Advances in technology are always met
with some degree of technophobia and villainization.
From the very beginning,
mechanization has been perceived as a promise
and a threat.
Talk of humans being replaced by machines
immediately emerged
alongside voices praising their life-enhancing benefits.
Cyborgs are a unique amalgamation of both ideas
since they directly merge flesh with tech.
Some of pop culture's most iconic villains are cyborgs,
but so are some of the heroes.
What is it about the blending of man and machine
that scares us but also thrills us?
[exciting orchestral music]
I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, and this is Monstrum.
The impact of industrialization
and mechanization are crucial to the cyborg's history,
but that's not where the idea began.
We have to go way back.
Stories of human automatons date back
as far as the fourth or fifth century BCE.
The Chinese philosophical texts "Liezi"
includes mention of a play
that utilized a mechanical puppet made from wood
and leather that could independently move its head,
sing, and dance.
Records of steam-powered human-like automatons
appear in the text of Alexandrian engineers in Egypt
around the Third Century CE.
There are also tales of automated soldiers
protecting relics in ancient Indian Buddhist texts.
In both fiction and real life,
automatons were intriguing rarities
prized for their unusualness
and ability to inspire wonder.
And yes, obviously cyborgs are different from automatons,
but the two have a blended cultural history.
A cyborg is a living organism machine hybrid
while an automaton is a machine made to look
and or act human.
Legends of brazen heads,
bronze or brass talking fortune telling automations
modeled after humans fill the pages
and stages of the Renaissance period.
First appearing in the 12th century text
"Chronicle of the Kings of England,"
they were often said to be powered by the devil,
sorcery, or necromancy.
So these disembodied heads were viewed as monstrous,
defying natural order
and challenging the idea of the soul
by raising questions about what moved our own bodies,
what imbued life in a thing.
In the 17th century,
French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes
introduced the beast-machine hypothesis,
theorizing that the human body is composed
of mechanical processes or motions.
As medicine emerged as a profession around this time,
so did the understanding of the body as an organic machine
supporting Descartes' theory.
Of course, this overlaps with the Industrial Revolution
and political revolutions across the world.
In science and culture,
the concept of the body was becoming destabilized
at the same time
the manufacturing process shifted from human hands
to mechanized devices.
New technologies like the battery, the steam engine,
and later, electricity,
opened a world of possibilities,
including artificial life.
While the emergent technologies
became increasingly linked to imagination,
magic, and utopia,
they were also met with fear and trepidation.
It wasn't until the 19th century
that the first human-machine hybrids appear in fiction.
Technically, German Gothic author
E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1814 "Automata"
has the first quasi-human automation,
but everyone knows it's a machine.
In his 1816 story "The Sandman,"
two men attempt to pass off
a wooden clockwork-driven automaton as a real woman
with moderate success.
Jane Loudon's futuristic 1827 novel "The Mummy"
includes speculative technologies
like a mirror holoscreen,
flying robotic horses,
and labor androids in the form of prison guards,
judges, and lawyers.
In these texts before
and after their non-human identities are revealed,
these creations are viewed with a mix of revulsion and awe.
Seen as unnatural and frightening,
these Romantic era androids
reflected the cultural conceptions
of the human-machine dynamic.
Edgar Allen Poe famously explored
the boundaries of the mechanical body
and the human body in his science fiction.
During his writing career,
the United States saw over 3,000 miles of train tracks
laid across the US,
with both the medical doctor
and machine doctor or mechanic emerging as professions.
All of this likely inspired his 1839 short story
"The Man That Was Used Up,"
which is widely cited as the first true cyborg narrative.
The tale is a satirical social mystery of sorts.
A narrator tries to determine the story
behind General John A.B.C. Smith's
great notoriety as a war hero.
Formidable and handsome,
the narrator is horrified to learn
that the general he admires so much lost his teeth,
arms, legs, scalp, shoulder, chest, and eye,
and most of his tongue from torture while a war prisoner,
and now uses a false eye, wig, cork legs,
and other man-made parts,
including a mechanical tongue.
When the narrator sees him without his non-organic additions
as a large and exceedingly odd looking bundle of something,
he's frightened into shocked silence.
So we've had humans with machine enhancements
in fiction for a couple hundred years,
but it took until 1960 for someone to define them.
The word cyborg first appears in 1960
in a New York Times article about scientists
looking into enhancing astronauts
for space travel efficiency.
