Cyborg Evolution

[PB666]

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/06/australian-scientists-say-we-are-on-the-evolutionary-path-to-becoming-cyborgs/

There are a number of similar articles out on the same topic.

 

[kerbiloid]

Fire, spear, grass and skin clothes, axe, hammer were invented/absorbed by pre-humans when they yet weren't really recognizing themselves.
Teeth, hair and other members have been reduced also at that time.

So, when a human as a sentient species recognized itself as a person, it already was absolutely dependant on artificial technologies.
The human never had a choice in this question. All "back to nature" pretensions are just efforts to be a lo-tech cyborg rather than a hi-tech one.

So, a human is a cyborg by definition, and what we have now is just an ongoing system upgrade.

[p1t1o]

Meh, they've been saying this since they invented the digital watch.

Though I think that being a "cyborg" refers to more than just using or living with technology. Having an ipad doesn't make you a cyborg in my book, electronic retina implants? Thats a cyborg. Something something futile something hasta la vista.

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, p1t1o said:

Though I think that being a "cyborg" refers to more than just using or living with technology.

Not just "using technology". Human species cannot live without technologies as without hands, teeth and skin at once.
Technologies are not a tool, they are implants allowing humans to exist at all. Without axe, spear, fire a human is less than nothing and will die in several days or in the best case degrade to an ill ape state.

[p1t1o]

4 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Not just "using technology". Human species cannot live without technologies as without hands, teeth and skin at once.
Technologies are not a tool, they are implants allowing humans to exist at all. Without axe, spear, fire a human is less than nothing and will die in several days or in the best case degrade to an ill ape state.

I think "man using spear" as "cyborg" is a bit of a stretch...

There's plenty to debate about man's dependance on technology, but the various definitions of "cyborg" I have seen over the last 5 mins have all alluded to technology *within the body*, not just "within society". Simply needing tools to survive doesn't seem to qualify.

[RainDreamer]

Technology has always been replacement/enhancement of our biological parts. Mills replace the need for our teeth to be thicker, fire replace the need for more robust digestive system, tools replace the need for our body to use more muscle mass/larger skeleton frames, etc. So if one day we start bringing those technology into our body, like enhanced muscles or hardened skeletons or brain with processor chips...it wouldn't be that strange.

[PB666]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Not just "using technology". Human species cannot live without technologies as without hands, teeth and skin at once.
Technologies are not a tool, they are implants allowing humans to exist at all. Without axe, spear, fire a human is less than nothing and will die in several days or in the best case degrade to an ill ape state.

Lets just redefine the word such the the original meaning actually has no meaning. The we can go about giving our own special ill- thought out meaning. 

 

[KerikBalm]

People with contact lenses = cyborgs?

Hip repalcements? hearing aids? dental implants? denchers... etc...

I guess I'd draw the line at permenantly installed things that replace a current functional biological part, and the replacement is optional, and not done in response to an injury or deterioration/a defect.

[Green Baron]

That is actually a horror scenario. Implanting chips will be invented for the sake of sanity, humanity or whatever goodwill you put in there. And it'll soon be abused for terror prevention, tax hunting or whatever control mechanism you put into in. Not my favorite outlook into the future ...

And i heftily object: whithout technology a human is still a human, capable of making tools and surviving even in adverse conditions. The fact that certain folks have unlearnt the ability (like the lady, equipped for a hike, that sadly died in the apalaches) doesn't mean that others still can try (the young japanese boy that survived for a week in the woods).

To put it very easy: toolmaking is what archaeologically defines the gender homo ("human") 'cause the tools came upon us through time. But this goes further, it opens up an interface that the individual cannot control any more. How long will it take until first government decides that an implant is mandatory for everyone ? For dogs it already is (in many countries) ...

:-/

btw.: What about human genome: with all that missing selection our genes are probably not improving ... i don't think even the most benevolent technology can counter that, or can it ?

