Could cyborgs really become the next step in human evolution?

Watching those far-away-in-the-future Eurosaver ads from our friends at McDonald's, we started wondering about other technological breakthroughs that might lie ahead of us. Today, we're focusing our gaze on the looming explosion of augmented reality and perhaps even cybernetic enhancement.

By Emmet Purcell

If you’ve ever seen The Terminator, you’ll know that there must be nothing cooler than to be able to walk into a bar and analyse every single object and person in the room within seconds, via your own personal news ticker implanted in your eyes. Just imagine the ultra-specific chat-up lines you’d have before female patrons realise that your eyes are glowing red or that you’re wearing a slightly dodgy 1980s leather jacket.

Undeterred, however, science is moving towards the field of machine augmentation at such a pace that perhaps the most pertinent question is not what we want to be, but rather what we want to become in the next fifty years.

Speaking to the BBC this month, futurologist (apparently that’s a real thing, and not just an amazing ‘ologist’ term) Ian Pearson responded to a question over whether humans will be wired to computers in the next 100 years by catching us off-guard – try 40 years, he reckons.

“We can expect this as soon as 2050 for many people,” said Ian, presumably while dressed in a garish aluminum foil one-piece outfit adorned with random flashing lights.

“By 2075 most people in the developed world will use machine augmentation of some sort for their brains and by the end of the century, pretty much everyone will.”

Clearly, this is very exciting stuff, but what form will this machine augmentation take?  Will humans conceivably gain intelligence or new abilities, or instead will this revolution lead to nothing more than pointless apps and the chance to play Angry Birds by blinking in a careful manner?

Where the future really starts to become scary, however, is in the burgeoning field of cybernetic enhancement and all the ethical issues it poses. If you’ve ever played last year’s tech noir video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you’ll know that such ‘enhancements’ are likely to begin – much as plastic surgery did – with the best of intentions, such as enhancements for those missing limbs, yet who knows where the limits stem from there?

If Deus Ex's chin-scratching future setting taught us anything, it’s that there will be even greater tension between the ‘have’ and ‘have nots’ than we see today at protests over the ‘1%’ of earners, specifically because if cybernetic enhancement and augmented reality displays reach their expected goals, the ‘haves’ will have machine guns for arms rather than a 64GB iPad 2. Probably…

Considering that the augmentations and enhancements in Deus Ex allowed us to hack any object, breath toxic air and leap from tall buildings in total silence and without injury, we’d say that the future sounds pretty damn fantastic – if you can afford it.

For the rest of us, it could be a case of seemingly suave club techniques being heinously ruined by smacking our heads in a futile attempt to reboot a distracting ‘buffering’ signal. A similar outcome to our efforts these days, but a rather more specific reason behind it.