I am a fan of Zoltan Isvtan. Opened up the world of Transhumanism. The mixing of humans and machines. Focusing on using technology, biology, and cognitive enhancements to change and upgrade our natural human traits. How technology and humans combine. The smartphone in your hand as a shining example. Your earphones (half of Americans wear earphones daily). We are already digital beings. We are halfway there.
Life and death as a cyborg
That is why I picked up “Life and Death as a Cyborg” by Candi K. Cann. “We are cyborgs” is the opening of the book. How technology, body, and soul are connected. Candi wears two hearing aids and has lens implants in her eyes. She is an augmented person. She has a parent with a pacemaker and a titanium knee. She has a friend with a hip implant. They, too, are cyborgs. The stats:
- One in three American adults today wears some form of wearable technology to track their health and fitness.
- A quarter of all American households own a smart speaker, more than half of those smart speakers are used daily, and more than 90 million US smartphone users use phone voice assistants at least once a month.
- Our phones are so integrated with our biological bodies that they rely on facial-recognition scans to unlock the data held within them.
- 90% of Americans and approximately 69% of the world utilise smartphones.
- Biohacking and genetic engineering are other forms of bioenhancement.
- Digital technologies are also affecting us neurologically and rewiring our brains.
A cyborg isn’t a terminator. It’s your neighbour.
Most of us will be disabled sometime.
Augmentation makes sense. In the United States, 28.7% of all American adults live with a disability. That’s one in four. The future of humanity is all about cyborgs. Disabled people are already cyborgs and have already embraced a technological reality that incorporates augmentation as part of their everyday existence.
In Korea
According to the World Robotics Statistics released by the International Federation of Robotics in 2021, South Korea has the world’s highest robot density, with 932 robots for every 10,000 employees in manufacturing. South Korea has more robots per capita than any country in the world, and robots are a part of many different aspects of daily life. Making life easier and more convenient in many ways. In Korea, attitudes toward machines, and more specifically robots, are overwhelmingly positive. Robots are everywhere, and people often welcome them as dependable, efficient, and predictable.
In Korean military camps, cooking robots assist canteen cooks in preparing everyday meals for more than 3,000 soldiers. They deliver posts and devices that employees request for work. Robots help elderly people with Alzheimer’s and children with ADHD in educational and cognitive function strengthening.
Koreans don’t see robots as a replacement for human care, but as a benign extension of care that can do more good than humans alone can. There are even Buddhist funerals for robotic pets, acknowledging the importance of their companionship for their families’ owners.
Some other examples:
- In South Korea, researchers have developed therapeutic brain implants controlled and charged via a smartphone, which they hope will also eliminate the need to surgically replace batteries in old or faulty implants, such as pacemakers and insulin pumps.
- China has allocated a large portion of its national budget to researching BCI technology, producing highly successful noninvasive technology.
- DAWN Avatar Café in Tokyo, Japan, which utilises café robots remotely run by homebound disabled people to perform everyday tasks at the café and interact with people.
- KT, the largest telecom company in Korea, has deployed over 75,000 IoT sensors to senior single-occupant homes in Seoul
- PARO: the baby seal robot for elderly care and companionship
- Grief Robots: Created by Etsuko Ichihara in Japan, Digital Shaman is a humanoid robot with a three-dimensional printed copy of someone’s face.
- Terasem enables anyone with access to the internet to create an account and develop a free interactive AI chatbot that gets more effective the more you visit and chat with it, imitating your speech patterns, mannerisms, and word choice. They hope that these digital chatbots will one day serve as an uploaded human consciousness that can meld with cloned human DNA.
- Nectome seeks to create digital copies of human brain memories as a way to conserve history, culture, language, and stories.
- Nanotechnology research combines tissue engineering and restructuring with nanotechnologies to combat disease and old age and to repair bone fractures at the molecular level.
- DARPA hopes that one day humans can use their brains to interface with advanced weapons systems.
- Spending on AR/VR is forecast to accelerate, growing from just over $12 billion in 2020 to $72.8 billion in 2024
- 80% of respondents in manufacturing, 75% in healthcare, 74% in education, and 70% in public safety predicted that their organisations will increase spending on XR technology over the next five years.
- Therapeutic applications of XR include physical therapy with a VR headset or cognitive behavioural therapies offered via AR, VR, or the metaverse.
- Remember’s Memorial Stone NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.
