Kevin Warrick researcher from Reading University presented a talk today on his research into cybernetic organisms. This brings with it opportunities for both therapy and enhancement of the human body. But it will also require us to radically rethink what the body is.

Warrick’s desire is to 'extend [our] sensory range' into the 95% of things around us that at present we cannot sense. In order to explore this, Warrick has used his own body for enhancement based implants. The first of these was a chip of 100 electrodes implanted in the meridian nerve in his left arm. Each electrode is about 1.5 mm long and 4mm in diameter. The tips of the electrodes are about 1-3 micro meters across.

He also hooked up his nervous system to the internet, which allowed him not only operate, but sense feedback from a mechanical hand in another country. While doing this he accepted as an occupational hazard the possibility of people sending messages directly to his nervous system.

While I am in awe of Warricks outcome, I am curious and concerned about the implications of the direction in which he feels we are heading. He suggested that in the future 'humans will be something of a sub-species'; we are converging on the superhuman. If we are becoming a society of cyborgs, we must consider who we are. Surely not all societies will have the funds to become cyborgs. What will the implications be for the humans that are left behind and will this mean we witness the embodiment of the digital divide?

Some such questions were asked at LIFT07 by anthropologist Daniela Cerqui which I think are well worth considering.

Paul Dourish delivered an intriguing paper at this morning’s final keynote, in which he considered how developers could cultivate a different relationship with anthropological knowledge. At present, the dominant mode of engagement is to consider 'implications for design' as the guiding principle in assessing and using ethnography. However, good anthropological knowledge can contain a plethora of useful analytic themes that have the potential to enrich development. If developers shifted their view away from simply focusing on the implications for design section towards analytical themes, then they could draw from a wide range of classical anthropological works which were not necessarily aimed at developers.

To illustrate this, Dourish pointed to two pieces of classical anthropological work: Munn's work on aboriginal navigation - which looks at the presence or absence of people from a landscape - and Malkki’s work on refugees and exile - which shows how, in contrast to the 'spoilt identity' of Goffman’s theory, the refugees clung to refugee status rather than accepting a new, inauthentic, identity. The analytic themes derived from such works, he argued, such as issues of interaction in space, absence and identity, could enrich understanding (and thus development) in such areas as electronic tracking of paroled sex offenders.