How Human is Human Augmentation?

             Human enhancement using nanotechnology has been a long-term goal to be able to manipulate molecular and atomic structures. A common controversy is whether or not this is moral and whether or not it makes a being less human. In order to understand if human augmentation is we need to decide what being a human is and how enhancements truly affect us, do we become more attached to technology and alienated from society or it is a mere enhancement to be able to understand the world around us better?

               Whenever you imagine human augmentation what comes to mind, a cyborg? Someone who is so far gone that they are easily identifiable by their physical traits. Often enough when we talk about being human it involves looking, acting, and thinking like a human. A world where everyone looks like Robocop is not the idea in mind when we conduct research into human augmentation. A seamless transition, an extension of ourselves is usually the aim. With that in mind we have already made significant progress in human augmentation. Hearing aids and artificial limbs that can feel are such examples. Hearing aids improve our sense of hearing to the point that the inner ear is able to process the input. Limbs can enhance our physical abilities up to about the point that the rest of the body can handle. Even lenses for eyes are already created where they process images just as fast as the brain can, with no increase past perfect vision. We may not see them as augmentation but they certainly enhance our abilities, you are able to see and walk/hold things, and you are able to be physically separated from the object. This is not ever seen in controversy when discussing how human it is to enhance ourselves.

               Why is today’s technology not seen as human augmentation, because it does not give us superhuman abilities. The best it can enhance us to the abilities of a human, which is because the limiting factor would not be the technology it would be us. When someone loses a leg or an arm they need to train and increase their strength so that they are able to use the new appendage. They need to increase their own ability to match some kind of quota that the limb places. The same kind of experience would be needed for something like neural enhancements, the brain to an extent would need to be able to sustain a certain threshold on its own before it is augmented leaving even cyborgs susceptible to human limitations.

               So how human are we when we augment ourselves? Well as human as we are now, we push our boundaries, our abilities, our knowledge only to be confronted by another obstacle that we must repeat the process for. Even if one day we are able to upload our consciousness to a cloud and be a collective cloud that does nothing but compute we would still be limited by the human aspect. Perhaps not physically but mentally as to how much it is able to comprehend, how fast is it able to compute, or  how long the conscious will survive. No matter how far technology goes there will always exist a distinction between human and artificial entities, the one that cannot go as far is the human. Since we cannot lose our humanity, human augmentation will never lose the human aspect.