 

Edited June 3, 2016 by Green Baron

[p1t1o]

2 hours ago, Green Baron said:

How long will it take until first government decides that an implant is mandatory for everyone ?

Well this would imply that the government would have to agree to being implanted themselves, with obvious implications.

If you are referring to the stereotypically corrupt government, one that wants to impose these "implants" on everyone else, but NOT themselves, well you could ask yourself the same question about anything - "How long until the government forces us to sign up to facebook/wear ankle bracelets/get an ID tattoo'd on our arms etc."

In which case your question devolves to "How long until the government becomes X% corrupt." 

Which is another debate entirely! (And one that should probably be steered clear of in the KSP fora)

 

2 hours ago, Green Baron said:

btw.: What about human genome: with all that missing selection our genes are probably not improving ... i don't think even the most benevolent technology can counter that, or can it ?

This is something I occasionally wonder too. Selection is powered by offspring, at the moment the people having the most kids are technically the most "successful" evolutionarily speaking. And the people having the most children are often NOT the richest, cleverest, strongest, fastest etc. I don't know what factor ties all of the child-heavy genelines together, but "lack of education" is a pretty strong candidate. We are selecting ourselves to be stupider.

Now THAT is a horror scenario.

 

2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

I guess I'd draw the line at permenantly installed things that replace a current functional biological part, and the replacement is optional, and not done in response to an injury or deterioration/a defect.

That  seems reasonable enough, its hard to imagine a hip replacement pushing you further towards post-humanity, but how about those hearing aids which are implanted into the skull, those I can get behind as far as cyborgification goes.

[justidutch]

3 hours ago, p1t1o said:

...This is something I occasionally wonder too. Selection is powered by offspring, at the moment the people having the most kids are technically the most "successful" evolutionarily speaking. And the people having the most children are often NOT the richest, cleverest, strongest, fastest etc. I don't know what factor ties all of the child-heavy genelines together, but "lack of education" is a pretty strong candidate. We are selecting ourselves to be stupider.

Now THAT is a horror scenario...

I believe "idiocracy" is what you speak of!

[SomeGuy123]

For those who want to move the goalposts : a reasonable definition of a "cyborg" would be a human with physical hardware installed inside their brain (or replacement of it) to improve their intelligence beyond human levels.

Anything else isn't really very useful or interesting, even if it might technically qualify for older definitions.  The reason why people becoming cyborgs is interesting (or us just making AI) is that technological progress is currently limited by the minds of the people making the progress, which at a physical level are pieces of tissue that have had very little change for thousands of years.  If this limit can be bypassed and removed, one would expect technology to quickly advance to the actual hard limits of physics, and these limits are thought to be vastly higher than anything that exists today.

Edited June 4, 2016 by SomeGuy123

[Bill Phil]

Tools are things we created to make life easier. A cyborg has those tools inside of him/herself. They're usually pretty advanced too.

[magnemoe]

11 hours ago, justidutch said:

I believe "idiocracy" is what you speak of!

Thought is old, was some of the background for eugenic.
Genetically it fails  as the process is very slow and diluted unless pressure is most without this gene dies in the diseases. 
Made more irrelevant in that genetic engineering is close.

Socially is an larger effect, kids of dysfunctional parent has an higher chance of growing up dysfunctional themselves. Effect is far larger than just poverty, 
 

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, SomeGuy123 said:

a reasonable definition of a "cyborg" would be a human with physical hardware installed inside their brain (or replacement of it) to improve their intelligence beyond human levels

As every computer with internet.
The only difference is the method of electrical signals translation from the outer contour (hardware) into the inner contour (brain).
Btw: direct electrical commutation is not a criterion here, because if a "CPU/brain" interface uses optrons, then it sends/receives optical signals, like in "display/eye+brain" scheme.

