Am I Human, or Have I Become a Soft Cyborg?

Working Notes from the Posthuman Frontier

I’ve just begun reading Francesca Ferrando‘s The Art of Being Posthuman: Who Are We in the 21st Century?

I’m only at the beginning, but I already have a feeling this book is going to take me somewhere interesting.

I picked it up because of a question I’ve been chasing for some time now:

In the age of artificial intelligence, what are we becoming?

Not what will AI become. Not whether machines will eventually achieve consciousness or surpass human intelligence. Those are fascinating questions, certainly, and I’ve spent my share of time wrestling with them.

But the question that keeps drawing me back is much closer to home.

What is happening to us as we increasingly live, think, write, remember, imagine, and create alongside intelligent machines?

A few months ago, I explored this question in an essay called On Becoming the Soft Cyborg.

My argument, or perhaps my working hypothesis, was that we don’t need neural implants or mechanical limbs to become cyborgs. We may already be crossing that threshold through our everyday relationships with technology.

Our phones extend our memories. Our digital environments organise our attention. AI systems increasingly participate in our thinking and creative processes.

The boundary between the biological self and its technological extensions begins to look less like a wall and more like a permeable membrane.

I called this condition the soft cyborg.

And the more I’ve experimented with AI-assisted writing, autonomous agents, and what I’ve come to think of as my textual underground, the more I’ve wondered whether I’m simply using better tools or participating in a subtle transformation of the self.

Am I still the same thinker, merely augmented?

Or is the process of thinking itself changing?

The question beneath the question

Ferrando brings another dimension to this investigation.

Philosophical posthumanism isn’t simply about imagining what comes after humanity. It challenges our assumptions about what it means to be human in the first place.

And that introduces a wonderfully unsettling possibility.

What if we were never the self-contained, autonomous beings we imagined ourselves to be?

What if the human has always been a creature of relationships, shaped by language, culture, technology, ecology, and the countless other forces with which we share existence?

In that case, AI isn’t necessarily turning us into something unnatural.

Perhaps it’s revealing something about our nature that we have been slow to recognise.

We have always been becoming.

The cyborg goes walking

There’s another thread running through this investigation, one that might initially seem unrelated.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a great deal about wandering. About getting out into the world with little more than my phone, a notebook, and my curiosity. About sitting in cafés, observing strangers, following unexpected ideas, and allowing an afternoon to unfold without demanding that it produce anything useful.

I find myself pursuing two seemingly contradictory impulses.

On the one hand, I’m building an increasingly elaborate technological environment that extends my capacity to think, write, and create.

On the other, I’m trying to recover something wonderfully ordinary: the freedom to wander, notice, contemplate, and simply exist.

But perhaps these impulses aren’t contradictory at all.

Perhaps the most interesting promise of human–AI symbiosis isn’t greater productivity.

Perhaps it’s greater freedom.

The freedom to spend less time servicing the machinery of modern life and more time actually living it.

Of course, there is a danger here. The same technologies that extend our abilities can colonise our attention. The tools that promise liberation can become new forms of dependency.

Which raises another question I’m carrying into this exploration:

Can the soft cyborg still be alone?

Can I sit with an unresolved thought without immediately inviting a machine into the conversation? Can I let an experience remain an experience without turning it into content?

I think those questions matter just as much as the technological possibilities.

An open investigation

So this is where I’m beginning.

With Ferrando’s book in one hand, my own experiments with human–AI collaboration in the other, and no particular desire to arrive at a definitive conclusion.

I’ll be sharing working notes as I read, bringing her ideas into conversation with my own experiences, other philosophers, and the strange little experiments unfolding across my digital and physical worlds.

This isn’t going to be a book review in the conventional sense.

It’s an ongoing inquiry into what we are becoming, conducted from inside the process of becoming itself.

The central question remains open:

Am I human, or am I now a soft cyborg?

And perhaps the answer is neither one nor the other.

Perhaps being human was never a finished condition.

Perhaps the real question is not whether we are becoming something else, but whether we can become more conscious participants in our own becoming.

For now, the book is open, the coffee is getting cold, and the investigation continues.

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