"I, Cyborg" - this book worth it?

So I found this book at the library at my college campus.  Guy's claiming to try and turn himself into a cyborg.  I checked it out (though I haven't read it yet), but the guy at the checkout table warned me that he's looked at Kevin Warwick's stuff before and apparently it's all bullshit.

Now, I don't have as much free time as I used to anymore, so I'm not wasting whatever precious free time I get on a worthless book (i'd rather waste my time on 4chan lol durrrrrrrrr) - but I'm not ready to dismiss the book just from one guy's statement.  What's your verdict on this, guys?  Should I really bother reading this book or are there better books on human/robot integration I should search for?

>>1
As a bioengineer I'll be one of the first to tell you that intimate integration between robots and humans has a long way to go. Currently we have monkeys with wires coming out of their head that can control a robotic arm with their brain. This technology so far is fairly crude (and probably not comfortable). I've heard there are simple things people have managed to control with peripheral nerve interfaced implants. But nothing complex can be controlled with peripheral nerves as of yet. In the end it depends on what you consider to be a cyborg. If you consider a cyborg to be half man half machine, we already have cyborgs among us. People with pace makers, ventricular assist devices, and the rare full artificial hearts. These seem like pale comparisons to sci fi images of the borg, but they are the beginning.

End conclusion. This guy is probably full of shit. The ideas of cyborgs today are alive and real, but this guy is likely leading you to believe he is going to turm himself into someone with artificial limbs and the like. The best he might achieve in the near future is opening his garage door by manipulating his wrist a certain way.

If things go according to plan, this guy is gonna be a future Lecturer of mine. From what I've read about him, it seems to be pretty small scale stuff so far eg: ultrasonic detection implant (I s'pose adding an entirely new sense isn't exactly small scale). He doesn't seem to say anything about becoming more machine than man anywhere.
http://www.kevinwarwick.com/

>>3
After doing some further reading it looks like he does do some cool and reasonable stuff. He's just really good at the publicity stunt. Which sadly probably does very well at getting him good funding. Some day in the future I would like to get into the field of controlling robotics with signals from peripheral nerves as a potential start to reasonable robotic prosthetic limbs. I think robotics has further to go than signal processing to make such an idea a reality.

Chips that mimic the first stages of animal vision neurons with >90% accuracy existed in 1999.

It is really hard to define cyborg, it wasn't a hundred years ago, but now, fuck.


Honestly by some of original ideas and definitions, people with contact lenses are cyborgs

"Someone with a mechanical or electronic implant that interacts with their (central?) nervous system" Does it as a definition for me.

>>1
oh you would waste time on us lol ^___________________^ wwwww

>>8

Shut the fuck up.

>>6

When did the definition/use of the word "Cyborg" really come into play? 1920s? I'm interested.

>>5

Now this is interesting, could anyone provide a link?