<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/25/part-human-part-machine-i...> At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Apple engineers embarked on a rare collaboration with Google. The goal was to build a system that could track individual interactions across an entire population, in an effort to get a head start on isolating potentially infectious carriers of a disease that, as the world was discovering, could be spread by asymptomatic patients. Delivered at breakneck pace, the resulting exposure notification tool has yet to prove its worth. The NHS Covid-19 app uses it, as do others around the world. But lockdowns make interactions rare, limiting the tool’s usefulness, while in a country with uncontrolled spread, it isn’t powerful enough to keep the R number low. In the Goldilocks zone, when conditions are just right, it could save lives. The NHS Covid-19 app has had its teething problems. It has come under fire for not working on older phones, and for its effect on battery life. But there’s one criticism that has failed to materialise: what happens if you leave home without your phone? Because who does that? The basic assumption that we can track the movement of people by tracking their phones is an accepted fact. This year has been good for tech companies, and Apple is no exception. The wave of global lockdowns has left us more reliant than ever on our devices. Despite being one of the first large companies to be seriously affected by Covid, as factory shutdowns in China hit its supply chain delaying the launch of the iPhone 12 by a month, Apple’s revenue has continued to break records. It remains the largest publicly traded company in the world by a huge margin: this year its value has grown by 50% to $2tn (£1.5tn) and it is still $400bn larger than Microsoft, the No 2. It’s hard to think of another product that has come close to the iPhone in sheer physical proximity to our daily lives. Our spectacles, contact lenses and implanted medical devices are among the only things more personal than our phones. Without us even noticing, Apple has turned us into organisms living symbiotically with technology: part human, part machine. We now outsource our contact books, calendars and to-do lists to devices. We no longer need to remember basic facts about the world; we can call them up on demand. But if you think that carrying around a smartphone – or wearing an Apple Watch that tracks your vitals in real time – isn’t enough to turn you into a cyborg, you may feel differently about what the company has planned next. A pair of smartglasses, in development for a decade, could be released as soon as 2022, and would have us quite literally seeing the world through Apple’s lens – putting a digital layer between us and the world. Already, activists are worrying about the privacy concerns sparked by a camera on everyone’s face. But deeper questions, about what our relationship should be to a technology that mediates our every interaction with the world, may not even be asked until it’s too late to do anything about the answer. The word cyborg – short for “cybernetic organism” – was coined in 1960 by Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline, whose research into spaceflight prompted them to explore how incorporating mechanical components could aid in “the task of adapting man’s body to any environment he might choose”. It was a very medicalised concept: the pair imagined embedded pumps dispensing drugs automatically. In the 1980s, genres such as cyberpunk began to express writers’ fascination with the nascent internet, and wonder how much further it could go. “It was the best we could do at the time,” laughs Bruce Sterling, a US science fiction author and futurist whose Mirrorshades anthology defined the genre for many. Ideas about putting computer chips, machine arms or chromium teeth into animals might have been very cyberpunk, Sterling says, but they didn’t really work. Such implants, he points out, aren’t “biocompatible”. Organic tissue reacts poorly, forming scar tissue, or worse, at the interface. While science fiction pursued a Matrix-style vision of metal jacks embedded in soft flesh, reality took a different path. “If you’re looking at cyborgs in 2020,” Sterling says, “it’s in the Apple Watch. It’s already a medical monitor, it’s got all these health apps. If you really want to mess with the inside of your body, the watch lets you monitor it much better than anything else.” The Apple Watch had a shaky start. Despite the company trying to sell it as the second coming of the iPhone, early adopters were more interested in using their new accessory as a fitness tracker than in trying to send a text message from a device far too small to fit a keyboard. So by the second iteration of the watch, Apple changed tack, leaning into the health and fitness aspect of the tech. Now, your watch can not only measure your heart rate, but scan the electric signals in your body for evidence of arrhythmia; it can measure your blood oxygenation level, warn you if you’re in a noisy environment that could damage your hearing, and even call 999 if you fall over and don’t get up. It can also, like many consumer devices, track your running, swimming, weightlifting or dancercise activity. And, of course, it still puts your emails on your wrist, until you turn that off. [...]