Are our children cyborgs now?

Harold P. Sjursen

Visiting Professor, Beihang University

Professor Emeritus, New York University

Abstract:

In many parts of the world advanced technological devices are inevitably a prominent part of children’s lives, supplementing (and sometimes replacing) interactions with parents, teachers, peer companions and others. These devices are used for education, care giving or supervision, play and even companionship. Children frequently exhibit highly intuitive capacity to use such devices interactively to the extent that they anticipate responses from such devices, which are a natural part of their environment from a very early age, in the same way that one expects appropriate reactions from living creatures. In some sense electronic devices, for example, become surrogate companions. Given the ubiquity of interactive “smart” devices in the experience of young children, it is interesting to ask how children regard such equipment. Child psychology considers how very young children learn to differentiate themselves from their environment and in so doing formulate an idea of self, distinct from surrounding environment but with various types of relationships to the environment. If the child’s environment is populated with interactive intelligent devices that respond faithfully to expressed wishes and needs, and indeed become the normative way such wishes and needs are addressed, will this experience tend to blur the distinction between living creatures and smart devices? How will this affect the child’s developing notion of self? These and other questions will drive this inquiry of how closely related children are to the machines they rely upon. Reference will be made to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology and contemporary theories of techno-humanism.