There are limitations
Hearing aids need to be recharged every day. Everyone relies on power for the most basic function of hearing. The failure of power grids, the impact of natural disasters, and wars have revealed the increased reliance on and fragility of such assistive technologies. Everyone now depends on their phones to keep in touch with friends, family, and work or to check the weather, read the news, or get directions. Our dependence on electrical power is the most basic element of our increasing reliance on AI in our daily lives—for everything from cellular phones to electric/hybrid cars to respiratory machines and at-home dialysis, power is often taken for granted, yet absolutely essential. Power literally begets power. When we augment in life, it is important to also realise the ways these augmentations may also lead us to death if we are not careful.
What kind of cyborgs do we want to become?
Imagine if we were to talk about corneal implants or pacemakers to someone 200 years ago; they might have reacted with horror and scepticism. As more of us become cyborgs, part machine and part human, could we become an even better kind of human, one that can live longer and perhaps change the definition and understanding of death?
Spirit beings
Is technology a part of the embodied self? If we are already cyborgs, what does that do to our spirituality? Where does embodiment stop? Animistic traditions such as Korean shamanism and Japanese Shinto embrace the notion that even nonsentient beings might have spiritual capabilities or possess spiritual power. Rocks, trees, mountains, or even machines might have spiritual possibilities not exclusive to humans. Asians tend to embrace inanimate objects (and thus robots) as spiritual beings. Multiple studies have demonstrated that “from an animistic viewpoint, robots are attributed life just like natural creatures, and hence are not alien to people. Viewing humans and robots as sharing characteristics would imply that they have similar moral status and both fall within the ‘moral circle.
With AR and VR, you can explore the boundaries between life and death through rules and simulations. Gaming death. In the Metaverse, you can explore other lives and afterlives. The metaverse offers a new conceptualisation of the afterlife, with much more reciprocal, interactive contact between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead.
Immortality
The metaverse as an extension of the afterlife. When your body dies, your consciousness might be uploaded in a digital format into a digital metaverse. Soon, bodies will be seen as vessels, and brains as biological computers that can move between bodies. Brains can essentially be uploaded into a computer chip that transfers memories and experiences from body to body. In Altered Carbon, the body is known as a “sleeve,” and one can upgrade one’s body.
Religion
So what might all these technological advances mean for religion? Throughout Asia, robots have been increasingly adopted, with Buddhist robot monks officiating funerals and serving as a low-cost, efficient way to fulfil religious duties. How many priests use AI to prepare their sermons? As the metaverse grows more sophisticated, religious platforms will expand their offerings—and the nature of religious experience itself will begin to transform. Religious organisations will most likely capitalise on the metaverse, selling services such as prayer recitation, religious intercession, memorial services, spiritual amulets, virtual online memorials, and interactive religious artwork from anywhere in the world.
Dying
What does it mean to dying? Life-support machines as an example. Or death-prolonging technologies. Technology is not merely changing life and improving it. Medicalised death has changed the dying experience so much that we die much more slowly and incrementally. This extension also complicates the very definition of death itself. Technology now intersects with death and dying in ways that are revolutionising the dying experience and changing definitions and understandings of death. We don’t merely live as cyborgs, we also die as cyborgs.
There are economic consequences
We are leaving digital crumbs across computer servers, in our emails, and in our everyday interactions online with others in gaming, shopping, and researching. In 2013, Duncan Stewart, Deloitte Canada’s director of research for technology, media, and telecommunications, estimated that the average Canadian had between $1,000 and $2,000 in their digital estate value (including the monetary, emotional, and practical worth of a person’s digital assets), with projections that this figure would rise to more than $10,000 by 2020—and up to $50,000 for wealthier individuals. Your digital remains have value.
The ethical implications of transhuman technologies
The resurrection of the dead in new and innovative ways raises concerns regarding digital privacy, digital legacies, and digital remains. There are also profound questions about the thresholds of personhood, the ontology of presence, and the ethics of replicating or sustaining consciousness in forms that may lack intentionality, sensation, or self-awareness. The concept of consciousness may shift to one that can be digitally present.
So?
What does this have to do with business? Everything. You are already augmented. Your customers are augmented. Your employees are augmented. Your organisation is augmented. The only question left is whether you design that augmentation with intent, inclusion and resilience, or let it happen to you with a Terminator script running in the background.
What kind of cyborg do you want to be? Body, mind and soul.
