Elana Goldstein Writing 50 Superhuman Cyborgs The rate of technological innovation is increasing exponentially.

The machines emerging out of the twenty first century are faster and more highly tuned than any of their predecessors, including the humans that designed them. This can be seen with the speed at which vast amounts of knowledge can be obtained using a search engine like Google versus a Librarian named Martha. By looking at David Levys book Love+Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships through the lens of Ray Kurzweils article The Next Frontier, it can be argued that technological capabilities are quickly surpassing human capabilities, and that technology is taking on the best qualities of humanity and exhibiting these qualities at a superhuman level. Therefore future technology, and more specifically the human cyborg, will represent the best characteristics of humans and so be more human than an actual biological being. This will inevitably change the dynamics of our society in which humans will be more closely connected to machines, blurring the dividing line between cyborg and human. Some may counter-argue that robots cannot fully represent the best traits of humanity because they can only imitate and not create; meaning they cannot come up with or have any desire to come up with new ideas. By lacking curiosity and drive, the robots lack fundamental human characteristics. Machines are able to process a lot more data at a faster rate than any human, even a genius like Einstein cant compare. In Kurzweils article, he argues that future human machines will emulate our best qualities. They will be the fastest and smartest things on the planet. He expresses this point using an analogy, in which he compares the working

of the human brain to that of a computer. But our thinking is extremely slow; the basic neural transactions are several million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits (Kurzweil, 68). Our biological bodies are very limited in what they can do. There is a ceiling on our human capabilities, for example how much information we can store or remember. This is not the case for a machine, which has an almost limitless range of capabilities because it is a nonbiological entity. The machine can store huge amounts of data and perform tasks using this data more effectively than a human ever could. Consider Garry Kasparov, who scorned the pathetic state of computer chess in 1992. Yet the relentless doubling of computer power every year enabled a computer to defeat him only five years later (Kurzweil, 68). In just half a decade a computer was able to beat the chess grandmaster at his own game. The machine was able to utilize its bionic brain to calculate every move and visualize the outcome of every piece placement and its effect on the endgame. There was no move the grandmaster could make without the computer knowing a specific strategy to beat that move. This huge amount of information storage and recall is something humans, as hard as they try, cannot accomplish. Moving from the general to the specific, Kurzweils argument can be used as a lens to better understand how robots will represent the perfect human sexual partners, as argued by Levy. Kurzweils analogy helps us understand why the robot will be the best sexual partner. The cyborg will be able to store vast amounts of sexual knowledge in its system and perform sex acts perfectly. Others [robots] include all the knowledge in the Kama Sutra and similar books, and in the famous Japanese paintings of sexual positions (Levy, 292). Robots will not only know everything about sex, they will also be able to change their physical bodies in relation to the preferences of their human partner. To the

human, the robot will be the perfect sexual partner, better than any human they could be with. As in the previous article a reference is made to chess: Just as chess programs are labeled with databases of moves in different chess openings, so the robots can be given databases of different sexual positions and techniques from around the world (Levy, 293). The comparison to chess is used in both works. This is probably due to the fact that people who are great at chess represent some of the smartest or most strategic beings in our society. The humans that play chess are able to think ahead and figure out the complexities of the game. Kurzweil uses the reference to illustrate how smart our machines have become; they can outwit even the greatest of chess players at their own game. They are better than the human. Levy uses the reference for a different purpose. He uses it to illustrate how complex a robot can be and how much knowledge it can store, which is a lot more than any human could. This enables it to perform the multitude of tasks more efficiently and therefore please its human counterpart by being able to respond to many variable desires. Its nonbiological brain will have the multitude of sexual options stored so that it can adapt to any human and so morph into the best sexual partner for that human. Our future society is going to be one dominated by technology. The advancements made in this field are increasing at a hypersonic rate and soon the machines we make will surpass us in humanity. They will exhibit our human qualities in an amplified form, free from biological barriers. Human machines can think faster, store and retain more knowledge and apparently satisfy other human beings better than any biological human can. They are the perfect humans.

Work Cited: Kurzweil, Ray. "The Next Frontier." Science & Spirit Nov.-Dec. 2005: 67-70. Print. Levy, David N. L. "The Mental Leap to Sex with Robots." Love Sex with Robots: the Evolution of Human-robot Relations. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. 274-302. Print.