Us, the cyborgs
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time now…
We are born with a certain potential and we develop a specific set of skills during our life. We are constantly shaped by our family, friends, our education, the context we are in, our role models, our life experiences, the things we love and the things we hate. Every single second of our life contributes to what we are in the present moment.
But, even if we study a lot, if we chose to be in a highly diversified, intense and rich environment or if we surround ourselves by the most brilliant people, at some point we are not enough. Our capacity to know, understand or memorize is somehow limited.
The nootropics or cognition-enhancing drugs are very interesting. People from students to programmers, from artists to engineers, use it to boost their executive functions, memory, creativity and motivation. It’s basically hacking your biological system and make it work loaded of substances that resemble the feeling of being energized and productive. The problem is that it has some adverse effects. One of them is the increasing of tolerance of that specific substance. This means, the more you take, the more you need to feel that level of well-being. In a more advanced state this could mean addiction.
How were the times when the creativity booster of an artist was a breakup? Or the writer enhancing options were a landscape or a bottle of wine? We got sophisticated!
Since the last century that we are changing as a species and we aren’t even aware that it’s happening. We are no longer an only-biological species, we are half organic, half technology. Since the moment we couldn’t live without our cell phone, tablet or computer that we changed to a greater race. We can now, easily, do any calculation or answer to any question in a matter of seconds. That’s a true cognitive-enhancing condition!
Artificially, we were given an extension of our body and mind. We can communicate trough time and space in seconds, we can record any memory that we want, and we have a substantial amount of knowledge that existed since the beginning of times, in the palm of our hands.
It’s no longer a human race, it’s a cyborg’s race.
It will come the time when there is more not-human intelligence than human capacity to deal with it.
We know that!
