We May Be The Robots Coming To Take Our Jobs
The Cyborg Option
by Paul Grimsley
Technology has blurred many boundaries, affecting social dynamics, and spatial ones. Think about the geography of your home, and you can see how the placement of certain bits of technology influences the layout. Is the next frontier the body?
Transhumanism has gained a lot of popularity in recent years, and Grinders, given their name by Warren Ellis in his comic Doktor Sleepless, have been adding rudimentary tech into their bodies already. Branching, to some degree, out of the body modification subculture, but becoming something distinct, the technology is starting to catch up with the desire to do certain things.
The definition of cyborg has been expanded as a catch-all for anything from glasses, to hip replacements, to various prosthetics, and right up into actual robotic limbs for people. People have had magnets put under their skin, animals have been chipped, and there is a whole trend of garagelab body modifications that you can find out about online.
In the movies it is always something that comes from a dark place, and is imposed on the people who have it done to them — think about Robocop, and the eventual capture and turning of John Connor — none of it is pleasant. In reality people are opting in on this stuff — in the same way that people want their phones or computers to be able to do anything; or more lately their wearables, now they want to bury it in their bodies and not even have to think about what they are doing. Have your tech as something integral to you, rather than something exterior.
On the surface it may tap into some notions of body horror, there are concerns about safety, but really, just look at some of the fashion trends that have taken off in the past, and it really doesn’t seem that far fetched that on the back of an easy installation process people might be lining up around the block to get themselves installed with the latest electronics.
Think about that with a filter of some of the data problems experienced by current platforms and technologies, and the areas that would need to be handled in terms of the technology are more frightening than the notion that something might go wrong with the equipment. Who would really want to be permanently networked? How would maintenance work? I would want a little more competence and transparency on the part of the companies I was dealing with — and some pretty solid guarantees on services and parts, and I can imagine it driving medical insurance through the roof.
It seems like it’s a way off, but if you look at the almost there trends, it might not be so far-flung as an initial look suggests. The future is coming.
