It is one of those days when the rain sets in and the wipers are a ker-kushing metronome, and you might as well be ploughing through a storm at sea as driving on the motorway. Andy is telling me about an experiment he is working on, but pauses as he lines up the car and then sends us through the spray billowing from a truck’s undercarriage, and we’re out the other side among the pairs of red brake lights.
What would Alice look like to Bob if she was falling into a black hole and Bob hadn’t entered it yet? It’s a thought experiment, which I can only see in images. Alice is a little girl stretching across the event horizon and Bob, who I’ve imagined as her brother, is screaming for her to come back. But Andy, I suspect – by the way he is trying to explain it to me – is seeing it only as an equation (Alice and Bob are just a and b to him, connected by symbols and calculations). It’s about the stretching of light and what colour-shift would happen, or something. I know maths is a language of the imagination, and I am nodding and making encouraging noises, but I don’t think I will ever be able to fully comprehend the complexity hidden in the terms he is using.
It’s a few hours’ drive and, to pass the time, I have opened Andy’s university profile page on my phone and I’m going down the list, asking him about his research interests. We’re in his Peugeot coupé. Soon after we had set off from his university campus I had pointed at the digital display on the dash, reading thirty-five degrees, and said, ‘That cannot be right – it’s freezing.’ He’d said (a little hurt) it was broken. It’s an old Peugeot and he liked it – the way it felt; even though it’s hard to get replacement parts, he didn’t want a newer car. He’d gestured to a few more things around the cabin that were broken – mostly electronics. It had been pretty cutting-edge when it was first released.
He pauses again. He’s lining up to pass another lorry; I feel like we’re in a slightly rattly, late 1990s starship and tighten my hold on the door grip – punch it! – and Andy is sending us into the swirling nebula.
We’re in search of the first cyborg.
How I came to be in a car with a theoretical physicist travelling down the M4 has to do with a boy in the street, probably ten, who asked me, ‘Are you a cyborg, or something?’ I smiled and said what I normally say: ‘No, half-robot.’ He was with his friends after school and they laughed at me, but mostly at the boy for asking a stranger a question. I wasn’t actually sure if I was a cyborg, so I looked it up later.
The word ‘cyborg’ is a blending of cybernetic and organism and was coined during the space race. The scientist Manfred Clynes first used it in the article ‘Cyborgs and Space’ for the September 1960 edition of Astronautics journal. He was thinking about ways we might explore extraterrestrial worlds. For him, we shouldn’t try to make habitable environments up in space (spacecraft and space stations), but rather should adapt ourselves to survive the inhospitable vacuum by amalgamating the human with technology – then we’d truly be free to explore. A very practical, if speculative, thinking-outside-the-box idea, and all before Yuri Gagarin first made it out there.
But in sixty years the term cyborg has taken on many meanings. My search results were littered with art, comics and the movies. It’s become a modern myth filled with fear, hope and the monstrous. A twenty-first-century parable about freeing ourselves from our frail bodies; the chance of immortality set against the stalking menace of technological enslavement. A modern Midas, with a twist of the werewolf. I had sudden images of our ancestors trying to entwine themselves with nature for empowerment – shamans dancing about the fire dressed in deerskins and antlers and communing with another spiritual dimension. The cyborg is ripe with the same sense of mystery.
Early among the search results was the Cyborg Foundation. It’s one of those very visual sites, where a montage of slick graphics and videos is collaged together and embedded under the text (cells divide, we fly through the inside of a microchip, strands of DNA unravel, fading into African wildlife, and then a space station and the Earth revolving). It’s great to look at. And positioned up front is: ‘OUR MISSION IS TO HELP PEOPLE BECOME CYBORGS, PROMOTE CYBORG ART AND DEFEND CYBORG RIGHTS’. Scroll down and there’s a DESIGN YOUSELF section with a step-by-step wire diagram, then further down a Cyborg Bill of Rights V1.0, which includes: freedom from disassembly, equality for mutants and the right to bodily sovereignty. It’s as much artwork as website.
