Are You a Competent Cyborg?

An anonymous reader writes "Beyond your smartphone screen lies an infinitely more interesting world, if only you could get past the myopic app view you're currently bound to. Glen Martin ponders the existential unease lying at the root of the Internet of Things: 'We're already cyborgs: biological matrices augmented by wirelessly connected silicon arrays of various configurations. The problem is that we're pretty clunky as cyborgs go. We rely on screens and mobile devices to extend our powers beyond the biological. That leads to everything from atrophying social skills as face-to-face interactions decline to fatal encounters with garbage trucks as we wander, texting and oblivious, into traffic. So, if we're going to be cyborgs, argues Breseman, let's be competent, sophisticated cyborgs. For one thing, it's now in our ability to upgrade beyond the screen. For another, being better cyborgs may make us — paradoxically — more human.'"

Comments

External cognition is not a new idea

[Anonymous Coward]

The unease lying at the root of the Internet of Things is not that you're becoming more machine-like. It's that you can't turn it off.

I do not think it means what you think it means...

[michaelwigle]

You keep using that word (cyborg). I do not think it means what you think it means... :P http://youtu.be/G2y8Sx4B2Sk

!cyborg

[snarfies]

That's like arguing that I am an ox because I use a tractor to plow my field rather than do it all by hand.