Kate Honeyman

Professor Collins
English 115
Why Cyborgs Are More Intelligent Than We Think
Many humans look down upon the idea of a world filled with cyborgs. They
think that this advancement in technology will make people more antisocial, and
that will somehow make them less intelligent. They seem to think that there is a
connection between emotions and intelligence. There is not for cyborgs; they can
not feel any emotions at all and still have the ability to be really smart.
Cyborgs can be programmed to act exactly like humans. They can use
ultrasonic sensors to sense whats around them, and they can move out of the way
of obstacles and they can follow directions and move to a specific point. They can
also feel emotions. They can absorb intelligence from a human brain and gain all of
its qualities. This means that they can feel the same emotions as a human. They
can feel excited in the same situations that a human would feel excited in because
they now have knowledge from a human brain, but they can show these same
emotions through observation. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the
androids start to feel emotions that humans would feel in their situations. For
example, when Rachael, Irmgard, and Roy find out that the other androids have
been killed and that theyre the only three androids left and that theyre about to be
killed, they become scared and try to hide, and any human would have that same
reaction if they were in that same situation. There are other instances of androids
getting frightened in the book, like when Luba Luft realizes that Rick and Phil are
going to kill her in the elevator, or even when she gets scared by Rick suddenly
going into her dressing room at the opera show. Another example of androids
feeling fear is when Isidore goes to Rachaels apartment for the first time and she is
frightened by seeing a human. Humans in the book dont believe that androids feel
anything. They think that the only way that androids can feel anything is by using
the empathy box, and that the empathy box and Mercerism are fake forms of
emotions. Ironically enough, the androids are constantly showing emotion in front of
humans. They feel fear and they show it, like in the examples that I gave before.
We always seem to look down upon anyone or anything that we think doesnt
meet our level of intelligence. In the article Sex Dillemas, Amazons and Cyborgs:
Feminist Cultural Studies and Sport, our discrimination against cyborgs is
compared to the way that we used to discriminate against women. Society used to
think that women should not waste their energy with activities that are seen as
masculine, such as sports. Men thought that they were superior over women and
therefore, they thought that they could play sports better than women. They
thought that women should reserve their energy for feminine activities, such as
housework and raising children. Although there is a lot less of them, there are still
gender equality issues. The article mentions how we still see sports as maledominated, since most sports on TV are mostly made up of men. We have the same
issue with technology. We think that since there are so many advancements with
technology now, we have become more accepting of technology and the fact that it

plays a huge role in our lives, but this is not true. Many people still hate technology
and think that its useless and makes people antisocial. They worry about cyborgs
because they feel that theyre going to be surrounded by people who arent even
people and that all communication is going to be lost because of the lack of
emotions. People feel that they cant communicate with cyborgs the same way that
they cant communicate with animals. We look down on animals for the same
reason that we look down at cyborgs, because they dont communicate the same
way that we do.
Being discriminated by humans is possibly the reason why cyborgs in Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep value animals so much. It is also suggested in
the book that animals are valued because of their appearance. Being seen with an
animal raises the social status of a character, in the same way that people in real
life buy luxury cars or name-brand clothes to show off and impress others. This is
another example of how humans and cyborgs are more similar than we think, they
both care a lot about their appearance and what people think of them, they want to
intimidate others and be better than them. Humans and cyborgs also both want to
intimidate objects and creatures that they see as having less power than them. In
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the androids find a spider and they wonder
if it would still be able to function with less legs, so they cut some of its legs off, and
they do this without thinking of the animals feelings, and humans dont think much
about animals feelings either. Whenever we see ants, flies, spiders, or any other
animal in our house, our first instinct is to kill it. Most of us dont think of how the
animal would feel about that, very few of us think that poor animal doesnt even
know whats going on.
In fact, in the end, humans end up being the ones who are less empathetic,
not the androids. Rick, who is shown to be the most human character in the book,
has the least amount of empathy out of anyone. He always kill androids without
thinking of their feelings, he only cares about the amount of money he gets for
retiring the androids. He ends up realizing how selfish he is in the end however.
When he meets Phil and finds out that he sleeps with androids before retiring them,
he ends up not wanting to be like him. He realizes this after he sleeps with Rachael.
Rachael gets angry with Rick when she realizes that hes about to kill her after
hooking up with him. She felt that she could trust him after having sex with him
because hes not like Phil. Rick realizes how selfish it is to gain the androids trust
and then kill them, although he claimed before to not have feelings for any of them.
His empathy is really brought out when he has to kill the last three androids. He
cant bring himself to do it and he realizes that he doesnt want to be a bounty
hunter; he wants to become empathetic and join Mercer. When he searches for the
three androids, he starts to see his world literally crumbling around him and he is
suddenly climbing a mountain, while having rocks thrown at him. Through this
experience, he becomes Mercer. So in the end, the least empathetic human
becomes the person whose religion is centered around empathy. If humans can go
from being selfish to empathetic, then so can androids, since they can gain human
knowledge.

We can all learn from cyborgs, as they can learn from us. They are said to
have the same amount of knowledge as 2 scientists and 5 writers. That could
definetly be helpful and useful to humans. Cyborgs feel emotions, as they can gain
knowledge from humans and they can move around, interact with others, and have
reactions in the same way that humans do. They are more like us than we think.

Works Cited:
Wu, Zhaohui, Gang Pan, and Nenggan Zheng. Cyborg Intelligence. IEEE Intelligent
Systems, 28.5 (2013): 31
Warwick, Kevin. The Cyborg Revolution. NanoEthics, 8.3 (2014): 263-273
Tolvhed, Helena. Sex Dillemas, Amazons and Cyborgs: Feminist Cultural Studies
and Sport. Culture Unbound. Journal of Current Cultural Research, 5 (2013): 273289