I can’t have been more than seven when I saw Superman III, and nothing else about it stays with me, but the scene towards the end of the film, in which an evil supercomputer turns a woman into an unconvincing but murderous cyborg, was enough to give me nightmares for weeks. Yet that was merely my first exposure to a trope that’s all over the trashy sci-fi of the late 20th century, from Doctor Who’s Cybermen to Star Trek’s Borg: the idea that, one day, people might merge with their technology, until they shed their humanity altogether.
Such horrors have generally been presented as something that might be done to you – or, more problematically, something you might reluctantly choose, to aid with disability or survive environmental collapse. Gradually, though, it’s dawned on me that if humanity ever does go down the road of merging with technology, it won’t be evil robots that do it to us, but something we do to ourselves. And the results will be far lamer than you can possibly imagine.
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