The Plight of the Modern Day Caveman

In tutorial, Kevin posed a question that both baffled and intrigued my mind. At what point do people stop being human? How many prosthetics does it take before a person is a cyborg? And during the lecture, we watched a film in which some professor from Cambridge of some other prestigous university claims that humans, in essence, are nothing more than machines. So it was that i began my Wednesday morning just as normally as any other, knowing exactly who i was and what im doing and where im planning on going, and by 2 in the afternoon, I was unsure about what it was to be human.

Stephen Hawking was brought up, and the issue of where he exists, so I went to his homepage to see if he had any answers for my query. I mean, who else is better qualified? This man is essentially the closest thing to a cyborg that exists today; he and his technology are interdependent for eitehr to function. And he stated that, despite his physical illness, he has missed very little of life. I don't know what he means by only a little, because the majority of my life is dependent on my ability to move on my own through a physical world and speak to people with my own voice. I mean, I'm also not busy discovering new dimensions and chasing the origins of the universe, so am I missing a lot of my life?

So I guess my question is, just as technology like a hammer or the wheel or harnessing fire set us apart from animals, is this new technology setting people like Hawkings apart from humans? I am not saying that Hawkings isn't a person, but wihtout technology he would be regarded as sub human because of his inability to communicate. But with his technology he is seen as one of the greatest minds to exist. So where does that leave the rest of us that are potentionally hindered by our lack of technological dependence? Could we be the equivalent to the modern day cavemen?