10 July 2002

Pinto's Point: Fusion of human and machine

By Jim Pinto

You might think of your body as totally natural. No silicon chips, no retinal or cochlear implants, no pacemaker -- perhaps you don't even wear glasses (though you do wear clothes). But we have all already advanced toward being a cyborg: a technohuman.

Technohuman hybridization began with speech and counting, written text and numerals, then went to early printing (without movable typefaces), then the revolutions of movable typefaces and the printing press, and most recently the digital encodings that bring text, sound, and images into a uniform and widely transmissible format. Such technologies constitute "mindware" upgrades, where the effective architecture of the human mind is altered and transformed.

The process of hybridization is continuous. It's only the speed of change that is disconcerting. Society always seems to resist the changes but then accepts them only after they become commonplace.

As we understand more and more how the brain works, we recognize that human mind upgrades have already been taking place over thousands of years. Technology is simply accelerating the changes.

Biological brains are already being enhanced by neural implants: for example, to counteract symptoms of Parkinson's disease and to allow stroke victims to communicate via PCs. Soon, neural implants will improve our perception, memory, and logical thinking. These implants will allow a person to connect with the Web and have sensory experiences as realistic, detailed, and subtle as physical reality.

While intrinsic human biological intelligence is essentially not growing, nonbiological intelligence is growing at an exponential rate. Synthetic brains will extend human brains. Ray Kurzweil predicted that by the end of the twenty-first century, nonbiological thinking will be trillions of times more powerful than that of its human progenitors. Many new technologies are waiting in the wings that will allow this to happen: nanotubes, three-dimensional chips, optical computing, crystalline computing, DNA, and quantum computing.

Pretty soon—and still without the need for wires, surgery, or bodily alterations—we shall all be technohuman. Perhaps we already are, not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being human technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems where minds and selves cross biological brain and nonbiological extensions. So at what stage of bio/techno hybridization does an individual stop being human?

The famous Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote:

The wheel is an extension of the foot
The book is an extension of the eye
The clothing is an extension of the skin
Electric circuits are an extension of the nervous system
The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world

We are all already "technohuman."

Read this fascinating article, "Natural-born Cyborgs" by Andy Clark:

Read more about Marshall McLuhan.

Behind the byline

Jim Pinto is founder of San Diego–based Action Instruments. You can e-mail him at jim@jimpinto.com, or view his writings at www.JimPinto.com.