cyborg

Cybernetics came from Greek kybernētēs, the helmsman or steersman. Norbert Wiener chose the term in 1948 for his new science of communication and control in animals and machines — the study of how systems regulate themselves. An organism, from Latin organum (tool, instrument), described any living thing organized into functional parts. Cyborg fused them: a cybernetic organism, a living being integrated with self-regulating mechanical components.

Clynes and Kline's 1960 paper 'Cyborgs and Space' appeared in the journal Astronautics. They argued that for humans to survive in space, it made more sense to modify the human body than to recreate Earth's environment inside a capsule. Their proposed cyborg would use drug pumps, osmotic pressure devices, and feedback systems to regulate temperature, oxygen, and metabolism automatically. The astronaut would barely need to think about survival.

Science fiction seized the concept. Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and later William Gibson explored cyborgs as figures of identity crisis: where does the human end and the machine begin? The 1987 film RoboCop made the cyborg a pop-culture archetype. By 1990 Donna Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto' had made the term a feminist philosophical concept, arguing that all humans with medical devices, glasses, or even language were already cyborgs.

Today's pacemakers, cochlear implants, deep brain stimulators, and insulin pumps are all cyborg technologies by Clynes and Kline's definition. The NASA report imagined them for astronauts. They arrived for anyone who needs them. The helmsman's word from ancient Greek now describes a condition more common than Clynes and Kline ever imagined.