I kind have always wondered what man/machine hybrids-Cyborgs if you will- would eventually end up looking like. And when we could expect their arrival-if ever. Well , William Gibson sure knows how to hit the nail on the proverbial head.
An excerpt I boosted from one of his blogs-
"The real cyborg, cybernetic organism in the broader sense, had been busy arriving as I watched DR. SATAN on that wooden television in 1952. I was becoming a part of something, in the act of watching that screen. We all were. We are today. The human species was already in process of growing itself an extended communal nervous system, then, and was doing things with it that had previously been impossible: viewing things at a distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead men talk and hearing their words. What had been absolute limits of the experiential world had in a very real and literal way been profoundly and amazingly altered, extended, changed. And would continue to be. And the real marvel of this was how utterly we took it all for granted....
The physical union of human and machine, long dreaded and long anticipated, has been an accomplished fact for decades, though we tend not to see it. We tend not to see it because we are it, and because we still employ Newtonian paradigms that tell us that physical has only to do with what we can see, or touch. Which of course is not the case. The electrons streaming into a childs eye from the screen of the wooden television are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently moving along that childs optic nerves. As physical as the structures and chemicals those neurons will encounter in the human brain. We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of artificially linked nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it.
Theres my cybernetic organism: the internet. If you accept that physical isnt only the things we can touch, its the largest man-made object on the planet, or will be, soon: its outstripping the telephone system, or ingesting it, as I speak. And we who participate in it are physically a part of it. The Borg we are becoming."
An excerpt I boosted from one of his blogs-
"The real cyborg, cybernetic organism in the broader sense, had been busy arriving as I watched DR. SATAN on that wooden television in 1952. I was becoming a part of something, in the act of watching that screen. We all were. We are today. The human species was already in process of growing itself an extended communal nervous system, then, and was doing things with it that had previously been impossible: viewing things at a distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead men talk and hearing their words. What had been absolute limits of the experiential world had in a very real and literal way been profoundly and amazingly altered, extended, changed. And would continue to be. And the real marvel of this was how utterly we took it all for granted....
The physical union of human and machine, long dreaded and long anticipated, has been an accomplished fact for decades, though we tend not to see it. We tend not to see it because we are it, and because we still employ Newtonian paradigms that tell us that physical has only to do with what we can see, or touch. Which of course is not the case. The electrons streaming into a childs eye from the screen of the wooden television are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently moving along that childs optic nerves. As physical as the structures and chemicals those neurons will encounter in the human brain. We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of artificially linked nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it.
Theres my cybernetic organism: the internet. If you accept that physical isnt only the things we can touch, its the largest man-made object on the planet, or will be, soon: its outstripping the telephone system, or ingesting it, as I speak. And we who participate in it are physically a part of it. The Borg we are becoming."