Reflective Essay

Research Analysis

I’ve always been incredibly interested in human culture and history. With our topic being technology, it seemed perfect to me to write about cyborgs. I crafted this idea while reading David Nye’s Technology Matters, I was reading about technology going hand in hand with human development. He says, “It is easy to imagine human beings as pre-literate, but it is difficult to imagine them as pre-technological” (5 Nye) Humans are mostly hairless, sensitive skinned, and relatively low on the food chain without technology. Everything from our cloths to our shelter is built with tools designed by human beings. We are technology, that’s our evolutionary advantage. If we were to suddenly leave all technology, we would go extinct. To deny technology is to deny what makes us a species. A human to deny technology is like a lion denying roaring, or a cheetah denying running. Our power is in our tools, we are technology. This got me thinking, I wondered what was next for humans, both physically and technologically. That’s when I thought about it, what if we became a product of our own ingenuity?
We are flying head first into the digital age at the speed of light. Computers are shrinking in price and size and doubling in power at literally exponential rates (Moore’s Law). Research in nanotechnologies and cybernetics are becoming hot industries. With the possibility of greatly increasing life spans, curing cancer, and cosmetically reducing times effect on the body, it’s not hard to see why these little robots aren’t a popular idea. With these technologies, humans will cease to become we humans as we know of today. To me, cyborgs are the next step in evolution. If we can run faster, jump higher, think quicker, and live longer we are by Darwin’s standards, evolving. That’s an interesting idea, and I felt it deserved to be written about. A decision like that would be the most morally challenging, difficult decisions to make. Are you willing to give up your past and start a new age, are you willing to leave some of yourself behind. I don’t know if I could. Even if it was just living a few extra decades, it is not what you know as natural. It’s not human.
Researching cyborgs wasn’t easy, especially because academic texts on it are limited. I tried to find a lot of medical texts and draw my research from those. We were instructed to stay away from popular media like magazines and news and stick to more “academic” sources. The problem with that is a lot of the current information on the technologies is in magazines and it’s hard to find current information in journals.
While writing I found it was hard to stick to my controlling purpose because it was so broad. Evolution is a big subject and there are a lot of issues that fall under it. I found myself focusing on the sociological side more than anything. I found that the most interesting, how people would react to a possible evolution. I thought how older generations react to modern technology and I figured something as radical as nanobots would be a hundred times more intense. My grandmother can barely use her own computer, if this revolution occurred today and everyone was asked to change, she would probably have a heart attack. What about my generation, how would we react? Would we embrace and adapt or would we finally discover a common tipping point. We are already plugged in twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Our devices never leave us, would we really care if they were just permanently connected to our being?
I covered the medical side of cyborgs greatly as well. I felt that if I didn’t it would just be a “what if?” paper. I wanted to stress that cyborgs aren’t just a thing of fiction, they’re very real. I did want to focus on the “what if?” of future cybernetics but I felt people would take me more seriously if I made cyborgs look more believable