We were always Cyborgs
There was no moment when humans met technology. No crossing of a line. No before and after. Only a continuous process of offloading and coevolving.
Technology is the eternal project of doing more with less, of harnessing resources from the environment to make life possible, of offloading a process to a more efficient layer, liberating resources elsewhere. When we speak of transhumanism as some future rupture with our nature we are already in error. Humanity and technology are not two things that have been coming closer. They are – and have always been – one.
The eye is a technology. Before specialized organs evolved, light sensitivity was handled by diffuse photoreceptive cells. Through genetic variation and natural selection, these systems evolved, forming lenses, retinas, and neural processing because they delivered more usable information at lower cost. We do not call the eye an implant, we call it anatomy. The logic is identical with the wheel, plumbing, the transistor or vaccines. They are all part of our extended phenotype.
Freeing calories for the brain
This is evolution; it has not stopped. As we began using fire (~1 to 2 million years ago), we externalised part of the cost of digestion. Cooked food yields more usable energy and reduces the energetic cost of digestion, freeing calories for the brain. The portion of our body that is gut shrank in this period by 30%, while brain volume expanded from about 500 cm³ in early hominins to 1,400 cm³ in modern humans. Human biology has co-evolved with technology. When we started wearing clothes and building shelters, our skin got thinner and our bones less dense. Our biology has incorporated the existence of tools into itself. Separating humans from technology makes as much sense as separating buildings from their basements.
We see the same learning curve and offloading in our brains: as we first do a task, it starts requiring activation from the frontal, more deliberate and expensive regions of the brain. But as one learns and gets accustomed to it, the activated regions shift back and down; this is automation within our anatomy.
Once a technology becomes common enough, it disappears into the background. Neither running water nor writing is considered technology anymore. Nor will neural interfaces, once enough people have them. What we call cyborg is a matter of degree. Every threshold we have crossed before followed the same pattern: fire, writing, printing, vaccines, electricity, computation. Criticised at first. Ubiquitous within generations because it proved its worth automating what otherwise would have taken more attention. What changes is speed.
Plumbing transformed civilisation. It allowed a person to live in a small urban apartment, reducing the usage of space per person. Digitisation continued the job. What once required warehouses and travel now requires less space than a bottle of water. This is the compressive nature of technology, freeing the organism from the overhead of its infrastructure so it can use its calories and cognition toward the next harder, faster, stronger step, exactly as the brain frees up the higher structures by shifting to the back the less novel activity. Automation is a law of life.
From rehabilitation to running faster than Usain Bolt
The same technologies that allow a paralysed person to walk again or a deaf person to hear through their tongue will give us, when tweaked a bit further, the ability to run faster than Usain Bolt or hear better than a dog. What technology was ever used only to improve the lower end of the distribution? We will break all records.
The objection from the political right is that this is dangerous, that we are tampering with what works. What we call human nature is itself the accumulated result of earlier technological adaptations. The fact is we always tampered with what works. That’s how we went from a population of about 1.6 billion to 8 billion in just over a century, how we reduced child mortality from 40% to 4%, how we made extreme poverty go from 90% to about 8% over the past two centuries, and how we eradicated diseases like Smallpox while bringing others such as Polio and Guinea worm disease to the brink of eradication. What has to be figured out is whether an implementation is a net positive. The use of leaded gasoline failed the test, nuclear medicine passed it, and vaccines solidly passed it. Every tool has to be evaluated on its effects; what else do we have to judge? The conservative heuristic of suspicion toward novelty is not wrong, but incomplete. Suspicion is a good starting point, not a conclusion.
