Computers and Our Humanity

The term cyborg (short for cybernetic organism) was coined in the early 1960s in connection with the U.S. space program, a venture that required an unprecedented blending of the human mind and body with technology—especially information technology: computer software, hardware, and robotics.

In the course of the intervening decades, science fiction literature such as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1986) and films such as The Terminator (1984) and The Matrix (1999) have introduced fantastical portrayals of cyborgs into the popular imagination.

However, cultural theorist Donna Haraway has suggested that our lives are so intertwined with technology that, in a very real sense, we all have become cyborgs. Indeed, some people—e.g., patients with pacemakers, cochlear implants in their ears, and even those who have had laser surgery resulting in the implantation of artificial lenses into their eyes—represent a literal intersection of the biological and the technological. And some researchers in the field of nanotechnology— technology that occurs at a microscopic level—envision a day when microscopic robots (nanorobots) will be injected into patients in order to perform tasks such as attacking cancerous cells.

However, consider also a more metaphorical meaning of the term cyborg. Our colleges, our governments, and other institutions quite often view us through a collection of data records instead of "in person." Consider also the increasing extent to which we conduct our interpersonal relationships via e-mail and instant messaging—a phenomenon often called telepresence. This, too, represents an odd mixture of the embodied and the disembodied.

Thus, have we all allowed our lives to become so inextricably entwined with information technology that we can no longer consider ourselves apart from it? Are we becoming "cyborgs"? Cultural theorist N. Katherine Hayles contends that this is so and that, as a result, we live in a posthuman age, where the word human no longer has the same meaning as it did in the past.

These are disturbing assertions. Information technologies can indeed improve the bodily conditions of human beings, allowing the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dying to live, and those separated by geographical distance to remain connected. But how do we negotiate between the miraculous nature of such technologies and the potentially dehumanizing effects of the same technologies?