Cyborg Me
By John P. Sagi
A child born today will only be 88 in the year 2100. We may be around too.
I was born human in 1949. However, I am now a cyborg, augmented with a small stent in my placqued left carotid artery. In a few years, I’ll have my heart and both lungs replaced. Diabetes may take my natural limbs, to be substituted by metal. Eventually, all of my organs may be augmented, except possibly my brain. Possibly. Each of these augmentations may extend my life span until well after 2100. Author Ray Kurzweil aptly noted that there will no longer be any clear distinction between humans and computers, and that “life expectancy” will cease to be a viable term.
Androids (extremely man-like machines), robots (common serf laborers), and cybernetic organisms (man-machines) like myself, will proliferate and morph as our lives (if that can be defined) become blurred between “carbon” and “artificial.”
Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute has experienced many research successes in “thinking robots”, intelligent manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, space-related robots, medical robotics, nanomachines, computer vision and graphics, and anthropomorphic robots. Hans Moravec, a leading authority there, predicts that robots will learn and make choices as early as 2020. He further predicts that the robotics industry will surpass the auto market by 2025. We will pay as much for a multitasking robot as we will for a car.
One distinction between us and robots seems to be a phenomenon called “consciousness.” Futurist Bill Halal postulates that the next era may well be the Age of Consciousness, perhaps emphasizing the distinction between the emotional “us” (no matter how cybernetic we become) and the calculating “them” (the androids and robots that may “think”).
Developments with androids, robots, and we human/cyborgs will re-create “life” as we experience it. By 2100, we cyborgs will own many androids and robots, posing interesting issues that will eventually require intelligent solutions. Some of these are:
- How much augmentation will be required to fully qualify us as human?
- Will we be legally responsible for our robot’s actions if it injures another human/cyborg?
- Can our robot possess another robot, or perhaps another human/cyborg?
- Will we work for a “very intelligent” robot? And
- When our robot says it, too, is conscious, will we believe it? How would we know?
We may be around to find the answers!
About the Author
John P. Sagi is a professor of business management and computer information systems at Anne Arundel Community College, Arnold, Maryland. Web site www.aacc.edu.