We’ve talked a little bit about having a “3G brain.”  The cyborg, or “cybernetic organism” is a human who incorporates artificial parts–generally enhancements. Some of you may remember (if you’re old enough) The Six Million Dollar Man and Woman from 1970’s TV (based loosely on Martin Caidin’s novel Cyborg). This was a pretty bad TV series (especially when they met up with Bigfoot), but it was evidence of the growing interest in the questions and problems people had with artificial enhancement of human beings. The idea of superstrength or megacomputing power in a human body is appealing, but the question of whether a person so enhanced is still a person is troubling. We may be moving toward a world where people become so connected to, and so dependent on technology, that they lose some of their essential humanity .

I carry a lot of devices with me at all times–some of them fairly primitive tools (a handkerchief, a pocket knife–but those are technology, too, aren’t they?), others more advanced (an iPhone, a laptop).  And I have enhanced or improved my body in some ways with technology.  I wear eyeglasses.  I have fillings in my teeth. Yet I wouldn’t call myself a cyborg.  I’m definitely more of an organism than I am cybernetic.  But I wonder–as I make these connections to technology more permanent and complete, does it affect my status as a human being?  Where does the line get crossed?

And we can look at this from both directions.  If a human enhanced with technology is a cyborg, what is technology enhanced with humanity? Alive, self-aware computers are frequent characters in many SF stories. (“HAL,” in Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and “AI” in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” are two inimical examples, and “Mike” in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a benevolent one).  Are these intelligent artifices all that far off? For a fun experiment in not-very-sophisticated artificial intelligence, which may make you want to punch your computer, download and try some of the chat robots, like Alice, and Eliza, and others, that will make your computer hold a real conversation with you…well, sort of.