Imagine it’s 2025, may be a few years later, and not only are gears electronic, but you can get this chip in your head that measures brain activity and knows when you want to change gear before you (think you) do. So it changes for you. It’s called di4u or something. May be it does something like that with the dropper and suspension tuning as well. And you’re obviously clipped to the pedals of the bike, effectively attached to the thing.
So you see someone riding a bike with this thing in their head: are they some sort of cyborg cyclist?
But imagine now this other person flies past. They’re on a hardtail. It’s 2025 and they’ve only just gone 1×11 and got boost spacing. They’ve never really had enough cash for anything fancy, but started riding BMX 30 years ago when they were 5yo. And it shows.
Meanwhile, the pseudo-cyborg-cyclist is a typical cash-rich-time-poor, started riding 6 months ago and is lucky to get out more than once a fortnight. This shows as well.
Watching these two, the rider on the hardtail would likely look far more like the bike was an ‘extension of them’ than the electronic-head-chip person. So who, if any of them, is a cyborg? Or what does it mean to be integrated into a technology?
[Context: I’m generally very technophobic, despite a background in engineering, but have been getting particularly p**sed off in recent years buy relentless injuries and mental health c**p, so am increasingly excited about the potential for technofixes. Also, I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Dues…]
