Squeamishness, cyborgs and the Uncanny Valley

One of the many annoying things I disliked about the Borg in Star Trek was that it was automatically assumed that they had to take everyone over by force. Really? Seems to me they’d have no trouble convincing legions to join them voluntarily. Another irritation was the clunky, black gear they had hanging off their cadaverous bodies. This struck me as a surprisingly primitive and inaccurate portrayal of what the fusion between emergent and artificial biology will actually be like when we perfect it.

This got me to thinking about cyborgs and artificial life in general and I found two rather interesting articles about real life cyborgs produced by surgery and about something called the uncanny valley.

Just some food for thought this Friday night.

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