The Eyeborg:
On of the leaders of the transhumanists movement is documentary filmmaker Rob Spence. When Spence was a 9-years-old, he thought it would be a good idea to borrow his grandpa’s 12-gauge and go shooting. He had an accident and began losing vision in his right eye. By his late teens he was completely blind in that eye and had it removed to prevent loss of vision in his left eye. The new glass eye was fixed to a piece of coral, and the coral in turn, was fixed to his existing muscle such that the new glass eye would move naturally. It is easy from the name “EyeBorg” to see where this is going. Of note is an encounter he had with a bicyclist who ripped across his film set, caused an accident, and began to complain and feign injury. At the time Spence had on sunglasses, hiding a blinking L.E.D. set into a black glass right eyeball. He recounts when the cyclist saw the blinking red and black eye, the argument ended, and he pedaled away fast. Spence’s documentary was released to coincide with the release of a video game, part II of the cult classic Deus Ex in 2011. I could do a book on the game series here but I will try to refrain as it has been years. In the game series the player plays the part of an augmented soldier/spy and the character can broadcast from his eye, just like Spence’s eye can broadcast in real-time high definition to a television screen anywhere in the world.
While his story alone is interesting, I feel the most important part is the story of the bicyclist who was so scared by the pre-eye blinker. It demonstrates that pluralism and acceptance are far from being achieved between the less-modified and more-modified humans. Mr. Spence is somewhat more important to the movement as his actions are a little controversial, he has become a spokes-person for the bionic man as compared to the disabled persons who we accept for getting regular medical type devices en masse, or the larger break-throughs we see like fully mechanical leg pairs which seem great and marvelous. Modern man is becoming robotized ourselves, when we learn about “Dopamine Squirt” or “Phantom Phone Buzz” we might not want to admit this because we have to take a look at ourselves.
On the Opposite Side:
I have looked at the writings of Douglass Rushkoff, who coined the phrase “Generation X,” poured over internet articles describing individuals such as girl who was expelled from college after placing subdermal plates in her leg to charge her iPod while running, a man who stores and transmits data from his finger, and many other H+ hackers to find the leader of the “Intelligentsia” side of the movement. Finding more than one recurring character in the collegiate or business atmosphere, was a surprise but Kevin Warwick at University of Reading, in Reading England, alongside his team of techs and surgeons has made him the most cybernetically enhanced person in the world. He started almost 20 years ago with a 2-hour long surgery where he implanted hundreds of electrodes in his forearm allowing him to control doors. Lights, heaters, and computers from merely being in proximity to them. In 2002 the forearm chipset was replaced with 2-way transmitters that could send information from his nervous system to computers and, get this, from computers to his nervous system. He has written a number of publications. For his work, The Institute of Physics selected Kevin as one of only 7 eminent scientists to illustrate the ethical impact their scientific work can have: the others being Galileo, Einstein, Curie, Nobel, Oppenheimer and Rotblat. To reiterate: he is labelled by a reputable international organization as being “Better than Isaac Newton.”
