I think when we hear the word ‘cyborg’, we immediately get the frightening image of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator guise (or similar pop culture examples), which can influence the way we see the relationship between man and machine. Can we become super-humans?….is it man or machine?…or both? ?….is this morally right? Likewise, you could be put off by hearing that ‘posthuman’ meant total disembodiment, our consciousness not being central to our existence, or being able to download the contents of the brain to a disk.

I think it is a big, big area for consideration spanning philosophy, biology. I.T., cognitive science and much more. From a certain angle it does offer some insights though, and it may be useful to reassess what we regard as ‘human’, or to look at some actual examples of cyborgs.

By creating tools and artifacts, mankind has always sought to distribute cognition, and make life easier. Technology has moved on, and we can now implant tools in the body, so the modern take on this would be something along the lines of the work of Kevin Warwick. Humans can live with some embedded technological device (hearing aids, pacemakers etc.) which in a lot of cases improves the quality of life. And it can be argued that we are all cyborgs as we use computers, iPhones etc. in our daily life. I hadn’t come across the idea, as Kevin Warwick stresses, of a ‘cybernetic organism’ being a ‘network of communication and control’- systems of interrelating parts, with each part cyborg-like as well as the whole. Halloway draws on other areas such as social studies to argue that the cyborg is a liberating notion, freeing us from the male-dominated, gender-orientated past.

This feeds into posthumanism also, which Hayles points out involves humans as information systems, intelligent machines, a collection of components or regards the body as the ‘original prosthesis’. The boundaries are blurred a bit and change as to what constitutes the person, so we could suffer the potential loss of individualism. Essentially we would be, like machines, vehicles for information flow. The idea does seem a little cold, but it is quite powerful. We can easily integrate with machines, and be part of a wider system of flow and feedback. When you look at humans using virtual reality or using some high tech device- they become a natural extension of us, all part of the one system.

Apart from the medical, philosophical or religious questions that this raises, it could cause a divide in the future in terms of who embraces it and who doesn’t. Those who don’t may be left behind and not evolve.