Locating Human Desires through the Cyborg Image
Cyborg through RoboCop
It is with the narrative of an animation series, RoboCop, that I would first comprehend the idea of the cyborg. RoboCop is the titular protagonist in the show set in a dystopian future Tennessee town of Murfreesboro. Originally a human police officer by the name Alexander James Murphy, he is killed in the line of duty but due to advanced medical engineering technologies available in his fictional reality, is brought back to life. The surgical procedure involves taking the remnants of Murphy’s brain, of both cerebellum and cerebrum, and installing them in a completely non-human cybernetic system. This essentially provides Murphy with not just the physical framework of a human body but also one that is enhanced due to the in-built technology of the body. One notable feature of his new capacity is to have the entire criminal database of the police department preinstalled, allowing him to assess risk situations on site when encountering criminals. This is shown through an imagery of how RoboCop views the outside world; in other words, how his eyes paint a different picture of the world, one that is a mix of the human lens as well as a computer screen. The idea of intermixing of capacities belonging to human and computer technologies is the most striking aspect of the cyborg. It signifies and situates the human desire to enhance the metaphysical as well as mental traits of Homo sapiens as a biological species but simultaneously not abandoning the emotional conscious within us nor the control we possess on our bodies. This is of course based on the common presumption that machines can improve our senses and that they are completely devoid of human feelings. RoboCop frequently addresses the notion of existing on the fringes, the struggle to outperform human outputs while retaining the empathy to enable social connections. The portrayal of villainous machines having no human past like Murphy allows the viewer to accept that a semi-machine is more likely to work towards human interests than fully mechanised and even weaponised robots. The irony here is that the robots are themselves under the will of humans, albeit those with nefarious intentions. The broader understanding is that machines would increasingly come to reflect human intent.
Understanding Human Motivation through Cyborg
It is necessary, therefore, to understand the motivation behind human actions in general. In today’s world where a vast number of activities are impossible without the gifts from cyberspace, we see a generationally constant desire to make the separation between humans and the networked world more seamless. This drive has taken various forms throughout history. The advancements in
transportation stemmed from the requirement to network in a physical sense. Meanwhile communication developed from one to one languages, to a recording of messages in print and proceeded to the methods of mass media to reach huge numbers at once and then today, where social media has added the feedback feature for every individual netizen. The idea of the cyborg captures the essence of entire histories of inventions whereby tools have been sought by people and hence, providing access has led to networking in different forms.
Reducing the Chasm in Access
The ease of access of the said tools is a motivation and desire in of itself. The success of Apple’s home computers lay in Steve Jobs’ vision of making his products a household item of computation.
The simultaneous and relative decline of IBM, originally the pioneers of the same industry, is not so much a coincidence then. It highlights that while a technology needs to be updated with the times, it should not lose sight of what people yearn for.
One instance of this could be how the entertainment space has moved on from physically static modes like television, in that one needs to be in a fixed locale to make use of it. Smartphones provide all the aspects of a conventional TV for the individual and combine with the addition of physical mobility. It becomes easy to visualise how the conduits to cyberspaces have become shorter and narrower, at least in the physical sense. But the key thing is, they still exist. The minimal distance is naturally due to their location of being outside our biological bodies. The cyborg eliminates the chasm of distance once and for all but it also needs to assure that the ubiquity in being ourself, at least in our minds, is not hacked by its installation. The power to wilfully dispense our thoughts and feelings should always lie with the human component of the cyborg and not the machine.
The Lure of Time
The cyborg and the desire to develop it notifies not just about the tendency to revamp technologies and make them more accessible but also to do it as fast as possible. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was conclusive of evolution being painstakingly slow and largely outside the control of species. Cyborg seeks to overturn both these effects i.e. it is a representational analogue of humans speeding up their own biological evolution. Essentially, machines would allow to skip the procedural steps in evolution and focus only on the final positive outcome that could otherwise take millions of years to achieve if left only to natural selection. It can be further visualised through Maslow’s pyramid, only in reverse. Where all our needs of security, socialisation, esteem and even self-actualisation have received a boost from the cyberspace, it is only natural that the very basic physiological needs are also served. In a way, the cyborg represents the scenario wherein humans would not be bound by their biological limitations, like the circadian cycle.
A 2017 story by the National Geographic showcased much more intricate interventions by which machines have aided medicine and in turn, human physiology. The tale of Neil Harbisson living in
Barcelona is particularly interesting in the article. Suffering from achromatopsia, he was unable to perceive colour. This changed when, after a series of low-tech failures, a microchip was implanted in his skull as well as a fibre-optic sensory antenna on the back of his head. The sensor would pick up the visual cues in colours and the microchip would convert their frequency into vibrations on the skull. These then are turned to sound frequencies, effectively rendering Harbisson’s head into a third ear but one that allows to see colours. But this cybernetic boon goes further by allowing him ultraviolet sensations that ‘normal’ do not possess. The article’s author D.T. Max is justified in making the claim that evolutionary change is no match for the speed and variety of modern life, seen through machines that are the weaponised cousins of culture itself.
The need for speed in our positive enhancements through machines is greatly magnified when contextualising the slow reproductive pace of human beings. Checking the effects of an induced
genetic trait itself would take years, let alone harnessing it for all of humanity. In that sense, Max’s saying that we “seem to be heading toward a time when our original genetic makeup is simply a
draft to be corrected.” is at once a harbinger of technological gains and a warning to remind us of the grave consequences. Technology might arm us with the ability to resist a future disease outbreak akin to the COVID-19 pandemic or allow us to inhabit Mars and other planets but how ethically equitable would its distribution be? Who gets to decide how they are disseminated? The politics of power is a huge question mark raised by the cyborg about itself keeping in mind that the history of how the human race has handled resources is bleak. The cyborg in that sense also conveys the idea of power – of those who have it and those who succumb to it.
Conclusion
The concept of cyborg crystallises the grey areas surrounding the omnipresent debate of developments in silicon usurping nature’s carbonic creations. We see how the change in human cultures, itself understood to be in constant flux, extends to humans’ biology. The cyborg pinpoints the reason behind our advancement not down so much to impalpable evolutionary processes but to the inevitability inherent in it as well as the desirability for change among humanity.
The cyborg can only come to being through a tinkering between the human and the non-human or machines. This represents the deliberate nature of effecting change. At the same time, it also raises the doubt of how far and fast would it reach amongst people. The motivation to consciously innovate, make the innovations more accessible and to achieve it as fast as possible are all
embedded in the vision of cyborg.
As Ray Kurzweil points out in his book The Singularity is Near, humans are best defined by the concept to “extend who we are” and the cyborg image allows us to imagine this ever-changing
identity. Although, real life instances like that of Neil Harbisson have come to being, we are yet to manufacture a consensus on how these new technologies could and/or should affect humanity. The ethicality debate within the cyborg is almost as inevitably endless as the constancy of changes to it.
References
1. Max, D.T. Beyond Human: Are Humans Still Evolving? Yes, under the influence of culture and technology. National Geographic Magazine. pp. 40-63. April, 2017.
2. Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Duckworth, 2016.
