There was an article in Scientific American about the efficiency of locomotion of different species on the planet. In other words, they measured how much energy it took a bird to get from point A to B, and then a fish, and goat, and so on and ranked them. It turns out the condor won. Man came in with a rather unimpressive showing of a third of the way down the list. But someone had the insight to measure the efficiency of man riding a bicycle. And man riding a bicyle was twice as good as the condor! And what it illustrated is man's ability as a toolmaker to fashion a tool that can amplify an inherent ability that he has.

From a broader cosmic perspective, the best of human science, engineering, and weaponry may reveal humans to be completely out of our depth, mere kindergarteners bidding for a place in the universe’s adult civilizations.

Tool Builders

When we think about humans compared to other living things, our bodies are inherently inferior to many of them. We're not the fastest, we're not the biggest, we're not the strongest. On top of all that, our five senses pale in comparison to that of many other living things.

However, we reside at the apex. And the single biggest reason for that is our fundamental nature as tool-builders: we're pretty damn good at building tools that augment our capabilities.

We've built some amazing tools throughout history to amplify our abilities, making us incredibly advanced and powerful. Just a brief overview:

• Shelter: clothing, heaters, air conditioners, bulldozers
• Food: tractors, fertilizers, irrigation, gas stoves, microwaves
• Transportation: bicycle, boats, cars, planes, jets, rockets
• Communication: language, money, paper, printing press, telegraph, telephone, camera, computers, internet, email, smartphones
• Physical power: spears, swords, guns, tanks, bombs, missiles, drones

Just like our ancestors, we have the same five senses and two arms and two legs. But with these tools, we can now achieve things our ancestors couldn't even dream of: live in and visit places they never could, talk to and learn from thousands of more people than them, and discover new ideas and truths about our world they would never know. (Those poor unlucky souls; their worlds were so small.) One can even define this amplification of our abilities as progress.

History has taught us that humans will continue to discover new truths and build more advanced tools in spite of how dangerous they may be. These tools are not always built because they are useful or will benefit the state of humankind, but because they can be built. The thrill of discovery, humans' need for ambition and heroism, and the enticing prospect of new frontiers all mean that progress is inevitable. Given this, what kind of future awaits us?

The Current Landscape

You are already a cyborg.

Take smartphones. Smartphones are one of the most incredible tools we've ever built as humans. Think about how you use it:

• You need to talk to your parents about some important personal news. Or you need to ask your friends where all of you should meet up. You can message or call them anytime no matter where you or they are.
• You need to get groceries for a specific recipe you want to cook. Or you want to check out that new spot your friend told you about. You can access all that information in your smartphone anytime and anywhere.
• You need to watch out for some news from your boss or the world in order to take action immediately and solve the problem as quickly as possible. You can do all of that instantly by just keeping your smartphone with you.

As a result, you've become incredibly dependent on this small electronic device. If you lose it, you wouldn't be able to do much of anything. What limited things you can do would take hundreds of times longer.

But no one can fault you for becoming so dependent on them. They enhance what you can do so much. Why the hell would you not use it? Without one, you're at such a huge disadvantage compared to other people in performing even the simplest of tasks. At this point, your smartphone is more or less a part of you; a second brain.

When so much of your life is dependent on this electronic device, the insistence that you're not a cyborg doesn't sound very convincing anymore. We're more machine than we think.

The Merge

Given that we recognize how useful this invention has been in enhancing our capabilities and how insatiable our need for growth and progress are, the next step function of progress will be to integrate these devices even deeper into ourselves. You can see this already with wearables and extrapolate the next iterations of them:

• Smartwatches
  • They track important metrics on our health and give us useful information on our physical condition and abilities.
  • Now imagine them with even more accurate and rich biometrics monitoring: blood flow, hormonal levels, and even mental stress detectors. It will become a near necessity to have one. Doctors will need and use the data to offer more refined and personalized treatments. It's no secret that this is also part of Apple's ambitions to expand its biometric capabilities and become a healthcare company in order to further ensnare you in its ecosystem.
• Smartglasses
  • For now, they're just cute. They play music and take photos and videos. The value proposition over doing the same thing with smartphones is shaky.
  • But now imagine them with argumented reality. You can see how you look in new clothes and view different furnishings in your apartment instantly.
  • Imagine them further augmented by AI. It can become a more integrated digital assistant that can give you step-by-step instructions on fixing your bike, identify the exact nutrients of your meals, and translate other people's languages in realtime.
• Pin
  • Kind of a cool new interface that's smaller and even more embedded into our body. You can imagine similar AI and health-tracking augmentations on top of this.

There's definitely a chance the above technologies will flop. Maybe the market timing is too soon, or the capabilities are far too marginal to justify the cost, or there's still some societal pressure to not be seen speaking with your devices.

But as long as cash-rich companies continue to pour money into its R&D, shove more computing power into it, and are able to augment our capabilities with a great user experience, people will recognize its utility and these devices will start to control more and more of our daily functions. They will become more and more a part of us, just like the smartphone.

If we project to the very far future, we may find ourselves bringing even more radical sci-fi ideas to life to level ourselves up even more:

• Uploading our brains to an android body where it can live even after our body decays and dies
• Uploading our brains to the cloud, effectively achieving immortality
• Enhancing our physical bodies with metal spines or X-ray vision or even artillery like in cyberpunk dystopias

I'm not here to tell you whether this cyberization is a future we should want. I do, however, believe that there's a strong case for it being inevitable. If we don't cyberize ourselves, we're faced with the reality that we'll fall behind other people who are more cyberized and are consequently smarter, healthier, and more powerful. That's not too different from today with how powerless people feel without their smartphones.

And other cyberized people wouldn't be the only ones we have to keep up with. If AI progress continues, we may even fall behind AI in our abilities. If we want to prevent AI from replacing us or ensure we don't become obsolete, we will have to continue enhancing ourselves even more with technology.

At some point through all of this, these developments will cause us to start to wonder: what does it truly mean to be a human?

At that point, the merge between life and technology will be complete.