After watching the Eyeborg Documentary, I thought, as probably many who watched this video, that technology is a wonderful tool. Just look at those disabled people and how robotic prosthetics have allowed them to live nearly normal lives and look at the lives we will save with tools like the fireman’s heads-up-display(HUD). How could such technology threaten us with the loss of our human dignity?
Looking at the video again, we see that these prosthetic technologies are ever more closely imitating and more closely integrating into the human body. Because of this fact, the idea of merging man and machine, to the point of being unable to distinguish man from machine, becomes tenable. From this idea naturally springs the question of whether man is a machine.
Those who hold that technology proves man is a machine and applaud and encourage the use of technology as shown in the Eyeborg documentary often call themselves technocrats. They defend their claim using known facts of human biology, modern technology and the history of technological development. With robotic prosthetics, they point to functioning non-biological limbs and organs replacing non-functioning or improperly functioning biological ones. With the brain-machine interface, they point to how we observe how the world is perceived through the biological and non-biological systems and these perceptions can be manipulated much like information is manipulated in a computer. Because the mind can be effected through the manipulation of the brain, technocrats claim that the mind is caused by the function of the brain.
At this point, the technocrat turns from the facts of human biology and modern technology to the history of technological development. The examination of this section of the argument will happen my next post.
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