In today's day-and-age, we're all "already a cyborg."
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said technology has already turned us into cyborgs At Vox Media's Code Conference Wednesday night. And he makes a really interesting point — our ability to have a digital version of ourselves online in the form of emails and social media has given us "super powers" in a way that wasn't possible before.
"You have more power than the president of the United States had 20 years ago," Musk said. "You can answer any question, you can video conference with anyone, anywhere. You can send messages to millions of people instantly. Just do incredible things."
Most people when they hear the word cyborg think of people that are half-bionic. Like Neil Harbisson, the world's first government-recognized human cyborg, who has an antenna implanted in his head that allows him to "hear" colors.
But Musk contends we should see ourselves as cyborgs just be virtue of how reliant we are on personal technology like phones and laptops.
And there's potential for us to become even more cyborg-like in the future.
Musk mentioned a new technology he said companies should be working on called "neural lace," which would add a digital layer of intelligence to our brains. It's a concept nanotechnologists have been working on, Busines Insider's Jillian D'Onfro pointed out.
It's unclear whether neural lace is something we'll see in our lifetime (Musk appears to think so!), but Musk raises an interesting point about what it means to be human in the digital age. Considering how much time we dedicate to our digital persona, it seems fair to say we're all already a cyborg.
You can watch Musk make his comments here:
