Cyborgs-what is it to be human?
Cyborgs.The word itself represents a collosile of meaning yet it is this very thing which is fundamentally changing the way people think about the human condition and what it really means to be human.
This idea of artificial humans goes back to at least to the Middle Ages when the Golem, a clay creature brought to life by Jewish mysticism, defended the ghetto in Prague. And back to 1818, when Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus."
Also as we saw in our Cyborg lectures, we saw Hollywood bring cyborgs to frution in RoboCop, Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Terminator," the chilling Borg Collective on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," a rakish collection of villains and flawed heroes respectively gunning or pining for humanity.
You yourself, or someone you know could probably be technically, in pun like terms, a cyborg. Things such as pacemakers, breast implants, contact lenses, a polio vaccination can be considered human 'add on's' that transition the term. Thus this can highlight how over time humans are becoming less oblivious to the combination of flesh and metal to the point where it becomes naturalised such as the use of contact lenses as such.
"The line between human and computer at some point will become completely blurred," predicted Alvin Toffler in his 1981 book "The Third Wave." This hasn't come to frution altough the possibility is worrying. This want and need by people to suffice cosmetic surgery or having a botox treatment in their working lunch hour highlights how humans somehow seek to be an immortal epitomy of perfection where the possibilities become endless. This relates to how an increasing 'cyborg' world could be due to human's fears of death and age and that by becoming more machine like we are enhanced.
If in the future, the uptake of having bionic arms and such becomes naturalised, will those whom don't have any modification feel the need to comform by doing so? Will it become the case that, like cell-phone dependency, people will only uptake to stay in the social loop?
I think that there must be a seperate distinction to the point where humans were born naturally to function the way we do- but with faults of course due to our imperfections. But the point where humans are devising machines means that these machines cannot be perfect, because humans are the ones idealising them.
The idea of the cyborg encourages us to thing beyond the binary of master and slave .They see us potentially working in partnership with our machines to discover and attempt new things. The term Cybernetics is this idea of a dialogue or symbiosis between humans and computer. Yetthinking along these lines, away from the idea of mastery of machines we have another problem. Anthropomorphize machines is giving technology human feelings, and ideals. Yet this is silly and possibly dangerous to imagine machines having human like status. The point of acknowledging that we share our environment with non human entities is that point exactly, they are non human. We cant look at/ study them as if they were!
~Sarah McElwain
This idea of artificial humans goes back to at least to the Middle Ages when the Golem, a clay creature brought to life by Jewish mysticism, defended the ghetto in Prague. And back to 1818, when Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus."
Also as we saw in our Cyborg lectures, we saw Hollywood bring cyborgs to frution in RoboCop, Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Terminator," the chilling Borg Collective on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," a rakish collection of villains and flawed heroes respectively gunning or pining for humanity.
You yourself, or someone you know could probably be technically, in pun like terms, a cyborg. Things such as pacemakers, breast implants, contact lenses, a polio vaccination can be considered human 'add on's' that transition the term. Thus this can highlight how over time humans are becoming less oblivious to the combination of flesh and metal to the point where it becomes naturalised such as the use of contact lenses as such.
"The line between human and computer at some point will become completely blurred," predicted Alvin Toffler in his 1981 book "The Third Wave." This hasn't come to frution altough the possibility is worrying. This want and need by people to suffice cosmetic surgery or having a botox treatment in their working lunch hour highlights how humans somehow seek to be an immortal epitomy of perfection where the possibilities become endless. This relates to how an increasing 'cyborg' world could be due to human's fears of death and age and that by becoming more machine like we are enhanced.
If in the future, the uptake of having bionic arms and such becomes naturalised, will those whom don't have any modification feel the need to comform by doing so? Will it become the case that, like cell-phone dependency, people will only uptake to stay in the social loop?
I think that there must be a seperate distinction to the point where humans were born naturally to function the way we do- but with faults of course due to our imperfections. But the point where humans are devising machines means that these machines cannot be perfect, because humans are the ones idealising them.
The idea of the cyborg encourages us to thing beyond the binary of master and slave .They see us potentially working in partnership with our machines to discover and attempt new things. The term Cybernetics is this idea of a dialogue or symbiosis between humans and computer. Yetthinking along these lines, away from the idea of mastery of machines we have another problem. Anthropomorphize machines is giving technology human feelings, and ideals. Yet this is silly and possibly dangerous to imagine machines having human like status. The point of acknowledging that we share our environment with non human entities is that point exactly, they are non human. We cant look at/ study them as if they were!
~Sarah McElwain
posted by Anonymous at 5:23 pm
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