Content area
Full Text
In an age of pacemakers and microchip implants, the old nightmare vision of man melding into machine no longer seems completely far-fetched. Not to worry, says a noted observer of technology. Surprising things happen when the body interacts with technology.
For more than 50 years, enthusiasts have proclaimed the corning of a new age of technologically augmented humanity, a somewhat unsettling era of bar-coded convicts and chip-implanted children. But technology has been reshaping the body since the very dawn of civilization. The feet of shod people, for example, are physiologically different from those of people who have always walked barefoot. Technologies as various as the thong sandal and the computer mouse have affected how we use our bodies-the techniques we employ in our everyday lives-and this coevolution of technology and the body has not always followed the course engineers and other designers imagined. The question now is whether mind, body, and machine will fuse in some radical new way over the next generation.
The enthusiasts themselves are far from agreement on the mechanism that might achieve such a fusion. For some, the new intimacy between humans and machines will simply involve more portable and powerful versions of devices we already take with us-computers, for example, that might be carried as we now carry cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), to be viewed through special eyeglass displays. Spectacles might also transmit the emotional states of their wearers, so that a speaker, for example, could detect an audience's interest or boredom. There are already sneakers that can transmit or record information on a runner's performance, and civilian motorcycle helmets with intercoms and navigational aids built in.
Other enthusiasts scorn mere wearability. They're having sensors and transmitters surgically implanted in their bodies-as, for example, some deaf individuals have been fitted with cochlear implants that restore hearing. The cyborg, or human machine, is an especially powerful and persistent notion, perhaps because it seems a logical next step from technological symbiosis. (Politically, the cyborg idea-which for a few enthusiasts is a movement-spans a continuum from Paul Verhoeven's original Robocop film in 1987 to the work of cultural scholars such as Donna Haraway and Chris Hables Gray, who see the connection between human and machine as an emancipatory strategy...