It was set up by two cyborg artists, Moon Ribas and Neil Harbisson. Harbisson has an antenna osseointegrated into the back of his skull, which bends forward over the top of his hair to dangle in front of his forehead. (It reminds me of an anglerfish lure.) He has achromatopsia – he’s only ever seen in black and white. At the end of the antenna is a fibre-optic tip that detects colour; the implant then converts the colour’s frequency into vibrations that he feels and hears in his skull. So if an orange is held up to the tip, Harbisson senses the colour by the pitch of the vibration.
He developed this device – the ‘eyeborg’ – while at university and, after a few refusals on ethical grounds, found a surgeon willing to implant it. Soon after he’d implanted the eyeborg, Harbisson’s passport came up for renewal, but the UK Passport Office rejected the photo he’d sent, with the prosthetic dangling over his head. Eventually, with help from doctors and friends, he persuaded the Passport Office that he identified as a cyborg and that the implant should be counted as one of his organs. The photo was accepted, and the press declared him the first cyborg to be officially recognised by a government. There were quite a few articles about Harbisson; whether or not he’s the first cyborg, he certainly seems to be a cyborg celebrity.
Moon Ribas is a childhood friend of Harbisson. To become a cyborg, she had a device implanted into both of her feet that connects her to online seismographs. She can perceive the seismic activity of the Earth as it happens – those little ripples and quakes the rest of us are oblivious to. It’s a completely new sense, she’s said, one that doesn’t make her feel closer to robots or machines, but to nature: the more she can feel the Earth moving, the more empathy she has.*
By some of the definitions I found in the results, I do seem to be cyborg: a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts … a creature that is part human and part machine. And I’d met disabled people over the years who had proudly introduced themselves as cyborg, claiming the word as part of their identity. A quick look through academic articles shows how the word has been used for meaning and metaphor in all sorts of fields – anthropology, identity politics, ethics, sociology, architecture. There are papers that describe people who have medical devices such as implantable cardioverter-defibrillators or cochlear implants as ‘everyday cyborgs’. And then some articles argue that humans are so enmeshed with technology we’re all cyborgs already. It’s such a potent symbol that anything seems to go. ‘Sure, I’m a cyborg,’ I could have told the cocky boy in the street.
But other definitions, which focus on enhancement of the human (a person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body), seem to suggest that I don’t quite fit into the category in the way that Ribas and Harbisson do.
Later that week I mentioned all this to my father-in-law, who said, ‘I know a friend of the first cyborg. You should meet him.’
‘Harbisson?’
‘No, Kevin Warwick.’
I navigate Andy to the suburban tree-lined street, and he turns us into the driveway of a 1930s semi-detached house dripping with rain. Somehow I didn’t expect to find the first cyborg living on a residential road just outside Reading. I’m not sure what I’d expected: that maybe you’d be able to distinguish a cyborg’s residence from all the others on the street. But it’s all very normal and rooted in the world of the familiar – the past doesn’t disappear when the future arrives. Even so, some of that mythology is acting on me and I feel a little intimidated; popular culture and science fiction are ramping up my expectations – a cyborg will be difficult to talk to, a little inert or mechanical, even aggressive and dismissive of a slow and yet-to-be-upgraded human.
In fact a tall, thin, sixty-something grey-haired man, in a loose shirt, stoops through the porch. ‘Come in,’ he says and shakes my hand and leads us into his living room. After Andy and Kevin have caught up, Kevin makes us tea and then sits opposite us in an armchair. My first impression is that he is smiling (and smiles a lot during the hour and a half we spend together). More than that, he is very alive, and his legs cross and re-cross as we talk. Just very human and warm – nothing of the myth. When I mention that the internet pages that claim Kevin Warwick as the world’s first cyborg have been sifted down and replaced by ones in which Harbisson gets the honour, he laughs – it doesn’t matter to him.
‘I did my experiments before Neil was around,’ he says. ‘He’s got it on his passport, though. He’s a great guy. We meet up at events every now and again, when we’re presenting at the same time. Neil’s an interesting case. He challenges different definitions of the cyborg. Having something extra that goes beyond the human norm is the definition I believe is most useful. Neil was colour-blind, so his implant overcame that; it’s a sort of therapy for his impairment, but also allows him to perceive infrared and ultraviolet light the rest of us can’t. That’s interesting.’
