Cyborgs: Essays, Papers, Notes

A cyborg is part human and part machine, and so it is much more efficient, enhanced and powerful than humans. Terminator, Robocop, Matrix are some of the movies where you must have seen humans with extraordinary power; but they were not humans in the true sense, they were “cyborgs”.

But you don’t see these cyborgs in real life, so are they just fictional things?

It’s true that humans with super powers do no exist yet (are yet to be created), but experts believe it’s just a matter of time before Homo sapiens undergo drastic changes.

Time for humans to become cyborgs? Elon Musk says yes

Elon Musk, the guy behind Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal (to name a few) recently told the attendees at the World Government Summit in Dubai that humans will have to become cyborgs if they want to compete with the futuristic artificial intelligence that guys like him are working on.

Key points highlighted by Elon Musk:

A computer can communicate at “a trillion bits per second” while a pathetic human brain can only do it at “about 10 bits per second.” So humans will have to upgrade in order to keep up.

Musk says his chief concern is what he calls “deep AI,” or an AI that is “smarter than the smartest human.” He wants mankind to stay relevant, so we can keep systems like that in check and avoid something like The Matrix (bow down before some supreme machine overlord).

Well, definitely really sound good for humanity’s future. Besides, Cyborgs tend to look silly, be it Steve Austin in his tracksuit or Lobot with his headgear…

So why is he saying all this?

Elon Musk will be running the first institute that turns humans into cyborgs, so he’s telling people they need to make the leap…though its not clear if you need to get some brain implants or whatever 🙂

For all we know, he’s already turned himself into a cyborg, and this is part of his scheme to assimilate the rest of mankind. Now there’s a movie.

Avatar-style manned-robot developed in South Korea

A giant robot that walks like a human has been created by a South Korean company that can enter areas that are too hazardous for humans.

The human-like robot (created by robotics company Hankook Mirae Technology) looks a lot like the military robots that were shown in James Cameron’s movie “Avatar”.

Vitaly Bulgarov, one of the designers, working on the project has previously worked on the set of popular Hollywood films like Transformers, RoboCop and The Terminator, where such human-like Robots have been featured.

References

A Cyborg Manifesto
Donna Haraway Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

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