Do cyborgs live next to you? Playing God

Magdalena Gacyk and I talk about who cyborgs are, what they are trying to do and how they affect our lives.

(Interview is simply a edited and completed version of the podcast Are you aware? ‘Playing God. Cyborgs live among usIt is not known whether or not you are taking advantage of me.

Rafał Górski: Do cyborgs live among us?

Magdalena Gacyk: They're alive, they're fine, there's more and more. (Laughter). And seriously, we're all gonna be cyborgs someday. due to the fact that if a cyborg, a cybernetic organism is, according to the definition, a combination of man and device (in the 1960s, 70s) and now with technology, then each of us someway uses this combination with technology, for medical reasons. After all, we usage advanced contact lenses, cochlear implants or bionic limbs – it can be exchanged indefinitely and it is not as scary as it frequently seems to people.

What you're talking about is the first step, but if we go further into the future, we might start wondering where the boundary between man and cyborg is.

Where's the man? Where's the cyborg? First of all, I wouldn't put a man apart, I would put a cyborg separately. This is simply a fantastic scarecrow. erstwhile we think of cyborgs, it seems to us that they are different creatures, reasoning differently, experimenting, besides bravely and besides drasticly interfering with their own organisms.

Allow me a brief digression. I got to know the cyborg community, and I went deeper into this subculture for 4 years erstwhile I was collecting material for the book “Playing GodIt’s okay. ” Indeed, any experiments seemed not only courageous – this is euphemism – but reckless or possibly dangerous. They didn't always end well. The cyborgs I was with dreamed of identifying with technology, with a machine. This frequently active illegal operations, attempts to grow our senses. Electronic devices were injected or inserted into each another to aid you hear better. It was a successful experience. But, for example, attempts to strengthen the bones straight on them with foam protectors made of non-newton material ended in rejection of the transplant due to the fact that it was a abroad body that the body did not accept.

Now to ask if there's a line somewhere between a man and a cyborg: and there is, and there is no line. If we look at the past of science, we're going to find doctors, like immune or hormonal researchers, who very bravely, now I would say digestively, experimenting on themselves, but then they said they were doing it in the name of science. any of them almost came out of this world. Can current experiments besides be dangerous?

Yes, due to the fact that all technology is like a baseball bat: you can play a large game with it, you can nail a nail if we don't have a hammer at hand, and you can smash someone's skull.

For the first time I've heard a comparison of technology to a baseball bat, it's an interesting metaphor. It is frequently said that these technologies are like a knife: we can kill a man with it, but we can cut bread and butter it. It seems to me that technologies, which are associated with, for example, widely understood artificial intelligence or synthetic biology, are no longer as simple to master as knife or baseball bat technologies. It's just fun here, as you say, a small bit of God, but actually Russian roulette. Don't we as humans strive for self-destruction?

We balance demolition and improvement throughout the past of humanity.

In the 20th century, erstwhile the United States and the russian Union experimented with biological weapons, experiments were carried out in the US that could have fatally ended for a immense population. It was said that in the 1970s, a bacteria was sprayed over San Francisco, which was just expected to check out the spread of biological weapons. The bacteria, which was to be completely safe and harmless, led to many diseases.

Or let's look at the findings, and then the work of Fritz Haber who created the fertilizer with the insecticide. This particularity saved tens of thousands of seasonal workers and farmers in South America from the death, who were frequently killed due to various complications after being bitten by insects. The same Fritz Haber, hailed as a savior in South America for these simple farmers, began to “perfect” his findings and invented cyclone B.

So all technology, not just this 1 right now, but all man-made technology carries a threat.

Each, even at first glance, the most saving.

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I callback the words of Stanisław Lem, who said that all technology has its dark, unpredictable side. I'm not hiding that I envy you being in Silicon Valley.And gathering these people. I think that this conversation may be a unique chance for our readers to get closer, even though a small closer to the state of minds of people who, to a very large extent, affect our lives. And they're going to have a bigger impact.

“The Politician Promises Voter Immortality” is the title of 1 of the chapters of your book “The Fun in God”. What will be found in the book by the reader?

He will find the communicative of the first candidate of the Transhumanist organization to be president of the United States. Members of this organization believe that the time has come when, thanks to technology, man can control his destiny much more effectively, evolution, that this is the minute in human history, erstwhile we have influence on how we look, what powers we have, or are able to grow our senses by specified additional skills as magnetoreception and so on.