And while Harbisson describes himself as a cyborg artist, it’s very clear from the way Professor Warwick talks he is a scientist. His first cyborg experiment, Project Cyborg 1.0, was in 1998. He implanted a silicone RFID-chip transponder into his forearm. As he moved through the Department of Cybernetics at Reading University, the signal emitted by the chip was monitored by a computer. Doors opened for him, and lights, heaters and computers switched on automatically. I’d read a bit about it, and I find myself trying to see the scar on his wrist, but it’s very dark in the room. Kevin hadn’t turned on the lights, and with the curtains half-drawn and the dank rain outside, we’re sitting in the half-light. I suppose it’s the most cyborg thing about the whole meeting – we don’t need to see each other properly to transfer information between us.
There are thought to be around 6,000 people in Sweden with RFID implants. The implants are grain-of-rice-sized and normally inserted into the fleshy triangle between thumb and forefinger. You can make payments in shops and on public transport with a swipe of the hand, and set the implant up for keyless entry to the home or office. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) has been around since the 1970s. It uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, so any device that supports this (smartphone or contactless card reader) can communicate or activate an application when the RFID is in close proximity. These small chips are everywhere now: in security passes, credit cards, toll-road tags and passports.
It was reading about Kevin Warwick (and seeing an identification chip injected into a pet) that gave professional piercing artist Jowan Österlund, the CEO of Biohax International, the idea to develop the tech for the general public. Österlund sells an ‘install’ for around $180. And while Kevin had proved the concept in a respectable scientific setting more than twenty years ago – with all the rigour, ethical sign-off and groundwork you’d expect – RFID chipping’s route towards the mainstream has ended up being through the fringe world of piercing, tattoo and body modification.
Body hacking sits as a sort of subculture within a field called biohacking.* It’s a branch of the health-and-lifestyle market and grabs the attention by playing on the idea that the body can be ‘hacked’ for better performance. It seems to include almost any new fad: diets such as intermittent fasting or exotic-sounding specialist supplements; nutrigenomics (tailoring nutrition to a person’s specific DNA); red-light therapy, in which you shine near-infrared light at the skin to encourage natural metabolic processes; audio-entrainment (playing functional music to relax and restore the brain); cryotherapy (exposing the body to incredibly cold air); and more widespread and accepted practices like meditation and positive psychology. Some of it has a strong evidence-base, some not so much, but it’s a powerful marketing tool playing on the ‘hacker ethic’ – that information should be free and shared, that we can change our lives for the better, and to distrust authority voices and opinions (that might be scientists, government advice or evidence-based research). If you remove the pseudoscience and marketing hype, it’s about self-improvement and agency, taking control of your health and increasing the chances of a long, disease-free life. Well intentioned and admirable, when safe and backed up by evidence.
As the extreme outliers within this community, body hackers (sometimes called bio-punks, or grinders) try to improve themselves with cybernetic devices or by altering the body’s chemicals and genetics – all experimental, and from labs in the basement. The goal is to extend human capacities by hacking themselves with affordable off-the-shelf kit – to become cyborgs. Installing RFID chips in your hand is now one of the more tame procedures of the body-hacking community. Groups, collectives and small companies around the world are running do-it-yourself experiments, and the options for modification have expanded. Take your pick (most of it can be bought online): if you want a circle of five LED lights to shine through your skin in time with music, you can get Grindhouse Wetware’s rather uncomfortable-looking North-star implanted in the back of your hand; if you want to feel the electromagnetic pull of speakers and hard drives, or magically move paperclips across the table, a biosensing magnet injected into your fingertip from Dangerous Things might be for you; if you want always to know how you are orientated, a North Sense device from Cyborg Nest pierced into the skin over your sternum will vibrate every time you turn through north; and you might even want to get in touch with someone at CYBORGASMICS, whose website says the Lovetron9000 vibrating pelvic implant is coming soon.
And if hardware isn’t your thing, there is also a whole group of body hackers engaged in do-it-yourself synthetic biology. Just as the first PCs gave rise to hobbyists coding, hacking and building computers from scratch, so the new hype in genome editing has led to a rise in do-it-yourself genetic engineering. Open-source techniques and increasingly affordable equipment have helped, but it is mainly possible because of CRISPR, a gene-editing technology that can find and cut a sequence of DNA in a cell and replace it with another – a process that used to take an expert laboratory months can now be done in days at home and at a fraction of the cost.
