Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (review)

What does it mean to be a "natural-born cyborg"? asks Clark in this popular science account of recent trends in the world of the cyborg. His answer, which is firmly stated and located in the realm of cognitive science, is simply to be human. We have a natural proclivity for tool-based extension, and this, coupled with the development of recent smart technologies, explains why we are beginning to resemble the cyborgs of fiction. Our lives are becoming increasingly connected to "non-penetrative cyborg technologies," and these are poised on the brink of a revolution, becoming smarter. This will allow us to have a more focused and enhanced relationship with technology in the future.

Clark's book offers a good general overview of some recent trends in the everyday technologies that he describes as being "cyborg like": mobile phones, PDAs, interactive computer programmes, smart-chipped automobiles. Indeed, much of this book is based on describing how these technologies are transforming and providing better interfaces with their human users. Clark's descriptions are certainly interesting, although the conflation of imminent smart / cyborg technology with the possible transformation of society seems, at times, to promise much more than will be available. These technologies are becoming increasingly "ordinary": mobile phones are part of our everyday lives, as are computers, PDAs and web bots. As we spend more and more time with these smart technologies, our lives will be transformed and much of the decision making, and humdrum routine, of our lives will be done for us by these external "non-penetrative" cyborg technologies. Clark is not simply cheerleading for cyborg technologies: he points out, in the most useful part of his book, the extent to which new technologies can be complicit in exclusion and control, surveillance and lack of autonomy. Yet he feels, overall, that cyborg technologies will transform our lives, if we are prepared to abandon our preconceived ideas of what the human mind is, and what cyborg technology might entail.

This is a strange and partial text, written from a distinctly one-sided perspective. Clark's analysis of cyborg technology and its relationship to the human mind comes from positivist cognitive science. At no point does Clark offer any kind of social, cultural, political or economic analysis of cyborgs, nor does he take time to consider why it is, if we have always been cyborgs, we are only just noticing now. This gives his book a rather breezy, cheery feel. Technology just happens, and this technology that is emerging now just happens to be really good technology. It's all great fun, as we think about how we can use the internet to enhance our research skills, our mobile phones to help us to communicate and our PDAs to extend the range of cultural choices available to us. Making sense of cyborgs and what "cyborg" means in contemporary society, from this perspective, is largely a matter of understanding the rather neat devices that are popping up all over the place. Although Clark promises that "this is not primarily a book about new technology" (7) it is. Cyborgs, from this line of analysis, don't exist; what does is "cyborg technology" which means, ultimately, gadgets that we can deploy in our everyday lives. It would appear that understanding cyborg culture is largely a matter of keeping up to date with developments in new consumer technologies: toys for boys, cyborgs for boys.

This would be fine were it not for the startling omission of almost all of the major themes of analysis that other writers have encountered when considering cyborgs: key concepts such as hybridity, nature-culture, the body, identity are hardly mentioned, although given Clark's starting point of cognitive science perhaps this can be excused on the grounds of the necessities of disciplinary analysis. Placing cyborg technologies in some sort of context — technoscience? cyberculture? — would be useful: even some mention of the huge investment that multinational corporations are placing in technology would...