Coined by researchers Manfred E. Clynes
and Dr. Nathan S. Kline,
the article proposes development
of human-and-then-some bodies
that would not need to eat or breathe
because of battery powered devices built into the body.
They provide us with the first public definition of cyborg,
essentially a man-machine system
in which the control mechanisms of the human portion
are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices
so that the being can live in an environment
different from the normal one.
The late 1970s and '80s were a time of cultural
and social technological pandemonium.
The introduction of personal computers,
portable phones, fiber optics,
and of course, the internet challenged our worldview
and created new anxieties.
In a post-industrial world,
existing fears of machines taking over humans' jobs
and relevance seemed even more possible.
And like always,
popular culture exposes that anxiety
and imagines the possible effects of digital technology,
positive and negative,
in dystopian android movies like "The Terminator"
and "Blade Runner,"
but also more optimistic characters
like the superhero Cyborg in DC Comic Universe
and "Ghost in the Shell's" crime-fighting cyberpunk
Major Motoko Kusanagi.
In 1985, Donna Haraway's feminist post-human text,
"A Cyborg Manifesto,"
declared we are all already cyborgs.
She argues that humans are chimeras
of organism and machine,
a reality we sit with uncomfortably,
although she argues we should take pleasure
in such instability and transgression.
Haraway uses the cyborg as a metaphor
to challenge the definition of human and non-human.
She points out that we are already cyborgs.
Modern medicine has advanced to the point
that small machines can reside in the body
in what she refers to as couplings.
The anxiety around cyborgs is their perceived threat
to humanity in the physical and mental,
enhanced humans who challenge the very idea of human.
Post-humanism is a philosophical concept
that challenges anthropocentrism,
the idea that humans are the central
and most significant entities in the world.
It's all about blurring or eliminating the boundaries
between humans and other organic and inorganic matter.
Monsters and the post-human are intertwined.
As N. Katherine Hayles argues in "How We Became Post-Human,"
even the threat of transformation via technology
inspires simultaneous terror and pleasure.
But that does not mean that post-human
has to be apocalyptic or anti-human,
but you can probably see how the cyborg
can easily represent both the negative
and positive interpretations of post-humanism.
Discoveries in zoology also contribute
to our modern conception of cyborgs.
By the end of the 20th century,
the distinction between the human animal
and the non-human animal is narrowed.
Many non-human animals craft and use tools,
problem solve, have complex languages,
social behaviors, and grieving practices.
The cyborg then is a man-made distinction
between human and non-human animal
where artificial devices
contribute to making humans less animal.
Although a more radical approach
is to see the cyborg as a break in the distinction
between human, animal, and machine,
in a post-humanist utopian vision
of connectivity among all things
where boundaries are not only blurred
but they also simply don't exist,
which is both liberating and terrifying.
This is why the cyborg is always made monstrous.
From the hive-mind driven villainous Borg in Star Trek
to Marvel's Dr. Octopus
or James Bond's nefarious Dr. No,
evil or antagonistic cyborgs are physically threatening
with their divergent technologies
marking them as the other or the bad guy in the story.
Even when cyborgs are the good guys,
this holds true,
but they are painted in a different light.
Robocop, Ironman, Major Motoko, the Bionic Woman,
and others like them
almost always have some traumatic backstory
or event that propels them towards mechanical augmentation,
justifying their monstrosity.
Star Wars is the perfect example.
Both Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are cyborgs,
at least since the end of Episode Five.
We spend "A New Hope" and "The Empire Strikes Back"
following Luke's struggles and triumphs.
His tragic backstory,
an orphan relegated to a hard life
on an unforgiving planet after his father was murdered,
at least that's what Obiwan tells him,
creates sympathy even before his hand is cut off.
Luke's artificial hand even looks organic at first.
Essentially, his cyborg nature can be hidden.
Darth Vader's tech, on the other hand,
is not only on full display,
it visually makes him the villain.
His cyborgness isn't justified.
That is, not until Anakin's own tragic history
which helped push him to choose the dark side is revealed.
I must point out that this only happens explicitly
in the newer movies
released at the turn of the 21st century when arguably,
attitudes towards robotics have somewhat shifted.
Nevertheless, all cyborgs still represent the fear
inherent in losing ourselves in the technologies we create.
Cyborgs may not inherently be monsters,
but we are afraid they will become monsters.
Our response to them is largely driven, I think,
by how we want to integrate technology into our life.
Do we live with technology or do we become technology?
"Liezi." Did I do it right?
Sliezi includes mention--
(crew) Hold on.
Clockwork-driven ato,
the automata, automaton.