computer.
That is of course assuming that what makes you “you” is localized in the brain and not spread out throughout your body and nervous system.
High-bandwidth Brain-Computer Interfaces
Once we have high enough bandwidth, the brain-computer interface will enable fully-immersive virtual reality where you would not need to have VR goggles to immerse yourself in an environment, and you could feed a data stream directly to the part of your brain which processes & interprets images from the eyes.
What are the building blocks of consciousness?
This conversation gets very interesting because it leads to higher-order questions such as ‘What does it mean to be me’ or ‘What is this I that I identify myself as? Am I the same as when I was three, when I was ten and when I was twenty-five?’
‘What is this I that I identify myself as?’
While it seems that way that there is this persistent sense of “self” with which we identify, the Buddhists have a different take on things.
They say that there is no real self and that you are just a complex matrix of behavioural patterns and cause-effect relationships which all combine into this representation of you & the sense of consciousness is an emergent property of the structure of the brain.
Both Buddhists & neuroscientists believe that the sense of consciousness is an emergent property of the structure of the brain.
What is human consciousness worth?
Questions like this will have wide-reaching implications for philosophy, metaphysics and human society in the future.
There’s an implicit assumption in modern society & cultural values that every individual has inherent value that is not defined by their productivity or their ability to contribute to society.
If in a hypothetical future human consciousness can be copied like that, then it has interesting implications on how human society would then value individual consciousness or whether there would even be a need to value or worry about the individual when we can just make copies of them and recreate essentially the same persona.
We will soon no longer be stand-alone, individual entities, where the limits of who we are and what is possible stops at the physical barrier of our skin.
I believe we are getting to the point where it’s becoming apparent we will no longer be stand-alone, individual entities, where the limits of who we are and what is possible stops at the physical barrier of our skin.
We will be able to make an impact that isn’t limited to our immediate surroundings.
Our technology will become much more sophisticated where we will become this hive-mind or clusters of self-organizing consciousness’. This is how most of the natural kingdom is also organized and seems like a natural evolutionary process in action.
The End of Individuality
The future is a cloud-based networked humanity.
My pet hypothesis is a future is that humanity will be a sort of hive organism connected in the cloud augmented with technology and AI.
And it will be the end of humanity as we know it.
It seems the root cause of a lot of issues we have in the world is because of an identification with some limited aspect of what makes a person an individual, such as identifying with your race, community or ethnicity, your subculture, your gender or your geographical location.
When everyone is networked and the sum of human knowledge is always available to everyone, these limiting identifications should naturally fall away.
The rise of techno-philosophy
This also has implications for understanding what it means to be alive, law & order, justice, punishment and what it means to die. The question is whether life is just a set of patterns that can be saved, retrieved & simulated in the cloud or is there something more fundamental that makes individual consciousness unique and there is some higher-level order to it?
Is life is just a set of patterns that can be saved, retrieved & simulated in the cloud or is there something more fundamental that makes individual consciousness unique?
From what we know of modern medical science, every part of you is changing, your body is recreating itself every moment of the day.
There’s even room for plasticity and changes in the brain itself, not just the physical structure itself, but how you make sense of the world around you.
You are not the same as you are yesterday.
When you learn something new, that changes how you view the world and interact with it forever.
These are questions that not just philosophers, metaphysicians and spiritual and world leaders are going to struggle with. This is an intellectual struggle that every individual will have to think about and come to grips with as the future plays out.
The User Experience of Reality
Brain-computer interfaces will not evolve independently of humans, because the human interpretation of reality, mental models and conceptual models that map reality are tightly defined by the limitations of the biological structures of our brain and nervous system and how our brain makes sense of raw sensory data.
The User Experience of the technology will have to be designed to match human perception, not the other way around, though there likely will be some skill & a learning curve involved with learning brain-computer interfaces also.
The User Experience of technology will have to be designed to match human perception, not the other way around
What if you can’t die?
Repairing tissue even without augmentation using DNA-repair biotechnology is becoming more of a reality every day.
When we have technology where we can design and 3D print human tissue and cells structures that we can integrate into the human body, then we might get to a point where the limitations of human biology will also start being pushed.
We can say that in some ways the future is already here, just not evenly distributed.
The Future creeps up on you
When we talk about cyborgs, books & movies often imagine a groundbreaking moment when a major innovation will change the world as we know. It seems more likely the change will happen over time.
It’s not going to be a flip of a switch. You will get an augmentation here, a part there, a little bit of retrofitting here or an upgrade there. Over a decade or two you will start to become more machine-like and more augmented with technology to function better and be more productive.
Once you’re using technology to redesign yourself and to craft replacement parts, then it also brings into question what it means to be human, what it means to be conscious and even what it means to be alive.
In the metaphysics of identity, the Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The concept is one of the oldest in Western philosophy, having been discussed by the likes of Heraclitus and Plato by c. 500–400 BC.
If you change every piece of you, is it still you?
Are you a snapshot of you as you are right now or a pattern of behaviours and cause-effect relationships?