Edited June 4, 2016 by kerbiloid

[SomeGuy123]

On 6/4/2016 at 1:24 AM, kerbiloid said:

As every computer with internet.
The only difference is the method of electrical signals translation from the outer contour (hardware) into the inner contour (brain).
Btw: direct electrical commutation is not a criterion here, because if a "CPU/brain" interface uses optrons, then it sends/receives optical signals, like in "display/eye+brain" scheme.

The limiting factor here is that our eyes/hands are very, very slow.  Much slower than our brains, even.  Someone with a direct link would be much smarter.  If we reorganized the internet so it was faster to find accurate information ("search term + wiki" is an ok solution but has flaws), and if we made our software tools less cumbersome to use (damn time wasting linker errors, and our current programming languages are 10% inspiration 90% perspiration) we'd also be a lot smarter.

[SinBad]

Have a google of Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading. Promising.

I would say we are approaching a tipping point when people start looking at medical prosthetic/therapudic implants and deciding to get them without a medical requirement. For example: an arteficial limb that performs as well as a meat one, and is just as fragile? No thanks. But one that is stronger, faster, and more durable? Bring me a saw.

[kerbiloid]

50 minutes ago, SomeGuy123 said:

The limiting factor here is that our eyes/hands are very, very slow.  Much slower than our brains, even.  Someone with a direct link would be much smarter.  If we reorganized the internet so it was faster to find accurate information ("search term + wiki" is an ok solution but has flaws), and if we made our software tools less cumbersome to use (damn time wasting linker errors, and our current programming languages are 10% inspiration 90% perspiration) we'd also be a lot smarter.

Or we can treat our brain as a slow peripherical hardware of a global network.
Let the fast servers do all stereotypic work which they can (searching, sorting, calculating, analyzing) and then send the result thrown the bottleneck of the human perception interface for the highest-level postprocessing.
Wait... Oh, sh...!

As currently most of people are getting common info from the internet and have more or less similar imagery, the server can predict what most of people would want to know and prepare this before they want to search.
As currenly any question asked on a forum stays there forever and is googled out on demand, this even makes another asking unncessesary.
Even more: it's treated now as a bad manner — to ask something before googling (sic!).

Post-internet people will be equal partners of water coolers and coffee machines. And maybe even have hot disputes with them on network forums.

Edited August 12, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Darnok]

On 3.06.2016 at 0:03 PM, kerbiloid said:

Not just "using technology". Human species cannot live without technologies

Literally some of us can not live without simplest technologies we made, for example scalpel changed our evolution and today we are totally dependant on that tool. I wonder how much we are changing our evolution by using other technologies that "saves lives today".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesarean_section

Quote

In the United Kingdom, in 2008, the Caesarean section rate was 24%.^[67] In Ireland the rate was 26.1% in 2009.^[68] The Canadian rate was 26% in 2005–2006.^[69]Australia has a high Caesarean section rate, at 31% in 2007.^[70] In the United States the rate of C-section is around 33% and varies from 23% to 40% depending on the state in question.

 

[James Kerman]

When I think of cyborg evolution I think of the Cochlear Implant  for the deaf and new technologies that allow blind people to see (The bionic eye under development by Dr David Nayagam).  Implanted technology can improve the lives of many disabled people and though I see a risk of abuse in the technology (implanted identification, human tracking, ect) it is too important to the lives of disadvantaged people not to pursue.

 

Edited August 12, 2016 by James Kerman
edited for more information

[Darnok]

1 hour ago, James Kerman said:

When I think of cyborg evolution I think of the Cochlear Implant  for the deaf and new technologies that allow blind people to see (The bionic eye under development by Dr David Nayagam).  Implanted technology can improve the lives of many disabled people and though I see a risk of abuse in the technology (implanted identification, human tracking, ect) it is too important to the lives of disadvantaged people not to pursue.

 

add hacking or remote disabling implants.

[JohnWittle]

On 6/3/2016 at 8:35 AM, Green Baron said:

btw.: What about human genome: with all that missing selection our genes are probably not improving ... i don't think even the most benevolent technology can counter that, or can it ?

 

What missing selection?