NASA scientist-turned-biohacker Josiah Zayner is one of a few high-profile characters in the field who have tried to genetically engineer their own bodies. He injected himself (between swigs of whisky) on the stage of a synthetic-biology conference with a home-made therapy he said would modify his muscles’ genetic expression and make his arms stronger. There’s no evidence it worked and it looks more like a marketing stunt.* His company sells a Genetic Engineering Home Lab Kit for $1,440, which includes everything you’d need to start playing around with your own genome (or to make glow-in-the-dark beer). With it you can rewrite the body’s biological instructions, if you don’t mind the potential risks of fiddling around with your own genetics.
The expansion of the body-hacking scene in the 2010s has had a little of the wind taken out of its sails in the last few years. Conventions have been suspended; new devices and therapies haven’t made it to market as quickly as promised, hit by snags in development and funding; and some of the first-generation implants have stopped working, or are faulty and are being removed. The number of people wanting RFID implants seems to be slowing – the rest of us haven’t piled in behind the early adopters. Pandemics and politics may have something to do with it. Regulations have been tightened by governments concerned about safety, fraud and identity theft. And even a general sense of mistrust pervades, stoked by conspiracy theories about mass vaccination programmes being a cover for chipping us all for control and state surveillance.
But it also has to do with the technology. It just isn’t useful enough yet. Yes, it’s slightly quicker to move through the Swedish transport network; yes, you can’t lose an RFID implant; some people have claimed it is eco – fewer credit cards mean less plastic waste – but you can’t easily upgrade an implant, can’t repair it when it goes wrong, and taking it out is far harder than putting it in. (I’ve tried to remove shrapnel I thought was just beneath the surface, and quickly wished I’d never started. It was much deeper, and much more painful that I thought it was going to be.)
A smartphone can do everything an RFID chip can, and more. Human enhancement is still easier with wearables. Smart glasses, prosthetics, exoskeletons and health-and-fitness monitors are all solutions that can be upgraded and removed, when needed. Imagine a set of smart soft-robotic clothes – a body suit – that could stimulate your skin in response to an input (warning of a rise in the air pollution on the street you are walking along, let’s say); and that had sewn-in artificial muscles to assist with walking and running; and could keep tabs on your heart rate, blood pressure and activity levels, and alert you when something wasn’t right or that today you needed to eat more fibre, or should drink another glass of water; that could keep you at a temperature of your choosing, even on a hot underground train; and hardly ever needed charging because it harvested energy from your body movements; and you could take it off at the end of the day and chuck it in the washing machine. Why permanently modify your body if a wearable offers a safer, upgradable and more effective solution than an implant?
‘I’m surprised about the RFID,’ Kevin says. ‘My experiment was over twenty years ago. Back then I thought it would be picked up quickly for uses like a passport. It would be perfect for walking through queues quickly, but it hasn’t happened. You can pay for the trains in Sweden, but there aren’t many other applications.’
‘I think most of us will have an implant some day,’ I say. I worry I’m saying this just because I think it’s what he wants to hear. I do really believe this – it’s not such a moral or emotional leap from a matchstick-sized implant that lives in your arm and delivers a small dose of contraceptive hormone, or a cosmetic implant that increases your breast size, or any of the medical health devices that the ‘everyday cyborgs’ already have to keep their hearts in check, or monitor insulin levels, or reduce peripheral pain. I do think the technological growing pains will be overcome and we’ll be jumping on board, perhaps with a mix of implanted biometric sensors and external wearables. But I suspect I’m more cautious than Kevin about how soon that will be.
There’s something of the prophet about Kevin, sitting there in the armchair haloed by the light of the window behind. He showed us the future and is surprised that we haven’t followed him there. He re-crosses his legs. ‘But the second experiment – that’s been used in the US for paralysed people and tested out in different ways. It’s even got one woman feeding herself, I believe. But it’s all still experimental and in the laboratory. I thought we’d be further on by now. Far more hybrid.’
Project Cyborg 2.0 was a few years after the RFID chip. Kevin had a BrainGate BCI electrode array surgically implanted into the median nerve of his left arm. (While the RFID was passive, this experiment physically wired Kevin’s nervous system with a computer.) Using the neural interface, he was able to control an electric wheelchair and make a robotic hand open and close in the lab in Reading. He also flew to Columbia University, New York, to control the same robotic hand over the internet, and received neural stimulation feedback from sensors in the robot’s fingertips. The experiment was a forerunner to much of the BCI research that is ongoing today. It’s how Thibault controlled his exoskeleton, and has restored movement in the paralysed and translated neural activity into speech, writing and control of a tablet computer – life-changing for those with locked-in syndrome.
In the car on the way, I’d asked Andy about Kevin’s reputation among scientists. I’d read a few articles describing Kevin as a maverick, and his experiments as not much more than entertainment. And I’d seen a few of the pictures from the experiment, close-ups of the surgery, the grey designed gauntlet that held the interface to his wrist and looked as if it was from a TV sci-fi set. Some of the emotive language Kevin used in videos and interviews from the time wasn’t what you’d expect from an academic, and I could see how this might provoke others in the field to attack him. Andy felt this was unfair: yes, with the importance of evidence-base and impartiality in modern science, performing experiments on yourself was always going to be controversial. ‘But Kevin’s done much more than the cyborg experiments, you know.’
As if answering this, Kevin says, ‘It’s probably true I wanted the publicity – it helped with the funding, and I felt it was important to use words people could understand when explaining the work – but mainly I was doing it for the science. If my going out on a limb makes some people uncomfortable, does it matter, if it increases the understanding that improves the blind’s ability to see, or of the paralysed to walk again?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I say.
‘It’s all had to be meaningful.’
Despite the controversies and ‘Captain Cyborg’ headlines the press loved at the time, it’s a reminder of what sets Kevin apart from the artists, hobbyists and body hackers that he is now so often mentioned alongside. Almost all of his research is about improving the lives of the disabled. From early in his career he was using robotics and computing to create aids for the disabled: a walking frame that gradually reduced its assistance as the patient improved; a system for sending simplified sign language over the landline telephone; and a self-emptying bath that detected epileptic seizures. Even if he was controversial, he was invited to present the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture in 2000, which was titled ‘Rise of the Robots’, and his biography now includes a long list of awards, honours and honorary doctorates.
There’s a lot that is fascinating about the Project Cyborg 2.0 experiment, but I get the impression Kevin wants to move on. (I suppose in the same way I get bored of always being asked about my prosthetics, the cyborg experiments must follow him around, as if that’s all he is – it must get a little wearing.) And sure enough, he seems more animated when we talk about what he is working on now.
‘AI is like magic for real,’ he says. He is explaining his research on Parkinson’s disease, using data from deep brain stimulation devices. ‘The DBS electrodes are there to push current into the brain and stop the tremors,’ he explains, ‘but you can also take current out to see what’s going on. We use AI to model the brain and predict when the tremors are going to start – to create an early-warning system, that was the goal. But what’s interesting is the power of AI to classify. Doctors find it hard to diagnose the type of Parkinson’s someone might have. They can only see how the disease presents in the patient – and the shaking and tremors look pretty much the same in everyone. The brain signals that cause those symptoms are actually varied and may be completely different diseases. As a human, we get a limited perspective, we only see what it looks like in the outside world; we found the AI can classify the signals into groups we’d never known about, which then lets the surgeons use more appropriate treatments. As with any neurological problem, you’ve got human simplification going on because we don’t understand, so we might say “This is Parkinson’s disease” but, in fact, it could be one of a handful of different things – you get overlap with diseases like dementia. AI can help us diagnose much more accurately.’
Our discussion about his Parkinson’s research moves to the future again. ‘You can’t completely predict the outcome,’ Kevin says. ‘That’s why AI is powerful. But it’s also a question of control.’ He holds his hands apart as if suspending an invisible cat’s cradle. ‘The benefits of AI also open up the chance that it will act against us. I do think it could be dangerous.’
Most of us have some sense that AI is a powerful tool. In the medical setting it can predict the onset of tremors in Parkinson’s and minimise the insulin dosage of implanted diabetics pumps so they last longer. It’s particularly well suited to image-classification tasks, identifying skin cancers from photos, breast cancer from mammograms and the onset of eye disease from retinal images (Professor Faisal’s AI Clinician helping treatment in ICU). An AI developed by Google’s DeepMind, called AlphaFold (a descendant of AlphaGo), predicted a protein’s three-dimensional shape from its amino-acid sequence, helping to solve one of biology’s greatest problems, and may well revolutionise many areas of science. It’s an incredibly powerful analytical tool for researchers, helping us extract insights from huge amounts of data that humans alone couldn’t hope to crunch.
And we also have a sense of AI’s limitations. While some of the current AI doctors are better than your average middle-career doctor, they can’t outperform the best senior doctors – the problem being that if future doctors rely too heavily on AI, they might never accrue the experience needed to become expert, and where would that leave us? There’s also a creeping uncertainty. The most advanced AI can help us identify the shape of a protein, or drive an autonomous car, but their systems are now so complicated – using deep learning – that the people who designed them struggle to understand how and why they arrived at any single judgement, and that is disconcerting. The next questions seem to be: will AI surpass our intelligence? Will it go rogue and become a threat to us?
It’s easy to dismiss the idea of an uncontrollable AI that wipes out humanity as the shrill cry of overreaction – something so far in the future that we shouldn’t bother worrying. But it’s probably worth listening when some of the best minds are warning us, as Stephen Hawking did shortly before he died, when he made a speech in 2017 at Web Summit, Lisbon: ‘AI could be the worst invention in the history of our civilisation,’ he said, ‘that brings dangers like powerful autonomous weapons or new ways for the few to oppress the many … AI could develop a will of its own, a will that is in conflict with ours and which could destroy us. In short, the rise of powerful AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity.’
‘I agree with people like Stephen Hawking,’ Kevin says. ‘We have to look to the future. But how AI could enhance a human, I have to admit, is most exciting for me. We showed twenty years ago that you could link the nervous system – your brain – and control a robotic hand. If we can link the human brain via a neural implant to an AI, it could give us access to entirely new realms of information and experience, and it might also be our best chance of controlling AI.’
I find myself telling Kevin about an argument I’d had with a friend. We were discussing Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, which is trying to develop a brain–machine interface: an ultra-thin neural lace with thousands of electrodes that could be implanted into the skull. The goal in the short term is an upgrade to the BCI (like the BrainGate Kevin used), with improved therapeutic benefits for the paralysed and those with neurological disorders – but at the Neuralink launch event, under the bullet Create a well-aligned future, Musk also spoke of a device that could achieve a human symbiosis with AI. ‘Even in a benign AI scenario, we will be left behind,’ he said. ‘With a high-bandwidth brain–machine interface, we can go along for the ride.’
I’d been pretty adamant with my friend that there would be too many technical and biological challenges. He’d said: yes, but let’s pretend. And so I’d rambled on about humanness and ethics, and how we would want to hold on to the body as sacred, to feel our place in the world. But my friend had argued: what if he bought a neural lace that cost fifty grand for his children and they were funnier, cleverer and healthier than my children, and got into top universities and had better jobs, lived happier lives? Would I not want to implant a ‘lace’ in my children? My first thought was about the fifty grand, but also about the horror of a technology that would truly upgrade a human – the potential for all sorts of societal inequality and the damage it might cause. So, no different from pretty much all the technologies already in your life, my friend said. He had a point: so many technologies made our lives better, but also created inequality – not least the prosthetics I was wearing to walk alongside him.
‘It’s when an application becomes irresistible,’ Kevin says to this. ‘Like laser eye surgery, or the first DBS devices; they were seen as ethically wrong and dangerous thirty years ago. Even the cell phone – everyone was scared of signals going through the body and we were told it wouldn’t be practical; but now everyone has a phone and we don’t mind about the signals because the technology is so powerful. I think it’ll be the same with neural implants.’
Kevin is loosely part of an intellectual movement called transhumanism. It’s a philosophy that studies the benefits and dangers of technologies that could overcome human limitation. At the heart of the movement is the possibility that all disability, disease and ageing will be eliminated – in the future we will be freed from the weak, badly designed bodies that evolution has given us. If body hackers are the grassroots foot-soldiers of the movement, unwilling to wait for the future to arrive and trying to upgrade themselves with what we have now, people like Kevin and Elon Musk are the sky marshals showing the way.
The ‘Transhumanist Manifesto’ by Natasha Vita-More, now on its fourth version, says that ‘Aging is a disease … Augmentation and enhancement to the human body and brain are essential for survival.’ The goal is longevity, immortality even, where genetics, wearables and human–computer interaction create ‘a transformation of the human species that continues to evolve with technology’. One moment of hope for transhumanists – their Independence Day, if you like – is the singularity, the moment in the future when machine intelligence becomes self-improving and begins to outstrip our human capabilities. A new age will dawn when we enter into a symbiosis with technology, and the human era as we know it will have ended.
And this is where the post-human cyborg becomes so exciting for people like Kevin. It is the potential to merge humans with super-intelligent machines. In this symbiosis the hope is that we’d be able to bring our complex human values and human control to the system and prevent AI being a danger. We will be able to solve many of the challenges that we face (poverty, food shortage, the energy problem, climate change – and, of course, human ageing, disease and mortality). Humanity will be emancipated from the flesh in which we suffer, with no more disability – we will be able to move beyond the social, religious and political bias and inequality that plague us, freed by technology.
‘So, would you upload yourself if you could?’ I ask Kevin. (One possibility the singularity might bring is uploading our minds to some kind of artificial super-intelligence substrate, in a sense swapping the fleshy wetware of our current bodies for something less prone to glitches and crashing – it would be the culmination of the cyborg project. Even as a hypothetical, I find the idea monstrous.)
He smiles, ‘Yes, I would.’ He then acknowledges that there are huge compatibility issues. As we don’t yet fully understand how the human brain works, it will be a challenge, but Kevin has already proved that we can communicate with machines during Project Cyborg 2.0 – and then he offers up answers to some of the biological and technical challenges (there might even be advantages): transistors fire many times faster than our biological neurons, and while signals travel through the nervous system at around 100 metres per second, in an electronic system information can travel at the speed of light. And we wouldn’t be limited by human anatomy, so a machine substrate could be much bigger than a brain.
I’d been trying to get Kevin to say something about the downsides or risks of the Project Cyborg experiments – part of me wanted him to acknowledge the loss of humanity I’d felt when assaulted by wires and tubes in hospital: the disconnection from my body, the risk of infection and danger of surgery, but he wouldn’t bite.
‘Speaking as a scientist, I didn’t feel like there were negatives with the experiments we did. Firing the array into the nervous system felt to me like a perfect marriage. The fibrous tissue of the scarring holds the electrode in place – you end up with a better connection. I know it’s strange. I can only really think of it scientifically.’
Kevin then describes how exciting it would be to have a nervous system that could reach outside the boundary of the body, into a network, or even link up separate human minds, with the chance of near-instant human communication and none of the hidden nuance or contradictions of spoken language – we could understand each other perfectly. (Whether understanding each other perfectly would be a good thing, I’m not sure, but I don’t say anything.)
‘In fact, joining my brain with another brain is an experiment I want to try,’ he says.
Kevin’s talk of uploading himself, or joining himself to another person, comes with the excitement of scientific exploration. In a sense he’s made it his job to think this way. But the transhumanist wish for immortality through human transformation makes me feel a little appalled. I’ve been close to death, I might have been dead, and would never want to return to the pain and loneliness of that. Perhaps I should be desperate for the chance of immortality if it meant I didn’t have to relive that sort of suffering. And yet I also have a feeling that death might in some way be important for a meaningful life – there’s a comparison on the tip of my tongue: an immortal life is like a story without an ending, no part of the story will hold any meaning without the context of a conclusion. I can’t quite articulate this to Kevin, sitting in his living room, and I suspect it won’t stand up to any scientific scrutiny he might bring to bear.
I know I look at the cyborg and transhumanist dreams from a certain point of view – as someone who has had no choice but to become dependent on technology – and I can only apply my less-than-perfect relationship to it, and the anxieties that come from relying on a machine. Transhumanists talk of freeing themselves from the body, of transforming, and I raise an eyebrow. All I see is rubbing and sores, oozing body fluids and infection; the frustrations of not being as mobile as I would like, the anxiety of dependence on a machine. I can’t imagine the pain, anxiety and frustrations of being a sentient being uploaded to a hard drive – what it would be like never again to feel rain on my face, or the visceral feeling of my family when we all bundle together on the sofa for a hug. In the future, being without the machine part of us, because it is broken or has crashed (or has given us an infection), might be wrenching in ways we can’t yet imagine, especially if it is a super-intelligence and has let us access unimaginable realms of experience and freedom.
