Natural-Born Cyborgs-Minds,Technologies,and the Future of Human Intelligence
Summary:
One may think that cyborg is only implants in the human body made of metal materials or processors. And that’s what a professor called Kevin Warwick tried to do with his experiments. He implanted chips under his skin. That allowed him to open doors, turn bedroom lights on and off; also in medical cases, people with heart implants and chest monitors monitoring heart rates and communicating data to the patient’s cell phone could be examples that we can all be cyborgs in this world.
On the other hand, one doesn’t have to implant microchips in his body to be considered as cyborg. Nonpenetrative cyborg technologies are all the technological tricks and electronic aids that are already transforming our lives and our sense of our own without actually need to be implemented in our body. The use of cell phone or a wrist watch are some examples of inventions that let individuals take real control of their daily schedule and without them, many nowadays feel lost and disoriented.
Natural Born Cyborgs explore ways in which we have adapted our lives to make use of technology and how that technology is inseparable from who we are and how we think.
What makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools.
Clark writes about 2 technologies opaque and transparent technologies. Transparent technology is so invisible to the user that it becomes almost an extension of the human body. a hammer for example is a simple tool but when a hammer is used frequently by a builder, it becomes an extension of his hand and he hardly realizes he is using a tool.
Opaque technology is something more difficult to learn,takes time to get accustomed. Like first time users in front of a PC. but by the time has passed, it becomes more and more transparent. Take for example a car driver who relies on an ABS (Automatic Braking System). Once drivers are accustomed to ABS, they cease to feel as if the braking is in any way “out of their control". Such semi-intelligent technologies can become as transparent in use as any others. In fact, we are all intimately familiar with this kind of case, since much of our daily bodily activity and decision making falls into the same category.
Our sense of being and physical presence can be expanded to a remarkable extent. For example, the experiment designed from V. S. Ramachandran,a professor of Neurosciences, with a plastic dummy hand. A partition is created so that you see only the dummy hand, and a volunteer again taps both your real hand (hidden behind a screen) and the dummy hand (in your direct view) in perfect synchrony. Subjects experience sensations “in the dummy hand.” In addition to that experiment, Clark mentions how a tennis player regards the racket as part of his body due to the constant images and logical interaction with it.
Simple technology like writing with a pen and paper, learning how to use internet search engine or a mobile phone, and as revolutionary as mind-extending neural implants can be, all can make the most of our brains astonishingly adjusting nature.
We are at the foothill of the era of wearable computing, wireless devices, intelligent environments, impants that can be controlled by thought, and the distance between humans and all sort of tools comes closer and closer every day . This combination of very adjustable brains and increasingly responsive tools creates an opportunity for even closer kinds of human-machine merger, and as Clark as says, such a merge is entirely natural.
My thoughts about the book
The only meaning that I had in my mind for the word Cyborg, it is from science fiction movies, like Robocop, the murdered cop who was re-created as a super-human cyborg. I never thought of the aspects that the Andy Clark is presenting at his book and that’s why this book was fun to read. What I got after reading it(using the writer’s quote that: “We are all cyborgs”) I realized that we all use technology as an extention of ourselves and we don’t even think that we are using technology, its more like an everyday activity, like drinking water. For example receiving calls and talking on mobile, isnt consider anymore as futuristic and awesome but more or less an everyday activity.
Digital technology in our everyday lives is not essientially great but neither is evil. it is promising to have integrated technologies but it is a bit scary for me, to think that we can implant in our body microchips that supposedly will be cool to use, like sending signals to doors in order open automatically when we walk by but what happens to our privacy when we can be tracked everywhere we go. And although I generally liked the book, I still cant understand why Clark chose this title..Why one should consider as Cyborg, if he has a wristwatch or even an implanted chip? We are geeks and we like our cyborgs to be cool,mean machines from the future, like Robocop or Terminator, with lots of metal parts, and guns. Mr. Clark , don’t take this away from us and present to us Cyborgs as an everyday dull human.
The whole book is a mixture of technologies and philosophical questions therefore i believe the target audience for this book is a really wide one. From computer science people, to philosophers and everyone who wants to see aspects of how and why we humans adapt technology.