The same candidate, Zoltan Istvan, a erstwhile National Geographic journalist, was at 1 point in his life very close to death. And then he thought he didn't want to die. From that minute on, he devoted himself to promoting the thought that aging is simply a disease, and death is not a sentence, but something we can fight. Actually, it's... nihil novi sub salts. akin thoughts can be found in ancient writings, where heroes tried to gain either eternal youth or immortality. They looked for it in magic springs, tried to make a philosophical stone to supply eternal life. Zoltan Istvan built for the presidential run immortality bus, Immortality bus: he converted the 1978 bus into a symbolic coffin – he painted it brown, decorated it with 66 giant plastic scales. This bus, along with journalists from respective portals, French television, MTV and others (I besides participated in it), moved from the west coast to the east to spread its ideas.

Istvan did not win the election (it was 2016, the clash of Donald Trump with Hilary Clinton). He knew he was doomed to lose in advance, but he felt it was worth talking about how we could live longer and better.

Not everyone who dreams of specified 100% control of their destiny dreams of immortality. any just want to live a healthier, better life as long as possible.

Zoltan now has 3 vineyards in different parts of the planet and produces wines with nootropics, or substances that support brain work, increase concentration, reduce consequence time to stimuli. On the another hand, the transhumanist ideology, in a somewhat modified version, was taken over by the most celebrated technicians of Silicon Valley, who founded the "great five", i.e. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, or Google's parent company, Amazon. They all age, and no of them want to die, so by their selfishness, they spend immense funds to yet make a individual live forever.

I would like to callback here the following words from your book “Games of God”: “As a organization leader's anointed presidential candidate, he decided to climb into political salons with a hit and 1 June 2020 announced that he had just grown a meat chop.” What do you mean?

It's specified a tasteless anecdote. Her hero is Ben Zion, another after Zoltan Istvana president of the American Transhumanist Party, a individual besides eccentric even for eccentric cyborgs and transhumanists. In an effort to scope mainstream and larger audiences, he decided to grow artificial meat. We are already a small acquainted with the concept of artificial meat created from stem cells, it is said to be a very forward-looking and possibly highly intuitive industry.

But it was shocking that he grew his own cells in the lab.

He managed to collect a bit of shapeless meat mass and decided on YouTube to make a transmission from eating a cutlet, from autocanibalism actually.

It sounds terrible, and it looked beautiful awful. The consumption has failed. After this sensational action, Ben Zion lost his title as president of the Transhumanist Party. His hearing's missing. I think he's rightly lost in the darkness of transhumanist history.

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When I read this book, it was very electrifying to me that in the Polish public debate there was no mention of the Transhumanist organization and its candidates for Presidents of the United States.

In the current elections, they did not put out their candidate, but erstwhile Zoltan competed, it was politically marginal adequate that specified a general public consciousness did not get the message that transhumanists were going to regulation the country. specified parties function in respective countries worldwide. In Poland we besides have the Transhumanist Party, but it acts more as a think tank, an thought exchange society. Cyborgism has changed a lot in fresh years. These are no longer extremist ideas, due to the fact that tech-visionists anoint with their money all these concepts of interfering with human organisms, sometimes braver than we would like. Consequently, the Overton window, which shows what is socially acceptable and what is not, begins to move.

We increasingly usage specified dressing cyborgism, due to the fact that what is different is our smartwatche – watches that can evidence and analyse biomarkers from our body.

It's all going in a little invasive direction, but it's the cyborgs that started their business in the UK in the 1980s and then in the late 1990s they started to appear individually in Silicon Valley, we owe the conviction that something could be mixed up and that doesn't gotta end tragically.

My next question is the immense money that technology companies are strengthening this full movement: who will benefit and who will lose in playing God?

I would say so in general that everyone will gain and lose due to the fact that it is simply a double-edged sword. The question of cyberpunk future is frequently raised, that is, 1 in which we have elites with access to various advanced technologies and social lowlands that cannot afford them. And this script is probable, but unnecessary.

Throughout its history, humanity balances between demolition and progress, and here besides it is visible. There's no stopping progress.

Witkaci utilized to say that trying to halt advancement is like putting a branch of willow on the tracks in the hope of stopping a speeding locomotive. If I can afford a individual opinion: control and care must be taken to guarantee that inherent human greed does not affect these technologies in the incorrect direction. due to the fact that with artificial intelligence, we can find fresh molecules, make highly promising medicines, fund fresh therapies, and we can go in this direction, that with artificial intelligence we will make alleged designer babies, i.e. children designed on request, with the right colour of eyes, height, level of intelligence and so on. It's forbidden at the moment, but I remind you: Overton's window. It's all moving. What seemed terrible and unexplored to us, and should actually stay unexplored, is at the minute something that we are increasingly studying and what we are digging into.

