Monday 23 January 2017

It’s true!  Yesterday the Sunday Herald ran a full-page spread about cyborgs and artificial intelligence “The rise of Homo Technicians: half human and half machine” and in the piece, there is a mention of the ‘everyday cyborg’.  I get quoted as saying:  “We shouldn’t be afraid of the cyborg,” says Dr Gill Haddow of the University of Edinburgh. “The fear that we get from the term comes from fictional representations, but the everyday cyborg is actually already all around us.” Haddow has been working on a Wellcome Trust funded project on what she describes as the “everyday cyborg”, people who are already living with a cybernetic device attached to their hearts called the implanted cardiac defibrillator (ICD). She predicts that in the not so distant future almost all of us will have some implant”.

Obviously, the fame has not changed me.  I am still the same person.  On a serious note its just fantastic that the research got a nod (as well as the funders).  I hope it inspires other folks to become interested in the everyday and mundane lives of cyborgs.  On that note, off up the road to the Chrystal Macmillan Building to give a  STIS seminar on ‘the becoming of the everyday cyborg’.