Cyborgs are coming

Mention the word "cyborg" and most people visualize muscled action-movie heroes, decorated with laser-finder eyes, mechanical arms and built-in machine guns, who ravage their environment, while being battled by equally muscled, but more flesh then machine like heroes. Our thanks to Hollywood, as usual.
How spectacular! But also, how silly. Reality is less spectacular, less frightening than action heroes, but more frightening in other ways. Or is it not?

Definitions

Let's first take a look at what a cyborg really is. To do that we first have to define the word "robot", a word originally by the Czech Karel Capek.
Well: A robot is a mechanical device that can be programmed to perform a number of tasks involving manipulation and movement under automatic control.
The difference between a machine and a robot is that a machine is limited to only a very few simple tasks, while the robot has more flexibility. In real life the border between machine and robot can be very vague.

Robots may look human, but they don't have to. In fact, most real robots don't look anything like humans. Those that do may border or fall into a different class: the androids.
An android is a robot that is made to resemble a human.
It has roughly the same atanomy (at least externally), same senses and preferably can also communicate by speech. It may even be partially non-mechanical, i.e. have living tissue instead of being built completely from artificial materials.

Having mentioned robots, androids and humans themselves, there is but one more position to fill in our "mechanical humans" diagram (see below). This, of course, is occupied by cyborgs. Cyborgs are the opposites of androids:
A cyborg is a human that is partially machine.

This completes our quadrant:

	origin biological	origin mechanical
direction biological	human	android
direction mechanical	cyborg	robot

Humans and cyborgs

So cyborgs are humans that are becoming partially machine. That sounds very frightening, but is this fear justified? An error that most people make is that replacing body parts with artificial replacements and devices also affects your mind. This is nonsense. Proof is walking among us in massive numbers: people with artificial limbs, steel bone replacements, false teeth, silicone breasts, hearing devices, glasses, wigs, etc. etc. We don't generally look at them as being less human than our fully unmodified biological brethren and sisters, yet they have partially artificial bodies, therefore are are effectively cyborgs. With advancing technology, artifical body parts, even whole organs, will become more and more commonplace, until the vast majority of people are walking around with a number of mechanical parts.
At this point some observing readers will remark that all these body mechanisations may change the way we look and our physical capabilities, but not what makes us human: our brains. Here is the seat of our intelligence and personality, that what makes us to what we really are.
Here too, though, machines may approach us. One of the great barriers that blocks computers from really widespread use, is formed by their cumbersome interfaces. While the output is fairly accessible, using mainly screens and speakers, input is awkward. Keyboard and mouse are still the main input devices, these take some time to master. Speech recognition is steadily moving up, but still falls short of where we would really like their interfaces to be: at mind-reaching distance, i.e. though-controlled, just like our own muscles. With our understanding of neurology growing, mind-machine interfaces will definitely arrive sooner or later, very probable the first (primitive) ones in this half-century.
Will this then, allow machines to invade our minds? Of course not. One should look at machine-mind interfaces in the same way that mind-body interfaces are regarded: as natural. For instance, humans are equipped with eyes, but babies cannot see with them. This is something they have to learn in their first weeks of life and perfect later on. The same holds true for other senses and more so muscular control. Even an adult, who can be thought of as being in full control of his/her body, can spend a lifetime learning new modes of movement and dexterity. One of the great strengths of the human mind is that it has more flexibility than instinct. A mind-machine interface should not give us that much trouble, it's just a new thing to learn. WE will control the machine through the interface, not the other way around. Or can your muscles control your thoughts?

Cyborgs and humans

It is when we starting replacing parts of our minds with computer circuits, that we really come close to being robot. Even this is probably not as frightening as it sounds. Do you fear that your mind will become uncreative, stupid, and worse, remote-controlled? Do you really think you would allow something like that implanted in your head? I'd rather think that if it comes to this point, quite some time into the future, we will select implements that would actually add something to us, something that helps us instead of hampers us.
I must agree with critics that these kind of "implants" or whatever form they will take, will move use beyond our current borders of humanity. Or more precisely, will move our human border forward. In this vision, now moving into the realms of sci-fi, humanity will first create robots, then merge with them, moving both up, not down. Let's face it: we are still hunter-scavengers at heart, isn't it time we humans started catching up with the evolution of human society?
I think that robotizing ourselves will be a way to do that. That means we will be the first species to (partially) control our own evolution. Playing god? Not if you are an atheist ...