Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer

This is an important book, which easily captured my attention and interest. In the spirit of a true cyborg, Steve Mann explores both the human and technological issues involved with living in an increasingly digital society. Through the cybernetic experience of the main author (a most interesting, curious and extremely diverse character), the reader is introduced to a plethora of advanced personal computing technologies that extend far beyond what most of us are currently exposed to on a daily basis. A very exciting taste of the very near future! I was surprised at how many different areas of life this book touched upon: to name but a few examples: wearable computers will change the ways we shop, dress, commute, read, communicate, and interact as a community. I like how Steve Mann's technologies and philosophies empower individuals to mediate, filter and augment their realities in a proactive and inspiring way.I found this to be a very well written book, created by a multi-faceted human being I'd like to succinctly describe as: an explorer who is pushing into new realms of human experience. It's pretty amazing what individuals within a community of cyborgs can do with wearable computers. Very thought provoking and highly recommended.-Tom

Steven Mann describes himself as a Luddite. Come again? Luddites went around smashing the machines of the industrial revolution. How could Mann, an arch-geek, a professor of electrical engineering who lives, invents, builds, and wears the very latest technology, call himself a Luddite? Mann's "cyborg philosophy" lies just here: in the thought that in an increasingly Orwellian world, the individual's only hope is to fight technology with technology.For a couple of decades, Steve Mann has lived as a cyborg: his view of the world mediated and enhanced by a wearable computer. Actually our clothes, contact lenses, heart pacers, and for that matter our books and our aeroplanes have already made cyborg of us all; but somehow most of us react with shock at Mann's experiment on himself. Rather than "artificial intelligence" conceived in the hope of making machines smarter than people, Mann wants computers to enhance human intelligence. Thanks to "WearComp," an increasingly inconspicuous and elegant "wearable computer" of his own design, Mann is perpetually in contact with the internet, communicating when he wants to by tapping messages on a pocket device and better by projecting the view from his eye-level camera onto the web. His senses of sight and hearing (though not yet, one gathers, smell, taste or touch) are thus mediated and enhanced: want to see a face more clearly from a distance? just zoom in! Hate Coke ads? Get the computer to erase them. Want an instant replay in slow motion? He can get that too, with enough control to read the markings on the spinning wheels of a passing car... And all the while he has the power of the internet literally at his fingertips, so that he not only can consult a dictionary, look up arcane facts to win an argument, but also bring the world to bear witness to what he sees -- and most important, turn the tables against the surveillance that state and corporations think it their right to monopolize. This fascinating book is about the consequence of this brave experiment, which Mann has been conducting with mainly himself as subject for nearly two decades.One of Mann's most striking philosophical ideas is to distinguish between privacy and solitude. The first contrasts with other people's ability to become aware of you, while the second refers to your ability to prevent intrusions into your own awareness. Some people care more for privacy than others, but a case might be made for the view that a lack of privacy is essentially harmless unless it comes with a violation of solitude. It wasn't lack of privacy but lack of solitude that killed Lady Di: for if the paparazzi had never intruded on her life -- if, for example, she had been using Mann's wearable computer to suppress any information about who was photographing her and what appeared in the press) she wouldn't have had to flee in haste and crash to her death. Mann's wearable computer serves to protect his solitude more than his privacy. (He quotes Scott McNeally of S