50 years of cyborgs

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50 years of cyborgs
October 3, 2010
Casper Llewellyn Smith
guardian.co.uk

Fifty years ago this month, the journal Astronautics published a paper titled "Drugs, Space and Cybernetics", recently presented by neuroscientist, inventor and professional musician Manfred Clynes and psychiatrist Nathan Kline at a space flight symposium in Texas. In contemplating the challenges that might lie ahead for astronauts embarking on voyages possibly lasting thousands of years – and this was still more than six months before Yuri Gagarin rocketed into orbit – the two authors proposed tampering with the crews' biological capabilities. There was no point in trying to cocoon them in artificial atmospheres – too risky, "the bubble all too easily bursts"; instead, how about "the incorporation of integral exogenous devices to bring about the biological changes which might be necessary in man's homeostatic mechanisms to allow him to live in space qua natura"?

In other words, a man-machine. And what might this be called? "We propose," Clynes and Kline wrote, "the term Cyborg."

Thus was the term coined, and since then, cyborgs have become staples of science fiction: from the silver cybermen in Doctor Who to the zombie-like Borg in Star Trek, and from the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman to Darth Vader and Robocop. (The Terminator, as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, doesn't really count: his skin is merely a disguise and so he might better be described as an android.) Inevitably, video games – Metal Gear Solid or Tekken, for example – frequently feature such creations, too.

"Those fictional characters speak to the horror as well as the excitement that we feel at our relationship with technology," says Tim Maly, the curator of website 50 Posts About Cyborgs and the complementary Quiet Babylon. "They ask what it is to be human and, as we augment ourselves and become dependent on these technologies, at what point do we stop being human?"

That process of augmentation has indeed begun. In 2002, Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, underwent surgery to have a device implanted into the nerves of his left arm so he could experiment with extending his nervous system across the internet. This effectively made him part-human, part-robot: the world's first real cyborg.

"It was tremendously exciting," he says, explaining that his wife also had electrodes pushed into her, becoming "a mini-cyborg", so that they could communicate nervous system to nervous system. The experiment lasted three months and since then, while two of his students have implanted magnets into their fingertips to play around with ultrasonics, Warwick has remained resolutely human.

"I'm a bit disappointed there hasn't been more research in these areas," he says. "It is risky, but the technology is certainly there. In fact, it's about time I gave it a go myself again..."

Of course, anyone fitted with a pacemaker might also be considered a cyborg. Disabled athletes have been considered as such, too: South African Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius is known as the "Blade Runner" because he competes with the aid of carbon-fibre artificial limbs

Such definitions sit quite happily with Manfred Clynes, who, at the age of 85, continues to explore the man-machine relationship through his creation of a music software program called SuperConductor.

"You could even say that if you're riding a bicycle or wearing spectacles, that fits the cyborg concept," Clynes says. "There's feedback there. You don't have to go into space!"

The paper coining the term "cyborg" appeared in the middle of the space race at the height of the cold war. Clynes and Kline, who died in 1982, emphasised in the paper that "although some of [our] proposed solutions may appear fanciful, it should be noted that there are references in the Soviet technical literature to research in many of these same areas..."

Times have changed, albeit not necessarily for the better. The professor says that "films such as The Terminator sadden me because they misinterpret our original message". That message was that technology offered mankind the chance to actuate its potential.

Or, as he and Kline concluded half a century ago: "The purpose of the cyborg... is to provide an organisational system in which... robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel."