Cyberman: “Our brains are just like yours, except that certain weaknesses have been removed . . . ”
Doctor: “The power cable generated an electrical field and confused their tiny metal minds. You might almost say they’ve had a complete ‘metal’ breakdown!”
Controller: “Activate them! The brain of this humanoid will be their target. Now!”
Doctor: “Well, they’re a form of metallic life. They home on human brainwaves and attack.”
—Various Cybermen quotes from Doctor Who
“We have no idea, now, of who, or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which “now” was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient “now” to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile . . . we have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”
—William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003)
“We are programmed to be dissatisfied. Even when humans gain pleasure and achievements it is not enough. They want more and more. I think it is likely in the next two hundred years or so homo sapiens will upgrade themselves into some idea of a divine being, either through biological manipulation or genetic engineering or by the creation of cyborgs, part organic part non-organic. It will be the greatest evolution in biology since the appearance of life. Nothing really has changed in four billion years biologically speaking. But we will be as different from today’s humans as chimps are now from us.”
—Yuval Noah Harari, The Daily Telegraph (2015)
This is the kind of cyborg chatter that you may see on social media in the twenty-first century: Are we evolving brains that are more like the brains inside the heads of the Cybermen? After all, scientists say our brains are busier than ever before. Every day we bombard our brains with facts, gibberish, and junk—all posing as information, so just struggling to keep up is a source of stress and exhaustion. Look at our smartphones. They’ve become somewhat like the Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver. Smartphones can now text, tweet, set calendar dates, calculate, spell-check, browse, email, and take high-resolution pictures. Not to mention Game Boy, voice recorder, weather forecaster, GPS, Facebook, and flashlight. Our smartphones have more computing power than the NASA mission that first put humans on the Moon in 1969. And our cyborg brains are becoming the same. We cram our brains 24–7. We text on the train, browse in the back of a baseball game, and dial-up a taxi when we’re drunk. Many of us are obsessed with finding out what our friends are doing on Facebook, and it’s all part of a twenty-first- century frenzy for “multitasking,” and cramming data into every single spare moment of so-called “downtime.”
What effect is all this having on our brains? Scientists say our brains are not wired to multitask. Our brains are best designed to focus just on one thing at a time. They don’t like their time divided up into many things at once. So, when we’re multitasking, it creates a kind of addictive feedback loop in the brain. And that rewards the brain for losing focus, and for constantly searching for more stimulation. This sounds alarmingly like a Cybermen plot. One can imagine a Doctor Who story where humans are slowly being taken over by machines. Gradually, we lose control. And eventually the Cybermen won’t have to remove all thought and emotion from our brains. We would have done it for them!
Cyborgs are something of a science-fiction staple, of course. And, like the ruthless Darth Vader and the demonic Daleks in Doctor Who, cyborgs are among sci-fi’s most famous villains. Indeed, Doctor Who got there pretty early. The program produced one of the most prominent cyborg incarnations in the form of the Cybermen.
Appearing first on British television way back in 1966, the Cybermen were a fictional race of cyborgs, a totally organic species to start with, who began to implant more and more artificial parts to help them survive. They are said to originate from Earth’s twin planet Mondas (this is totally made up, as we don’t actually have a twin planet, last time we looked). As the Cybermen like Victor Stone added more and more cyber parts, they became more coldly logical, calculating, and less human. As every emotion is deleted from their minds, they become less man, and more machine. Quite ingenious, really, as you can also use the idea of Cybermen as what humans may one day become, if we base all our decisions on cold calculation, and ignore our more human and emotional aspects.
Like Doctor Who, real-life scientists and writers are beginning to worry about our cyborg future. For example, in 2015 a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Yuval Noah Harari, said the near-future cyborg fusion of man and machine would soon become the “biggest evolution in biology” since the emergence of life on Earth, four billion years ago. That’s some claim!
Professor Harari hit the headlines in 2014 with his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Originally published in Hebrew under the title A Brief History of Mankind, Harari’s work became a global phenomenon, attracting a legion of fans from Bill Gates and Barack Obama to Chris Evans and Jarvis Cocker, and available in nearly forty languages worldwide. Harari used the expertise gained from charting the history of humanity and turned his eyes to the near future. His verdict? Humans would evolve to become like gods, with power over death, and become as altered from the humans of today as we are from apes, maybe more so. Central to Harari’s hypothesis is the idea that the human race is a striving species. We are driven by dissatisfaction, and we simply won’t be able to resist the urge to “upgrade” ourselves, whether it’s by genetic tinkering or augmenting tech. Yep, sounds like the Cybermen to me.
But Harari’s cyborg future is not for everyone. Given the potential expense of the tech, he feels it’s likely the imminent “go cyborg” option will be limited to the rich. And while the wealthy have the money to “go all Batman” and potentially live forever, the poor will simply die out. What led to humanity’s dominance, now and in the future? According to Harari it is the human ability to invent “fictions,” like Doctor Who.
Harari is talking about the kind of fictions that also hold society intact—fictions such as money, religion, and the idea of basic human rights, all of which have no basis in nature. Harari says that what enables humans to cooperate flexibly and exist in large societies is our imagination. Take religion. You can’t convince a chimp to give you a banana with the promise it will get twenty more bananas in chimp heaven. It doesn’t compute. But humans understand the promise. And money is the most successful story ever. Harari sees bankers as master storytellers. Finance ministers tell us that money is worth something. It isn’t, of course. Even chimps know money is worthless. Harari also sees the concept of God as extremely important. Without religious myth you can’t create society. God and religion are the most important fictions humans ever invented, according to Harari. And as long as humans believed they relied more and more on these gods they were controllable. Harari suggests the most interesting place in the world from a religious point of view is not the Middle East, but Silicon Valley. That’s where they are developing a kind of techno-religion, just like the Cybermen. In Silicon Valley, they believe even death is just a technological problem to be solved. And what we see in the last few centuries, according to Harari, is humans becoming so powerful that they no longer need God, they just need technology.
Harari’s conclusion is stunning for Whovians. He believes that in the next couple of centuries, just like a Cybermen script, we humans will upgrade ourselves into a kind of divine being. By engineering the creation of cyborgs, we will become post-human in what Harari calls the greatest evolution in biology since the dawning of life itself. Someone should get this guy to write an episode of Doctor Who!