Cyberpunk

The definition of cyberpunk from has something to do with the future technology where it impacts the life of the people in that future era. Because of the rapid technological change, it causes the social effects in different ways. Most of the stories that relate to Cyberpunk often happened when the earth is severely damaged. It often expresses a sense of rebellion, corruption in governments, and alienation. Most of cyberpunk stories happen in the near future and have negative impact of technology on humanity.
In addition, most of times when we see cyberpunk, there often have some type of fusion between men and machine. It’s not as same as cyborgs because cyborgs are purely made by machine to imitate human characteristic, but the fusion is different. For the fusion, the machine affects the control of the human perception, usually involves with some virtual reality environment images either taking place in the real world or in cyber world. Much like what we saw in Johnny Mnemonic where he went into virtual world via internet. We consider that men fusions with the machine are still humans.
Hackers are also important for cyberpunk genre. Hackers always have the big role to break into another organization or corporation’s computer security system to steal important information from them. They act like the Robin Hood or dark society side either to help or destroy one another.
Also the styles of cyberpunk visual are dirty and hyper-realistic “lived in”. We saw that when the character interact with computer scene visually and at the same time physically. Be able to move data or hack the program just a bare hand while maybe wearing high technology equipment. From many cyberpunk movies, we see patterns of dark motifs contrasted with shocking neon color schemes when characters work with the computer.
My reaction to cyberpunk is that idea behind cyberpunk is that because of fast development of technology, human society can’t adapt to the new technology and lost the control of the pace of change, so it caused many smart people or corporations using those technologies in the bad way to cause social problem in many ways such as increasing crime rate, poverty, disease, rebellion and pollution. I try to be optimistic about the future that it will not go as bad as many cyberpunk movies. If people are well informed of the possibility of cause and effect of the new technology, I don’t think we will have to go though a dystopian society. However, there are still many concerns about future including global warming and peak oil which could strike us in the near future. They could interfere with the vision of cyberpunk and it may change the direction. Of course, most of the cyberpunk stories were created during eighties which back in the old day, but we didn’t put the current global problem into account. The source of energy could be changing from oil consuming to other new resource of energy, so the vision of cyberpunk might change to something better or worst.

What is Cyborg?

According to Wikipedia, a cyborg is a cybernetic organism. This organism has both artificial and natural systems which mean that a cyborg is not total machine like a robot, but it also has some biological system that might be as same as humans or other living nature. From what I have seen from TV or other media, most of cyborgs are human like, and inside the body, it could have some complex mechanism that enhance their biological capabilities such as faster running or incredibly strong.

In my opinion, I feel that between cyborgs and androids are a bit different. I always thought that an android is made by advance technology where physical body looks like human being, but inside is a robot. An android might have superior capability than a normal robot such as capable of expressing emotion or thinking. On the other hand, a cyborg is less advance technology than the android. For example, a cyborg is incapable of expressing feeling and emotion. It may look like human on the outside, but it may also have some piece of non-human organs such as metal object on its physical appearance which can be indicated whether it is robot or not. However, androids are something that is difficult to determined whether it is robot or not. For example, in the movie “Blade Runner” Rick Deckard has to ask a series of questions to the android to determine if it is a human.

Actually I don’t feel threatened by them if Cyborgs would exist in the future, but I might not be so exciting about it either. Just thinking about some new computer technology being used to replace human would give a lot of trouble to us. For example, labor work could be replaced by cyborgs which could cause human to lose their jobs. If there are in fact cyborgs living in this world and being used in a war, it would be like the movie “The Terminator” where they use robots to kill humans. I still don’t see why we need cyborgs to replace human beings. It’s not like I want to see humans going to a war, but if we create something like cyborgs or androids to a war, it’s the same as creating a new kind of weapon, and we all know what damage is already done by guns.

Anyway, I think I believe that if cyborgs exist in this world, they could also be useful to humans for many reasons. We can use them to do some certain tasks such as being a house keeper, doing some extremely dangerous jobs or so many other things. If cyborgs will be used in the right way, that would be a good thing, but if not, it could destroy us too.

We never know whether we will have cyborgs or androids in the future. From many movies that I have seen, they have shown some bad consequences from having cyborgs or androids in this world like the movie “Terminator”, “I, Robot”, “Blade Runner”, or “Universal Soldier”, so I feel like it might not be a good idea for cyborgs to exist. However, I think that we won’t have cyborgs in our world in twenty or thirty years from now because we still have so many existing problems that need to be solved such as global warming or bad economic. We are not ready cyborgs for that yet. Maybe 40-50 years from now, it could happen.

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