Will humans ever become cyborgs?

Joel from our Live Science Team explores whether humans have become cybernetic organisms...

The traditional view of a cyborg is a person that has been modified with electronic or mechanical features, which would usually require some kind of invasive surgical procedure. Perhaps an eye has been replaced with an infra-red camera, or the mind is half a computer that can understand any language on the planet.

Despite the possible advantages, if these modifications were widely available I still don’t think that most of us would be opting for them. Technology that requires invasive surgical procedures that might permanently alter our bodies is not, I imagine, appealing to the majority of people.  

Most of us are cyborgs of a certain sort...

We just don’t realise it.

Think about the kind of things that cyborgs can usually do in science fiction. Perhaps they can see in the dark or read people’s vital statistics, like a heart rate, just by looking at them. We don’t have circuits and wires running under our skin or through our skulls, but a lot of us do now have the ability to do previously unthinkable acts of science fiction via our smart phones.

Imagine that you can see in the dark. You could assess landscapes before you get to them and have a pre-planned route to a specific location. You could look through cloud to see the location of stars. You could tap into the collective consciousness of your species to find out the answer to almost any question you can think of, and talk to people who aren’t in front of you. Yet all of these things can be achieved through a smart phone with the appropriate app.

Better, faster, stronger...

Phones can ‘look’ at people’s faces and, through detecting tiny variations in skin tone associated with blood flow, can monitor a heart rate. A smart phone can monitor your movements in bed and wake you up at an appropriate time during your sleep cycles so that you feel more refreshed. People can input the data from their gym sessions to allow applications to plan their progress in a given endeavour, pushing them to get better, faster and stronger.

So although we aren’t soldering each others eye sockets or having the latest titanium limbs fitted at the local ‘body’ shop, we are now living lives that are massively augmented. Through the external modules of technology that we call smart phones, I think we have already become cyborgs. Just not in the way that science fiction predicted.

For more future science, check out our Live Science video 'How to make your own hoverboard'...