Cyborg

For other uses, see Cyborg (disambiguation).

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism (i.e. an organism that is a self-regulating integration of artificial and natural systems). The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline used it in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space. Ever since then, it has often been used to name those creatures that complicate traditional boundaries between mind (or spirit) and matter, machine and animal, evolved and invented, living and dead: D. S. Halacy's Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman in 1965 featured an introduction by Manfred Clynes, who wrote of a "new frontier" that was "not merely space, but more profoundly the relationship between 'inner space' to 'outer space' -a bridge...between mind and matter." The cyborg is often seen today merely as an organism that has enhanced abilities due to technology, but this perhaps oversimplifies the category of feedback. Fictional cyborgs are portrayed as a synthesis of organic and synthetic parts, and frequently pose the question of difference between human and machine as one concerned with morality, free will, and empathy. Fictional cyborgs may be represented as visibly mechanical (e.g. the Borg in the Star Trek franchise or the Cylons from the 1978 TV series, Battlestar Galactica); or as almost indistinguishable from humans (e.g. the Cylons from the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica). These fictional portrayals often register our society's discomfort with its seemingly increasing reliance upon technology, particularly when used for war, and when used in ways that seem to threaten free will. Real cyborgs are more frequently people who use cybernetic technology to repair or overcome the physical and mental constraints of their bodies. While the majority of all cyborgs are mammals, they can also be reptiles as well.

Overview

According to some definitions of the term, the metaphysical and physical attachments humanity has with even the most basic technologies have already made them cyborgs. In a typical example, a human fitted with a heart pacemaker or an insulin pump (if the person has diabetes) might be considered a cyborg, since these mechanical parts enhance the body's "natural" mechanisms through synthetic feedback mechanisms. Some theorists cite such modifications as contact lenses, hearing aids, or intraocular lenses as examples of fitting humans with technology to enhance their biological capabilities; however, these modifications are no more cybernetic than would be a pen, a wooden leg, or the spears used by chimps to hunt vertebrates. Cochlear implants that combine mechanical modification with any kind of feedback response are more accurately cyborg enhancements.

The prefix "cyber" is also used to address human-technology mixtures in the abstract. This includes artifacts that may not popularly be considered technology. Pen and paper, for example, as well as speech, language. Augmented with these technologies, and connected in communication with people in other times and places, a person becomes capable of much more than they were before. This is like computers, which gain power by using Internet protocols to connect with other computers. Cybernetic technologies include highways, pipes, electrical wiring, buildings, electrical plants, libraries, and other infrastructure that we hardly notice, but which are critical parts of the cybernetics that we work within.

Bruce Sterling suggested an idea of alternative cyborg called Omar, which is made not by using internal implants, but by using an external shell (e.g. a Powered Exoskeleton). (Bruce Sterling: Cicada Queen). If human cyborgs are classically perceived as traditionally human externally while synthetic internally, an Omar looks inhuman externally but contains a human internally. The computer game Deus Ex: Invisible War prominently featured three clans of Omar using that name.

History

File:Vader complete.jpg

Darth Vader, a famous cyborg from the Star Wars science fiction saga

The concept of a man-machine mixture was widespread in science fiction before World War II. In 1908 Jean de la Hire introduced Nyctalope (perhaps the first true superhero was also the first literary cyborg) in the novel L'Homme Qui Peut Vivre Dans L'eau (The Man Who Can Live in Water). Edmond Hamilton presented space explorers with a mixture of organic and machine parts in his novel The Comet Doom in 1928. He later featured the talking, living brain of an old scientist, Simon Wright, floating around in a transparent case, in all the adventures of his famous hero, Captain Future. In the short story "No Woman Born" in 1944, C. L. Moore wrote of Deirdre, a dancer, whose body was burned completely and whose brain was placed in a faceless but beautiful and supple mechanical body.

The term was created by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in 1960 to refer to their conception of an enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments:

"For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term ‘Cyborg'." Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline

Their concept was the outcome of thinking about the need for an intimate relationship between human and machine as the new frontier of space exploration was beginning to take place. A designer of physiological instrumentation and electronic data-processing systems, Clynes was the chief research scientist in the Dynamic Simulation Laboratory at Rockland State Hospital in New York.

A book titled Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable computer was published by Doubleday in 2001. Some of the ideas in the book were incorporated into the 35mm motion picture film Cyberman.

Individual cyborgs

Generally, the term "cyborg" is used to refer to a man or woman with bionic, or robotic, implants.

Today, the C-LEG system is used to replace human legs that were amputated because of injury or illness. The use of sensors in the artificial leg aids in walking significantly. These are the first real steps towards the next generation of cyborgs.

Additionally cochlear implants and magnetic implants which provide people with a sense that they would not otherwise have had can additionally be thought of as creating cyborgs.

Social cyborgs

More broadly, the full term "cybernetic organism" is used to describe larger networks of communication and control. For example, cities, networks of roads, networks of software, corporations, markets, governments, and the collection of these things together. A corporation can be considered as an artificial intelligence that makes use of replaceable human components to function. People at all ranks can be considered replaceable agents of their functionally intelligent government institutions, whether such a view is desirable or not.

