Are We Human, or Are We Cyborgs?

AUSTIN, Texas - The external brains we tuck away into our pockets, that we tend to when they cry and feed when they're hungry—do they make us cyborgs? Amber Case thinks so. She is, of course, referring to smartphones, those ever-connected machines in which we store increasing amounts of data and use to connect at nary a moment's hesitation to new information.

In her keynote speech at SXSW Interactive here this weekend, Case, who is a "cyborg anthropologist," explained that indeed, "We are all cyborgs. From the moment you look at a screen, you are in a relationship with technology."

Formerly, she said, all our tools were a physical extension of the self, from the lowest hammer that we gripped in our human hands thousands of years ago. What's different now that makes us cyborgs, she said, is that our devices are now an extension of our mental selves. We no longer use our tools to accomplish physical tasks. We now use them to think.

"These devices are larger on the inside than they are on the outside," Case said, "like Mary Poppin's bag. You can put more and more into it, and it never gets any heavier."

But the relationship we cyborgs have with our devices may be getting frenetic. For example, said Case, "It's easy to hoard when you have a computer, because it's easy to put things in it, but hard to take them out." And in looking at the last 20 to 30 years' worth of development, the devices we've had at market haven't become the invisible, implantable, fluid machines that fiction sometimes imagines them to be. She pointed to forward-thinkers such as Professor Steve Mann, who has spent decades refining , shrinking them significantly since the 1980s, when his gear weighed 80 pounds, so that they now comprise a tiny laser attached to a headpiece that projects information into his eye throughout the day (click below for larger image).

These wearable devices may shrink in size, but they continue to be disruptive. Every communication tool we have — such as email, SMS text messages, Facebook messages, voicemail, phone calls — seem to have their own time zones, Case said. Each form of communication requires a separate response time. It's easy to get information "jet lag" just trying to deal with it all.

What we cyborgs should be moving toward instead, Case said, is so-called calm technology. Calm technology is defined by information that lives quietly in the background and is relaxed. Usually, calm technologies have invisible interfaces, and not projection screens and dashboards, but more like haptic feedback and trigger-based interactions. Imagine, for example, setting a geo-fence around your house that can tell when you arrive home because it senses your smartphone has crossed the threshold; the geo-fence instructs the electrical system in your house to turn on the lights. Or imagine a bicycle messenger who wears a belt that gently buzzes whenever he faces north, a technology that could effectively train him to become immensely more aware of his orientation and positioning. Both of those examples in fact exist already, but only as experimental projects.

Case has a small startup company, called Geoloqi, which aims to further develop calm technologies, and in particular those that use geolocation information. The end goal of her work is to make it easier for us to live our daily lives with more relevant extensions of our minds. Her group faces a few fairly mundane real-world hindrances, like cell phone battery drain, which they hope other tech researchers will solve soon, so they can push forward with their quest to turn us all into cyborgs.

For more from SXSW, see the slideshow below.