He's not a cyborg at the moment, but more biohacker, Brian Johnson, the world's most researched man. He's a billionaire who spends all his luck on showing how to live the best life. He experimentes on himself in specified very simple habits as sleep or diet, but besides uses gene therapy. It shares the results of all these experiences completely free of charge with a wide scope of fans and critics. Eventually, individual will take care of it seriously. Whether it is China, where government is very loose erstwhile it comes to human DNA interference or any another country, we will not halt it. We should just make certain it's done as ethically as possible.

Then the question arises: does the future request us? What's your sixth sense?

But the future never needed us. We are not truly kings of creation, this biblical belief that we are to make ourselves a subordinate land is totally missed.

We're different from another creatures, but we're no better. The planet will do large without us.

In an age of increasing anthropocene, the fact that there are more and more people with an anti-humanist attitude, that is, 1 that says: "We halt multiplying, we no longer harass the planet with our increasingly exploitive existence to Earth's resources, we are not needed by the world," does not come out of nowhere. And I think all we can do is effort very carefully on this planet. As the natives of North America of the Lakota people say: what truly remains of us is simply a footprint. Let us be careful that this footprint is gentle, subtle and does not origin damage.

Has anything changed in the planet since your book was published? I'm talking about 1 key thing that might turn out to be a changemaker in this area.

One thing I have already mentioned is that cyborgism has changed its face and has stopped being so profoundly invasive. There have previously been illegal treatments in illegal laboratories. Legally nothing could happen, no doctor, no clinic or infirmary would agree to implant any cyberimplant in any place, so cyborgs created illegal laboratories where it was truly sterile. I was amazed by their very professional approach. There were nurses and doctors among them, but everything incognito.

That's changed. Now we are talking more and more about dressing cyborgism, which is that we can put on technology and take it off at any time, that we are not slaves to electronic devices that are ticking in us, unless it is simply a pacemaker, 1 of the examples of cyberimplant.

And the second thing: our planet has changed so much and so fast that subcultures are disappearing.

There are a fewer reasons. They are mass media, including social media, and this is digital globalisation. The time of specified circumstantial subcultures as cyborgia, earlier punks and even earlier hippies ended. We live in specified a interconnected, networked society that there is no chance of creating a small, distinct subculture. Everything is increasing immediately, like the number of K-pop fans, Korean pop music, which was at the beginning of few, and now there are hundreds of thousands.

What crucial question has no 1 asked you yet in the area we are talking about, and what is the answer to that question?

I thank you very much for that question, due to the fact that I think I've been asked everything. I missed specified a human approach to cyborgs. To ask me: “What are these cyborgs as people all day? Can they be liked?’ And I would say that they're very ordinary, average people with different dreams. Or possibly not so unusual, due to the fact that each of us dreams of surviving without diseases, surviving as long as possible, productive, possibly with peculiar talents, gifts.

And cyborgs aren't discipline fiction demons that feed on electronics and computer science.

When I met the others, I was absolutely moved that they were people who, for example, cared very much about the environment. They were very careful that at cyborg conventiones or at any secret garbage meetings they were segregated to usage biodegradable packaging, they had the most ecological toilets possible and so on.

I was frequently asked about cyborgs, as if they were aliens, invaders from another worlds who were alienated by human emotions and feelings. And they frequently had families, houses bought on loan, they had a life completely outside these experiments and activities, which were frequently truly motivated by the desire to change the planet – I would like to emphasize: specified a real desire. due to the fact that erstwhile we talk about tech, these large corporations, that's where the profit clouded everything, the posts in Excel gotta agree, the budget has to spin.

And these cyborgs tried to do something to make the planet better.

In the end, I would like to talk about 1 of them. Josiah Zayner was an highly promising scientist, working at NASA. He came from a very mediocre part of the United States and remembered this poorness well. And erstwhile his uncle applied to him, asking for a replacement battery in the starter (uncle lost medical insurance, which very frequently in the United States involves possible bankruptcy), Josiah was forced to refuse. He felt that he could not, that he had no skills, that it would be besides risky, but it shook him so much that he decided that he would do his best so that everyone, not only the richest, could benefit from these technologies. He quit his occupation at NASA due to the fact that he felt he couldn't work on the conquest of the Moon and Mars erstwhile his uncle died due to the fact that he couldn't afford a stupid battery in a pacemaker. And since then, Josiah has remained faithful to his ideals.

Thank you for talking to me.