While visiting some out-of-town friends a few months back, I had a really great discussion with my friend Rob involving the future of cyborg technology. The gist of the conversation dealt with two main points: 1) that cyborg technology is already here, and 2) that it isn’t as bad as some people would imagine. If anything, practical application of cyborg technology might be quite useful.

The first example Rob gave had to do with cell phones. “Just look how people act when the get all the way to work or school and realize they forgot to bring their phones with them. That alone shows you how dependent we are on little devices we carry around with us,” Rob explained. Indeed, this seems to be very much the case. People rely on cell phones for much more than just making calls; text messaging, with the popularity of social networking sites like Twitter, may be steadily wrestling the use of the phone calls away from cell phones as a primary means of communication.

Rob and I aren’t the only ones comparing cell phone use to the beginnings of cyborg integration. “As we advance, we will surely become more like cyborgs,” says Joshua P. Warren in his new book The Secret Wisdom of Kukulkan, “blurring the line between the current concept of man and machine. It’s already happening. How often do you see someone with a tiny cell phone/computer practically glued to their ear? In the future, we will be a combination of organic and inorganic.” However, our dependence on phones, according to some, isn’t necessarily a good thing. “Because of our technology dependency on cell phones, we don’t know anyone’s phone number,” writes Sharalyn Hartwell at the Examiner. “Think about it, when was the last time you actually dialed a phone number, rather than just hit send on a name in your address book?”

Strange as it may sound, this very aspect of devices like phones rests at the heart of the debate. Sure, we don’t remember telephone numbers anymore because we store them in our phones. The down side to this is obvious: what happens when we lose or forget our phone? How do we make an emergency call if we don’t remember anybody’s number? This is an obvious concern, but look at it from the other extreme; in most circumstances, we don’t have to recall phone numbers any longer, thanks to the convenience of having a device that stores such information for us. In essence, we’re outsourcing human memory into little devices like cell phones, potentially freeing up “space” in our minds, similar to plugging an external hard drive to your computer. By storing all the “heavy stuff” on an external drive, your computer runs faster, right? Could the same not work for the bio-electric computer between our ears?

Looking at other technology that might do this, my friend Rob also suggested GPS systems used in vehicles today. If we aren’t having to allocate so much of our attention to getting where we’re going (and more importantly, how to get there), does this potentially make us more alert drivers by “freeing up” a little extra hard drive space? In the future, will this sort of technology improve to the extent that we’ll be able to use cyborg technology to introduce the equivalent of “random access memory (RAM) into our bodies, allowing us to process information more quickly and, in essence, making humans more efficient, intelligent beings? For the sake of argument, one must consider that aliens alleged to be visiting Earth might already do this, and with all the discussion of hive-like behavior or “the collective” (i.e. the notion of a sort of “shared intelligence”) described by abductees, it certainly seems that humans might at some point consider using information systems to back up our own memories, not just information stored on other computers. A virtual collective, if you will.

But when you really stop to think about it, this too already exists.

With the profuse blogging, Twittering, texting, upload and storage of videos and photos and other info exchanges that occur daily, the Internet is already becoming that extension of consciousness I discussed earlier. Indeed, the great “data cloud” that is the World Wide Web is, according to many experts in technology, already a “brain”. Jeffrey Stibel, author of the book Wired for Thought: How the Brain is Shaping the Future of the Internet, writes that “The Internet is a brain. By this, I mean that the Internet is more than a reflection of intelligence; it actually manifests intelligence. This is because the Internet (unlike computers) has evolved with many of the same basic structures and abilities as a brain. You may argue that “is a brain” and “is like a brain” are merely a matter of semantics, but subscribing to either version will help you better understand the Internet.”

Pop culture warns us of the eminent threat of our computer systems ultimately becoming self-aware, from stories and films ranging from the Science Fiction of Issac Assimov to the popular Terminator film franchise. However, Stibel says this may not be a great concern. “The Internet may never be ‘conscious’ in the human sense (and who needs it?),” he writes, “but it will be (and already is) capable of creating a collective consciousness. This to a great extent, accounts for the success of the Internet.”

Indeed, our use of the Internet and its interactivity–right down to the act of me writing this blog and posting it here on the Web–fulfills the notion that we’re steadily integrating our thoughts in a new kind of information exchange; outsourcing memories, brain activities, and thought processes to computers that ease our heavy mental load. It’s the way of the future, of course… but more importantly, it’s the way of today. Just by looking around us, we can see the future already, and it gets a little closer with each passing nano-second.