Want to be a Cyborg? You Already Are, Says Author Andy Clark

June 21, 2003
Angela Pacienza, Canadian Press

TORONTO (CP) - The idea that one day cyborgs - flesh and metal, brain and electronics merged as one - will overrun our streets has long intrigued us and been fodder for Hollywood films like Terminator and Star Trek.

This summer Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines, will show us a stronger, more powerful terminator that has been sent to kill John Connor. Luckily Arnold Schwarzenegger's trusty part-flesh, part-machine bruiser returns to protect the boy who will grow up to save humanity from a race of machines.

And as companies race to build better gadgets and gizmos to improve our daily routines, a part-human, part machine organism comes closer to becoming reality.

But it seems, at least in some circles, that we became full-fledged cyborgs long ago.

Technology is inseparable from who we are and how we think, argues Andy Clark in his new book, Natural-Born Cyborgs.

He claims our minds are already technologically enhanced, extending far beyond "skin and skull boundaries."

He says that bio-technological unions are happening at breakneck speed. Wearable computers, sensory augmentation, wireless devices and thought-controlled prosthetics are already in use in everyday society.

"There's no stopping this now that it's started," said Clark, a philosopher and cognitive scientist, in an interview. "It's just a natural progression from what we've always been doing. It's the signature of our species to kind of wrap things around ourselves so tightly that we begin to identify with them, like clothes."

A wristwatch is the obvious example of having technology wrapped around us. If someone asked you 'Do you know the time?' you'd likely answer 'yes.'

But, Clark says, that's not because you automatically know the time in your brain, but because you know how to get the time.

"It's a good example of the intimacy we have with our technology. Really we just think of ourselves as a kind of creatures that command the time and that's why we say yes to that question. Yes, because I'm the kind of thing that knows the time. But it's not the biological lump that knows the time - it's the cyborg lump," said Clark, the director of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University.

Usually the term cyborg conjures images of an ugly, distorted post-human being.

"It's normally a reaction to images of bodily penetration and mutilation. What I'm really trying to do in the book is say that first of all a lot of the technology that we will blend and bond with the best won't even involve penetrating the skin, you just wrap it in a cocoon of devices and information."

That means we don't necessarily need to be doing what Kevin Warwick is.

Warwick, a cybernetics professor at Britain's University of Reading, had a silicon chip transponder surgically implanted in his left arm in 1998. He's also been involved in various experiments where his nervous system has been linked to a computer. In his most recent book, I, Cyborg, he warns that machines will become more intelligent than humans in the near future.

Clark isn't a fan of heavy-duty implants - he calls himself an electronic virgin - and doesn't think humans will ever look like Robert Patrick's T-1000.

"Terminator isn't the kind of cyborg that I imagine we'll become. Nonetheless, it gets people used to the idea that the boundaries between biology and machinery might not be as firm as perhaps we intuitively sometimes think."

A better example of Clark's cyborg is Steve Mann, the Toronto inventor whose wearable computer technology has made him Canada's first cyborg.

Mann, who teaches at the University of Toronto, has been working on his WearComp invention, a display and camera hidden in eyeglasses, since he was a high school student in the 1970s.

On the Net:
www.kevinwarwick.org
www.wearcam.org

http://www.canada.com/ottawa/story.asp?id=CBD86942-FDF0-475E-A0DF-DD70029C1146