Our technolog) The cyborg future By Natalie Serafini, Editor-in-Chief Before Current Era If we're referring to all forms of technology, technically speaking our adulation of innovation dates back further than recorded history, to prehistory. There’s been evidence of stone tools dating back as far as 2.5 million years ago, with fire emerging roughly 500,000 years ago. From there came kilns for pottery, bricks, weaving and spinning, farming equipment, and the notoriously groundbreaking advent of the wheel. Technology throughout centuries has been and will continue to be a necessity for survival, in facilitating farming, defence and protection, travel, artistic expression—the list continues unendingly. In addition to those survivalist modernizations is the significance of technology in communication. The alphabet itself is a form of technology, presenting the building blocks for words, sentences, and soliloquies. Without some base forms of communication, our lives would be lacking the rich complexity and depth of language, our history would possess gaps through the absence of a recorded history, and relationships would be stunted by an inability to profess our feelings, attitudes, and intentions. Basically, we’ve been dependent on technology since we realized its significance to not only our existence but the quality of our existence. a niggling need to respond. Do you hear that? an inseparable appendage tc A ding, trill, whistle, or similarly cacophonous on a literal level, as people se command for attention. Do you sense that? The undergo surgeries for pacem overwhelming feeling that something has happened in increasingly modified in a cy that nebulous, ether-like territory of social media, and the true on a hauntingly figurati resultant need to refresh, update, and load more. the brain may identify inani As technology becomes increasingly entwined with of the body, extending the “ ® o you feel that? A vibration in your pocket, and % — our daily lives, it seems inev: Current Era Our dependence on technology is nothing new, but perhaps the ways in which we've melded ; modifications are a prime example of how we've accepted science fiction into our reality, whet modifications of piercings, the medical modifications of pacemakers and other life-saving tec modifications of magnetic implants (wherein a small magnet is implanted, usually into the fi The magnetic implant is rather appropriately a trend that’s sprung up in the biohacking r biohacking merges biology with technology. Put in more detail, BiohackYourself.com describ of improving oneself with the least investment for the most reward. Biohacks can take the for experimentation for self-improvement—including mental health and well-being through she power—but the biohacking movement has been closely associated with the use of technology Biohacking isn't just for the self anymore, either: NewsWeek.com reports that the term h: “biohackers, teachers, librarians, and artists who have gone rogue,” and who bring scientific b in “the era of crowd-sourced science, in which almost anyone can make a new creature.” Already we're aware of how prosthetics can aid amputees, pacemakers can help a faltering the mechanisms of a kidney albeit in an arduous and inconvenient process. Although they me improve human functioning through technology, we don't generally consider these to be char lifeforms. Nevertheless, the cyborg title has become more commonplace, as people develop innovat themselves. Neil Harbisson, for example, is colour-blind and a self-proclaimed cyborg. Harbis an antenna implanted into his head in order to “hear” colour, addressing the gap in his colour Ribas, also identifies as a cyborg and has an antenna attached to her elbow that vibrates when Technology has also become an intriguing extension of ourselves in less medically facilita cell phones have become a lowest common denominator, in the sense that just about everyon increasingly irrelevant, and a lower income generally just means an older phone. The standar« us like a bizarre appendage—one that we perpetually check for updates. As Adrian Hon write phones increasing to the point where they’re the first thing we look at in the morning and the their absence as painfully as a limb’s, creating a ‘phantom mobile’?”