What for, Vol. VIII No. 16/17, 2009.
Conference paper
What is a cyborg? Ashort conceptual/terminological analysis
Bojan Basrak
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Zagreb
Abstract
Advances in technology have enabled many people to overcome physical shortcomings and disabilities preventing them from functioning normally in society and life. Be it glasses, contact lenses, hearing aids or prosthetic limbs, their function is always to compensate for a certain disadvantage. However, possibilities emerged enabling body modification that can enhance or even create new physical and intellectual capacities, surpassing natural human abilities in a way essentially different from using tools or implementing technology as we have done for millennia. When the body is altered and its capacities significantly upgraded, made inseparable from the body and integrated within it, has the biological and anthropological definition of a human being been surpassed? Do we, in fact, create a new being? Call it “Cyborg”, “Superman” or “Human 2.0”, such a being would have permanent and inherent advantages over the netural human, which, among other things, opens the possibility of a post-human world. Such human body modification implies ethical problems not only for the individual, but also for the society as a whole. It is necessary to define a terminological framework for further discussion, recognize the present and future technological possibilities, and open a new area in the bioethical discussion – the (bio)ethics of cyborgization.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
61675
URI
Publication date:
17.3.2009.
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