Sometimes I think of how great it could be to be a cyborg. Clearly I don't have any data on that type of experience but i'd like to focus on the reason it's interesting to me: thought + computation would open up new and amazing possibilities. # Complimentary Tools Many things we take for granted as humans are extremely difficult for computers at present. Consider: - Locomotion (standing, walking, running, swimming...) - Any are hard problems computationally and we do them all.. - Conversation - Even modern text to speech is pretty lame compared to the human capacity for separating audio signals. Imagine running text to speech with 100% accuracy at a noisy bar. This is a piece of cake for your human brain. - Vision - Computer vision has come a very long way and may well surpass human vision. But human vision is still significantly better for now. Think about how we can perceive depth, identify people/objects/landscape and effortlessly envision what we can't see (if i'm looking at your face I can imagine what the back of your head looks like. Not with 100% accuracy but well Enough) Computers are also much better at many things than humans: - Math - The obvious one. - Record keeping (databases are pretty reliable and can be replicated to mitigate the risk of data loss) - Imagine being able to remember millions of phone numbers, or names, or full-text books? - Expansion - We can make a computer more powerful, capable of doing more operations more quickly, by upgrading it's hardware. This is not yet possible with humans. - Replication - If one computer has some data, we can copy that data very quickly to another. If this was possible with human knowledge learning languages would be a breeze. Just find a native speaker of the language you want and trade with them. They get native english and you get native $LANG. - Networking - Computers are very good and sending data between themselves. - Humans are good at this too, but we are considerably slower than computers. The point being, humans and computers are good at different things. How great would it be if we combined the two?! # A mediocre combination Clearly we do already combine human intelligence with machine intelligence. The fact that your'e reading this meant it was written up by me on a computer, transmitted over some networks to be stored somewhere and then again transferred to your device when you requested it. We use computers all the time. Sometimes we even pay people who are good at talking to computers (programmers) to instruct computers on our behalf. It's all quite marvelous, it's just slower than it seems it could be. ## Interfaces We interact with computers in many ways: - Mouse + keyboard - Touch screens - Voice recognition and commands - etc but these are all slow and havne't gotten much faster the fastest among this is the earliest among them, mouse and keyboard. and beyond that the keyboard is significantly faster than the mouse, and indeed it came earlier thesis: our bandwidth for interacting with computers has actually been going down, but the intuitiveness has been going up, so it has indeed been a net win. what if we could have both though? This is why it would be interesting to be a cyborg. Imagine being able to interact with computers both intuitively and as fast (ideally much faster) than you can type?