And then we’re in the car and Kevin is waving us off. It’s a long journey back to London in the rain and the traffic. Andy and I chat, but in the silences I turn over the conversation I’d had with Kevin. One part of the Project Cyborg experiments that he’d talked about – the part, he said, laughing, the press had found too weird to cover much – was when he connected through the BrainGate implant to the nervous system of his wife, Irena, achieving the first direct, purely electronic communication between two humans. His motor-nerve signals had travelled to her brain and caused her to feel ‘lightning running from her palm up the inside of her second finger’. In one of Kevin’s books, I, Cyborg, he’d said their marriage had looked to be on the rocks, but after the experiment they were closer than ever, ‘having experienced something that no couple before us had experienced’. Given the opportunity to connect to another human, Kevin hadn’t opted for one of his research assistants, but for his wife.
Even though many in the cyborg and transhumanist projects make huge imaginative leaps into the future that seem a little unfeeling and scientific, apocalyptic even, a lot of them would argue that a future human–machine symbiosis need not necessarily make us any less human; indeed, it might deepen our connection with each other and the natural world. And that’s hopeful – many of their dreams are also the dreams of the disabled, so I’m glad they are out there pushing the boundaries of what is possible, ethically and practically.
But it’s easy to think they are a little bonkers when they talk about these advances being just around the corner. I can’t see it like that, when we struggle even to solve the problem of satisfactorily attaching a prosthetic leg. Perhaps this makes me too pessimistic, and technology will advance to provide unexpected answers. It has done so many times before; even if it takes a little longer than the futurists predict, we tend to get there in the end. And I suspect it’s likely to be the disabled who will continue to be at the vanguard of testing out what is possible in this human–machine symbiosis – bodies already damaged enough to take the risk on.*
In the process, and if my own experience is anything to go by, there’s hope that we won’t lose what makes us human. For the most part, I don’t feel any less human because of my prosthetics. I don’t feel cyborg or robotic, either. What I feel is lucky to be able to walk, and stand, and pick up my children.
*
During the weeks after meeting Kevin there remained a slightly unsettling feeling. It was this thing about the body being a suboptimal package that needs upgrading – I found the idea we should use technology to overcome death most troubling. I couldn’t answer why I didn’t agree with these ambitions. Then, late one sleepless night, some connections deep in my brain must have aligned and I remembered what I’d been groping for and picked up my phone, googled it and found the recording.
It was an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that I’d heard repeated the previous summer. Dame Cicely Saunders, the founder of the hospice movement, is being interviewed and towards the end is asked, having looked after so many people at the end of their lives, how she would want her own death to be – would she want it to be speedy and painless? ‘No,’ she replies, ‘I would like to have time to say thank you, one needs time to say I’m sorry, one needs time to sort out something of yourself, of what really matters, until perhaps you can finally reach the place where … you can say, Well, I’m me, and it’s all right.’
* And in one of their more recent collaborative projects, Harbisson and Ribas have connected to each other. They both have what they call a transdental communication system: a tooth implanted in each of their mouths. When one of them presses a button, they can send a signal in Morse code to the other cyborg’s tooth, which vibrates and communicates the message.
* ‘Biohacking’ made the Oxford English Dictionary new-words list in 2010.
* He also tried to replace his microbiome (he suffered from irritable bowel syndrome). He first removed all the bacteria from his skin and gut with antibiotics in a sterile hotel room, then substituted it with a friend’s microbiome. That meant rubbing himself with cultures he’d taken from his friend’s skin, and ingesting his friend’s faeces.
* Peter Scott-Morgan, a scientist who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, has used surgery, robotics, augmentations and AI to become a cyborg and challenge the terminal diagnosis he was given. His deteriorating body becomes the laboratory on which to trial cyborg technologies that might prolong his life. The Channel 4 documentary Peter: The Human Cyborg tells his story.