Examples

Non-fiction

File:Claudia Mitchell - first thought-controlled prosthetic limb.jpg

Claudia Mitchell using a thought-controlled prosthetic arm

• Jesse Sullivan
• Steve Mann
• Kevin Warwick
• Michael Chorost
• Claudia Mitchell
• Robert Tools (deceased)
• Rush Limbaugh
• Jeffrey Hunt

Fiction

File:Cyberman2006.jpg

A Cyberman from the 2006 series of Doctor Who

Most works in the cyberpunk genre include cyborgs.

Main article: Cyborgs in fiction

In 1966, Kit Pedler, a medical scientist, created the Cybermen, a race of cyborgs, for the TV program Doctor Who based on his concerns about science changing and threatening humanity. The Cybermen were a race who had replaced much of their bodies with mechanical prostheses and were now supposedly emotionless creatures driven only by logic. However, the Cybermen exhibited motivation towards certain goals, and so clearly possessed some kind of subjective axioms.

Isaac Asimov's short story "The Bicentennial Man" explored cybernetic concepts. The central character is NDR, a robot who begins to modify himself with organic components. His explorations lead to breakthroughs in human medicine via artificial organs and prosthetics. By the end of the story, there is little physical difference between the body of the hero, now called Andrew, and humans equipped with advanced prosthetics, save for the presence of Andrew's artificial positronic brain. Asimov also explored the idea of the cyborg in relation to robots in his short story "Segregationist", collected in The Complete Robot.

The 1972 science fiction novel Cyborg, by Martin Caidin, told the story of a man whose damaged body parts are replaced by mechanical devices. This novel was later adapted into a TV series, The Six Million Dollar Man, in 1973, and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman in 1976.

The 1987 science fiction action film RoboCop features a cyborg protagonist. After being killed by a criminal gang, police officer Alex Murphy is transformed by a private company into a cyborg cop. Murphy's brain and face are preserved, but the rest of the body is replaced by machine parts. The transformation is used to explore the theme of reification and identity. There are cyborg kaiju in the Godzilla films such as Gigan and Mechagodzilla.

Although frequently referred to onscreen as a cyborg, The Terminator was more properly an android. Although it had skin and blood, Kyle Reese mentioned that they were grown specifically for the Terminator units. Therefore, the Terminator possesses no truly living components except the blood and skin which serve only for disguise.

See also

• Android
• Biomechanoid
• Bioroid
• Body horror
• Brain-computer interface
• Cybernetics
• Cyberware
• Exoskeleton
• Fictional cyborgs

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• Gynoid
• Hybrot
• Monster
• Robot
• Terminator (character)
• Transhumanism
• Waldo (short story)
• Wetware hacker

• Metal Sonic

For further reading:

• Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
• Caidin, Martin. Cyborg; A Novel. New York: Arbor House, 1972.
• Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Crittenden, Chris. "Self-Deselection: Technopsychotic Annihilation via Cyborg." Ethics & the Environment 7.2 (Autumn 2002): 127-152.
• Flanagan, Mary, and Austin Booth, eds. Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.
• Gray, Chris Hables, ed. The Cyborg Handbook. New York: Routledge, 1995.
• Grenville, Bruce, ed. The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002.
• Halacy, D. S. Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
• Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingston. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
• Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women; The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Klugman, Craig. "From Cyborg Fiction to Medical Reality." Literature and Medicine 20.1 (Spring 2001): 39-54.
• Mann, Steve. "Telematic Tubs against Terror: Bathing in the Immersive Interactive Media of the Post-Cyborg Age." Leonardo 37.5 (October 2004): 372-373.
• Mann, Steve, and Hal Niedzviecki. Cyborg: digital destiny and human possibility in the age of the wearable computer Doubleday, 2001. ISBN 0-385-65825-7 (A paperback version also exists, ISBN 0-385-65826-5).
• Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell. Endnotes, 1991. Kodansha ISBN 4-7700-2919-5.
• Mitchell, William. Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.
• Muri, Allison. The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660–1830. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
• Muri, Allison. Of Shit and the Soul: Tropes of Cybernetic Disembodiment. Body & Society 9.3 (2003): 73–92.
• Nishime, LeiLani. "The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future." Cinema Journal 44.2 (Winter 2005), 34-49.
• The Oxford English dictionary. 2nd ed. edited by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Vol 4 p. 188.
• Rorvik, David M. As Man Becomes Machine: the Evolution of the Cyborg. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.
• Rushing, Janice Hocker, and Thomas S. Frentz. Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• The science fiction handbook for readers and writers. By George S. Elrick. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1978, p. 77.
• The science fiction encyclopaedia. General editor, Peter Nicholls, associate editor, John Clute, technical editor, Carolyn Eardley, contributing editors, Malcolm Edwards, Brian Stableford. 1st ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979, p. 151.
• Yoshito Ikada, Bio Materials: an approach to Artificial Organs. (バイオマテリアル: 人工臓器へのアプローチ)

External links

• Are you a cyborg? by Alexander Chislenko
• Border Crossings: Cyborgs
• Cyberman reviews
• Cyborgblog
• Cyborg Fantasies
• Animal Machines A look at past attempts to marry technology with biology
• Futures wiki, Cyborg
• The open-source Electroencephalography project; The open-source programmable chip Electroencephalography project; wiki; WikiCities wiki
• Stelarc FROM ZOMBIE TO CYBORG BODIES - Extra Ear, Exoskeleton and Avatars
• TransVision: Transhumanism Conference, 2004
• Wetware Technology
• World Transhumanist Association