The Cybermen

Estimates of the time it will take for computing power to reach the capacity of the human brain put it at about 2050. This brings to light the idea of uploading ones brain and attaining immortality. This concept has fascinated and enraptured fiction and literature for ages. My favorite take on this is the reappearance of Cybermen in the popular Doctor Who series in 2011. They are a cyborg body that can cut off an entire human head and implant it inside their ‘skull’. Thus the human becomes a cyborg and can live forever. The most notable aspect of the show is that an emotional inhibitor is required so the human brain doesn’t ‘feel’ the cold isolation of being a robot. The Doctor destroys the inhibitor in the show and in doing so causes the Cybermen to go insane and self-destruct. The emotional inhibitor represents our fear of becoming a machine. We would love to live forever, but we still want to live. In fact, despite the idea of getting to be the first immortal, nobody actually wants to be a Cyberman. This is most apparent when the Cybermen created by John Lumic in the episode ‘Rise of the Cybermen’ attempt to convert John. He built the Cybermen in order to live forever and rule the world, but when he was finally confronted with the reality of becoming a Cyberman he recoiled in fear for the loss of his humanity. I would go so far as to say absolutely no one would choose the life of a Cyberman. The Cybermen clearly demonstrate the conversion from technology serving us to our serving of technology. I’m curious about this line of thinking because I don’t fully understand what exactly technology would pursue. I think AI coding is very important with regard to this, and the warnings of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking should not go so ignored. It only takes a few lines of code to convert a robot soldier into a machine designed to kill all life. Once something with this purpose is brought into existence, it’s only a matter of time until it succeeds.