CYBORG
A thought crossed my mind recently that intrigued me. Humans didn’t create technology. Technology has always been out there to be discovered in the world. We have just found it. With technology, we are merely shifting our relationship with a phenomenon that already exists.
When I was a child, I always thought it was inevitable that artificially intelligent machines would become the dominant force on earth. Not necessarily in my lifetime but at some point in the future. It made sense to me that artificial intelligence would merge with humanlike machines and play out their role on earth, while the classic biological humans got left behind.
Fiction has helped us visualise these types of future scenarios. James Cameron’s Terminator films are a good example of this. But the cyborg has the potential to change this linear narrative. Humans merging or partnering with artificial intelligence and machines.
Many of us are already cyborgs. Technology such as prosthetic limbs, pacemakers, hearing aids and insulin pumps are intelligent machines that work with, or within our body. We are also attached to machines in a social and more proactive way. We take our mobile phones everywhere with us for example. For many people, their phone is a part of them. The next step in this evolution is to formalise the relationship with our technology. To literally attach ourselves to these machines for a smoother, instant interface. This new interface opens up new possibilities for knowledge, exploration and evolution. Imagine our minds being uploaded to a spaceship that explores the universe. The possibilities of the cyborg are extraordinary. Young children today may well be the first generation to live in this world of cyborgs.
The imagination is a curious thing. We can see potential futures in our mind before they happen. Stop and think about this for a moment. This is an odd ability that we have. Science fiction writers have been showing us future worlds for some time and slowly many of their visions are now our reality.
However storytellers no longer need to look 200 years or even 50 years into the future to create colourful or shocking portraits of the future. Science fiction TV shows such as Black Mirror and Years and Years paint technology related scenarios that are possible in a relatively near future, or even now. Perhaps even more strikingly, non-fiction television and news can seem like science fiction. Videos of robots dancing, walking up stairs, telling jokes and looking after older people are all being streamed onto ur devices right now. Reality in many ways has caught up with science fiction.
A significant moment in 2020 was the release of previously classified US video footage of UFOs. Where US pilots film an unidentified flying object behaving in a way that is impossible with current human technology. This phenomenon is currently unexplained. We are now living in a world where it is not beyond the realms of possibility to believe that these were space ships from the future. We simply do not know. Our imagination, reality and fictional narratives are all now in one place. Technology is our reality. While technology is indistinguishable from fiction.
This brings me nicely onto simulation theory. The theory proposes that we are in fact not real, the real world is out there and we are just part of a computer simulation, made by someone who is actually in the real world. This idea has been around in different forms for thousands of years. It is a compelling idea that we keep coming back to. Life continues to be a mystery, as is technology and all the things we keep discovering in this world. Will the human race one day be erased, to be replaced with cyborgs and machines that live in a world where the difference between reality and virtual reality is almost non existent? Perhaps. But let’s take advantage of this special opportunity now to be a human in the real world. Being a human is such a rear and strange opportunity. Let’s make the most of it.
November 2020