The Matrix is real?
I don’t know about you, but I want to be able to learn all languages or at least get to a point where learning a language becomes unnecessary because we will all have real-time access to high-quality translation fed directly into our brain.
Where technology is heading, knowing a language and not knowing a language will feel the same.
Everyone will be able to learn any language, have super-vision, super-hearing, telepathy and experience immersive virtual worlds with such a level of clarity and detail that they become indistinguishable from reality.
A hookup to infinity
Right now, we have internet-of-everything and virtual reality.
I believe the technological push for the current decade is finding ways to integrate smartphones with everything but not with the human brain itself.
If our smartphones are a bridge to a seamless level of connectivity, then over the next decade as our smartphones become more integrated with everything, our devices start getting smaller and once we have a high bandwidth brain-computer interface, then all we have to do is sync our brain to our smartphone, and you will have access to capabilities beyond anything that we can imagine right now.
How hooked are you?
Most people are so deeply integrated into their smartphone and the internet that if they’re deprived of the internet for any length of time they will start to get anxious, depressed & display all sorts of neurotic behaviours.
I am part of that group because I am so heavily dependent on the internet and my smartphone for all my work and a lot of my productivity is driven by them. If I don’t have access to both I don’t know whether it will be a benefit to me, at least in the short term.
This world is so far integrated into technology that we could not live the life we have right now and do the things we do without this access.
We’re at a stage where you cannot deny anyone access to the internet just like it would be unimaginable to deny someone access to food, water, transportation, education & healthcare.
Designing for Humans
In the future getting augmented could be as common & as simple as buying and using a smartphone, and the device’s user experience would also be optimized to ensure that all users find it intuitive & effortless to work with this technology.
And I believe that seamless high bandwidth direct-to-brain transfer of information will transform our socio-political systems, economic systems and of course our religious and spiritual systems beyond recognition.
The Distributed you
Let’s say as a prank you decided to scrape all your social media, your messages, all your conversations for text data, use machine learning to extract conversational patterns from it and use a bot to simulate text conversations with your friends online.
If your bot is good enough your friends will mistake it for you at least some of the time and some aspect of your personality that people can recognize by your communication style is already stored in the cloud.
Why do you lock your cell phone?
People don’t like people looking at their phone because as you use it to access your online profiles along with notes, to-do lists, photographs & memories, a major part of your self-identity & how you see yourself in relation to the world is already infused into your device & your virtual avatars.
Your phone and your social footprint is an extension of your identity and you are already in a way distributed in the cloud.
The future is here and it is smart
By simply having your smartphone you’re
- Infinitely smarter
- Have near-infinite memory
- Near-immediate access to almost all information
With the advent of smartphones, we have already crossed a major threshold into man-machine integration.
Infinite Creativity
We are also infinitely more intelligent, productive and creative simply because of how one device brings us access to so many tools.
If you’re a writer who has to do a lot of research you can do all of it using your smartphone, and now you have AI tools such as the Hemingway editor, Grammarly and others which assist you with all aspects of the writing process, be it recording interviews, organising your research, editing, formatting, and publishing & distribution.
You can go from zero to publishing a full-length book and having it available immediately all over the world using just your phone.
Smartphone cameras have rapidly improved to the point that now even mid-range phones have cameras that click stunning photographs which would have been unimaginable just a few years back. Apart from the cameraphone itself, there are also photo & video-editing tools which have become ubiquitous.
Sharing and reaching people is effortless because with a single click you can reach potentially billions of people.
How augmented is augmented really?
To answer the original question, are we going to become cyborgs or are we already one? When you think about it, even simple things such as wearing lenses or glasses are a low-tech form of augmentation and our species has been slowly turning into cyborgs for a long time. You can even say that clothes are a form of low-level augmentation because it allows you to thrive in environments where humans would normally perish.
Generally, people interpret cyborgs as humans with some surgically-implanted layer of high-level technology and communication tools.
We’re getting to the point where we can connect seamlessly to the internet and IoT devices even without implants, but if connecting our brains to computers could be as simple as putting on a headset it would be an easy, accessible and low-cost way to be a cyborg.
Are you already augmented?
If the criteria we use for calling someone a cybernetic organism is that this technology should be implanted into the body rather than outside, I believe that’s a very arbitrary way of interpreting what a cybernetic organism is.
Now that we have smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches and all our biometric tracking we’re already enhanced with technology, the only difference is that most of the technology that we augment ourselves with is outside our body right now,
We are already at a point where we can no longer determine where our human identity ends and where technology begins because it is so seamlessly integrated.
After all, we’re already cyborgs.
Who am I?
Hi there,
I’m Yash Chheda
I’m a UX Designer based out of Bengaluru, India who can help you improve user experiences by making your products accessible and intuitive.
If you are an Enterprise or SaaS organization dealing with challenging & complex problems at the intersection of users, business & tech, please connect with me to see how I might be able to help.
When not dissecting users, I enjoy hiking, reading, meditating & travelling.
