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Activist Neil Harbisson has an antenna implanted in his skull, and is by most definitions a proper cyborg. He is pictured here in Milan in 2017.
Activist Neil Harbisson has an antenna implanted in his skull, and is by most definitions a proper cyborg. He is pictured here in Milan in 2017.
The main character of Alita: Battle Angel is a cyborg with an entirely mechanical body housing a biological brain. While some of the elements of the movie are farfetched, many are startlingly plausible.
Writing in the journal Science Robotics, Murphy argues that works of science fiction such Alita and antecedents stretching all the way back to Edgar Allen Poe's The Man Who Was Used Up, first published in 1839, have done much to anticipate the technological developments and trends of our slow transformation into cyborgs. However, she adds, they have done little to predict many of the ethical and legal complications that will accompany them.
So, what exactly is a cyborg? The word itself is a portmanteau of "cybernetics" and "organism" and was first coined by the Austrian scientist and musician Manfred Clynes in 1960 in a paper written with the American psychologist Nathan Kline. Their article inspired NASA in 1963 to investigate the possibility of modifying human beings for extended travel in outer space, to produce a human-machine hybrid system.
Beyond space travel, the idea has come to mean many things, ranging from technological interventions in the human body to our increasing cognitive reliance on various devices.
Comment: For more on horizontal gene transfer and why it doesn't fit nicely into the (neo-)Darwinian worldview, see Perry Marshall's Evolution 2.0. Maybe genomes are selfish, after all? The only problem is, to be selfish one must first have a degree of agency. And there is no agency in evolution, at least according to the doctrinaire priests of Saint Darwin.