It’s 1996: students experiment with being cyborgs. That strange circuitry covering one eye? People imagine they’re disabled, offer them chairs. Nowadays you’d need to pry our ubiquitous connections to the borg collective (er, sorry: ‘cloud’) out of our cold, dead hands. So are we there yet?
Sherry Turkle feels we’ve been seduced, assimilated. Then we were all ‘it’s just a lot of futuristic hype’, now we’re all ‘just can’t live without it’. We were sold convenience, connectedness and choice. What’s really happening?
As an example of ‘things we never knew we’d miss’ as we exchange our information-impoverished existence for real-time omniscience, I offer you: boredom, or rather, maybe just what we used to call ‘peace and quiet’.
Is killing boredom killing innovation too?
Oh, and if you want to see a more upbeat view of our bionic future:
And if you think that ‘digital overconnectedness remediation’ is an issue, there’s an app for that (well, ok, it’s actually a book):
Here’s scene from the notorious 1975 film.
It looks like the notion of ‘humanoid technology portrayed as a source of potentially insidious de-humanisation’ has done surprisingly little to prepare us for the kinds of issues we are currently experiencing, even though it’s a pretty much universally recognised meme.
On the other hand, sometimes we let our imaginations run away with the whole idea:
